Why Silicon Valley should settle in Oakland | Hacker News Reader

Why Silicon Valley should settle in Oakland

gigaom.com

32 pointsrajbala58 comments

If only there were some way for programmers to collaborate without them being in the same room.

I just moved to the Bay Area last year and living in SF was never an option. You can get the same housing (or better) for $1000/month less by living in the East Bay and you'll be right next to the BART. If SF real estate prices continue to climb like they have been, I think there's going to be an even greater trend of folks moving to the East Bay where it's more affordable.

I also think the East Bay will be attractive for the same reason the Valley was: once you get older, it's a great place to settle down and think about having children. You can buy a single family house (with a yard!) in Rockridge, Berkeley, or Orinda with great schools that's still accessible to SF. I know plenty of folks getting into their mid-30s or 40s for whom this has become a lot more attractive than a million dollar rowhouse in SF.

For how long? The situation sounds untenable. Better to spread the tech-industry all over the country and world in my not at all humble opinion.

No. Economies of scale, network effects and (god willing) an end to sprawl-based development.

By all means, if your career allows it, telecommute from anywhere you like - but nobody needs physical infrastructure and commute-endpoints spread evenly all over the land...

Somebody needs to solve the out-of-sight-out-of-mind problem then. The technology already exists for easy videoconferencing (Hangouts/GVC), for easy screen-sharing (VNC), for easy code collaboration (GitHub), and for easy code reviews (Rietveld/Gerrit). The problem is that this isn't enough: many of the great ideas that the big tech companies are built on came out of small informal discussions in hallways, in cubes, or over dinner. Until you can hack human nature so that people will randomly say whatever just popped into their head to the avatar sitting next to them, there will still be a strong incentive for creative companies to colocate their employees.

None of these things will be true if the current trend continues and the tech sector does move to the east bay in force.

If there's one lesson to be drawn from the San Francisco mess, it's this: if a community is going to choose a city to move into, it had better not be a city where political corruption has rendered it illegal to build new housing. How does Oakland fare in that regard?

Political corruption or utterly stupid democracies that can't think beyond one dimension?

I lived in the south bay area for 20 years, although I moved away ten years ago. Unless there has been a seismic shift, why is it inevitable that the tech industry must move north? There is an assumption in this article that the ideal place to be is SF, except for the prices there, so the game is to get as close as one can afford.

I utterly reject that idea. I loved visiting San Francisco when I was 20, and when I was 30, and when I was 40 with kids, but through those different phases of my life, I never wanted to live there, and not living there was never an impediment to my career. None of the companies I worked for considered moving there.

Looks like someone invested in Oakland real-estate...

I always wondered if you couldn't finance a high speed train (Or Elon Musk's "strange loop") in areas like California by buying cheap real estate and selling it to future commuters.

Edit: It ought to be enough with 50-150 km distance to get low land prices around that part of California? Assume a train at 250 km/hour, the commute will be short and there won't be a need for "exotics" (maglev, Musk's tube, etc).

I don't think anyone has every figured out a way to make trains profitable at a price that consumers will pay. That's why governments are pretty much the only people that build them now, since they are willing to take the losses to facilitate any economic gains generated by public transit. Whether or not those gains are real is a separate argument, but as far as I know, no American public transit system is profitable on a revenue-expenditures basis.

There are two profitable high-speed rail lines: Japan (Tokyo-Osaka) and France (Paris-Lyon).

Some will say Acela, but it is only profitable if you ignore capital expenditures.

That's what I thought. Ignoring capital expenditures could make lots of unprofitable businesses look profitable.

I've learned a lot of journalists don't look at the footnotes or supplemental tables when they write articles. It does provide a good indicator of competence though.

Yes, but I wrote:

What if you use the land price increase at the other end of a (quite) fast train to finance building the commute link?

As the comment below notes, even if you ignore capital expenditures, there are only 3 profitable trains in the world. It's operating costs that make it unprofitable. The increase in value on the land may cover your construction costs, but operating it is a recurring expense. You'd have to realize extreme gains on the land to fund that.

2025: That's the (%$&!ing ridiculous) year that BART is scheduled to open up in downtown San Jose:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_San_Jose_%28BART_stati...

In the meantime, downtown Oakland has many of the same problems (and a surprisingly similar crime rate) as downtown Santa Cruz (OK Oakland is more violent by a bit). The former is right next to San Francisco and the latter is right next to UCSC, both technological hotbeds.

I wouldn't want to live in either place because they're just not safe(tm) and by that I mean the perception more than the reality.

SF dealt with such issues by pushing all the "undesirables" out of the center of the city and into the residential neighborboods. I wonder how Oakland would deal with this. Santa Cruz OTOH continues to stick its head deep into its own digestive endpoint and deny such problems even exist.

Moving to SC has one big issue - Highway 17.

It's one of the most dangerous highways in the State of California - even worse I'd argue than CA-152.

Route 17 should not be an issue. Santa Cruz should be filled to the brim with tech jobs incubated by the mere existence of UCSC and its top-notch CS department. It's a beautiful place with ugly problems.

It's washed out hippy and NIMBY central with a crony government that presides over an unconscionable crime and homeless rate as well as a runaway meth problem.

In just the past few weeks there have been drive by shootings and a mental case driving a car into the lobby of a downtown theatre and slicing his own throat with a shard of windshield glass. Last year, the most famous thing that happened there was two cops getting gunned down:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/us/violence-spurs-identity...

I harp on Santa Cruz because based on the shenanigans there, I don't think the great Oakland migration is going to happen. There are just too many other places to live in the bay area. What we need is a county-wide moment of clarity about mass transit. I'm not expecting that either. I'm expecting status quo. In an age when we could at least work partially remotely, the trend is running towards banning telecommuting and pushing more and more people into coding boiler rooms. Yuck.

The unsafeness isn't just perception. I see friends becoming victims of violent crime and property crime in Oakland/SF on Facebook fairly regularly, and I don't have that many city friends. The cities are too progressive to seriously address their crime problem. Someone needs to call Giuliani.

Transportation from the valley to Oakland is just too bad. How will all the SV folks who live in... well... SV get to Oakland? There's no BART from Cupertino, Palo Alto or Mountain View. And driving is HELL. Every tried going a few miles on 880 in rush hour? Now try to go thirty, fourty miles or more! Good luck.

Why not Mountain View?

It's much easier to move a number of local businesses in and construct high-rise apartments than it is to move a bunch of tech companies with thousands of employees. I predict that we're a lot more likely to see hip restaurants, bars, bubble-tea shops, and cultural venues move into Mountain View than we are to see Google and Facebook move to Oakland.

It's already happening to some extent. My girlfriend grew up in Silicon Valley - she says that the Mountain View downtown has changed dramatically since she was in high school. We're seeing high-rise apartment towers going up near San Antonio, along with a number of walkable shops and supermarkets near their base. A number of mid-rise apartment complexes and townhomes have gone up by the Caltrain station and downtown, where it's already walkable. And there's been a longstanding plan to build high-rise apartments with ground-level shops north of 101, within walking distance of the Googleplex. This plan has been blocked a few times by the Mountain View city council, but 3/4 of the voting block opposing it is retiring this year.

>It's much easier to move a number of local businesses in and construct high-rise apartments than it is to move a bunch of tech companies with thousands of employees.

True, but then a certain dominant Mountain View company is already running the n-th largest transportation network to commute people from SF/upper peninsula down to them, so in many cases it would just be like "hey, stop commuting as far".

That would free up a LOT of space in SF, so I think even that scenario isn't bad

You mean it's currently freeing up space in SF? Because the status quo is where your commute is shorter in proportion to how close to Mountain View you are. The hypothetical was where they'd move to SF, where proximity that city would determine commute distance.

Despite all that, Mountain View is still a dreary wasteland. It's a great place if you want to buy a $1.5MM home and raise kids, but not if you want to enjoy your youth. Even if the big behemoths stay down there and employ the people with the $1.5MM homes, the new exciting startups will probably keep popping up in SF and the East Bay.

-- Former Mountain View resident now living in Berkeley

Once you leave San Francisco and Silicon Valley, why stop in Oakland? Why not go to Walnut Creek or San Ramon?

Let's take it all the way to Tahoe ;-)

Because Walnut Creek.

Many people carry out fruitful lives in The Nut.

Companies tried this in the 1990s-- PeopleSoft, etc. It didn't work, but failed ideas seem to re-appear as fresh ones after a few years.

Silicon Valley has already moved north. PG has mentioned that at the beginning of YC, they saw startups based in SF as a warning sign, now, they have an office in the city. It started out in Palo Alto, now SF is pretty clearly a part of it. It wasn't always.

I think moving south to Silicon Beach is a better idea.

http://www.accuweather.com/en/us/santa-monica-ca/90401/daily...

Makes sense. People coming from San Jose are the only ones likely to think that Jack London Square is cheap and convenient for shopping.

Another article wondering why City X hasn't attracted more of a tech community given some spelled-out advantages over Silicon Valley.

Rather than wondering why markets don't act the way one wants them to, we could learn more by trying to understanding why markets do what they do.

So Oakland = Silicon Valley 2.0? It seems plausible that the new 'up and coming' start-ups would seek territory in unconquered land such as Oakland, but for companies already established in SV to move to Oakland - I don't see it.

I don't imagine it ever replacing SV, but supposing a tech scene did take root in the East Bay, where do you think it would be? Think something analogous to "Silicon Alley", AKA Dumbo/Red Hook in Brooklyn, NY.

There's already a bunch of companies in Oakland- Pandora is the best loved. Emeryville is growing like crazy and there are lots of companies there. Berkeley has a bunch of small shops, and the university and city are trying to coordinate an "innovation zone".

Isn't "Silicon Alley" more known to be Flatiron/Chelsea/midtown south in Manhattan?

Silicon Alley is the general Union Square area. There are quite a few tech offices in Dumbo, and starting to be more in Williamsburg/Greenpoint and Downtown Brooklyn, but very few in Red Hook, which is one of the least transit-accessible neighborhoods in Brooklyn.

Sorry I am not super familiar with the neighborhoods. I think of Red Hook and Dumbo as the same for some reason, I am thinking of one neighborhood (with lots of tech companies), but not sure which of the two is the name of it. Apparently it's Dumbo.

I'd actually argue the tech center should leave the bay area and colonize a part of the country where land is cheap and plentiful - it could be an existing metro, like DFW - or something completely greenfield.

Kinda what is happening to Austin, with all the California techies moving in

What's Oakland like in SF neighbourhood comparisons? I've never been on any of my visits to the Bay Area. I'd heard it was gross & ghetto, but lots of SF is pretty disgusting too…

Doesn't distance to Sand Hill road play a role in VC-run Silicon Valley company locations?

Or least proximity to the Universities. Oakland is neither here nor there in terms of being a useful place to collaborate with either VCs or Academics. There is no good public transit, for example, because you cannot take Amtrak (it goes only SJ via east bay). So you have to Dog-leg from Bart to Cal-train in SOMA (PITA). In theory, Emerville would be well situated (close to bridge, oakland, and convenient to Berkeley) but again, there is no Bart-station...so no Transit to SF or the Peninsual (and terrible cross-bridge traffic for driving). There are some areas that maybe could be developed, but the Transit situation is straight out of the Buck-rodgers 1970's. As bad as it is, SF is just way more mobile to get around (at least mission/SOMA)...by taxi, bike or Bart...And its a direct/reasonable drive to either Berkely or Palo Alto.

Oakland isn't much less convenient to Sand Hill Road than SF. It's a commute from either city.

Curious on the downvote -- was my question too offtopic?

In all public forums there are people who never post, who only express their opinions by voting, and there is often no perceptible logic or pattern to their votes. I would call them the silent incoherent majority.

I like that "moving north" idea, but why not Portland or Seattle?

The West Coast itself still has a great appeal to many, and Portland is still affordable, quirky, and frenetic.

Weather is nicer in Oakland, assuming you like sunshine.

Housing in Portland (particularly rental housing) is getting less affordable by the day, and the city is very aggressive about land use planning. This is, of course, one reason why the city is so nice... but it also means that there is a very fixed amount of buildable space, literally all of which is already taken. Infill is certainly happening, but the city really can't absorb any larger of a population increase than it already has over the last couple of years.

Beaverton is just over the hill, and it's a short MAX ride to downtown.

Very good point.

I wouldn't choose engineers based on who needs the money, and I wouldn't choose a location based on who needs the tax revenue

Berkeley appears more pleasant than Oakland, though further away.

As much as I find it unappealing, I notice more things happening in Oakland. For now, it looks like the hippest devs are moving there first, guys like substack who seem like they enjoy a bit of chaos, crime, and dirt. Engineers with kids aren't going to live there, though

"Berkeley appears more pleasant than Oakland, though further away."

In the grand scheme of things, it's not that much farther. We're talking 2-3 short BART stops.

The bigger issue with Berkeley is real estate. Oakland was zoned industrially, it's got a lot of cheap space, and it can bear the load of big company HQs and apt/condo conversions. I'm not sure Berkeley can absorb scale as easily, at least as it's currently laid out.

The crime rate also has something to do with the cost of space

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