

Redfin CEO:  Stanford is the Hogwarts of Silicon Valley. - timr
http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2008/02/the_next_silicon_valley.html

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pg
_a high cost of living – a two-bedroom house in Palo Alto typically costs more
than $1.5 million — prevents people from buying homes and having children_

Yet again the housing fallacy, this time from a guy _at a real estate
startup._

The houses in Silicon Valley are not sitting empty because they're expensive.
In fact, it's not merely false that SV's high housing prices prevent people
from living here, it's necessarily false. The fact that a house cost $x means
someone was able to buy it.

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davidw
What he seems to mean is 'prevents _many_ people from buying homes and having
children', which I think is difficult to argue with. Obviously people buy
those houses, but they probably aren't 'average middle class american' types,
either.

One of the reasons I was happy to return to Italy in 2000 was that most towns
there seem to have a mix of young and old, rich and poor that seemed much more
real to me than San Francisco, which especially in those days was like living
on another planet in terms of how weird it had gotten with all the money and
craziness.

~~~
pg
I suspect the variation in wealth in SV is as great as in other places, if not
greater. It's just that the median is higher.

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pchristensen
But that higher median means that you get less variation in the kind of people
around you. You only get the kind of people that could meet that price level.
Thanks to the 30 year mortgage, gentrification is slower than conventional
economic theory would predict.

The fact that the median is higher means that there's a smaller slice of
society that can afford it.

~~~
pg
_But that higher median means that you get less variation in the kind of
people around you._

That is an illusion. To someone poor it might seem like everyone in Silicon
Valley is "rich" and thus the same. But that's just an illusion caused by
being an outsider, like the feeling children often have when they see people
from some very unfamiliar society: how do they tell one another apart?

You'd feel there was even less variation in the people around you if you moved
to a city in China, because the people there would be way more like one
another than they were like you.

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xirium
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[http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2008/02/the_next_silicon_valley....](http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2008/02/the_next_silicon_valley.html)

