You'd think an article about the fate of California would mention Los Angeles, or agriculture, or anything other than the SF bay area and tech. Even the mention of the state government is a reference to the tech industry.
California is almost as big as my own country (France) and yet when people use the word it's a synonym for the bay area. Seems crazy from that perspective.
Well yeah, if you're going to sell how great California is then of course you are going to point to the place that basically puts California on the map in recent years.
> However, the current crop of big companies will still be the big tech companies in 2030 and 2040.
What’s the reasoning here? Rewinding to 1999, Microsoft is the only (then) big tech company still doing interesting things. Apple was mostly irrelevant and on the brink of collapse, Google was an academic curiousoty, and Facebook wouldn’t exist for another half decade. A lot will change in 20 years. I suppose Yahoo, Oracle, and IBM are still kicking and probably will for a long while, but they are hardly forerunners at this point.
Seems this article is not about California, but the SF Bay Area. Greater Los Angeles housing is not nearly as over priced, nor is it as dependent on the tech sector.
We've had "peak San Francisco" three times since the 1980s. Late 1980s, when the heavy industry moved out. 2001, the dot-com crash. 2008, the real estate crash. Looks more cyclical than fundamental.
Arguably, the reason why the valley was the best place for startups is due to the density of the VC economy there and the wisdom of founders who have exited startups there. Once other factors have provided enough competing negative value the only thing that is left is empty consensus (trend chasers, vanity, popularity admirers), which is healthy for marketing but is horrid for innovation.
With those things in mind if you have no problem achieving early investment and a healthy base of users/clients there is no reason to be in the valley (or any high cost market).
This is interesting but he kind of jumps all over the place; it strikes me more as a brain dump of ideas and hypotheses.
There are a few areas where he’s playing pretty fast and loose with the facts, too. For example: NYC has way more homeless people than SF, but they aren’t as visible because under city law, the city is required to provide shelter to all of them. It has nothing to do with the weather, and in that sense NYC is way nicer to its homeless than SF.
There are landlords everywhere. It’s not a uniquely California problem.
London, NYC, Hong Kong are all notoriously expensive places to live. But they are not Bay Area. I don’t get the oft repeated hatred and contempt towards landlords.
Bay Area is better than most other places in the world..more diverse..more philanthropic and inclusive. Things grow and flourish in the Bay Area. We want everyone to succeed. We rise and we rise others. That has been my experience.
But that doesn’t make sense. The reason we have prop 13 is because someone 30 years ago bought a property for a couple hundred thousand dollars and by the time they pay off the mortgage, it’s worth a few million dollars but they are retirees and can’t pay the property tax.
If prop 13 is repealed, older Californians should have to move out of state. Remember..no one makes money unless they SELL the property.
However there is room for reform with : 1. Investment property 2. second homes 3. Foreign investments in CA properties 4. Inheritance of property and tax breaks on that..5. Prop 13 repealed for commercial properties.
A retiree shouldn’t be penalized for their primary home after paying it off for 30 something years and when they are on fixed retirement incomes.
> If prop 13 is repealed, older Californians should have to move out of state. Remember..no one makes money unless they SELL the property.
Ideally nobody would have to move out of the state, and ideally any solution could be implemented gradually enough to ensure that there were cheaper housing options available nearby to minimize disruption. Regardless, please consider another perspective. A pair of retired people whose children have reached adulthood and moved out should be discouraged from continuing to own a 4 bedroom house in an urban area. There should be structural incentives to encourage them to sell their property and move to a home that is more efficient for society. Proposition 13 is a disaster for society precisely because ensuring that older Californians do not have to move is a disaster for society. Retired people no longer have jobs that they need to commute to, so the average commute time goes up when they stop working but decline to move. A younger couple with young children or perhaps planning on having children cannot move into the house. They are kept out of what is likely a quality school district, and will end up raising their children in less space and at a greater distance from institutions like museums that children benefit from visiting. Meanwhile, the government misses out on oodles and oodles of tax revenue that the next resident would be paying because our hypothetical retired couple doesn't have to pay adjusted property tax until they move. Not only does prop 13 provide no structural incentive to move, it provides a structural incentive to not move!
Not only is the subsidy on the order of billions of dollars, it's subsidizing something bad! It's as though the government was buying cigarettes in bulk and handing them out to children. Ensuring that retired people don't need to consider moving is the opposite of a good idea.
It seems to be suggesting that older Californians need to downsize and live small after they retire and don’t have to enjoy all the decades of working hard to pay mortgages so that the state can gain more taxes?
How is it a subsidy? They are not subsidized as they don’t realize value and if they realize value, it is only after they sell which means that taxes are delivered to the state coffers anyways.
Retired people should ‘move’ away and die someplace else because the taxes are necessary?
Why would anyone want to own property if this becomes the norm? There is no incentive to own property usually bought on mortgages and interest rates.
> It seems to be suggesting that older Californians need to downsize and live small after they retire and don’t have to enjoy all the decades of working hard to pay mortgages so that the state can gain more taxes?
And so that scarce resources can be efficiently utilized. It is broadly agreed among economists that the best taxes are those that encourage people making inefficient use of scarce resources to sell them to people who will make more efficient use of them. Generally the best way to do this is to levy a tax proportional to the value of the scarce resource in question. This is why a land-value tax is so strongly favored by economists. Property taxes are a tax on the negative externality of underutilization of resources, because someone who derives more use from the resource (close to work, close to schools, space to raise a family) will be more willing to spend money at a specific rate to continue owning the resource than someone who derives less use from it.
> How is it a subsidy?
They receive a tax break as long as they retain ownership of the property. Their continued ownership of the property is being subsidized. Tax incentives are a common method of distributing subsides. Consider the tax incentives associated with mortgages, retirement accounts, and college education funds.
> Retired people should ‘move’ away and die someplace else because the taxes are necessary?
Scarce resources are scarce, and their efficient utilization should be encouraged rather than discouraged by government policy. Markets are a crude but effective means of determining value. If a retired couple values continued ownership of a property as much as a younger couple looking to start a family values that property, then they will have equal willingness to pay the associated property tax.
> Why would anyone want to own property if this becomes the norm? There is no incentive to own property usually bought on mortgages and interest rates.
Are you asking why people would want to own property if property taxes existed? Property taxes are pretty common, and unsurprisingly people continue to own property even when subject to property taxes, because they derive more value each year from continuing to own the property than they pay in tax. And when that stops being the case, they sell the property.
In California, under the new funding formula, all property taxes collected for public education is redistributed based on certain metrics.
For example..if there are more children on free meals, that school gets more funds from Sacramento. If there are more students whose parents are non English speaking immigrants, the school gets a bigger share of the funds for extra teachers etc.
For example: Fremont in the Bay Area who has a higher income and educated demographic spends around $9000/student while Oakland which has a lower income demographic spends 14k/student.
So good Area = higher property taxes = good public schools is no longer valid. Good schools are in regions where affluent parents are able to send their kids to private tutoring classes. The schools have crumbling infrastructure because 85% of their school budgets go to wages and salaries.
It’s not really simple as it seems. CA is more complicated and we are one of the highest taxes in the state anyways.
Most of CA’s woes would be alleviated if we had a good public transport system. Not like the high speed rail system but even public
Infra and inter city fast public transport improvements.
We are not connected enough. The taxes are not being efficiently used for the benefit of the entire state. High Tax payers often get the least benefit. I think there is some societal responsibility for the wealthy to bear the needs of the weaker sections , but it’s veered a little too far to the left especially since it’s about virtue signaling now rather than accountability. I think the public would trust the govt if there were more transparency and accountability. My 2c.
"value isn't realized until it's sold" doesn't mean anything when you can borrow against your appreciated asset (tax free btw) to acquire more property.
If you borrow against appreciated asset, the property is considered refinanced which would mean that the property tax would be on the appreciated value of the property. This is why many people don’t refinance because even that would be a burden when one is on fixed income.
You are making an assumption that people would want to borrow against primary dwelling.
Debt and loans are not always attractive to everyone. Especially if they are older and retired. They are likely to get a reverse mortgage if they have no income or if they are on fixed income. And that’s a risky strategy to many.
That's not true. Many states explicitly protect your primary homestead. For those 65 & older they may reduce or even freeze property taxes. Usually the city/county can't evict you for unpaid property taxes either.
100% this. It also can't be emphasized enough that these property tax breaks have disproportionately benefited older, white Californians (due to both historic property ownership rates and demographics).
Edit: For the folks downvoting, well, here are a few links:
Peak California is real and this is a quite good summary of it.
One redeeming aspect not well understood, though, is the role of capital. We're temporarily in an odd age of overabundance in venture capital (overabundance relative to investable ideas and people) but in general, and pretty much at all times except for 1997 to 2000 and 2014 to 2018, the people willing and able intelligently to invest in $0 revenue / 0 progress companies with wild ideas have tended to be in just one place.
Nothing about this demands that the companies stay in California. But it means that they'll probably keep coming here to find capital being allocated by risk-loving Ph D-holders.
I have only been in the Valley for 10 years, but even I remember, in 2009, how fast the tourist capital vanished. And some pretty cool companies were founded in 2009.
When the next cyclical downturn arrives, the same determined VCs are still going to be in the same MPK and SF offices, plugging away on new ideas, while oil kingdoms and plutocrats are going to be off cleaning money in some other, hotter corner of the globe.
I wonder if it is actually the case that YC believes 150K is the necessary number to operate over the course of the program. As I recall, the chain of events was YC provided 16-20K, then Yuri Milner decided to index over all YC companies by offering an extra 150K on a no-cap/no discount note, then it became a lot easier for YC to just manage the investment themselves, then the money was rolled into the main YC investment so there wouldn’t be this weird two rounds of investment from the same investor, the latter for a TBD amount of equity. Each decision along this step had other motivations, like DST reaching more early stage companies or YC simplifying their investment, which were unrelated to how much money it takes to get through the YC program, a number which has undoubtedly gone up but probably not by 7.5X
I have always what it is about places with a mediterranean climate that causes some sort of renaissance mindset to form there - Greece (well at least a while ago), Roman empire, Italian renaissance, Silicon Valley....
On the East Coast, there are maybe two months out of the year when the weather doesn't strongly disincentivize going outside. And those months aren't in contiguous blocks - there's usually a week in January where it's nice out, and then it's crap until one afternoon in February and a randomly selected third of the days in March, and so on. I bet that has something to do with it - especially since you need cities for this stuff, and cities have to care about the weather more than suburbs, since people aren't just driving everywhere.
And, having lived in both regions, the only difference between the Northeast and the South is that the Northeast rolls fewer of these days (it still gets way too hot in the summer in Massachusetts) - but the Northeast is where most of the cities are, because a few hundred years ago, colder overall weather meant 1) you couldn't develop a primarily agricultural economy the way the cotton and tobacco belt did, but 2) you had fewer parasites and disease carriers to worry about. (It's a little harder to build major economic centers when half your population has hookworm, malaria, or both, which was true of the South until the mid-20th century.)
Lee Kuan Yew called the air conditioner the most important invention of the 20th century.
Having lived in Bethesda for a few years, I am convinced that a non-negligible fraction of our governmental dysfunction comes from the collision of formal work attire and 100% humidity swamp. Not even joking.
I developed a mildly negative opinion of Singapore and HK when I saw their brightest minds enter the finance industry and wear three piece suits in sweltering weather every single day of the year.
Never again have I seen so many successful people so determined to be uncomfortable for a majority of their workday.
One of the first great truly world power, between the 6th and 11th century, was a port in Indonesia (surprisingly). After that, Europe took the lead, with Bruges, Venice, Anvers, Genoa, Amsterdam, London. US came after that with Boston, New York, California. Asia is now taking the lead again.
The sea is a powerful ideology in itself. It brings you new goods, new ideas, change, desire to welcome strangers. It's also the place of nomadism, which was the normal way of living in almost all of human history.
How do you produce "new" stuff ? By connecting "old" stuff in a "new" way. That's exactly what ports do, and that's probably why so many great empires emerged from them.
Wow, I thought this writing was really superb. I read one of the author's other linked articles, https://medium.com/@byrnehobart/alchian-allen-and-agglomerat... , and it was the first time I read a convincing argument for the relationship between high real estate values and industry concentration in specific urban areas in the age of globalization. Fascinating read IMO.
If Bay Area and tech is a talking point. For most of the tech existence, Silicon Valley has always been the go to place. Then, it got too expensive. The next stop was sf and now even soma is crazy shit expensive. The natural progression i see is to start looking at the east bay (Hayward, Oakland..). They still are comparatively affordable. Work with the local governments where it is a win win for both. I live in Hayward and I can’t imagine there are no startups here. It is so close to the city.
In every article like this, I'm always looking for the author's orientation to place. It's important to me whether they consider the Bay Area, or any other place, an actual home, with some transcendent quality besides a collection of objectively measurable attributes. This author clearly does not.
The author is annoyed that people like him (according to him, the smart people, the good people, the people on whom the entire society and economy depends!) are treated with such disrespect. But how does this author treat the people around him?
He writes about the Bay Area like he's observing it from an alien spacecraft, as if he's entirely separate, outside of time and space. He evaluates the various objective factors of the Bay Area solely in terms of their benefit to him, and finds it wanting. And the author, with an unlimited ability to simply uproot himself, darkly insinuates that he, and all the other good, smart people like him, are going to do it, and soon.
But why should anyone care? By the author's own admission, he and his fellow good, smart people aren't meaningfully a part of the culture or the social fabric of the place. The author clearly has contempt for the people around him ("If you can afford Pacific Heights rents and rideshare everywhere you can pretend you don't live here!"). He clearly has no intention of contributing to the place. He clearly sees it as a pool of resources for extraction and nothing else.
It's clear that the author sees it this way because if this wasn't the case, he would be involved in some effort, any effort at all, to fix some of the problems that he's describing. Yes, California and the Bay Area have their problems. And our problems and our fortunes are the result of generations-long processes. Whatever comes next will be the outcome of people digging in, working to fix the problems, putting their shoulders to the wheel, and not just bailing out because moving somewhere else would maximize certain values in their personal spreadsheets.
A few people that I consider friends were doing that work before the current round of good times. They're people who've been in San Francisco back when it was considered frightening and dangerous, and the set of problems the city had were completely different than the current ones. They stuck it out. They made the city a much better place. As a result, we now have a new set of problems to fix. The cycle repeats itself.
Right now, we don't need any more people who are just looking to extract resources for themselves. We need people who are willing to engage, to become part of the social fabric of this place, and to figure out what the future looks like. So I want to enthusiastically encourage this author, everyone else who's written a functionally identical article in the last few years, and everyone on Hacker News who constantly complains about how much they hate San Francisco, to get out.
If you're among that group, and you don't leave, you're actually cheating yourself. There's likely some place in the world with which you could find the same profound, transcendent connection that I and many others have with San Francisco.
It's a tragic waste of a life to live in a place you hate, and that you have neither the commitment nor the desire to make any better. It doesn't benefit you, and it doesn't benefit the people around you whose home you hate so much. Everyone would be so much better off if you would simply show yourself the door, and find a place you can call home, for better or worse.
While I think this is a valid critique of many of the comments in this thread (including the current top one about SF being "dystopian"), I think you're being uncharitable to the author. Nowhere does he say he hates SF and is desperate to leave; though he is predicting decline if the housing and COL issues don't eventually get addressed.
Hopefully if you believe that the solutions to SF's problems are folks being positive, committed, and pitching in, you'll also agree that we need more inclusive land use policies (zoning and tax) that aren't aggressively pro-incumbent.
Your comment resonated deeply with me as it put into words something I’ve been trying to express for a while now - so thank you!
I too think that it’s odd as well as discouraging that people so often express their disdain of a place (SF seems to be the popular punching bag as of late) in the context of “What can this place do for me?”. It’s in sharp contrast from a perspective of “This is my home. I’m a part of the inherent fabric of the city. What do we all need to do together to make our home a better place and how are we falling short?”
The most worrying part of this is that when the system described in TFA crashes and burns and people flee they will not realize that it was the sum of all parts that created the system that they fled and will unwittingly attempt to enact it piece by piece wherever they relocate (see Denver, Portland, Austin, etc. for examples).
>>I’ve lived in the Midwest, on the Texas/Mexico border, and in New York, and when I moved to San Francisco I was surprised to see that anti-immigrant sentiment was quite socially-acceptable there
The author is not an immigrant as the word is commonly understood if he’s only lived in these places.
Aside from the homeless in Southern California a lot of young people are living out of vans. See Vanlife on Youtube, eventually these young couples living a Nomadic lifestyle will want to settle down and start families. Also, a lot of middle aged people are also living out of vans.
A discussion of "Peak California" without mention of freshwater?
This appears to basically be a NIMBY property values complaint by a rich person... either someone with property or who wants property under the current conditions.
maybe its silly but i think california will always attract lots of great people because the weather everywhere else fucking sucks. i did a huge road-trip across the US last year and the biggest lesson i drew from it was that california is paradise compared to the rest of the country. i never traveled as a kid, so i assumed that things were nice in other places too. seriously, i dont understand why anyone chooses to live somewhere else. other places are cheap but they also suck massively. and people who live in NY? its just as expensive over there, even more restrictive gun laws (you cant even carry a fucking taser) and the weather SUCKS. why someone would know about both places and choose NY over CA is a mystery to me.
I'll accept that chastisement, especially respecting that this is your site. But I do feel that the Bay Area vs. not discussions are as relevant to our industry as ageism, or any other criteria that causes us to judge each other unfairly. I'll seek better ways to engage in those discussions, though.
Sure, I'm not saying the article is off topic. If it were, we would demote it (or rather, it would already have been heavily flagged). The issue is simply that when people respond with shallow dismissals, especially with a provocative edge like "wouldn't touch region X with a ten foot pole", it leads to lousy discussion. Worse, in a case like this, it pours fuel on regional resentments, which unfortunately are a lot stronger than one might have hoped.
Admittedly the article set itself up for such a dismissal by making a provocative generalization about "smart people" in the first place. But commenters here need the discipline not to take the shallowest bait in a piece, but respond to the parts that are actually interesting. In a way, that's the article-scoped version of this guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
I would argue your selective enforcement of moderation is more harmful to the commentary than the original comment. This is your site, do what you want, but I really don’t think this is the comment you want to fight, considering the other pendatry, bickering and outright hate I’ve seen around here.
That's a non sequitur. If you see a worse comment that didn't get moderated, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We can't come close to reading everything that gets posted here.
If you notice bad comments that shouldn't be on HN, you can help out by flagging them (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), or in egregious cases, emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
It is decidedly not a non sequitur. My argument is that selective moderation by you, the site owner, is worse than no moderation by you. If you go about only moderating the things you see, moderation on the platform is now directly correlated to your preferences on what you read and now open to your bias. Do you want an open discussion, or a discussion guided by you? To be clear, I'm in favor of moderation based on principles and thoroughness, but against moderation only when when it suits you.
Moreover, your tone and attitude about these things is not helpful. If you continue to dismiss people with valid points out of hand, so will the rest of the commentariat here. With great power comes great responsibility.
That argument still seems incorrect to me. The subset of posts we look at it is determined by users (flags, votes, emails, etc.) and by software. Neither of those share whatever personal preferences we may have.
Are you sure that the moderation here is so aligned with particular points of view? In my experience, most of these perceptions can be explained by people being far more likely to notice and remember the cases they dislike or disagree with. If that delta is 10x (and I think it's at least that), things are inevitably going to feel skewed.
Ah, now we are discussing my argument instead of dismissing it. Thank you for that. I think this tone is much more productive for an open conversation.
You are right that I am off if you are using tooling to assist you in moderation. From the outside, it seems arbitrary and misaligned, but I understand that it is a black box from my side.
In this particular case, I still feel like your argument is weak, but I care much more that you are grappling with my argument than anything substantive about the argument itself, so we can agree to disagree.
"Substantive" has to do with the signal/noise ratio of the original comment.
As for your last sentence, that's dismaying to hear. If you're saying it in good faith, suggestions about how to do better would be welcome. Keep in mind that it's my job to post moderation comments and try to coax people into following the site guidelines. (In case it helps, they're even more tedious to write than they are to read.)
Ah, seeing as you are a mod (I assume) that makes sense so all I can do is apologize for my response. The quick look at your comment history looked to me like all you did was jump on people for having opinions.
I still support the comment pointing out the generalisation of smart people and believe it's also fair to give a frank opinion of such arrogant assumptions without being told your opinion isn't "substantive" enough.
I'm sorry the mod thing wasn't clear. Of course we've thought about adding 'mod' tags to the relevant usernames (dang and sctb), but it somehow feels out of sync with the spirit and traditions of this place.
I guess I’m not a smart person and my friend group must be full of idiots because concensus among all of us — many of which who have lived in there — is that the Bay Area is terrible. I would never move back. The lifestyle is very hard, even if you make a lot of money, because the public transportation is insufficient to cover everything you want to do in your life. And the culture is boring and getting worse.
I can understand why Americans who have never lived in NY or a nice city outside of the US might think it’s “really hard to find any place on planet earth that’s nicer to live in and to work in”. But this attitude says more about the author than anything inherent to the Bay Area.
I was guilty of the same kind of thinking when I first moved to San Francisco - it was, at the time, worlds better than the suburban Florida environment that I'd grown up in or the other mid-sized southern cities I'd visited frequently. I fell in love immediately.
But after a couple of years, the little cracks in the armor start to show up - outside of a very narrow strip of Market St and the Mission, getting around to other parts of the region is difficult. The weather is good, but certainly not the perfect beachy warmth I was used to as a kid and got monotonous. Most people I met seemed to already have their circles of friends and they centered mostly around who worked where or what hackathons you wanted to do, and that wasn't my ideal weekend scene. Rampant, aggressive homelessness made simply walking through many neighborhoods saddening at best, actively hostile at worst. Credit where its due, I found a lot of solace riding my bike around in the Marin headlands, but I could only really do that a couple of days a week at best.
NYC, by comparison, I moved to and didn't immediately fall in love. It was huge and intimidating and I showed up in August when it was humid and moving into my 5th floor walkup was painful. It took a few months to feel comfortable with transit options and like I wasn't solely reliant on maps. But I had an easier time making friends who didn't want to code 24/7, yet still take their professional life seriously. Nightlife is waaaayyy better in NYC, and there are hundreds more options. There is still a homelessness problem, but its generally less in-your-face and less aggressive. Its still expensive, but less so than SF. Sometimes I call a car to go somewhere because the weather is bad or I'm in a hurry, but I rarely feel like there is somewhere I simply cannot get to on public transit. Its the only place I've ever lived where the longer I've been here, the more I've liked it.
SF definitely has charm, but like you and your friends, many of my friends and I who have done both find NYC to be a much better example of a functional, diverse, very livable city. I wouldn't trade my time in SF for anything else, it was valuable to a younger version of myself - but I'm happy it propelled me elsewhere.
Heh funny, I did Chicago first as well and now I'm doing SF. It was also really cool for me to be in Chicago and discover my first tech scene, now SF is a thousand times crazier.
I agree with GP, although I really want to like SF but it is hard because I've lived in nicer cities.
We've contemplated moving to NYC in the beginning, or after SF if we really don't like it, but I don't see myself living in NYC. It feels like a great big city, without the advantages of the great big cities you have in Europe or Asia.
I LOVE visiting San Fran, but i'm with you. I would never live there. I also know many people that moved from San Francisco to Utah and after they got over the huge culture shock, they absolutely loved it here.
Chicago is a melting pot of various immigrant cultures. It’s a city literally built by Irish, German, Polish, and Italian immigrants. It also has walkable neighborhoods and public transit that for most part rocks (compared to other US cities).
It's too bad the author started the article with that line.. I almost stopped reading right there. "Smart" people move here because it's relatively easy to get hired at a job that pays six figures even for the relatively inexperienced. The closing line about "lovely houses" was also a stretch. More like million dollar tract housing.
In between though, the article had a lot of interesting points.
Nope, the author is right—for many people, it's hard to find a better place for life and work than the Bay Area, and that's why so many people move here.
That's perfectly compatible with you and your friends disliking the Bay Area. For example, it's hard to find a more widely loved movie than the Godfather, yet some people dislike it, and probably argue just like you that people who like the Godfather must do it out of ignorance.
This argument doesn't look very solid here, however. Many people in the Bay Area moved in from cities and countries around the the world. I'd expect them to be less ignorant than average about life in other places. Just today at the public library I met a family from France and another one from Canada. I could myself legally move to and find work in any US state or EU country tomorrow. Yet, here we are.
At some point you need to realize that 1) liking or disliking a place is intensely personal, and 2) you don't need to seek validation for your personal choices even if they diverge from the mainstream.
> The lifestyle is very hard, even if you make a lot of money, because the public transportation is insufficient to cover everything you want to do in your life.
Public transportation is the limiting factor in determining what you want to do in your life... even if you have a lot of money???
Once I had enough money, I bought a house 20min from work, 15min from an excellent park for mountain biking, 25min from SJC and 45min from SFO.
All of that can be done by car much faster than public transportation ever could.
Whether or not this is sustainable for a large population is a completely different discussion. But your premise is flawed.
> Coming to the bay to live far from SF? What's the point?
I don't regret a second of living 5 years in NYC. And I still have one friend there who, 15 years later, still lives that same life of partying until 2am, fancy restaurants, and whatnot. It sounds very exhausting.
The vast majority of my friends back then have moved to the suburbs. Good schools for kids, a nice house in a quiet neighborhood with a garage for the minivan to drive those kids to cross country meets during the week or to go camping during the weekend in the summer and ski in the winter.
The point of living in the Bay Area but not in SF is that I can have a nice house with a large garage for my hobbies: the fumes of a laser cutter or the noise of a table saw wouldn't go well in a tiny apartment. Or that I can live close to some of the best semiconductor companies in the world, something that's not even available in SF. That, if needed, there are tons of similar companies in a radius of a few miles. Or that I can drive 15min to my local park for 45min of mountain biking in the morning and still arrive at work before 9:30am. Or the weather: I still occasionally forget a warm sweater when I go to SF in the summer.
Have you considered that people in their early thirties might have different priorities in life than those who are 50? Maybe you should?
Yeah, I don't know why anyone would tie themselves to public transit in the US if they had a decent job. US public transit is for people too old, too young, or too poor to have a car, and for people commuting into very dense areas that it is impractical (too expensive) to bring a car into.
Owning a car is expensive and a pain in the ass, walking to the station every morning is good for you, you can read/relax on a train whereas driving in traffic is a nightmare.
That's fine. But there aren't a lot of people like you, and only a few places in the US are a good fit for that kind of lifestyle. It really only works in the densest hearts of the biggest cities, like New York and Chicago, and the odd college town or retirement community.
There are reasons why 90+% of US households (and some 97% of households that include a worker) have a car.
All of the usual suggestions are too small, IMO, except Seattle (4M) which is already expensive and facing similar problems to the Bay. Austin (2M), Raleigh-Durham (2M), Denver (3M), Portland (2.5M) are not suited to compete with the Bay (8M). Baltimore-Washington (9M), Boston (7M), New York (20ishM) and San Diego (3.5M) are already very expensive. Climate isn't king, but Phoenix (4.5M) and Minneapolis (3.5M) are too uncomfortable for most people. That leaves Chicago (9.5M), Dallas (7M), Detroit (4M), Houston (6.5M) and Atlanta (6M), of which the first and last have a more mature tech sector, denser urban geography and better public transit (Atlanta's transit ridership is five times Houston's). Of the two, Chicago has much better infrastructure, but Atlanta has much nicer weather. Both are far too small currently to pose a threat to California's dominance, so I wouldn't expect to see any changes any time soon.
You can't post like this to HN, regardless of how strongly you felt when you were someplace. Name-calling rants and slurs are not allowed, regardless of which people or region you have a problem with. Please don't do it again.
California does OK with climate change. Rising ocean levels aren't a big deal, because the coast of California is mountainous. Even where it looks flat, like Venice Beach, go 3 blocks inland and you're usually 20 feet up.
San Francisco has some low-lying areas near the coast, but they're small enough and valuable enough to justify big seawalls if necessary. It's not like Florida or New Orleans, which are barely above sea level now.
Hotter is a problem, but CA isn't going to heat up to unlivable levels, like parts of India.
Yet another Medium moron that lumps lots of disparate ideas (about people) into just a handful of neatly-formed but incorrect blabs. Only in the Bay Area would "hippies" "conspire" with landlords to keep the engineers out.
I'm expecting the "tech bubble" to burst at some point. Looks at this way. Desktop and laptop market is saturated. Phone market soon. Semiconductor industry reaching its limits. Ad revenue will trend down as governments clamp down on a lot of the sketchy stuff. A lot is riding on self driving cars and machine learning. What else is new in the horizon that people really need?
There are going to be many, many more ways we utilize software and connected devices to optimize existing industures (construction, healthcare, logistics etc). Some of them will seem so obvious in retrospect, others will be exceptionally creative and thus hard to predict. We may have reached a saturation point for hardware (but even that will need constant replacing), but the ways we deploy technologies out into our economy will continue moving forward for many years to come. Tech changes, but always moves forward.
The tail of what's possible with ML is very long. We've just only picked the low-hanging fruit.
Medtech is going to be big this century, as biocompatible nanotech and the shockwaves of CRISPR reverberate through industry over the next couple decades. Not saying immortality is coming or anything, but within 20-30 years we'll probably see a slew of new therapies and products. And if anyone figures out a really good, affordable BCI, then that's another Pandora's box of possibilities.
Also, I respectfully disagree on a downward trend of ad revenue. The rise of advertorials in news outlets, product-placement-driven subscription media a la Netflix, and the whole influencer thing indicates our future will be even more fully integrated with advertisement. The per-impression cost may still fall, but look forward to the day when anyone with friends is micro-compensated in realtime for mentioning Coke at a party.
