I never understood why companies paid the living costs of SF instead of locating in the Midwest or smaller cities. Someone told me it’s because SF is where all the talent goes so it would be unwise to locate elsewhere.
Maybe COVID has revealed that geography is not as important to success as people believed.
1. Closeness to the Stanford university ecosystem which promoted tech. Berkeley isn't too far away physically, though it may not be very near ideologically. Talent helps.
2. Matthew Effect: The (talent-)rich (cities) get richer.
3. Weather. I have lived at some point in the midwest. Shovelling snow in a morning storm so that you can get in the car to go to office is not something I'd want to do again. Maybe Denver has mild enough weather to be considered a replacement. On the other hand, Colorado is a beautiful place and it'd be sad to see it overrun by large crowds of morning commuters. Austin is a viable alternative, Texas school boards notwithstanding.
4. Covid is not a long-term trend. Nothing beats the bandwidth of a physical meeting, or a discussion over coffee.
While I think all that's true, tons of people manage to deal with states with snow including metros with major university systems. It's not a deal-breaker for most. Furthermore, there are lots of ways people can get together and collaborate. I even live near a local office that I rarely go into. I mostly meet people when traveling.
i live in denver. winters are getting warmer and drier but the summers lately have been very very hot and wayyy too much smoke from fires. still amazing weather though!
you're right on the traffic it's always sucked but not as bad as like LA of course.
with the population growth it goes right back into highways.. always building/expanding ;(
i feel like in theory we should be super bike/walk friendly; if Minneapolis can build bike highways that are used in the dead of winter we should be able too. but we don't. my neighbors prioritize and fight politically for street parking. you can't even see into intersections because they let cars park right up to the edge. they're trying to make a street near me a bike corridor - put in fake roundabouts - but it's not a protected lane and they still have parking on the street ffs.
the light rail should have been more promising too. we do have good buses though and the train to airport is nice. maybe can someday finish the boulder extension.
we're building a ton of condos in the center of denver so i really hope we get more pedestrian first voters.
And also please let's keep outdoor dining/drinking post COVID. take back the streets from cars!
I don't drive and live purposefully where i can walk or uber. it's great unless you go to the mounatins a lot.
i supported a mayoral candidate who really wanted to restore the street cars - it makes a ton of sense would love to see it return on a few of the major streets like colfax downtown to CU hospital.
I'm not sure about 4. in a corporate setting. In academia, maybe, but in corporate physical meetings the person with the greatest reality distortion field uses them to his/her way.
Could you clarify more on the ideological differences between Stanford and Berkeley? Also other universities. I had no idea that something like that even exists. Are they (also) different on the political spectrum or in some other area?
People closer to the ground can comment better. But to summarize, tenure decisions in Stanford reputedly take into account whether you are involved in startups etc. Berkeley is more traditionally academic, as far as I understand.
As for the political spectrum, Berkeley is left-liberal. I am not sure about Stanford. It is also somewhat liberal, even though conservative/libertarian think-tanks like the Hoover institution are based on the Stanford campus.
At around 2000 - 2010 San Francisco had the reputation of being an amazing city. It wasn't a tech hub back then but it was a very cultural city with a lot of diversity, art and amazing views. A lot of people just wanted to live there, including tech workers. One my friends worked at google and lived in SF because she told me she was so "enamored" by the city.
In fact that's why those google shuttles exist. Because back then tons and tons of people loved the city so much that they wanted to live in SF while working in Mountain View.
When tech started rising more and more, tech workers started moving into SF turning it into the tech hub that it is today. This upped property values which in turn drove a lot of junkies and homeless people out of the condemned properties as those properties were getting repurposed to take advantage of the growing market.
That's why you see shit on the streets and needles everywhere. Rising property values essentially took what was happening behind closed doors and put it in the middle of the street. Everybody applauds all the social programs offered to the needy by SF until it they see it up close and personal.
So really there's two main root causes for why SF is the shit hole it is today:
1. Excessive amount of tech workers.
2. Drug availability.
The Tech worker thing is new. The Drug problem is old, although I'm not sure how much the recent opioid epidemic contributes to that.
Anyway this seemed like a tangent but to address your point: Companies wanted to move to SF because the tech workers WANTED to live there. The companies relocated based off the location of talent.
The situation today is the end result of a feedback loop produced by Tech companies and Tech workers from 2010 to now. Tech workers move to SF, so companies follow. This causes more workers to follow the companies.
You'll see this correlation everywhere. If companies don't want to be in a certain city, for sure there's an amount of skilled workers who don't want to be there either.
Maybe COVID has revealed that geography is not as important to success as people believed.