...or we could move to a sensible model, where software delivers on its promise and allows people to work anywhere. The cost of living here is the invisible hand of the market showing you that you're making a mistake by locating your company in the bay area. Yet the dominant techno-nerd narrative continues to be that the bay area has somehow made a mistake in not anticipating the bizarre fetish that global wealth has developed for local real estate since the early 1990s.

It's insane that an industry of otherwise-intelligent people insists on cramming itself onto a tiny peninsula with seismic development challenges, and I chuckle every time someone draws the comparison to New York, which has seven times the land area, a capable and efficient transit system that has been developed over more than a century...and one of the highest costs of living in the world. Development is not a panacea.

I live in SF, but I wouldn't make the choice to move here today. It simply isn't worth Manhattan prices to live in a city full of tech bros, where you can't get a good meal after 9:30. Increasingly, the choice not to locate your company in SF is a sign of competitive intelligence.

In WV, you can find food at most places until 12-1am 7 days a week. And the major local grocery is a Walmart, which is open 24 hours.

Last Easter I had no clue nothing would be open, and didn't prepare for that. So I just had some crap picked up at a gas station to hold me over until the next day. It's a really bizarre situation compared to most other metros, but even compared to a bunch of small towns.

In my case, definitely.

Thanks for the clarification.

Yes and to finish my OP thought, I would argue that this was without a doubt the worse of it as well.

The people here are poor, and my perception is that they don't have much hope and/or desire to affect any kind of change in their life. They just seem not to give a crap.

I don't live in a nice part of town, and I suppose it could just be culture shock for me personally having moved from Irvine to Not-Summerlin, Vegas, but that's my perception.

Then again, another thing with Vancouver (that I think I've heard said a bit about SF, but less-so) is that there's no night life. The bars close at midnight. (Actually, you can't even get a license to operate a "bar" here; you have to build a sit-down restaurant in order to serve alcohol.) I wonder if the correlation is actually between this sort of Victorian-era teetotaling "healthy living" sensibility, and the sort of generalized NIMBYism that prevents highrises from deflating housing pressure.

I think you're onto something with the Victorian "healthy living" bit. There is some hypocrisy as well: the way Vancouverites talk down about alcohol drinkers or tobacco smokers all the time but meanwhile promote the pot trade and never talk about the rampant heroin problem in that city.

Really sad to hear that Vancouver and San Francisco are plagued by real estate siphoning out all the potential of what those cities could be. Feudalism seems to be a trend everywhere though.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-14/millennial...

All the great things that Vancouver has to offer happen in the day or afternoon. The only thing I'm sad about is the Jazz Cellar closing down. RIP Ross Taggart.

That said, nightlife closing at 2AM is a plus and a minus. I kind of like there being a defined end to the evening, I'd rather not stay out too too late and this way I don't have to be the party pooper :)

I've spent 8 months looking for a technical position. The only interviews I've managed to get are in Roanoke/Blacksburg, VA. Every interview I've had (not many because the market is dry), either drastically undercuts my experience (one company tried to write down my experience below the length of my last job) or otherwise offers a very meager salary, 30-50% lower than even the cost of living adjusted figure from my last job where I was living SoMa.

Also due to infrastructure, and partially the company who marked down my experience because they don't consider remote experience, I'm no longer interested in remote positions.

I can't find food after 10pm.

Morgantown also has late hours in my experience, though you might have to walk to High St.

I'm there fairly frequently.

The Asylum serves regular bar food til about 11 I think. Still later than what I was seeing in SF.

The public transit system shuts off by 12 AM - 1PM, and most service workers would likely have to live outside of the city, as well as most people coming into SF to work. The city is forced to shutoff at a certain time because of the transit situation, even if not for any other reasons.

The current disparity certainly causes plenty of concerning issues, though SF's early closing has been a thing since at least 2007 when I first lived there, at which point cost of living was somewhat reasonable.

I moved here because it had a pleasant climate and (once had) a vibrant art/culture scene that provided ~80% of what you could get in bigger cities, at a discount. It was a city, but with a higher quality of life. For that, you might be willing give up some things.

That's no longer true. I don't know how new people rationalize the costs here, except as an "investment" into something else -- their career, real estate, whatever.

And they've all worked out, shopped for groceries, had breakfast, etc. before 9am.

Even then, the jetlag only made it work for a week or two.

As others have noted, people who have the sorts of jobs that put them behind a register can't afford to live in SF, and public transportation shuts down at midnight or so. If you were working a restaurant it would have to close by 10:00 so you had time to clean up with a little buffer to make sure you were on the last train.

This one took me by surprise when I visited SF for the first time five years ago. I thought it would be booming with activity just like NYC, so I thought nothing of trying to find food when I arrived at ~11pm.

NOTHING. Nothing was open.

It must be a huge bummer to live in a city with NYC prices without that (very important --- to me) NYC perk.

Has nobody started a great 24/7 food delivery service bringing overpriced food to tech workers on demand?

You probably couldn't see anything open from your hotel in Union Square or SOMA, but it's there. Just open foursquare or Yelp.

Even if we lower the standard to include fast food and/or greasy post-drunk food, the number jumps to perhaps 30, on a weekend night. So there might be a late-night restaurant in every neighborhood, but there's definitely no more than one. If you want something good, you need to eat before 9.

Also, get off your high horse for implying that a greasy spoon can't be good or have high standards.

I routinely had good meals at 10pm or 11pm at night. Never once did I eat at a diner.

Lots of restaurants stay open later in NYC, and then there are plenty of gastropubs serving great food even later.

In NYC at 4am, I could Seemless any meal/quantity I wanted!

In Seattle, I can only get pizza past 2am.

Companies neither have to have physical offices nor do they have to be located in the Bay Area. And unfortunately culture dictates that an office is always necessary and that you need to locate your tech company in the Bay Area for dubious reasons like fundraising (which should only take a small portion of the operation of your company anyways), hiring (good engineers might come here if they agree with the lifestyle, and the job opportunities, but that doesn't mean jobs should come here because good engineers are here), or synergy (the belief that the physical proximity to other tech firms may help your company. Only applicable to certain markets at best).

Even the crack heads in SF are high class though. Where else do you see homeless people sleeping in $250 REI tents?

Sorry, but this is flawed logic.

Tech, more than seemingly any other industry I can think of, has a winner-takes-all model of success. Given this, starting a tech company anywhere other than where the overwhelming majority of the most capable employees live is virtually suicide. And this seems to pan out in the data as well — Twitter, Square, Uber, Google, Facebook, Reddit, AirBnB, Apple, Oracle, Box, Palantir, Pinterest, Lyft, Stripe, CloudFlare… not that these are all of tech, but finding even a fraction of these anywhere (other than perhaps New York) is a stretch.

Given that, it's patently worth it to pay the extra cost per employee, when the relative value of each employee to the company ends up being so high compared to other industries.

This is not to say you can't build a strong tech company in other parts of the US, but you're stacking the odds against you by doing so.

A quick scan of Fortune's unicorn list* shows 12 out of the top 25 are from outside of California, and two of the Cali ones are LA, bringing SF down to 11 (after generously counting Palo Alto in SF, because I assume you meant the Bay Area). Without numbers on how many startups are started in various places, I'm not sure what these numbers mean, but it doesn't obviously favor your winner-takes-all argument.

* http://fortune.com/unicorns/

For an area with less than 2% of the country's population, that is overwhelmingly dominant. I'm not sure if you could have underscored my point any more succinctly.

The point is that you still have contributed no idea of what portion of startups are starting in SF. If 95% of startups come out of SF but only 80% of winners do, it still has an overwhelming majority but is by the numbers a terrible place to start a startup.

Of the top 25 international, only about half are American, so stop pretending the denominator is 25 if you've decided that international companies for some reason don't count. There are 2 in LA, one in Boston, and 1 in NYC (what list are you looking at?), giving the Bay Area something like 2/3 of American companies, and about 1/3 of all.

Communication technology hasn't so far enabled, at least in the general case, geographically-distributed tech companies – otherwise we would be seeing an increasing trend of successful tech companies headquartered elsewhere. I don't think we are. Put another way, whatever advantage is conferred upon SF by physically housing an outsized share of tech workers is clearly giving it a competitive advantage that other locations have yet to overcome.

Having a distributed tech team is not hard, but most startups aren't distributed because the VCs aren't distributed. They want face to face meetings.

...and hopefully, everyone has first class redundant internet, something not guaranteed across the nation.

Which you have to pay yearly, not as a one-time discounted cost. In fact even down at the very, very low-end of tech-related jobs (~$50k in PDX) the difference between SF and PDX is ~$18k.

There is literally no shape of tech-oriented business you could operate where having to spend only $15k per employee when they're onboarded isn't a net financial benefit compared to having to pay SF-area competitive salaries for the same positions.

You shouldn't need most of the rest of that, either. Make sure everyone has a 2nd monitor, and you'll need to buy a $30 webcam if they don't already have laptops. I wouldn't worry about the headset, either - cell phone headsets or earpods generally work fine and most everyone has a decent one nowadays. Wait for the folks who want something nicer to ask for one.

Cheap internet is fine. I worked from home with rock bottom residential service, the cheapest they would give me, and my connectivity was fantastic, better than anything I've ever had from an office. The secret is that nobody's on the Internet from home during the day, so you've got infrastructure that was meant to handle the whole world watching Netflix at 8pm more-or-less to yourself.

This is assuming a distributed team. mind. They have a tendency to self-assemble. Partial co-location is where things get messy and you start needing to worry about smart whiteboards and fancy videoconferencing equipment and all that crap. All that's really for is to make it an eensy bit more likely that the co-located folks will be willing to collaborate with the remote folks rather than forming a clique and forgetting that the rest of the team exists.

Speaking from far-too-much experience, partially colocated teams are a productivity suck.

But I really do mean a fully distributed team needs a way to properly sketch things out. One of the biggest weaknesses I've seen is that people get limited by the equipment. So long as that's a separate piece of equipment from your video conferencing, it should be fine.

0/10, would not try again.

I'm just saying: consider locating your company somewhere else. There are great engineers all over the world, and most of your customers are not here.

Also, of course, few around here believe that there are good programmers outside of the city. Mostly, though, I think it's about 20-somethings who want to feel like they've made it because they're running a startup in the most expensive city in the country.

The cult is powerful, for such a group of disruptive, innovative thinkers.

The main requirement is that everyone communicate over the same channels. No planning sessions at the watercooler. Take it back to your desk and have the conversation in Slack instead.

If people really figure out how to consistently develop any kind of software remotely, with any team size and with average programmers, a lot of programming jobs will move away from high living cost areas, as happened with manufacturing jobs.

If you're in the US, where software developer salaries are much higher than most of the rest of the world (even on developed countries average programmers don't earn 6 figures), you'll be probably be on the losing side.

This is a false alternative, since it's not something SF government can do.

As someone who lives in Santa Rosa, having something that connected directly to SF or BART from up here would be awesome (even if not really feasible). My brother lives here as well and he commutes to the Embarcadero for work. I'm not jealous, I already have no time. An extended commute would be the end of me.

No it doesn't. You might have some memories crossed, but there's definitely no railway.

Unless you're proposing eminent-domaining people out of their houses to be handed over to for-profit developers (and man, that's a mess, and it's still super-expensive), you aren't going to be replacing too many blocks of two-storey homes with high rises, and you're also quickly going to saturate the ability of local developers to build out giant skyscraper projects -- like, how much slack do you think that there possibly was in the construction industry?

And as soon as we step away from literally insane levels of accommodation to a pattern of in-fill development and recognize that, rightly or wrongly, in-fill development is not wildly popular and you can't just strong-arm an entire city into an unpopular policy, the realistic amount of new development that you could get in SF is, you know, maybe twice as much development as we actually did get.

Which might've shaved 5% off the rents or so.

You also don't need to limit yourself to the existing local developers with political connections. Construction workers from all over the world could move here, just like software people do.

The idea that there's a lot of elasticity to the construction trade is also naïve. Construction workers from "all over the world" can't move here -- we have an immigration process, and it's not one that's favorable to construction workers. We are also in an area that is itself not very conducive to living on a construction worker's salary.

And also, who are these developers who are so eager to build high-rise housing in a market that is stipulated to have affordable rents? It's a big capital investment to build a modern skyscraper, especially if there's a construction crunch, especially if you have to do things like buy out large areas without the benefit of government coercion, especially if there are similar projects going up across the city to compete with you. Housing is not typically a highly profitable use of real estate to begin with, and San Francisco is also a city that is not very landlord friendly.

This dream of in-fill development being a simple cure-all to San Francisco's housing ills like most "one simple trick to fix all your problems" -- click bait, not a real solution.

None of this is to say that SF shouldn't have in-fill (it should), or that SF shouldn't reduce barriers to development (it should). But be realistic. Unless you rewrite everything about SF back 50 years, it's not going to dramatically change everything about this city overnight.

Your post I responded to talked about 15 years, not overnight. I absolutely think SF could have been transformed with a different policy if starting in 2001.

Even without any immigrants, there are an enormous amount of construction workers among our 300 million US citizens.

The idea that it's so incredibly hard to build a lot of housing over 15 years is disproven by the many successful big cities that actually do it.

> This dream of in-fill development being a simple cure-all to San Francisco's housing ills

Again, nobody is talking about a simple cure-all in three easy $19.95 payments.

Process, shmawsess.

Look what actually happened during the real estate bubble years: a large number of laborers just simply came to California from foreign countries to build houses and condos.

A large number of these workers went to California when they felt like it and left when the bubble burst. The government was scarcely able to impose anything resembling a "process."

This timeline is measured in decades, but imagine if San Francisco was easier to get permits to build?

Large swaths of the city are built under their _currently allowed_ zoned height (there was a map that went around, I wish I could find it). Add a few stories to some existing buildings, build on empty/underutilized lots, reduce parking requirements, legalize in-law units, add in the affordable housing bonus program...you'd be talking about tens of thousands of units.

I do agree there is a strong argument that this wouldn't be enough (Bay Area-wide coordination is necessary), but it would slow the rate of increase. For example, after an apartment building boom, Seattle rents are now decreasing: http://cityobservatory.org/in-some-cities-the-housing-constr...

You don't need eminent domain to build high rises. Developers can easily make very compelling offers to those currently in small houses to get them to move.

This article http://newyorkyimby.com/2015/01/the-yimby-report-2014-adds-a... suggests that in 2014, NYC added 44.8k units and in 2013 it added 22.9k units -- call it an average of 34k units.

This article http://sf.curbed.com/2015/7/16/9939720/sf-is-set-to-add-more... suggests that SF is adding about 3.6k units per year right now.

And NYC is 10x the population of SF. So. Sounds like they're expanding at around the same rate. (NYC is only 6.2x the land area of SF).

We all know those would be luxury units, but it would add 20K below-market, so there's that.

As always, I stand ready to let them bring a bulldozer to their favorite Mission block as long as I can bring one to Palo Alto and Atherton.

For some reason, people just see that as a cray-cray demand...

this meme has reached seattle as well.

"Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, come out on top — attracting more than twice as many citations per paper as the global average."

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101020/full/467906a.html

Nah. Manhattan is a really, really expensive (not as expensive as SF, though, on the average) city to live in. SF rents would have dropped, but not enough to cover the influx of people coming in. Rent prices probably would've dropped in other areas of the Bay though.

NYC also offers plenty of compelling options in other boroughs that are simultaneously cheaper and more convenient than their SF equivalents.

Hilarious. No. Absolutely not. To even compare the cities on this level is an insult to what New York is and how it came about.

San Francisco is a dinky little town compared to New York, the population is comfortably under a million people. It will take another hundred years of perfect planning and growth to catch up to where NYC is today.

Thought experiment: Let's say we do massive high density development in SF. A bunch of people move in, but now that SF is denser it's more desirable, so demand has increased as well, which drives rents right back up. Now we're stuck where we were before: high rents.

Having said that, I still support high density development because I think it leads to better living (and is better for the environment usually). I just am not optimistic that it will actually lower rents.

When you ask why Manhattan is expensive even with increased supply, you ignore demand.

The theory that increased density in itself drives up the value of housing is popular among anti-housing activists. I've never heard an economist who believes it.

If true, it would be an incredibly simple way to generate enormous amounts of money to simply building super dense neighborhoods. Since I don't see anyone getting rich off that, I have strong doubts about that model.

People don't move to where they can find expensive housing - people move to where they can find good jobs. Doubling SF housing wouldn't double the number of good jobs there.

Thought experiment: What do you think doubling the number of high paying jobs do to SF rent? Or, alternatively, halving the available housing?

Democracy in action!

Also: SF's refusal to build is having repercussions elsewhere, like here in Oregon where there is a steady stream of people who can't afford a house for their family in the bay area. In turn, they're pricing out people here, and so on.

Also, there's nothing 'extreme' about the population density of San Francisco. Density in Paris is 21,000/km^2 and in SF, 7,124/km^2

But if SF's refusal to build is having repercussions in Oregon, and all SF needs to do is build… well, then shouldn't Portland be able to solve its problems by doing the same thing?

Or has NIMBYism morphed into NIMSOTPNW (not in my section of the pacific northwest)?

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2016/03/charlie...

It'd probably be best if it were fixed in several places at once. For instance, Bend is a town of 80K people, and it could (and should) add a bunch of density. But if all that just goes to soaking up 1000's of "refugees" from California, it's not as effective as it could have been. In other words, California can produce many more people looking for a cheaper, better place than Bend can hope to absorb, so it'd be nice if the Bay Area fixed some of its own mess, as well as Portland, Seattle, Austin, Boulder etc...

We might wonder what will happen this momentum is deflected. Technical talent will disperse, and we'll end up with a more distributed workforce? Or will it simply concentrate somewhere else?

Right now, the Bay Area is in an extremely enviable position: it has a high concentration of extremely profitable companies; it has a high concentration of highly skilled workers; it has a high concentration of wealth; and, except for housing, it's a desirable place to live.

The Bay Area's residents and local governments oshould be able to leverage these positive factors to maintain the strong economy while making the area a better place to live for skilled workers who want to set down roots and raise families. Of course, it's more likely that nothing will happen and living conditions will become less and less sustainable.

I know this is ancient history, but I keep having to remind folks that the fetish for locating tech companies in SF didn't start until the late 1990s. Then it crashed, and didn't pick up again until the mid/late 'aughts.

Viewed dispassionately, the "momentum" of SF as a technology hub looks more like a fad that happens at the peak of VC consumer investment cycles.

Of course, that might not be in the Bay Area's interest but they seem to be voting firmly against it already.

I am a fan of neither, but they are completely different cities.

Compared to actual dense cities in the world, SF is nearly empty.

SF does need to build, badly, but I'm wary of the term NIMBY-ism. It is descriptive, but I think it invites false equivalence. There are degrees of NIMBY. I actually think that some of the burbs, like walnut creek or mountain view (especially the latter) have engaged in genuinely shocking levels of refusal to build housing. Mountain view's NIMBYism is especially objectionable since it actually green lighted the corporate construction that brings many new workers to the area, while almost with the same stroke of the pen banned new housing around those places of business. There's NIMBYism, and then there's actually generating the problems that you push out to other neighborhoods.

I'm always a little bummed to read statements by people who, probably out of frustration that I largely share, start to disparage SF's architectural and cultural heritage. It is absolutely possible to grow, dramatically, without tearing down some of the oldest neighborhoods west of the mississippi.

This is out of date, and has been for a while. The voters of Mountain View responded to the housing crisis by voting in a much more pro-housing city council. There are now over 10,000 units planned for North Bayshore (the area around the Google and LinkedIn campuses):

http://www.mv-voice.com/news/2016/03/03/council-oks-plans-fo...

As a long-time resident and voter in Mountain View, it's exasperating to have people so fixated on the NIMBY narrative that they ignore the significant steps the city and voters have and are taking to address the housing crisis. Regardless of what Matt Yglesias said, or that article from the Washington Post said, the votes of the Mountain View citizenry, and the resulting choices of the City Council, should make it clear that we're not a bunch of anti-density NIMBYs.

That's why it's mostly brothels and growhouses (exaggeration).

Keep in mind, what I'm saying here is a thesis, not a conclusion.

SF is city that ranges from very high density to middle density, with a few expensive and relatively suburban neighborhoods west of twin peaks and/or near the coast (St Francis Wood, Forest Hill, Seacliff, etc)… It has also had a relatively stable population density for over 50 years, and in some of these neighborhoods considerably longer than that.

SF is also a relatively small geographical area that is a different municipality from the nearby cities. In many (most?) cities in the US, sections of SF and Oakland/Berkeley would be the urban core of a larger city, but those suburbs and even exurbs wouldn't be considered different cities in the same region, they would be part of the same municipality. As a result, construction in the hinterlands that doesn't count as growth within "San Francisco" does count in growth in a place like Seattle, where the "city" of Seattle encompasses a much larger geographical area.

So, hear me out - while SF can be excessively preservation minded, think about how people would react if you tried to bulldoze not just the French Quarter in New Orleans, but the garden district, Bayou St John, or even some of the shotgun houses in less famous districts. What would happen if you tried to tear down historic houses in Philadelphia or Boston, or replace entire city blocks of 100+ year old houses or apartments with modern high rises?

My thesis (again, not a conclusion, I'd need to see the data) is that if you identify regions similar to SF - medium density neighborhoods that have existed in this form for 60-100 years, it is very difficult to tear things down and build greater density in many places outside SF. I wouldn't be surprised if it's especially difficult in SF, but I suspect this would be a difference in degree, that SF would have an unusually strong preservation instinct, but that you'd find strong, similar preservation instincts in many other comparable regions - but that these similarities are not evident because we aren't comparing similar geographical regions, again because of the oddity of municipal boundaries in SF (which are a large contributor to the NIMBYism problem, to be sure).

A new 50-story apartment building is far more likely to survive an earthquake without damage than a 3-story apartment built in the '70s or '80s (even with retrofitting).

As a kid, my wife grew up always wanting to live in the Marina. Now, you couldn't pay her to spend a night there because of the landfill.