I know that in Toronto there's a lot of casual evidence of empty condos. Multiple buildings are springing up without any need for sewer system upgrades. The lights never seem to be on in most of the units. Keep in mind it gets dark before 5 in the winter. New condo developments don't seem to have grocery stores or supporting businesses.
But again, there's evidence but no one can get any real numbers.
Also owners have an incentive to lie to the government. Getting Canadian citizenship requires spending most of your time in the country for multiple years, but that's hard to track if you come and go on different passports.
>Multiple buildings are springing up without any need for sewer system upgrades.
How would you know? Do you think most people ask the guys digging up the streets what they are doing? Or what kind of capacity exists in Toronto already(was it future proofed?)
>The lights never seem to be on in most of the units.
Can you give any examples of buildings that are over a year old that are like this? I moved into 33 bay st on the first day residents were allowed in and my floor was empty for 3 months other an me. Most of the building was empty but that was largely because a) there were a lot of units for rent that took time to fill out. b) the sales office was open for 2 years after the building was complete as a lot of units weren't sold straight away.
>New condo developments don't seem to have grocery stores or supporting businesses.
Have you got any examples of this? 33 bay doesn't have a grocery store in it but everyone in those 4 buildings went to the Longos under Mapleleaf square or the Loblaws the other direction. Cityplace has a grocery store and pretty active bars/restaurants now. The ones on King/Queen have the Loblaws on Queen in walking distance and the ones on Yonge between bloor/king have the MLG Loblaws.
>Getting Canadian citizenship requires spending most of your time in the country for multiple years, but that's hard to track if you come and go on different passports.
Most of the people aren't looking for citizenship though only PR status which doesn't require that.
Why the Bay Area? Because it has a huge collection of both jobs and employees. As an employee you have lots of options should things fall through with your current employer, and as an employer there is lots of talent you could potentially hire (though for a high price). No reason it had to be the Bay Area in particular, but it had to be somewhere.
If it moves somewhere else, it's likely that place's real estate market would be similarly inflated by an influx of professionals.
Some people (pretty much everyone who is vocal about this on HN) see remote work as the solution. I'm skeptical - it takes a lot to make your issue tracker, documentation, mailing lists etc. thorough enough that they're the only communication developers need. In my experience (and I expect at many companies) developers come across crucial bits of information through serendipitously overheard conversations, or by wandering over to people's desks, etc. such that if structured (i.e. either async or scheduled) communication were the only communication, things wouldn't get done as well or as quickly.
I'm not sure the former is good for me as an engineer. It'd be nice to afford a decent house, but less so if I have to sell it and move cross country to advance my career or flee an employer going the way of Yahoo. Barriers like geography, moving costs, social ties in different cities keeping the best employer-employee pairs from finding each other are a form of inefficiency that I'm not sure we should seek to introduce.
I'd like the latter - we could build it somewhere more development-friendly, which would make it less insane than the Bay Area housing market, but putting a huge industry of well-paid professionals somewhere isn't compatible with low cost of living (see: Manhattan, DC).
And seriously that zone along the coast range up the peninsula is a really sweet spot[1]. If you and your associates have to be somewhere it's really hard to beat. (not so nice for the middle class couple trying to buy a house where the schools are still good, or the guy commuting from Tracy)
[1] Los Gatos all the way up to Woodside. Also check out Danville CA on the other side of the Oakland Hills.
There's an excellent video on him around, I'll see if I can't turn that up. Here: "The Secret History of Silicon Valley", tech talk at Google: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hFSPHfZQpIQ
Briefly:
UC Berkely and Stanford, each of which had (and have) excellent engineering deparments. Other colleges, universities, junior colleges, and public schools were from the 1950s through 1970s excellent. Most have been faltering since the 1980s.
Moffet Airfield. Already established by WWI and home to airship activity.
World War II. An immense industrial capacity built up, many defense industries, and a nascent technology cluster.
Amazing weather. There's little else in the US, or anywhere in the world, which can compete.
(For all the specific local boosters out there: I didn't say no places, I said "little else".)
Cheap housing. Up through the 1970s, California had ample room to grow, and things didn't start getting particularly nuts until the 1980s and 1990s. Since 1995, it's simply been insane.
Freeways. For a time it was possible to get around. That's no longer particularly the case. BART helps. Caltrain doesn't hurt too much. Both are entirely inadequate.
The ability to work from anywhere is only about 10 years old. The need for tech industry is closer to 50-60 years old, and local efficiencies, economies of scale, job-mobility, etc., all happen and matter.
If engineers are purely sitting at their computers and not talking to each other at all (except during scheduled meetings), the team could probably be converted to remote without downside, but plenty of organizations have an implicit dependency on unstructured conversation, and while there are ways to facilitate that in a remote work environment, it's not obvious.
Tldr; early internet infrastructure