> Honestly, I find the culture of Silicon Valley's tech industry to be utterly degenerate.

I'm not sure what that means. I was mostly referring to the fact that there are a ton of techies there. If you want to strike up a conversation about microservices with a stranger on the street, SF is probably the easiest place to do so.

> I honestly don't get why the Bay Area doesn't just expand outward.

Traffic, probably. It takes about 30 minutes to commute from Oakland to SF, and those two are pretty close geographically. Your commute could be far longer depending on where you live and work in the existing Bay Area. I doubt most people want to commute an hour from San Ramon to SF.

Plus there are mountains not far east of the Bay. I'm not sure how much of that land is easily developed.

Yes; traffic. Anywhere within an hour to two hour commute to SF or SJ or the peninsula carries a huge premium, and it's not like we can just hop on a train to the city. The yellow line reaches the furthest into the east bay, and all the places along it range from "pretty expensive" to "rich people area". The blue line to Pleasanton...well, it's called "Pleasanton", what do you think it is? Lots of rich people live there and the "downtown" is one street. They complained a lot about BART even running out there ("we don't want that inner city crime coming out this way!"), and BART doesn't run to SJ (not even close; even though that was in the original plans: http://io9.gizmodo.com/5866928/a-map-of-san-franciscos-subwa... ).

IMO if we had proper mass transit, it'd alleviate many of the real-estate problems we see now. All the low density and NIMBYism makes that a pipe dream, for now and the foreseeable future.

I think the question is why San Francisco doesn't expand like, say, New York has? Where each new neighborhood becomes somewhat self sustaining. I seem like there would be a queue of people that wants to start a company in the cheaper part of town. I guess maybe SV is that cheaper part though.

Is each new neighborhood of NYC really self-sustaining? It seems NYC's ability to grow is based on massive amounts of people being able to easily and cheaply commute to Manhattan daily.

It has. You don't have to go into SF for anything if you live in Mountain View, or Oakland, or Sunnyvale, or any of the other towns in the bay area. But as you noted, those aren't cheap either.

You don't have to unless you want things like nightlife, good food, cultural events, etc. It's true that you can survive in the peninsula without those things, and every bar around is not dead, but it's not the city and not even close.

I lived in Mountain View and ate plenty of good food without ever going into SF. I wasn't much into nightlife, but there were bars there and in the neighboring towns. I don't know what cultural events you're referring to so it's hard to answer that. Probably fewer parades if that's what you're interested in.

And no, it's not the same as SF, but that's really a far different question than whether the surrounding towns are self-sustaining. If you want to live in a truly urban area, then MV and Sunnyvale will not be for you. If you want a place that you can work and live, then they can. It's unfair to pretend they have no food, bars, or culture.

The Bay Area already has sprawled north, south, and east. I have coworkers who commute from all those directions. It's hit the limit of the current transit infrastructure, and adding more is cost and time prohibitive.

SF is not in SV.