The biggest thing preventing tech workers from moving is that some interactions simply must be done in-person. Often this requirement is due to culture, not technological limitations. Still, there are significant advantages to in-person interactions. People are much more likely to pay attention to each other. There can be interesting and beneficial chance encounters. And of course, the likelihood of anything getting recorded or leaked is lower.
I think that as remote work becomes more feasible (both technologically and culturally), more tech workers will move out of the bay area. There are simply too many incentives to leave.
1. The worst being Guam, which couldn't keep electricity running for more than 12 hours a day. Great beaches, though.
2. Oh, and who had the bright idea to put cloth seats on BART? That person has probably caused the spread of more disease than Typhoid Mary.
After all, teleconferencing all the time is not the only alternative to everyone living in the same city. People could actually travel for important meetings from time to time.
A best-of-the-class high-speed train (300mph+, not the pathetic 200mph version they're talking about) should be able to get you from Portland to SF, or from LA to SF, in two hours flat. Even better, you'll be able to work during those two hours.
And then they could uproot their workforces (and if you took the combined employees of Yahoo, MS, Google, Apple, AOL, Facebook, etc, you would have moved the employee base) and move there, it would probably be the most futuristic city on the planet.
I mean, they wouldn't - or they already would have - because it isn't economically feasible. But that always comes off as a buzz kill since we just end up trying to grow new businesses like cancer into the ancient ruins of lost revolutions we call "historical preservation".
Most of us in the tech sector are young and single and least likely to go house hunting, so the expensive housing is painful for us, but probably affects us the least.
There is high demand for what the city offers.
There's also high demand for face-to-face meetings with people to assess and establish trust. There is no replacement for that, and why experience tends to cluster together, whether tech here, or entertainment in the South.
I suppose if you're in your 20s and without children, it makes a bigger difference, but I find I don't often have the time to do anything until the weekend anyway, and so there would be little use paying high rents when 60% of the time, I'm just crashing there and spending all my time elsewhere.
Where I disagree is that I think of those things as having two faces. On the one hand, a vibrant culture and a large group of trustworthy colleagues increase people's quality of life. On the other hand, they reduce mobility, distort markets, and therefore reduce people's quality of life.
And the hacker in me wonders whether it might be possible to reduce the negative side while keeping most of the positive side.
That does help explain why you see locations as essentially fungible. :)
> Apparently I'm incapable of developing an emotional attachment to geographical coordinates.
There's coordinates, and there's community. Places become keys for personal/shared experiences and history, people build up neighbors and networks that provide society, help mitigate risk, and introduce opportunity (and the fewer resources you have, the more important that is).
> We don't need to be in any particular city in order to write code.
Certainly not to write code. To raise money, on the other hand, it seems to be pretty advantageous. Whether that's about dev convenience or VC convenience, though, is probably a key question worth exploring.
The larger point about making other choices than the Bay Area is one I'm very on board with. There are times I wish I lived there and opportunities that have tempted me, but it's also clear to me that SF and the Bay at large have some structural problems and don't have good policy for protecting/fostering the stuff that's important about communities. For the most part, I've chosen to move in other orbits and it's been rewarding.
Who knows, maybe the ex-Californians will vote yes on Prop 1 so we can keep our buses.
The problem is not the new people moving in and the solution is not to stop them, the solution is to address the pressure those new residents create that is driving the old residents out. Entire families shouldn't be uprooted and have their lives thrown into disorder just because some twenty-something wants to live in SF for a year or two while they're working at a startup, and that twenty-something shouldn't have to practically evict some low-income family to find an apartment.
If those families wanted to be able to stay there permanently at a fixed rate of housing expenses, they should have purchased the property. Can't afford to buy? Then deal with the risks of renting.
Their desire for low rent that keeps them comfy and entails no inconveniences has no validity. That's just a wish. That's immature. This is not grade school and not everyone gets a trophy for simply showing up.
There's a LOT of upper-end housing supply due to come in soon - tens of thousands of units. Amazon is taking a lot of heat about it, since they chose to build in the city and their workers usually do as well.
Sorry to be blunt, but that's how "supply and demand" is really supposed to work. If Seattle supplies the same quality of housing for half the cost of San Francisco, buyers/renters should flock to Seattle, thereby reducing demand in SF and eventually causing SF housing prices to come down until the market finds an equilibrium. Trying to lobby for "below-market-price" housing is always going to be a losing game; the only long-term solution is to make the market price lower.
Unfortunately, competition among cities to attract residents is not like competition in other industries. A lot of people are stuck in a relatively small geographical area their whole lives due to employment, their children's education, various kinds of emotional attachment, and the sheer difficulty of uprooting themselves from a familiar neighborhood. This creates a captive market, severely limiting the effectiveness of inter-city competition. And of course, whenever there's a captive market, there's somebody who profits from it. In the case of SF's housing market, entrenched neighborhood groups and "below-market-price" renters enjoy benefits at the expense of newcomers to the city. Perhaps they actually deserve those benefits. Still, it's unfair to everyone else.
But there's one group of people who can afford not to be bound by the usual excuses that keep people stuck in a captive market. That's us, the techies. We don't need to be in any particular city in order to write code. Most of us are young and don't have kids. Few of us have any "root" in the Bay Area, so we couldn't care less about being uprooted [1]. There is no reason for us to be a part of San Fran's captive housing market. We can pack up and leave, all 8% of us if possible. That would be "supply and demand" doing its work.
Of course, there are a few problems with this proposal, including the fact that there really is such a thing as social networking of the offline kind. The Bay Area undoubtedly has one of the best tech "scenes" in the world. But I see it as a problem that needs to be fixed, not merely an advantage that we're free to exploit. HN, for example, requires everyone to move to the Bay Area, perhaps for a good reason. But in doing so, they directly contribute to, and exacerbate, the hideous distortion of the Bay Area's housing market. It's like mandating that everyone meet at a particular Starbucks. It makes sense when everyone you want to meet is already a regular of that Starbucks, but when the manager of Starbucks begins to take advantage of its captive clientele, you should seriously start considering an alternative.
Remember, the only vote that the market respects is a vote with your feet, i.e. a realistic threat to do business with a competitor.
[1] Disclaimer: I've lived in at least seven different cities in three continents, and harbor no particular emotional attachment to any of them. Apparently I'm incapable of developing an emotional attachment to geographical coordinates. But I must confess that I kinda like it that way.