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> It's got some great culture if you're in tech. Honestly, I find the culture of Silicon Valley's tech industry to be utterly degenerate. Even if the area was
by amyjess 10y ago
> It's got some great culture if you're in tech.
Honestly, I find the culture of Silicon Valley's tech industry to be utterly degenerate. Even if the area was affordable, I wouldn't live or work there in large part because SV puts me off.
I work in tech, I'm LGBT myself (multiple letters of LGBT at that), and the Dallas area is pretty much everything I want in a city.
I honestly don't get why the Bay Area doesn't just expand outward. Sure, you can't go farther west because there's an ocean in the way, but what's stopping it from sprawling north, south, and east? I'm from Dallas, which has experienced booming growth for as far back as I can remember, and we've kept housing prices down without sacrificing suburban culture by simply expanding outwards. Nobody cares that none of the expansion is in Dallas proper; the locals here see each suburb as neighborhoods, not separate cities (albeit, neighborhoods with their own street signage and lane markings, but still). Not just housing; workplaces are moving outwards too. Hell, right now, I live in the burbs, and my workplace is in a suburb that's even farther away from Downtown from where I live.
- Kalium 10y agoThe 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.
- dpark 10y ago> 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.
- uola 10y agoI 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.
- umanwizard 10y agoIs 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.
- dpark 10y agoIt 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.
- seanp2k2 10y agoYou 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.
- dpark 10y agoI 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.
- sneak 10y agoSF is not in SV.