I've thought about this a lot. I've always lived in an unfashionable part of San Francisco - I grew up west of twin peaks in the 70s when it was considered fog

I've thought about this a lot. I've always lived in an unfashionable part of San Francisco - I grew up west of twin peaks in the 70s when it was considered foggy, boring, and square, and I now live south of 280, where mission isn't hipster. I do wonder why some of the people getting crushed on rent don't just move farther out the bart or even muni line. There are still cheap spots south of 280 in SF that are an extremely short hop to the mission or downtown (like, 8-12 minutes on bart, if that). Thing is, while people may complain, they often aren't quite as irrational as they seem. There may be exceptional value in living in the intense concentration of young tech workers and artists (well, with the latter rapidly diminishing). In spite of being a programmer who spent almost my entire life in SF, I never really was in the thick of it. I think this might partly be age - I'm in my mid 40s now, and when I was in my 20s, SF wasn't nearly as big a part of tech as it is now. There were a few startups and design companies, but "Tech" was really mainly South Bay. Even well into the 1990s, SF proper was actually law firms, a few bankers, and a bit of publishing and media, with a generally much more conservative dress and business culture. But watching it now - obviously there's something very valuable in the network effects of being in the thick of things. And by that, I actually do mean bumping into people you know or will know soon, working on similar things. Almost none of these young people expect to stay in SF (from the sound of it, many don't want to), but they're building careers in a way that, again didn't really exist to the same extent 20 years ago. SF just wasn't an "alpha" city for careers, it was a beta plus, a perfect fine place to have a career, but not the place. The most ambitious career driven types almost all lived elsewhere - even if it was tech, it was South Bay. In short, if you're going to sacrifice your 20s to live in the Bay Area and pursue your career in the alpha city for that career, it actually might make sense to pay through the nose to truly live in the thick of it. Even a 15 minute drive on bart might deprive you of 90% of those in the moment interactions that make the whole difference. It's just a thought, but there may be a higher career cost for those intensely career drive people than we realize if they live just a bit further, add just a bit more friction to interactions. Truth is, I've never really been one of them. I'm from an era where staying in (or moving to) SF was something you did because you liked SF, and you were willing to live in a good but not best city for your career. Of course, it's changed the culture dramatically, to say the least. But if you've decided to live in an outrageously expensive place to pursue your career, perhaps it also makes sense to pay through the nose to live in the epicenter rather than merely nearby?