> I will say that as an outsider, the Bay and San Francisco often seem to get conflated when people discuss them. I've heard plenty about the issues the city of

> I will say that as an outsider, the Bay and San Francisco often seem to get conflated when people discuss them. I've heard plenty about the issues the city of SF is facing right now, but my sense is that many parts of the Bay are still thriving - just prohibitively expensive for most. Is that true? Or is the lived experience in other parts of the Bay also getting worse? That's very, very true, and also one of my pet peeves as an insider. Most of the problems that people are associating with the Bay Area - the rampant crime, poop on the streets, poor schools, dysfunctional politics, performative wokeness - are specifically San Francisco problems (and to a slightly lesser degree, Oakland and downtown San Jose). In my neighborhood, there are yard signs out saying "We [heart] our police", right alongside BLM signs and rainbow flags. There is no poop on the streets, not even dog poop (there are occasional broken bottles, but they're as likely to be Snapple as beer). The two times I've had to call them (for identity theft and a medical emergency), they were there within an hour and 3 minutes, respectively, and they were courteous and professional. I feel safe walking my kid back from preschool. Mid-peninsula, Redwood City, Mountain View, most of Sunnyvale, Fremont, North San Jose, Berkeley/El Cerrito, are all on the upswing. Housing prices are unfortunately all going up to match, but that's because people want to live there. I've heard that the center of gravity of Silicon Valley shifts every 5-10 years or so, each time a new tech wave happens. It was SF in the 2010s (mobile & sharing economy), Palo Alto & Mountain View in the 00s (Web 2.0 & social networking), SF in the late 90s (dot-com boom), Mountain View in the early 90s (SGI & Netscape), Cupertino in the late 80s (Apple, Seagate, and Borland), Scotts Valley in the early 80s (Borland), spread over the peninsula in the 70s (Oracle in Redwood Shores, Intel in Santa Clara), and Sunnyvale in the 1960s (Lockheed Martin, Hendy Ironworks). It's likely we're seeing another turn now, and my bets for a new center of gravity would be Redwood City (crypto, drones) or Foster City / Redwood Shores (biotech).