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More than half of Silicon Valley residents want to leave: The mood is darkening
- peterbonney 4y agoI have one thing to say about this: “Online survey”
- eunoia 4y agoData point of one but my wife and I decided we were done and left earlier this year. Quit my FANG job that wouldn’t support the move, bought a house in a MCOL area and could not be happier. I’ve even lost some pretty significant weight just getting back to living a non-workaholic lifestyle. Life is short people. Keep an eye on what’s actually important to you.
- f1shy 4y ago> Life is short people. Always when I think about how short life is, in the cited context, I remember this essay from PG. Which I found great: http://www.paulgraham.com/vb.html http://www.paulgraham.com/vb.html
- bmmayer1 4y agoWhat does MCOL mean?
- SoftTalker 4y agoMedium/Moderate Cost of Living? Just a guess, but seems likely in context.
- FeistySkink 4y agoMedium cost of living, perhaps?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ch4s3 4y agoIt means Medium Cost of Living. Think Philadelphia or Atlanta.
- mv4 4y agoMedium Cost of Living?
- RichardCNormos 4y agoI did the same and haven't looked back. I can take a walk without wandering through a sketchy bum colony. The streets aren't lined with RVs. My property tax is in the single-digit thousands of dollars. I was able to get a concealed carry permit, but ironically, I only carry when I have to travel back to the Bay Area.
- klondike_klive 4y agoCalling first dibs on "sketchy bum colony" as a band name.
- justnotworthit 4y agobetter than "itchy bum colony".
- triyambakam 4y agoWhere did you end up?
- powerslacker 4y agoI wonder how this will affect housing prices in the rest of the states. The bay area has a lot of people, if half of them migrate that's bound to have an effect.
- jeffbee 4y agoMost American cities are only slightly behind Bay Area cities in the housing crisis process and small disturbances radically upset their housing markets. Market rents in Austin almost doubled in the past year alone. If you're leaving SV for lower housing prices you might be surprised.
- jimt1234 4y agoFacts
- gnulinux 4y agoThis is true. I make $150k a year and Boston area rent prices + cost-of-living makes me live close to paycheck-to-paycheck. (I'm not there, but I can save very little even though I try to live frugally, prices are insane!). I simply cannot comprehend how low income people live in major American cities, you'd have to live with many roommates and be very food insecure! Life is hard in the US [1] right now! [1] In the cities. I'm guessing life in suburbia/rural towns is easier. I lived in a major city my entire life, and living in rural parts of the country not worth it unfortunately. It's my own personal decision, I understand that it comes with significant trade-offs.
- jefftk 4y agoBoston rents are much higher than they should be (build more housing!) but $150k is still quite a lot compared to rents? For example, you can rent a 3br unit 10min from Harvard sq for $3700/month or in East Arlington / West Medford for $2800: https://www.jefftk.com/apartment_prices/#2022-08-18&3 https://www.jefftk.com/apartment_prices/#2022-08-18&3
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- stuff4ben 4y agoAnd the places they move to are seeing the effects. Rising home prices here in RTP, NC is making life difficult for those not in the tech sector since wages haven't increased proportionally. Good for us that bought homes even just 4 or 5 years ago, but I feel for those who are just entering their careers and looking to buy or even rent a home.
- leetrout 4y agoIt is felt 2-3 counties away. Anything within a 1 hour drive. I am glad big tech is growing in the area but the home prices have been bonkers.
- clusterhacks 4y agoUgh. I do NOT miss commuting into RTP. What counts as a 1 hour drive these days? Dating myself, but I remember co-workers at Nortel commuting into RTP from well east of Raleigh . . . that was awful even years ago when Nortel still existed. Know much about folks buying that far out these days? I mean, I hear apocryphal stories about Apple/Google engineers buying up houses unseen in the immediate RTP area but I am not entirely sure I believe those.
- leetrout 4y agoWe were house shopping 5 years ago this month a lost a couple potential houses to unseen offers hours after going on the market. Most recently I have seen neighbors buying for 10% or more over asking. I am in Burlington and everything from Mebane toward RTP has just been crazy prices and moving crazy fast. I am very glad I got in when I did. I worked in Chapel Hill for a couple years and could commute on the back roads but going in to Cary or RTP would be at least an hour for me.
- clusterhacks 4y agoAnecdotally speaking re: RTP, NC but I think the area may have peaked back in summer. Inventory is sitting much longer. I know sellers who sold under asking for a price much more similar to previous years recently. New construction is always a bit behind here and we will definitely see higher prices in central NC with the various tech companies increasing their presence in the area. But it was complete bonkers until August. Sellers were getting double-digit all-cash offers 10%-20% over asking price. Never seen anything like that here before.
- jandrese 4y agoThe Bay Area is one of the few where half of the residents could move out and they would still have a housing crunch.
- borski 4y agoThe death of Silicon Valley has been stated and overstated for decades now. This isn’t the first “exodus” we’ve had, and it won’t be the last. But somehow, new blood finds their way back here every time.
- jjtheblunt 4y agoDoes the new blood finding their way back depend on H1B programs? (I actually do not know one way or the other, but am aware of that topic.)
- borski 4y agoNope. Well, yes, but not solely. H1B visas don't tend to change based on the other ups and downs of the valley.
- jjtheblunt 4y agoI mean would a refill of valley residents be disproportionately (compared to other metropolitan areas) holders of H1B visas.
- borski 4y agoI knew what you meant. No.
- yazzku 4y agoI'm not even going any further than HN comments on this one. NYPost (and also SFChronicle) were constantly talking about this 'exodus' during COVID. How everyone was leaving; how the U-Hauls were cheaper in the egress direction. Seemed like complete and utter BS. I'm sure they made a lot of revenue from ads though.
- billylindeman 4y agoTo be fair, I did leave during COVID and it was actually impossible to get a Uhaul (September 2020). Moving back to SF in the next month for a new gig (after the startup I was working for ran out of cash and laid everyone off).
- fasteddie31003 4y agoDo it. We got probably 5x the amount of house than we could have gotten in the Bay Area and we don't have to worry about our car windows being broken. We now live close to nature and I'm in such better shape being able to trail run, mountain bike, and snowboard minutes away from our house.
- triyambakam 4y agoColorado?
- fasteddie31003 4y agoShh
- senko 4y agoIn all fairness, whenever someone says they left CA it's either Austin or (if they mention anything related to snow) Boulder or Denver. I've yet to hear anyone gushing about how they left SV for North Dakota or Alaska.
- WWLink 4y agoI THINK YOU SHOULD GO BACK TO GREENVILLE ALABAMA!!!!!!! -forrest gump to jenny lol.
- bobkazamakis 4y agodelete this
- spaniard89277 4y agohaha ur fucked
- catiopatio 4y agoPlease don’t, unless you’re willing to confront your own contribution to the situation you’re fleeing. Wherever you go, there you are. As someone in Colorado watching the influx of Californians with a dread and frustration over the past 10 years, the majority of newcomers seem to vote and live exactly like they did in CA, creating the exact same problems in CO that they ran from CA to escape.
- xivzgrev 4y agoThis seems really high, and feels like a biased population. The article says this was based on 1700 responses from 5 counties, but who did they survey? A lot of families have deep roots here (and houses). They have businesses, friends, families, etc. despite the crap they don’t plan to move anytime soon. I wouldn’t be surprised if this survey captured more renters, or techies / transplants, or younger folks. Then I’d believe 50%+ thinking of leaving.
- thewebcount 4y agoGiven that this is from the NY Post, it is probably the results of some deceptively worded push poll. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that it was on their web site with no constraints on how many times you could answer.
- jibe 4y agoNo, they didn't do the poll, they are just reporting on it. They link to the full poll results in the first paragraph. https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/sv-poll-2022-report.pdf https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/sv-poll-2022-rep...
- 120bits 4y agoI was working in tech in Bay Area and left to a mid-west 13 years ago. My friends called me crazy. Who is crazy now?!! I was really burned out and though the tech scene was good in silicon valley(startups, good companies), it still felt my life was just monotonous. I had same tech friends, which were competing against each other. Talking about FAANG companies. I took a pay cut when I moved away to my new place. I joined a small tech company and was happy. 9-5 job and skiing on the weekends. Taking dog to the walk everyday. I feel happy.
- elforce002 4y agoThat looks like a really good work-life balance right there. Congrats!
- WWLink 4y agoIt felt like the vast majority of people I knew on IRC lived somewhere in the midwest, mostly Ohio. Honestly things didn't turn out so well for a lot of those people. Glad to hear it worked out for ya!
- aftbit 4y agoI left during COVID to be closer to family. I don't miss the high cost of living or the crowding, but I definitely miss the climate and access to nature. I've gained a bunch of weight now that I drive everywhere instead of walk. Just another anecdote to go with the rest in this thread.
- giantg2 4y agoI've never lived there, but I image other would share my strategy (not that I ever got to use it) - move there, make a ton of money, move away 5-10 years later, possibly switch to a smaller company (big fish in a small pond). I would guess there's a lot of churn on the population there but I don't have the numbers.
- bfung 4y agoThat’s the typical pattern in SF: young 20s & 30s there, move to the burbs/San Jose after marriage and kids. Due to the high cost of living and high incomes, the other local wisdom is: [get in early, once you leave, you’ll never really go back]
- jeffbee 4y agoThere's a thing they are doing on Twitter these days: "a short history of [false meme]". This fits that pattern very well. I can find mass-market news stories about how [large fraction] of SV residents are planning to leave from this year and each of the past 10 years.
- eli_gottlieb 4y agoNew York Post is really not a suitable source for this site, is it?
- daltont 4y agoI'm sure they are eager to report problems in what they deem progressive areas of the country?
- SpacePortKnight 4y agoIt's interesting since as a SDE in India/Bangalore, I would absolutely love to work in California. All the reasons citied in the article applies to Bangalore as well? For example similarities include, cost of living / rent in Bangalore is high but it's also the city with most tech jobs. The public transport infra is weak and there is an acute shortage of Uber cabs and yet it still is the most fun city for the youth to be in. I guess what I am saying is that the grass is always greener on the other side. There will always be a tradeoff to make.
- InitialLastName 4y agoSomething tells me that most of the people who want to leave Silicon Valley don't think that India is where the grass is greener.
- ok_dad 4y agoIt would be a giant culture shock for an American to live in India, but I was in Bangalore for a while auditing some vendors there, and I have to say I would be very happy to work at any one of those places, they were like Google campuses and I enjoyed sitting in their gardens doing work in between audit meetings. Their work ethic was also very hardcore, so they worked a bit harder than I would be willing to do, but they were certainly as professional and their companies and facilities were as nice as anything in America.
- dxbydt 4y ago> as a SDE in India/Bangalore, I would absolutely love to work in California As someone who spent all his childhood in Bangalore before migrating to the USA & specifically California, let me give you some perspective. No SDE wants to work in a Shimoga or Davangere. They want to work in Bangalore. Similarly, no SDE wants to work in a Concord or Martinez or what have you. There are thousands of perfectly good cities in California, but the SDEs all want to work in Silicon Valley. I remember during the early days of YC, I wrote to a founder saying I'd like to work with him. So he invites me. I go to see the company. Its just a 2 bedroom house in San Francisco! They've gotten rid of the furniture, put tables & chairs & laptops. So I tell him, look, I have a 2 bedroom house in San Ramon. We can just operate out of that. He says, I too have a 2 bedroom house in San Ramon! So I say, why are you working out of San Francisco ? Because that's Silicon Valley, you see! So 2 people who live 5 minutes walking distance from each other, both in San Ramon, each have 2 bedroom houses with enough space to spare, no cost, have to commute 1 whole hour, all the way to San Francisco every morning, to work in an expensive rented 2-bedroom house, because Silicon Valley. Now if that's not ridiculous, I don't know what is. In the case of Bangalore, one could argue there is a huge advantage to commuting from say Hebbal to Electronics City, because there is a gigantic 4 million square feet Infosys campus over there. But if you have a collection of 1000s of startups, and each of them is just a 2-bedroom house or some small office building, the same can very well exist in Danville or Pleasanton or Walnut Creek or Clayton or Dublin or Antioch or .... I've stayed in all those places and there's plenty of cheap office space & 2-bedrom houses. But no. All the action must happen in Silicon Valley. Because. In that sense I really welcome all this disruption. You don't have to go to Colorado or Seattle or whatever...just go 20 miles N/S/E/W...that itself would be a huge deal. Forget cost cutting, Cutting down on the pollution due to commute traffic would be a very significant positive contributor to the environment.
- borbulon 4y agoIf you’re looking for truth, might I suggest looking at something other than the NY Post.
- jibe 4y agoThey appear to have reported truthfully. Read the source poll yourself, which the NY Post didn't commission, but helpfully linked to in the first paragraph. https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/sv-poll-2022-report.pdf https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/sv-poll-2022-rep...
- 1270018080 4y agoI wish this was actually true. I'd love to live in the best climate in the country if it was affordable.
- smithclay 4y agoI’m a 30-something transplant that happily decided to stay in San Francisco, but I have a lot of empathy and understanding for those who decided to leave. The thing that had the biggest impact on various quality of life issues (and why I stayed) was moving from the Mission to a quieter and safer SF neighborhood. I bike everywhere, don’t have a car, and can walk to work and several beautiful parks, including one that opened this year. If I had kids, don’t think it would have been possible at all to stay.
- floren 4y agoI'm curious, what would have been the "breaking point" if you had kids?
- smithclay 4y ago(Hypothetical) breaking point: Cost of housing for a family in desirable SF neighborhoods and the SF public school system.
- bradgessler 4y agoIt’s hard to answer this question hypothetically because if you don’t have kids, you don’t pay attention to how the school system works. It’s a beast. If you have kids and send them to the public schools, you can’t just move into the neighborhood next to the school you want your kid to attend. There’s an entire placement system you have to learn about that takes into account where you live, stated preferences, etc. It’s possible you live next to a school, but your kid has to go to a completely different school in a different neighborhood. If don’t want to subject yourself to that then you can send kids to private schools that cost between $15k-$45k/year. On top of that these schools hit you up for more money at fundraisers, etc. Middle School and High School is another can of worms. I’m also skipping past the huge budget shortfalls SFUSD is facing and the possibility the state of CA takes over. At some point it just gets exhausting having to think through all this stuff. A big reason I moved out of SF to a nearby town is because I knew all the schools were great from K-12 in my district and I just don’t have to think through the insane logistics people have to worry about in SF. Maybe I overthink my child’s education, but for me it didn’t sit well with how much was left up to chance in public education, the expense of private education, and all the logistics and hassle involved for both options.
- belfalas 4y agoReminds me of the 2000s dot com bust, there was a funny meme that got shared in a chainmail (remember those?). It was one of those "Top Ways You Know You're From the Bay Area" lists, maybe twenty or thirty bullet points. The one that got me was: "People are leaving due to the economic downturn. But you're not, because you're already home."
- theGnuMe 4y agoThe only reason is for stock options and the weather. Schools are pretty good too in select metros. Otherwise not worth it.
- salmonfamine 4y agoThe discussion here regarding how fleeing SV workers is disrupting property markets in other cities in the US brings up an uncomfortable but, I think, unavoidable point: local housing policy has nation-wide consequences. If SV and SF allowed for the construction of additional housing, there would not be a downstream housing crisis in Denver, Austin, etc. The policy decisions of a handful of city councils of the suburbs on the West coast has had a huge impact on these cities -- and has indirectly displaced residents, disrupted local economies, and pushed many people into homelessness. Housing policy in major economic zones in the US is a national issue, and should be treated as such. This doesn't even touch on the wider problem of income inequality itself. If we're being completely honest, the average American would be much, much better off if SV had never produced a single unicorn.
- SllX 4y agoAuthoritarian regimes across the Pacific Ocean have consequences on American property demand too. So does migration across the southern border. In fact I think you would be hard pressed to name a thing that happens anywhere in the world that doesn’t downstream from it have an effect on the American property market. Clearly the solution is for US to annex the Earth like we annexed the Moon and then nationalize housing policy. /s Our local housing policy does suck, but this is not a constructive direction. You’re simply replacing one power structure with a different one in the hopes that maybe it’ll be better, when what you want to make are specific policy arguments.
- salmonfamine 4y agoYes they do. But we -- that is, our nominally democratic government, a "power structure" which you have arbitrarily equated with a collection of private corporations -- have placed restrictions on immigration, and some light restrictions on foreign ownership of real estate itself, for precisely this reason. Secondly, Canada, whose real estate markets have been even more seriously disrupted by authoritarian regimes across the Pacific Ocean, have already placed outright, albeit temporary, bans on citizens of those regimes from parking their capital in the domestic real estate market. Your characterization of my argument is specious and straw-man-esque. You are assuming that globalization is a given, that borders are always porous, that neoliberalism is the only way of looking at the world. I am kindly inviting you to reconsider your point of view, in light of evidence that it has made housing more unaffordable for the many Americans, disrupted their livelihoods, and dissolved their communities. Or you can keep making colorless jokes to yourself about the property markets on Mars, up to you.
- munificent 4y agoSeems like a lot of comments here are quick to fit this into a moral narrative. The survey results aligned with my impression from talking to folks in the Bay area over the years: Most don't like how expensive it is and are there primarily for the jobs. Once more companies became open to remote work, the value of being in Silicon Valley went down. If housing prices don't drop fast enough to match that, then simple cost-benefit analysis says that people will want to leave. Sure, the weather's nice, but it's not that nice. People here are saying that this will make other cities unaffordable, but I don't think that really holds up. There's many many cities that people leaving Silicon Valley to move to and distributing the load across all of them should be easily absorbed. Sure housing costs will go up some, but this is not going to turn Spokane into SF. Obviously, it would be great if housing was miraculously cheap everywhere, but that's not reality. Slightly more expensive everywhere and significantly cheaper in Silicon Valley is probably a net win for the country. (Remember that non-tech people do still live in Silicon Valley.) This seems like an overall good thing to me. The US has been struggling under an incredibly painful demographic shift. We outsourced our manufacturing jobs to China and automated away most of our agricultural jobs. This forced a huge migration into the relatively small number of metro areas with significant service and tech economies, but those cities physically can't grow as fast as people want to move there. Giving information workers more remote work opportunities lets the country load balance jobs more effectively across its existing physical infrastructure.
- zamalek 4y ago> homelessness at 71% Stereotypically, not conclusively, speaking: The most bizarre thing about this problem is that both sides don't want it solved. The NIMBY crowd obviously doesn't want affordable housing, or housing programs, anywhere near their million-dollar home, or city for that matter. The YIMBY often oppose extremely effective (although never perfect) approaches to this crisis. These people are bringing one of these attitudes with them to wherever they move. The homeless [generally] aren't the cause of homelessness, the homed are. I'm sure many of the QoL problems will follow these people/attitudes around. [1]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/homelessness/id1380008439?i=1000465289894 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/homelessness/id1380008... "You're wrong about: Homelessness" (Available on other platforms too)
- beej71 4y agoWhen housing prices fall significantly we'll know this is a thing. But right now it seems like plenty of people want to live there. (I left the Bay Area in 2014.)
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoYa, when is this exodus going to happen already so I can pick up some cheap Silicon Valley real estate. When people are eagerly waiting for prices to drop...they aren't going to drop.