Because people in Santa Clara County don't have issues relating to housing and health care? I've seen this argued before by various people from Alex Payne to B

Because people in Santa Clara County don't have issues relating to housing and health care? I've seen this argued before by various people from Alex Payne to Buzz Andersen and I'm starting to feel like it may be a good idea to add an asterisk to this assertion: this is a function of the people in SV that you happen to be talking to. It's true that many of the startups in Silicon Valley and San Francisco are focused on "social media" and this leads to an awful lot of circle jerking that may be sharply lessened in other places, but it's not too difficult to find all sorts of startups out here that are focused on less abstract problems than how open the Twitter API is. (Also, I think that just as people out here can miss the circle-jerkiness of the Silicon Valley scene, people in other cities sometimes tend to miss their own brands of it.)