That's horrible. Paying the high rents isn't that bad. It sucks to have to have sell off your prime saving years to landlords, but the high tech wages and care

That's horrible. Paying the high rents isn't that bad. It sucks to have to have sell off your prime saving years to landlords, but the high tech wages and career benefits of spending one's 20s in high-prestige companies almost sorta quasi-compensate for that. The problem is that it's culturally devastating when rent gets that high. When rent prices go up, losing a job is a financial catastrophe (as opposed to an annoying inconvenience) and employers know they can get away with more bullshit. Adventurism goes away and you get an almost creepy deference to authority in the workplace that's unbecoming of high-talent people. That's a big part of why the New York startup scene is, while well-funded, so unimaginative and mediocre. If Silicon Valley wants to be relevant in 25 years, it will drop some Nordic Indignation on the NIMBY assholes. New York has tons of other stuff and will be fine (as a city, if not necessarily a tech scene) when what is now called "the Series A crunch" is fully fledged and recognized as what it it is-- a post-bubble correction, the start of a bust-- but the Valley will die if it doesn't reverse course. (By the way, one might think that prices would come down and reverse the problem; that doesn't happen. Real estate prices are so sticky against downward movement that, by the time they start to seriously drop, it's too late.)