9 ms·
The current San Francisco influx is unsustainable. If you're somewhere else in the world and thinking about coming here to do a startup, I wish I could convinc
by timr 13y ago
The current San Francisco influx is unsustainable. If you're somewhere else in the world and thinking about coming here to do a startup, I wish I could convince you to change your mind.
San Francisco is incredibly expensive. Rents have shot up by ~50% since 2008, office space is following the same trend, and competition for (even mediocre) programmers is intense. Worse, a lot of the cultural diversity that made San Francisco interesting has been driven out by the high prices -- it's a much more homogenous city than a few years ago, where mom-and-pop shops and other neighborhood amenities have been replaced by places selling $10 "artisinal grilled cheese" sandwiches and "mixology" bars where you can buy your choice of $15 cocktail. SF feels increasingly like a city for wealthy yuppies, because...it is a city for wealthy yuppies. Living here on anything less than a good engineer's salary is becoming a tall order.
Which brings us to a very important point for all the young programmer dudes: when you all crowd into the same tiny city and bid up the rents into the stratosphere, your available dating pool shrinks to a puddle (yet another consequence of the skewed gender balance in tech. sigh.) All the pour-over coffee in the world doesn't make you happy when you can't get a date, and those artisan cocktails are far less cute when you're jockeying for position at the bar in a crowded room full of guys. If you're a 20-something male programmer looking for a date in SF, I feel badly for you. Hope you like BART, because you're going to Oakland (if you're lucky!)
Once upon a time it was only a mildly bad decision to locate your startup in San Francisco, but you could justify it with the appeal of a diverse, cosmopolitan city. Right now, there's a very real financial penalty (rents, salaries, taxes), and the cultural benefits are waning. There are a lot of great cities in the US, and on the internet, you can work from anywhere. Try those instead.
- blisterpeanuts 13y agoSF used to be known as good woman-hunting territory, because of the predominance of gay males. Has that changed because of the tech influx?
- timr 13y agoThat was always a little exaggerated IMO, but in the 20-something demographic, yes. SF feels like a giant frat party right now. At an all-boys school. If you're 30+ things are less bad just because of the basic demographic realities of single life. But my friends from NYC still laugh at the dating scene here.
- pyoung 13y agoA buddy of mine had a theory that the lack of acting and fashion industries (compared to LA and New York respectively) had a significant negative impact on the overall attractiveness and gender balance of the general SF population.
- rayiner 13y agoPeople have been saying for decades that NYC is unsustainable, yet it's still the center of the country for finance. San Francisco could well become the next New York: software engineers getting paid $300k/year and talking about how they're not really "rich" because they can't even afford to buy a 2 bedroom condo.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- pacaro 13y agoOr it could become the next Detroit when the tech industry decides that it doesn't "need" to be in the Bay Area. I doubt that there'll be that dramatic a change because there are too many actors, Detroit was more vulnerable because it depended on such a small number of anchor employers
- bruceb 13y agoDetroit is freezing cold during the winter and doesn't have the same scenery. Even if tech declined SF will be a hot destination.
- dredmorbius 13y agoDetroit's early draw was its access to transportation and raw materials: iron ore, coal, the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway. For heavy manufacturing, these were all advantages. San Francisco has appeal for weather, scenery, and an excellent harbor. Disadvantages include earthquake hazard, and an increasingly unreliable water supply. The latter isn't critical yet, but could well be.
- rayiner 13y agoThe car industry didn't move from Detroit. The work got automated away and growth got captured by foreign competitors. If that happened to finance, New York would suffer the same fate. But by the time robots can program themselves, all bets are off anyway.
- 13y ago
- debt 13y agoIt is becoming quite homogenous here. There's just a ton of really wealthy, well-paid business/engineer types. I've heard varied reports on dating. Some friends are very successful, others no so much. This seems to be more a personal situation then dependent on the culture of the city as a whole. You just gotta get on that tinders or cupes or grindr if that's your thing and play the game just like any other city. It's a fun city, but it's increasingly become a fantasy for rich white people. Like parent says lots of "lifestyle" shops; I'm going to arrange a store so it looks like my home but everything is for sale. It's all bullshit though because the rent for these lifestyle shops must far outweigh what they're bringing in. It's hobby businesses for the wives of rich white C-level execs. I don't know I just made that last part up, but you get the picture.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- erikpukinskis 13y agoWhat you're missing is that when people say an area is "becoming increasingly Black" they usually are talking about it going from 0% to 5%, or from 5% to 10%. Parts of San Francisco (at least certain businesses) are moving towards 100% white. It's a fundamentally different phenomenon.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- GFK_of_xmaspast 13y agoDetroit isn't like that because all the black people moved in, it's like that because all the white people moved out once black people started moving in.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- pkinsky 13y ago>Which brings us to a very important point for all the young programmer dudes: when you all crowd into the same tiny city and bid up the rents into the stratosphere, your available dating pool shrinks to a puddle (yet another consequence of the skewed gender balance in tech. sigh.) All the pour-over coffee in the world doesn't make you happy when you can't get a date, and those artisan cocktails are far less cute when you're jockeying for position at the bar in a crowded room full of guys. If you're a 20-something male programmer looking for a date in SF, I feel badly for you. Hope you like BART, because you're going to Oakland (if you're lucky!) So what you're saying is San Francisco is now highly optimized for homosexuals? (part of why I want to move there from Boston, to be honest)
- timr 13y agoHah. I don't think you'll find a city in the world that's more highly optimized for gay men...but that was true before the tech boom, too.
- x0x0 13y agocastro is really pretty small; I think you're better off as a gay man in nyc.
- nols 13y agoIt's been the best place for homosexuals for decades. I can remember a character from The Way of the Gun calling it a "Mecca for homosexual migration".
- refurb 13y agoThe character was refering to LA in the movie!
- wcfields 13y agoBetter idea would be to do a Media/Advertising/Entertainment focused start-up in West Hollywood in Los Angeles.
- 13y ago
- dkl 13y agoRents have shot up by ~50% since 2008 More than that. Rents for apartments have doubled in the last year in Oakland, says my friend who owns a lot of diverse properties in the East Bay, so you know it's much worse in SF.
- zem 13y agonot necessarily; the relative desirability of oakland might have increased faster than the relative desirability of san francisco, compared to their respective 2008 values
- aarondf 13y agoYour comment about "artisinal grilled cheese" earned my upvote. Who knew such a thing existed? Better yet: why?
- joshrotenberg 13y agoBecause people will buy them.
- mixmastamyk 13y agoIt's more typically called Panini, which is Italian for "$9 grilled-cheese."
- carlob 13y agoPanino is Italian for sandwich, it literally means small bread. Panini is something I first experienced in France, where it's made with a special semi-raw bread. I've never seen anything quite like it in Italy, though.
- monkeynotes 13y agoPanini and Panino are pretty much synonymous. Panini is just the anglicized word, although it seems the Italians don't generally grill them. I've had Panini/Panino in Italy, France, the UK, and Canada. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panini_(sandwich) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panini_(sandwich)
- hussong 13y agoI'll bite: panini is simply the plural of panino.
- carlob 13y agoGrammatically, yes. But it's really a different type of sandwich outside of Italy.
- danmaz74 13y ago
- vinceguidry 13y ago> when you all crowd into the same tiny city and bid up the rents into the stratosphere, your available dating pool shrinks to a puddle (yet another consequence of the skewed gender balance in tech. sigh.) Women don't live in SF? Or are you just talking about women in tech? They're rare everywhere.
- seniorsassycat 13y agoTech workers have a low female population, SF has a high tech worker population, therefore SF has a low female population. I don't know if that's true, but I think that's what the commenter was saying.
- mixmastamyk 13y agoYes, combined with the fact that California has a low female population.
- kpennell 13y agoExcellent comment.