What are the best alternatives to the Bay Area? Off the top of my head I'm thinking Portland, Seattle, Boston, Austin and Chicago in no particular order. The annoying part is that there's so much talent concentrated in the Bay Area that it makes going elsewhere very difficult, especially if you have specific senior talent in mind that have already established their lives there. Hopefully telepresence tech gets so goo…
Denver/Boulder area as well. :-) Plus if you like doing things outside we have that in spades here.
People should give up. People should leave the area. They should move where they can find a job and a cost of living that's reasonable. The fact that people don't give up is why landlords can afford to charge $2,800/month for a 1 bedroom. You can't rent at $2,800/month if no one will sign the lease.
Maybe it's time for some soft vigilante action. Start mailing people brochures about how Denver, Seattle, Portland and Austin are really really nice places. And enclose a bullet.
Oregon has been putting commercials on SFBA airwaves saying "move here."
Did you miss the part where BART is packed every commute hour? There are huge numbers of people in Oakland and the rest of the east bay. But the most efficient transportation system is one that doesn't have huge rush hour stresses, i.e. ones where people live close to where they work. So if the offices are getting built in SF, then so must be the housing.
so then build the offices in oakland ;)
Uber tried this and backed off of it because their employees didn't want to move.
Different sectors are hot now and different sectors are concentrated in different areas. It’s not consumer social that is hot. Nor is it enterprise. It appears to be silicon. That is South Bay.
There are also YIMBY orgs almost everywhere. The south bay YIMBY twitter account has updates on what you can do as well. From following the YIMBY movement ( http://www.slate.com/articles/business/metropolis/2017/06/yi... ) it's hard to not take the YIMBY position. More needs to be built, but we can have ~10% BMR requirements as ways of increasing diversity in a neighborhood and preserving some local control/culture.…
10% is way low. SF has been negotiating for 25% and up.[1] BMR isn't just about culture and diversity. It's about teachers and service industry workers and everyone a functioning city needs. The gap is so large between market rate and affordability, and there are so many richer people still wanting to move into SF, that it is likely wishful thinking that market rate development will be "enough" to solve the problem.…
The higher the %, the more expensive the market rate apartments have to be, which creates its own pressures. It also seems that every time a developer caves, no one is satisfied, and people are back demanding a higher number.
This is excellent opportunity for anyone who wants investment from west coast VCs but doesn't want to deal with San Francisco, Oakland or the bay area. San Francisco frequently has human feces on the sidewalk in many areas right near the city center, high housing prices and a combination of startup bros and angry hard left outrage culture folk. The bay area is a cultureless void and Oakland is still dangerous. Better…
Portland, LA, and Boulder all have the problems you listed...
Also the idea that Boulder has some kind of culture that the Bay Area doesn't is laughable. Disregarding that only 100,000 people live there, I've never seen a place more homogenously populated by "rich boring white people" in my entire life. It's like an entire city of the stuff that pops up when neighborhoods gentrify.
Did you miss the part where BART is packed every commute hour? There are huge numbers of people in Oakland and the rest of the east bay. But the most efficient transportation system is one that doesn't have huge rush hour stresses, i.e. ones where people live close to where they work. So if the offices are getting built in SF, then so must be the housing.
> So if the offices are getting built in SF, This is the problem. Embrace edge cities, people. There's no reason to expect hundreds of thousands of people to commute to a downtown area. Scatter the businesses throughout the suburbs, dammit. Start locating new startups not just in Oakland but even farther out, in places such as Walnut Creek or Santa Rosa. Hell, maybe a tech influx could get the crime down in Stockton.
Have you paid no attention to that happened in the past century? The sprawl and traffic and unsustainable scaling?
Why should cities not be allowed to change and have their density spread? The heart of a city is its density and population mass. It didn't become the perfect amount of population when the current residents arrived, never to be changed again. A city that does not change is dead.
Correct. And the best way to fix Bart overcrowding is to build apartments near where people work so they don't HAVE to commute.
Just want to point out that Detroit built itself this way through the 1950's and 1960's. At the time, urban planners thought it would be efficient and sensible design. What ended up happening, though, is that as factories shuttered, the neighborhoods that were built around them started to collapse. The net result was pockets of localized decay, that eventually led to the entire urban area rotting as more people left.…
Factories are not the same as office buildings.
If a factory closes down, you are stuck with a specialized building that can't really be used for anything else.
If a company in an office building closes down, you can pretty easily replace it with either a different company, OR with simply more residential housing stock.
People should give up. People should leave the area. They should move where they can find a job and a cost of living that's reasonable. The fact that people don't give up is why landlords can afford to charge $2,800/month for a 1 bedroom. You can't rent at $2,800/month if no one will sign the lease.
Maybe it's time for some soft vigilante action. Start mailing people brochures about how Denver, Seattle, Portland and Austin are really really nice places. And enclose a bullet.
All those places are sick to death of Californians moving in and fucking things up.
It's almost comical how overcrowded BART has gotten at rush hour. Embarcadero and Powell stations become standing room only. I live deep in the east bay, and the new apartment building going up across the street has 1 bedroom layouts starting at $2800. Something has to give, or people will simply give up.
People should give up. People should leave the area. They should move where they can find a job and a cost of living that's reasonable. The fact that people don't give up is why landlords can afford to charge $2,800/month for a 1 bedroom. You can't rent at $2,800/month if no one will sign the lease.
I did. LA is 1000x better. I don't miss anything about SF, except Golden Gate Park :)