Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

tomtunguz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 417 posts

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#241

Post by thrillgore »

Houshalter wrote: post #60
fatbird wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Move where exactly? So many people want to live there for a reason. If moving to another city saves you $1k a month on rent, but you lose $1.5k in income, it doesn't make any economic sense.

Suburban Atlanta is always an option.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#242

Post by kec »

davidw wrote: post #235
kec wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does any of that help when the real issue is the distorting effect of prop 13 on the market? Insane housing prices are being driven by an illiquid market, adding more housing isn't going to change that.

Politics is about "the art of the possible" and not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. First the low-hanging fruit, then you keep going.

well yes, but what problem are you actually solving by adding more units? Yes, you're adding more people, but due to larger market effects you're not actually making the area any more affordable....

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#243

Post by vedanta »

kec wrote: post #234
kevinburke wrote: post #6

Both top-level comments have mentioned housing prices. I grew up in the Bay Area and want to stay here and I am trying to work to change policy to help build more housing. Unfortunately due to law, bad policy and NIMBY's the market is not going to solve this problem on its own, without political change rents and housing prices will keep increasing. Here are some political actions you can take to help: - call your Sta…

How does any of that help when the real issue is the distorting effect of prop 13 on the market? Insane housing prices are being driven by an illiquid market, adding more housing isn't going to change that.

Prop 13 affects all of CA, you don't see prices in LA going up 100% in 3-5 years like you do in most south bay cities.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#244

Post by Animats »

xr4ti wrote: post #148
narrator wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does everyone have to squeeze into San Francisco and the peninsula? Can't you tech workers gentrify West Oakland at least? Guess a few street thugs are a force more powerful than million dollar home prices. I bet those guys are really proud of the chaos they create that forces all of you to avoid their neighborhoods.

Yes. Thugs. Drugs. Drive by shootings. The east bay is a burning trash heap with no redeeming value. Please do not move here.

When I moved to Menlo Park in 1987, there was automatic weapons fire from Whiskey Gulch every weekend. It was all liquor stores and bars, hence the name. The fried chicken outlet there had full transparent bulletproofing, heavier than some banks. East Palo Alto was Murder City, USA. Tiny Whiskey Gulch, about three city blocks, had the highest murder rate per square mile in the US. I thought I was moving into a declining area, so I rented a house, instead of buying.

That was fixed by leveling the entire area, removing a freeway offramp, and replacing the liquor stores and poor people with a Four Seasons hotel and a large office building housing a law firm and medical offices. The final solution to the underclass was thus implemented.

When Facebook moved to Menlo Park, house prices went through the roof.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#245

Post by amyjess »

jorts wrote: post #182
amyjess wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the reasons I'm considering a move to SoCal, but I will never, ever consider moving to NorCal. One thing I've heard is that SoCal is full of superficial, shallow, materialistic people, and that people in NorCal are expected to have a cause. It doesn't have to be a left-wing cause, either; look at Curtis Yarvin, for example. I'm somewhat SJW myself, but really I'm a consumerist at heart. I just want to…

Your perspective on residents of SoCal is a huge generalization of literally millions of people. Of course there is some of that and it varies by area, but you can definitely find large cities in SoCal where that is definitely not the norm. Equally, NorCal is not full of militant vegans or Bernie Bros. I recommend you spend some time in these areas before forming such a negative perspective on their societies.

> such a negative perspective on their societies.

You misunderstand me. Yes, my perspective on NorCal is negative, but my opinion of SoCal is very much positive. I am specifically looking to move to a place that's superficial and materialistic. I want superficial. It's exactly what I'm looking for. It's a compliment, trust me.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#246

Post by LMYahooTFY »

timr wrote: post #228
briandear wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AirBnB doesn’t cause 3 bedroom tract houses in Cupertino to cost $2 million. There is AirBnB in Houston and it has almost an unmeasurable effect of prices. I don’t know if the Bay Area has rent control, but those types of policies (along with planning commissions and other bureaucracies have more deleterious impacts than a thousand AirBnBs. The simple fact is that if you own a Bay Area home, you will oppose increased…

"The simple fact is that if you own a Bay Area home, you will oppose increased supplies because it makes your home less valuable." Yeah, this is a bit of "yimby" rhetoric that's pretty simple-minded. People don't oppose new construction because of abstract fears like "property value"...they oppose them because of concrete fears, like changing the character of the neighborhood, or increasing traffic. I'm not saying I…

I would not consider property values abstract in any sense of the word, especially when your "concrete" fears directly affect those values.

Writing off the whole notion that people fear their property value falling is illogical.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#247

Post by davidw »

kec wrote: post #242
davidw wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politics is about "the art of the possible" and not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. First the low-hanging fruit, then you keep going.

well yes, but what problem are you actually solving by adding more units? Yes, you're adding more people, but due to larger market effects you're not actually making the area any more affordable....

By adding supply, you will bring down prices or at least stabilize them.

This is what all the economic literature on the subject says.

Of course, it may not seem like you're making a dent, because housing has been so badly undersupplied there for so long.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#248

Post by sotojuan »

vonmoltke wrote: post #169
sotojuan wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NYC? It's not as expensive as people say, especially if you have a tech salary (which is about twice the median household income). If you have a family I think that changes things, though.

Depends on whether or not you are fine with either a studio or roommates. Even then it's hard to get an affordable place that is near the jobs.

With a non junior tech salary you can have a half hour commute and get your own apartment. It's not bad unless you want to live 15 mins from your job.

I've done more than fine here with $80k and $100k, but maybe I have a cheaper lifestyle than most.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#249

Post by amyjess »

epistasis wrote: post #207
amyjess wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I live in Dallas where everything is suburb outside of a very tiny urban core, and I absolutely love it here. I adore sprawl, and I want more of it. The only reason I'm even considering moving out of town this year is because the state legislature is becoming increasingly hostile to trans people (and being trans myself, this personally affects me), and even then I'm planning on moving to either SoCal or Vegas, both of which are full of sprawl.

And traffic isn't a problem if the city is designed right. The idea is that each suburb is an edge city with plenty of businesses. In Dallas, for example, it's not uncommon for people in an inner-ring suburb to commute to an exurb, and when people do commute farther inwards, it's typically people commuting from an exurb to an inner-ring suburb. The long commute form exurb to downtown doesn't happen that often here. Street layout helps, too: we have arterials on a grid system, and all arterials are six-lane divided highways. Freeways are placed at regular intervals on both the north-south and east-west axes to segment the city into bite-sized chunks (just go to Google Maps: Dallas looks like a sequoia because of the way the multiple loop roads are laid out). Five-layer stack interchanges are used to cut down on the bottlenecks in freeway interchanges.

Cities are antiquated, noisy, dirty, and crime-ridden. Suburbs are much more comfortable places to both live and work.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#250

Post by jtmcmc »

Kpourdeilami wrote: post #191
aaron-lebo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are massive swaths of the US with much cheaper living than SF and better infrastructure, markets, and basic rights than Russia, China, or Brazil.

I would strongly recommend Canada, especially the Kitchener-Waterloo area. The rents are very reasonable (~$700 USD for a one bedroom apartment, in the safest neighbourhood in Waterloo) and there are tonnes of resources and help available there for early stage startups (Velocity - a free incubator that provides mentorship & office space, Communitech, etc) Not having to worry about things like health insurance is very…

however the salaries are sooo much lower.
Post reply on HN