Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

SF could've been a modern metropolis if the state and local government had effectively taken advantage of their tech boom.

Instead, the NIMBYs and their passionate hatred for any change or growth led to a bottleneck in progress. New housing construction has been anemic at best, and Prop 13 has starved local budgets (especially schools).

So they took the economic/innovation powerhouse of tech and squandered it with absurd housing costs and an inability to pay civil servants adequately.

To all the SF locals who regularly pushed for these things, you reap what you sow, and all the damage to SF is on you.

Anything specific?

One guess I'd have is that an influx of new people creates that anti-housing response anywhere which can lead to some of the same problems. I suspect that's less about CA policy and more about bad incentives around housing being an investment in the US.

If you mean that most people from CA don't like Trump (or the Republican support/defense of him), then yeah I think you're probably right about that (but that's not really CA policy). A lot of people I work with are more center or center-right than the general narrative about Californians would have you believe, I'd suspect those leaving to be more from that camp.

At the same time, a significant portion of the computer industry (HP, which is moving its--well HPE's--HQ to Houston, notwithstanding) was in the East through about the 90s. Boston in the case of the Route 128 companies, etc. But also others like IBM. So a large chunk of the industry was away from California.

While I don't fully agree with the parent, there was a long tradition of "Go west young man" for people who wanted to make their fortunates far from eastern bankers and other conservative industries. Very broad brush, but also not wholly inaccurate.

1) SF & Valley: Education levels of the people here. You can get that in a couple other places--DC, NYC, Boston--but not too many others. Relatedly, two easily accessible world class universities are in the Bay Area: Boston beats us here, but we beat NYC and DC.

2) SF & Valley: Diversity. Bay Area cities top the list of largest number of foreign born residents, with only LA and NYC being competitive.

3) SF & Valley: Weather. LA beats us here, but SF trounces NYC, Boston, DC, and Seattle.

4) Just SF: Walkability and street life. SF is more walkable than most cities (the weather helps with that), and although it has shitty public transit options, it's only shitty in comparison to places with actual good public transit, which more or less don't exist in the US.

5) Just SF: Weirdness. Okay, SF has driven out most of the interesting weirdo and artistic crowds and replaced them with CrossFitting Burners. But there are still remnants of that culture, more so than most places except perhaps NYC.

6) SF & Valley: Food. It's mediocre in comparison to the scenes in LA and NYC. But it's still worlds better than the rest of the country.

7) SF: Arts. Similar to food, it's mediocre compared to LA and NYC. But it's still worlds better than the rest of the country.

8) SF & Valley: Nature. West Coast cities are all competitive here, as is Denver/Boulder (though even they lack the beaches), but this is another place where East Coast cities fall short.

In the end, the only plausibly competitive cities on this scoring matrix are LA and NYC. LA sacrifices a lot of the walkability and weirdness of SF. NYC sacrifices the weather, and moving to NYC from SF isn't going to get you of any the much vaunted coupon-cutting decrease in cost of living that everyone in these comments is so pumped about.

Just to be fair, I'll also list disadvantages of SF:

1) Cost of living. "No one is willing to pay that much to live in SF, it's too expensive."

2) Dating scene for men.

3) Travel. Subjective, but East Coast cities are better situated for international travel than the West Coast.

4) Cleanliness. Yep, SF is an unhygienic shithole in many places.

5) Monoculture. Too many tech folks here, not enough diversity in industry.