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Why I'm Moving My Business From San Francisco To St. Louis

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Re: Why I'm Moving My Business From San Francisco To St. Louis

#41

Post by pkinsky »

timr wrote: post #18

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 F…

>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)

Re: Why I'm Moving My Business From San Francisco To St. Louis

#43

Post by zinssmeister »

mjn wrote: post #39
zinssmeister wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"sun tax" is cheaper in Texas. It's zero as in 0% income tax.

The average property tax rate is 4x California's, though. On the other hand, the average property value is lower. How all those factors combine depends on your income/location/etc. The group that comes out worst is the middle class in cheaper areas, around 40th-70th percentile incomes. If you make mid 5 figures, and live in a $150k house, your tax situation would be better Bakersfield than in Houston.

and if you make 6 figures your income tax alone would make for a mortgage payment in Texas. Property Tax in Cali is also pretty messed up with people paying almost nothing because they inherited their home from their parents along with their tax rate from the 60s.

Re: Why I'm Moving My Business From San Francisco To St. Louis

#44

Post by blisterpeanuts »

aliston wrote: post #5

St. Louis is cheap, but it's cheap for a reason. If you think 6th and Market is bad, take a stroll through East St. Louis. It has the 3rd highest murder rate in the country. Violent crime is on the rise. [1] Basically, it's one of the most dangerous cities in the country. If that sort of thing doesn't bother you, then you'd probably be better off just moving your startup to Oakland and maintaining a connection to the…

East St. Louis is really a separate topic from St. Louis; the name is just coincidental. That said, when I lived in St. Louis, East St. Louis was the destination of choice for carjacker-rapists who would take their victims across the bridge and dump them in some industrial parking lot.

St. Louis is currently listed as 3rd highest violent crime rate in the country (Detroit is #1, but in years past St. Louis edged out Detroit for murder rate). I'm not saying don't move there, but just be aware that north St. Louis is a pretty bad area and the economy doesn't seem to have improved much, despite the massive investments into the central urban attractions like the Arch, Union Station, and the things listed in the OP.

Perhaps the main problem with St. Louis is the division between the actual city of St. Louis and the various suburban towns that surround it. In 1970, the city boasted a population of nearly one million, and just 3-4 years later it was down to about half that. City residents blame the population implosion on school busing which led to white flight. The burbs like Clayton, Webster Groves, etc., in St. Louis County ("the County" as people call it) had their own tax base and when affluent people flocked there, the city lost a substantial portion of its tax revenue.

Overall, I really liked St. Louis but the crime rates are pretty bad. The weather in the summer is also bad -- very hot and humid. You will need AC, and it doesn't come by default with every dwelling. If it were me, I'd be looking at Phoenix or Tucson, because of their proximity to southern California and of course the weather, but then I spent some time in Arizona and fell in love with the place. Cost of living is probably comparable if not cheaper than St. Louis as well. Can't speak for the start-up community in Phoenix, however; there's not much of one that I heard of, as of 2010 or so.

Re: Why I'm Moving My Business From San Francisco To St. Louis

#45

Post by timr »

pkinsky wrote: post #41
timr wrote: post #18

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 F…

>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 whe…

Hah. 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.

Re: Why I'm Moving My Business From San Francisco To St. Louis

#46

Post by jskonhovd »

St. Louis is great. I wouldn't live there. It's very similar, at least in my experience, to my hometown of Memphis. The Italian food is obviously better, but we have barbecue. :)

America has a lot of great cities. They all don't have the technical talent level that San Francisco has, but good culture is not monopolized in San Francisco.

Re: Why I'm Moving My Business From San Francisco To St. Louis

#47

Post by randallsquared »

hapless wrote: post #4
randallsquared wrote: post #3

I was in St. Louis for Strange Loop 2013, and I was pretty astonished at how nice (and uncrowded) the downtown was. I asked about it at http://www.reddit.com/r/StLouis/comments/1mlum2/whats_wrong_... and got some interesting responses. The "what's wrong with..." was in the sense of "surely it can't be as great as it seems here?", by the way.

Most midwestern cities have no pedestrian traffic downtown. That is perfectly normal across much of America. In a typical midwestern city, anyone who can afford it commutes to the central business district by car. They live, shop, and eat in the suburbs. They use their cars for all of these activities. The C.B.D. ends up deserted at night when the office workers leave. Any successful night-time businesses have parkin…

"In a typical midwestern city, anyone who can afford it commutes to the central business district by car."

And, as I was walking about at rush hour, I expected to see a lot of car traffic, but the streets were practically empty of autos. The nearby freeway across the river was quite busy, however. I think the reddit thread had good things to say about the former decline of the city center.

Re: Why I'm Moving My Business From San Francisco To St. Louis

#48

Post by bzalasky »

slm_HN wrote: post #23
carsongross wrote: post #2

> If you’re trying to bootstrap, being based in San Francisco is awful. Especially if you have a family. I rented a four bedroom house in a great neighborhood in Sacramento that was a bike ride from Midtown for $2900/mo. We ended up buying a bigger house in the same neighborhood for even less per month. No commute, food is cheap, etc. The cost savings are enormous, and I'm sure it's more expensive than St. Louis... Y…

I know this isn't exactly the best metric, but the demand for programmers in St. Louis seems very low. When I look at Craigslist I see a couple Java jobs, a couple PHP jobs and even one godforsaken VB.net job. Even Jeff Atwood doesn't use VB.net. So I'm doubtful that it would be easier to keep the contracts coming in while in St. Louis.

Craigslist doesn't hold the same clout outside of the Bay Area in my experience. Almost never the best place to look for anything.

Re: Why I'm Moving My Business From San Francisco To St. Louis

#49

Post by geebee »

You're reminding me of a quote from Patti Smith: it's about New York, but it could easily be about SF as well...

http://gothamist.com/2010/05/03/patti_smith_suggests_finding...

"New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city."

Re: Why I'm Moving My Business From San Francisco To St. Louis

#50

Post by petercooper »

This is one of the things I'm jealous of America for coming from a British perspective: that is, a wide variety of cities being technologically advanced and good for startups, tech and businesses generally. Think Austin, think Raleigh-Durhan, think Philadelphia, think Seattle..

Everything in the UK is so grotesquely skewed towards London when it comes to modern tech. Some other cities aren't entirely horrible (Manchester, say) and some have a technically progressive air going for them (Brighton) but it sounds like even St Louis as a relatively small US city has more going for it in one place than most top tier British cities that aren't London (say Leeds, Nottingham, or Birmingham).

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