The writer had some expectations and was used to things being a certain way in his native Poland, but was disheartened to find that they were different in CA. Ultimately, he could not / did not adjust, and decided to move to NY. Main complaints:
- Weather: The Bay Area has none. The changing seasons and large variations in weather they brought was something the writer missed.
- Culture (or lack thereof): The Bay Area has none. The main leisure activities in the Bay Area are centered around enjoying nature and food . There is no music, or art scene of any sort.
- Public Transport (or lack thereof): The Bay Area has none. This means that many weekend hours are spent getting to a particular place where the leisure activity (which is already not to the taste of the writer) will occur, and this also entails advance planning!
- Variety (or lack thereof): There is a lack of variety, whether it be in the type of people encountered, the conversations, the cities/suburbs, or the scenery.
- Affordability (or lack thereof): Flimsy, modest houses cost north of a million bucks minimum. Everything that requires human labor is stratospherically expensive.
- Politics: Even though the writer is ostensibly of a similar persuasion as most Bay Area residents (left-leaning liberal), the actual policies and attitudes of Bay Area residents are heavily arrogant, technocratic, plutocratic and short-sighted.
All of the observations ring true. But the overall impression I got was that the author really did not or could not change himself, and expected something the Bay Area never offered in reality.
I experienced this same feeling in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Every day the sky and air are almost exactly the same, day-in-day-out. I was very ready for some seasons and weather when I got back to the UK.
I’d push back on weather and culture. There are entirely different microbiomes within short driving distances of any city in the Bay. And if you look for it, you’ll find tons of underground art shows, theatre, music and film. It just isn’t organised and marketed the way it is in Europe or New York.
On variety of conversations, Oakland, Berkeley, Vallejo, Fremont, Cupertino, Mountain View, San Jose, Belmont, South San Francisco and Sausalito offer drastically different bar talk with friendly strangers.
You can also get to this conclusion axiomatically just by following Jamie Zawinsky's DNA Lounge blog and reading about how hostile SF is to nightlife, and also how hard it is to book shows in SF.
If you are talking about musicians coming out of SF, then I agree. If you are talking about tours coming to SF/Oakland, I don't see this at all. I can't think of an artist I care about that hasn't been through.
I don't know what you want. I find bands I like, I add them to Song Kick. I get emails when they come to SF. Music venues have been expanding in the last 10 years, not contracting.
I've never seen a show a Levi's or Shoreline.
I guess your complaint is there aren't more artists coming out of Palo Alto? Yeah, sure, I'll concede that if I lived in Palo Alto I'd probably be unhappy with its music scene.
Name two mid-sized music venues on the Peninsula or in South Bay.
Not stadiums or sports arenas that host Top 40s mega-acts like Britney Spears and Lady Gaga, but also not the local coffee shop that has a guy play some guitar covers on Friday nights.
I live in SF. I go to shows in SF and Oakland. I agree that the music scene of the burbs is bad. That's the way it is everywhere though.
Venues that I'm happy to go to: Bottom of the Hill, The Chapel, Hotel Utah, The Rickshaw Stop, The Independent, August Hall, Swedish American Hall, Great American Music Hall, The Fillmore, Bimbo's 365, Warfield, The Fox, The Masonic.
OP here. I loved most of those, I'd add DNA Lounge (though it seems based on the selection you're not into electronic music :) ). All of those are fond memories of some nice shows. Still was hard to justify a 1h (one way!) drive. :(
An to me, the essential part is the local scene/culture. I didn't see too much of it in SF, maybe I didn't stick for long enough (my brutal commute to MTV took away my will to live and I had to move).
> I'd add DNA Lounge (though it seems based on the selection you're not into electronic music :)
You got me. DNA Lounge does have a special place in my heart though. JWZ was such a slashdot folk hero, its sad that so many people in SF don't know who he is anymore.
I also can't think of anywhere else in SF that is keeping the dream of the 90s alive the way DNA lounge does.
I do think that the bay area has pushed local artists out to more affordable cities. John Vanderslice/Tiny Telephone has done more than anyone else I can think of to keep the local music scene alive. He seems to be connected with just about every other local musician I know of.
>There are entirely different microbiomes within short driving distances of any city in the Bay.
That's not really "weather" though in this context. Here in Southern Michigan, I don't have to plan for, or travel to, changes in the weather. Same thing with seasons in general. As I go about my daily life, the weather around me is constantly changing from day to day. More broadly, the changing of the seasons punctuates the passing of time, and is the scaffolding upon which most of us hang our social lives on. It does all this because weather and the seasons just happen to us, we don't have to go find it.
As an example to go along with the article's point. I visited SoCal to see a friend of mine who moved out there a few years prior. It was my first visit to SoCal, and it took place during a September. For the week I was out there the temperature was the same every day and every night. What caused me the most discomfort though was during that whole week I didn't see a single cloud in the sky.
That's an extremely small sample size to use to condemn an entire region; I've never been to SoCal but I doubt there are no seasons, no clouds, and it's the same temp day and night
Indeed, for the writer to blithely assume that CA has no weather, culture, public transportation, variety, affordability, or politics ignores that the Bay Area is a tiny portion of the state, and that Silicon Valley is but a small portion of the Bay Area.
This is a "dangerous" summary. Not in the sense that I think it may cause significant harm to anyone, but that I consider it misleading for everyone reading your comment, thinking that it sums the article up accurately, and then ignoring to read it.
I'm not Polish, but I'm another European living in the Bay Area as well, and I don't think your comment reproduces what the author is trying to say, most likely through no intention of your own.
I won't repeat the same mistake by giving my own summary, but I understand too well the weirdness and isolation that suburbs and zoning laws give compared to European cities. It's totally weird, but I live in San Francisco, a dense city, and the zoning laws and "built for cars" layout[1], as well as spreading the population over California style suburbs, still make me feel more like I'm living in some backwater village. After close to a decade of living here now.
[1] I think European cities are just "lucky" that they've mostly been built when cars weren't a thing yet, and also organically grew over much longer timespans.
> I think European cities are just "lucky" that they've mostly been built when cars weren't a thing yet, and also organically grew over much longer timespans.
Yes. That's it. This is what a lot of people critical of the design (or execution) of US cities don't seem to understand. This also applies to the many failed attempts to make mass public transportation --and the reduction of automobile-based transportation-- a thing.
Cities evolve. And these cities are no exception. By the time they reached scale it became pretty much impossible to re-engineer them to fit a new vision of how things should be.
The best example I have is the absolutely failed California high speed train. We are about a hundred billion dollars into it and have nothing usable in place. I believe they built about ten miles of low speed track that you can't even use yet. To make things even more interesting, it was supposed to cost ten billion (that's how it was sold to voters).
This high speed train goes through so many towns and counties, each with it's own rules and issues, that the probability of it ever approximating something like the TGV or the Eurail ICE I usually take from Amsterdam to Munich during my visits is kind of laughable at best.
We'll see what happens at a trillion dollars, I guess.
Munich is where I grew up, by the way, so I'm all too familiar. And yeah, I have no idea of the history here, but it would not surprise me if a lot of what happened in the Bay Area (and maybe other places in the US, though admittedly I don't really know them) was not intentional.
Where I'm pretty critical however is zoning laws. That just seems unnecessary to me. The fact that even in a city I have to travel a large distance just to go to the nearest supermarket, to get a haircut, or to even just sit down in a café, is a bit maddening. This means I literally have to take my car just to go to Safeway here--which is weird at least to me.
As for the cafés, I'm not even sure whether zoning laws would prevent them from popping up in residential areas, but I suspect even if they were allowed, they would be sparse because of the overall effect of zoning. Residential areas mostly only consist of homes, and you are pretty much either in your specific home of that large zone, or out in another zone anyway. So there would probably be little incentive.
What's interesting here is that the author grew up in Warsaw, which has about half the population of the bay area in one third the space (and the more than half of warsowians living in the center live in 1/36 of the land area compared to the bay). The city was rebuilt after WW2 from almost nothing and was given a very car friendly layout. It's also a very dense city with lots of medium and high density apartment blocks and has excellent public transit that can zip you across the city in 15 minutes. While car vs. walking friendly are often at odds, it's possible to do them both reasonably well and Warsaw is an example of a new city that often gets it right. Score one for socialist city planning?
A counterpoint to the California high speed rail situation is that Poland has been building new expressways to connect its major cities. This has been an enormous undertaking with enormous success. Huge swaths of farms, forests and villages are being bulldozed to make way. The needs of the many...
> think European cities are just "lucky" that they've mostly been built when cars weren't a thing yet, and also organically grew over much longer timespans.
You should give Howard Kunstler‘s The Geography of Nowhere and Duany, et al.‘s Suburban Nation a read. (There are other good ones, too). They’d readily dispel the timing notion you suggest. Rather this bland outcome is clearly from adopting civil engineering and planning codes intentionally.
Thanks. I haven't looked myself in how this situation came to be, and I totally accept that this can have come by intentionally. But whatever the causes, the outcome is not very good.
Public Transport (or lack thereof): The Bay Area has none
Wrong. The South Bay has Caltrain, the East Bay has BART. SF has... a few systems, but mostly Muni.
Variety (or lack thereof): There is a lack of variety, whether it be in the type of people encountered, the conversations, the cities/suburbs, or the scenery.
Very untrue. Try visiting Oakland, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Santa Cruz and see if you think they are the same.
Affordability (or lack thereof): Flimsy, modest houses cost north of a million bucks minimum. Everything that requires human labor is stratospherically expensive.
The situation is the same in NYC. Housing is expensive.
On top of that it isn't available all the time (how can last train be at midnight -- that means everyone has to wrap up their thing and head out between 11pm and 11:45pm depending on where they are. So it's impossible to not live in SF, not own a car, and say attend any normal house party. Like even one that ends on the early side, at 12am, you'd have to leave before it's over.
It is entirely accurate to say that there is literally _no_ public transport for major routes, for part of the day.
Also within the city, to access most parts you have no BART or other train, you only have Muni. And if you've ever tried to take it without the help of an app like Transit (or even with the help of the app) it's pretty unreliable and can be difficult to figure out. Compare to Taipei or even NYC where you can more or less jump on a train that arrives at regular intervals, at any time, and get to most parts of the city.
Yeah, it would be nice if their last train was later. To be fair, SF kind of shuts down around midnight anyway. If 24/7 bars and so on are important to you, there isn't any substitute for NYC.
> Wrong. The South Bay has Caltrain, the East Bay has BART. SF has... a few systems, but mostly Muni.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my guess is that you have never lived for a significant time in a major (or even smaller) European or Asian city? Where I come from, pretty much everyone, everyone, uses public transport all the time. To go to work, to go to any leisure activity, to do some quick shopping. And it's extremely clean, modern, and convenient (yeah, people complain, they do all the time, but they complain that it's 10 minutes late in the deepest winter and then still use it daily).
That's just not feasible in the Bay Area. You are screwed here if you don't have a car, where as when I lived as a fully grown adult in Europe, I and many of my peers did not even have a driver's license (getting one is expensive, time intensive, and usually plain not necessary). Many others had a driver's license but no car. Now I need a car just to go to the supermarket because there isn't any in a walkable distance.
I have to say the subway system in Manhattan is indeed the closest I've seen compared to the European or Asian systems I'm familiar with, even though it still looks pretty "industrial" and somewhat run down.
this isn’t true at all. “everyone” isn’t actually everyone. and it isn’t always “clean and convenient”
all you’re measuring is living closer to a city center. and the larger the city the better the story. if you live in the burbs in either location you get a suburb experience
Does not match my experience of both living and traveling in multiple places. Compared to the Bay Area, I know public transport from for example multiple German and French cities plus Prague (places where I lived), or Tokyo and Hong Kong (places where I traveled), and a few others, as clean and convenient, and the "suburb" experience being much different as well.
There is a dramatic difference between most European & Asian public transport systems and most non-NYC American public transport systems, though.
Once I stayed with my in-laws in Sanxia Taiwan, an exurb of Taipei. When we wanted to get to Taipei 101 (37km away), we took public transit. When we wanted to get to the historic district (26 km away), we took public transit. When we wanted to get to Tamsui (a bucolic oceanfront suburb, 42km away), we took public transit. When we wanted to get to Banqiao (the main shopping district, 16km away), we took public transit.
From the mid-peninsula, this is equivalent to going to San Francisco; going to downtown San Jose; going to Half Moon Bay; and going to Stanford Shopping Center. You can actually get to the first two through Caltrain, but you'll walk about a mile to get to the Caltrain station, rather than half a block to get to a bus that comes every 10 minutes. You can't effectively get to HMB, Stanford Shopping Center, or any of the other non-city-center through public transit in the Bay Area.
That's what foreigners tend to complain about with the walkability of American cities. It isn't the difficulty of getting from dense, built-up city centers to top tourist destinations. It's the difficulty of getting from common, ordinary residences to the next tier of destinations.
I don’t know how much you have taken the bus but it is truly abysmal in the Bay Area. Not to mention the VTA is cutting a bunch of stops due to low ridership (it’s a chicken and egg problem). Additionally, the buses are slow and rarely go where you want to go.
I just looked on Google Maps. Assuming that I can only walk and take public transport getting to Stanford Shopping Center from where I grew up takes 5x longer than driving, Half-Moon Bay 4x longer. For contrast getting to London from any surrounding area and vice versa is generally faster by public transport when compared to driving (even when that trip involves buses).
It simply isn’t comparable. The infrastructure might exist in theory, but it is not very usable.
Regarding culture, variety, and politics, I think it’s more a consequence of the Bay Area being socioeconomically segregated. My neighbors are all artists, and have great and vibrant communities around their work — but of course, no one in tech mixes with those people!
Fewer people in SF work in tech than is often perceived, but the social circles are very clique-y and exclusive. It creates perceptions about the entire city that are really only true for one’s friend groups.
I wonder what it is about the design/culture of SF that makes that the case.
I think the poor public transportation really hurts the city. The time to arrival is a crapshoot and discourages it's use. It's also not a walkable city or bikeable unless you stick to certain parts of the city. I think this + lack of density in certain parts of the city means that SF is largely a suburb with tall buildings on one side. It's not really a city, or at least not on the level of NYC. You are just surrounded by people in Manhattan at all times and I bet that helps promote socializing. You just don't really meet people in SF unless you stick to certain pockets of the city.
> I think this + lack of density in certain parts of the city means that SF is largely a suburb with tall buildings on one side.
This is a great take. I was driving back into SF this week. As always, the green population sign stuck out to me. There are fewer than 1 million SF residents. Part of this is because it’s only 49 square miles, but the fact is you’re exactly right. SF may be urban, but it isn’t dense.
This rings true to my experience as well. I only managed to make friends with some fellow engineers after living there for a few years.
And it's not for lack of trying, I joined sports teams, wide variety of meetups, social clubs and tried to chat to strangers I encounter.
It seems people are generally not interested in adding another engineer to their friend circle, except fellow engineers. It's quite ironic because my interests are actually more athletic and artistic than geeky.
I've had the opposite experience in the Bay Area, on average. I'd follow the typical advice people get, which is to create opportunities for serendipitous meeting. To say, I'd try to set up group dinners and invite a bunch of different engineer friends to them, only to get a bunch of responses like "I don't want to meet people I don't know already" and "I have enough friends, my social circle is full."
The opposition that you failed to notice was between your comment that "people are generally not interested in adding another engineer to their friend circle" and my comment that my engineer friends seem really loath to interact with people they don't already know.
I really disagree with those points about Variety, public transport, culture, and weather but I suppose if ones frame of reference is NY or a large euro city then perhaps some of them may be that way.
But variety? That one just is weird. Within a couple hours driving distance is a vast array of hugely different environments. Within bart-ing distance is a huge variety of very distinct neighborhoods and cultures.
And the comparison of living in Poland and being able to walk from the suburb across city districts to having to drive or take a long train ride from Palo alto to Sf doesn’t make sense. I doubt he walked 25 miles back in Poland. I lived in a small German town for while, it also took 1.5 hours to train into cologne. I could walk across cologne like I do SF. But I could not walk to cologne from Juliche. And driving would have been much faster than taking the train, just like driving from PA to SF is.
His points about suburbs are mostly accurate, but sounds like he was in the wrong spot in the bay. Oakland/Berkeley/sf are better than Palo Alto or the South Bay for actually walking to bars and places. He also doesn’t like the brown looks Mediterranean climates have, so NY does sound like a better fit.
The comment about the lack of seasons was odd to me. I grew up in the Bay Area, but spent about 10 years in Southern California where there truly is no such thing (based on my schema) as autumn and winter. When we were moving back to the Bay, my wife (an LA native) and I were looking at neighborhoods during January or something, and she remarked, "everything is dead here!"
It's winter. We have deciduous trees in Northern California... In autumn they turn orange, and they spend winter without leaves! A foreign concept in LA, where most of the trees are palms or coral trees or other evergreens.
It's true that we don't get snow like many European cities. But I guess the presence or lack of "seasons" depends on what you're used to.
For people who come from tropical climes, such as Hawaii, Singapore, or subtropical Australia and India, the Bay Area does indeed have "seasons".
But the majority of Americans and Europeans hail from places that have much more delineated (and varying) weather across the four seasons, the Bay Area seems lacking in comparison.
My point of reference is very European.
In most of Europe you get very distinctive four seasons - cold, sometimes snowy, almost always frosty and depressing winter, fresh and optimistic spring bringing some change, muggy and sweaty, but exciting summer that you spend outdoors with your friends and 'white nights', nostalgic, colorful and beautiful smelling autumn reminding you of passage of time. And all of those are sometimes dry, sometimes muggy, often raining/snowing. To me (growing up in central-eastern Europe) it's essential to add some "rhythm" of life, otherwise I get into "day of the groundhog" workaholic mode.
I'm sure though that people who grew up in those non-seasonal climates have internalized some different ways of marking the passage of time. :)
> The writer had some expectations and was used to things being a certain way in his native Poland, but was disheartened to find that they were different in CA.
I think this is pretty unfair, he's just giving context for the things he's experienced elsewhere. It could have been anywhere. It's hard to say what you like and dislike about a place without having another experience for contrast.
The story is not, "I came from Warszawa, SF was not like Warszawa, so I went back to Warszawa." The story is, "I came to SF, and I loved it, but we think NYC is a better fit for the lifestyle my wife and I want to live."
> - Culture (or lack thereof): The Bay Area has none. The main leisure activities in the Bay Area are centered around enjoying nature and food . There is no music, or art scene of any sort.
Wrong. Plenty of music in SF. Lots in Oakland too. Great shows at the Greek in Berkeley, or big acts at Shoreline (kinda meh the last few years though), Levi's Stadium, or San Jose. If you enjoy chamber or symphonic music, you get it year-long at Stanford, Music@Menlo, and more.
100% agree with author, 3 years ago I quit cold turkey and left sfbay for NYC. Now thinking about moving to Europe for even more developed urban lifestyle, like Amsterdam.
I empathize with most of what he writes, but an irritatingly common pattern I notice when people criticize SV is pointing at destitute people next to wealthy people - as if proximity is the same as causality. California has more than its share of destitution, but fifty years of NIMBYs and catastrophically bad housing policy are a better candidate for blame. If you make housing expensive you shouldn't be surprised when people go unhoused and when everything becomes expensive because labor (which has to be housed) is expensive.
Having lived there, I don't think you need to blame the people living in the houses to be disheartened to see that kind of wealth disparity in such stark contrast, regardless of the reasons. It's sad to live in a place which has so much money flying around and so many wealthy people that can't find a way to help the most vulnerable or the working class.
It's not just housing supply, despite YIMBYs being the loudest voice in the room and housing supply is the most common presumptive scapegoat for all the poverty woes of SF.
There's another side. California is also much friendlier to the homeless and devotes way more resources to even trying to care for them. Meanwhile, the rest of America ships their homeless to a handful of destinations, with California's major population centers being top targets.
Silicon Valley in particular has been known for boring suburbs (with the rare except being SF with its $5000 rents), massive wealth disparities, and general lack of livability and inability to get around easily.
These are well documented issues of living in the bay. What's with the surprise? Do people not do research before uprooting?
The trope that SF is more expensive than the rest of the Bay Area isn’t even true, at least not anymore. I pay $1650 for a studio apartment in a decent neighborhood near a tech shuttle stop. That’s cheaper than Stanford’s student housing in Palo Alto.
It's not "catching up," it was built for and by business elites. For example, Los Altos Hills incorporated specifically to avoid raising taxes or building any kind of civic infrastructure. Saratoga has dispensed with its police department. None of these places are even remotely affordable (or reachable without a car), and they have never been.
Atherton is almost defined as a community for the ultra-rich, what with its prohibition on multi-family housing and enforcement of a minimal ratio of house floor area to lot size.
> Unfortunately, suburbs typically mean zero walkability
I grew up in the Bay Area so I think I know how to do it: An electric bike makes most of the pain go away. I've been exploring South Bay since moving here and finding all kinds of cool things on my bike that are invisible by car (walking is not an option, author is right about that.) Just the other day I rode to the San Jose Diridon train station, threw my bike on Caltrans and spent the day riding my bike around San Francisco. Electric bike is the only way to explore SF in my opinion. I'm going to buy a second battery for my bike soon, then put my bike on Bart and go to Berkeley where I went to University. There's a bunch of interesting stuff there. You don't need a car to avoid being stuck in the suburbs.
tldl; Get an electric bike and learn the public transport system
I lived as a pedestrian for 15 years in SF and I can attest that it is a perfectly, fabulously walkable city, at least the Northeastern quadrant where most of the stuff is located. But I was always dismayed when I would walk around elsewhere, even in urban areas like Oakland, and find some gargantuan highway interchange sprawling between me and my destination, practically daring me to try to find my way through at my own physical risk. It's an absolute failure of urban design that plagues the Bay Area and is one of the things that ultimately led me to leave.
And yes, bikes are great, but some of us prefer to galavant around without a multi-thousand dollar liability to keep locked up. Also, I was usually at least half drunk.
> Also, I think I haven’t really met in person even a single person (openly) into this stuff, so maybe it’s an exaggerated myth, or maybe simply much more common in just VC/startup/big money circles?
I loved living in NYC for city stuff, but came to miss Mexican and South Indian food, hikes, surf, Fry’s (RIP), talking with other techies rather than being a curio for finbros. Flavor in the Bay, well, Oakland/Berkeley.
PATH’s slow and annoying, runs an inconvenient weekend route to Hoboken, and except for downtown Hoboken, you need a car after the train. It works when you have relatives in NJ.
You can get great authentic Mexican and Indian food in Queens. The tech scene in NYC is solid these days without being in your face 24/7 like SF. Finance bros are confined to a few shitty areas of New York and can easily be avoided.
I don't understand the author's focus on himself and his personal happiness, even though he is obviously entitled to it. This really illustrates the entire Millennial focus on "do what makes you happy" to me.
People don't live in the suburbs because they want access to museums and night clubs for themselves. They give up their own happiness for the sake of their children. They buy a more expensive home to put their children into a higher-achieving school. They live in a remote cul-de-sac so their children can safely ride bicycles and shoot hoops in the driveway. Their idea of "going out" is a drab, desiccated local park in the foothills because it is safe and healthy, not because it's fun or diverse. They put pressure on their kids to succeed so they can afford to live in this area when they grow up and repeat the cycle to become well-paid professionals and suburban parents. People pursue this stressful and family-focused lifestyle away from big, busy cities precisely because they want the same for their children, or better.
When the author says that there is no clubbing or spontaneity in Silicon Valley, he demonstrates just how out of touch he is with our local communities, and how little he understood the motivations of the people living here. It makes all the sense in the world for him to move away and find a better fit for his personality! I hope he likes New York better! People live here because they are executing a very precise and demanding life plan for the sake of the next generation, not because they want to be spontaneous and fun. We don't need that here.
Basically none of what you just described rings true to me, for what it’s worth. I moved away from the big city because I love the quieter life in suburbia. I can stand to visit cities for a few days but much more and it really wears on me. Different strokes for different folks.
I was responding to the sentiment that people don’t enjoy living in the suburbs, that they only move there in order to raise kids. I don’t even have kids I just don’t like living in big cities.
If you are paying Cupertino real estate prices to live by yourself, then you and I clearly have very different values. You could play DOTA for 12 hours a day anywhere else in the country for much cheaper.
Cupertino? DOTA? What are you talking about. I moved from a completely different city and to a completely different state. I also have no interest in video games.
He addresses this point with a quote. The suburbs can be boring/stifling for children as well.
**
As noted, those are my preferences. Suburbs have “objective” problems, strip malls and parkings are ugly, cars are not eco friendly etc – but yes, there are people who love suburbs, relative safety (in US it’s a problem – at least a perceived one), having a large house, clean streets, and say that it’s good for family life. I cannot argue with anyone’s preferences and I respect that – different people have different needs. But I’d like to dispel a myth that suburbs are great for kids. It might be true when they are 1-10 years old, later it gets worse. As I mentioned, when I was ~14 I moved to suburbs – and I hated it… I think that for teenagers, it’s bad for their social life and ability to grow up as independent humans. Now being an adult, I think my parents have a very nice house and a beautiful garden and I can appreciate chilling there with a bbq – but back then I felt alone and isolated, and if it wasn’t for my friends in other parts of the city and great public transport, I’d be very miserable. Which teenager wants to be driven around and “helicoptered” by parents and have whole life revolving around school and “activities”?
Yes, and I think that's blatantly false in almost every way.
South Bay (or at least Cupertino/Sunnyvale) is extremely teen-friendly. Lots of opportunities to hang out. You see groups of teens moving independently between local bubble tea shops, cafes, libraries, and town parks. Who do you even think patronizes the dozens of bubble tea shops and light snack places in the area, if not kids hanging out after school?
The author's arguments about suburbs being bad for kids are that (a) he had an unhappy childhood and (b) that kids here have a high risk of suicide. The first is not something I can argue with, the second is simply false. Apart from the cluster of suicides at Palo Alto high schools in 2014, there has not been an elevated rate of suicide among local schoolchildren. Heck, I remember more suicides at my completely mediocre high school in urban New Jersey in the late 90s. It is a shame the author is perpetuating what is essentially an urban legend and a TV pundit talking point.
The reality is, any interest my kids want to pursue, they basically have the best possible resources at their fingertips. The robotics team will have a coach who is an award-winning roboticist. If they're into marine ecology or music production or whatever, one of their classmates will have a parent who's a marine ecologist or the sound engineer for Stanford's theater program.
Compare that to anywhere else in the country, where basically any hobby or interest your child pursues is limited to, like, the Boy Scouts or hanging out at the old shopping mall.
Hey, it's the OP here - I explicitly mention in my post issues with having kids in the SFBA / SV (competition, high suicide rates) and being a teenager in the suburbs (I grew up in the city center until moving to suburbs as a ~14yo and hated it - totally isolating and depressing) as things that I consider and think it's a myth. I think it might be a great place for a few year olds, but once the school starts, I personally wouldn't want to grow up in SV.
But obviously YMMV.
Yeah, no, parents value the Bay Area exactly for what it offers to older children and teens. You can live anywhere with a toddler, but you want your kids to spend their teens in South Bay. Why?
- Some of the best high schools in the country. Many teachers have advanced degrees in their fields. A direct connection to Stanford and Berkeley. Courses beyond AP Calculus available for children to take.
- You can raise your children in the church. You do not seem to understand what a luxury it is to have a vast choice of local churches, where many people you meet are doctors, engineers, lawyers, and other influential professionals. The Bay Area is composed of lots of tightly knit communities where people can exchange experiences, favors, and insights with others they can trust and relate to. Maybe you weren't able to break into one, so you couldn't see the benefits?
- You overstate the pressure on local kids. Aside from a couple of tragic incidents at Palo Alto High several years ago, children in the area have lots of opportunities to hang out in bubble tea shops and cafes, visit friends, participate in sports, and basically do whatever they want to. The unique luxury of living in the Bay Area is that if you kid is over at a friend's house, you can rely on the mom to say, "Sure, you can play Zelda, but first let's do an hour of homework!" This unique and amazing culture of high achievement is what drives parents to the area at any cost.
To be honest, all your points sound scary/depressing/unappealing to me. Like the last point - helicopter parenting - kind of creepy to be honest, yikes.
But this might be a difference in our cultural backgrounds and how we grew up.
But one thing that is not just matter of cultural background and preferences, but of facts and ongoing research - is that pressure, high expectations etc. do have a devastating effect on teenagers' mental health and mental wellbeing.
Again, I'm glad you have decided to look for a place to live that's a better fit for you right now!
The way parents in South Bay raise their kids might seem hardcore, but it gets results. Many families come here from overseas with nothing and spend many years working in dismal jobs with low pay, all to give their kids a chance at success. We have some of the best schools and some of the highest rates of attending elite universities in the entire country. The FAANGs are stocked with graduates from local high schools. Many families have parents who work at Apple and other well-established companies. We live in wholesome, family-friendly, welcoming communities. If you ever decide to have kids, we would be happy to welcome you back to the area!
And when I was at Findhorn I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted himself to saving trees, and he’d just got back from Washington lobbying to save the Redwoods. And he was eighty-four years old, and he always travels with a backpack because he never knows where he’s going to be tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn he said to me, “Where are you from?” And I said, “New York.” And he said, “Ah, New York, yes, that’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?” And I said, “Oh, yes.” And he said, “Why do you think they don’t leave?” And I gave him different banal theories. And he said, “Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all.” He said, “I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built—they’ve built their own prison—and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have—having been lobotomized—the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or even to see it as a prison.” And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said, “This is a pine tree.” And he put it in my hand. And he said, “Escape before it’s too late.
> is that pressure, high expectations etc. do have a devastating effect on teenagers' mental health and mental wellbeing.
Having grown up in the South Bay and then having moved to Europe myself I think that lots of parents in the Bay Area really don’t understand this, and props to you for doing so (even though you aren’t a parent). Sure plenty of kids end up being extremely high achievers. Plenty of kids also crack under the pressure and spend their formative years hating themselves.
Sure it’s a cultural thing, but it’s a cultural thing that actively hurts children.
If you stay in NYC and have kids, I'll be interested in your perspective then. I lived in NYC for a long time, and now live in the NYC suburbs. All your criticisms of suburbs are spot-on, IMO, even here in the NYC metro, but at the same time I don't think living IN the city with kids really would have worked out either. NYC is great because it's a true city, but it's very large, very loud, and still part of the broader American culture where you need to pay for what are arguably essential services such as good schools, physical safety, etc. We don't have a lot of in between options in the US though -- only here on the east coast do we have much urbanism, with NYC being the biggest and most intense by far, but pretty much everything else is suburban or exurban. I suspect this will be different within, say, 150 years, though of course that's a prediction I won't be able to check.
As someone who grew up in a European city, the thought of instead having grown up in a suburb is terrifying to me. You don't need suburbs to have the life you describe, and it wasn't stressful at all.
Oh boy, I have no idea what Silicon Valley really is like but you sure manage to make it sound absolutely horrifying. Sounding that smug, boring, authoritarian and exclusionary at the same time is impressive.
> "They give up their own happiness for the sake of their children"
This sentence makes total sense for North Korean parents who work super-hard to afford smuggling their kids out of the country. But not for the richest region of the world superpower and the "citadel of democracy".
> "They put pressure on their kids to succeed so they can afford to live in this area when they grow up and repeat the cycle to become well-paid professionals and suburban parents"
I'd understand if they lived in a poor country, where being a "non well-paid professionals" meant constant suffering. But if a person "sacrifices" themselves so their kids can afford fancy car, hmm, something is suspicious here, isn't it? :-)
Are you implying that the Bay Area is a great place for kids to grow up? Because I, and the author, argue that it's a terrible place for them.
Also, are you implying that there is anything wrong with living a lifestyle without kids? Why would I want to raise a child in a world that will be undergoing tumultuous climate change over the next 100 years.
> walking from one suburb town – Mountain View – to an adjacent one, Palo Alto, would take 1.5 uninspiring hours to walk with many intersections on busy highway streets. Even a drive would be ~half an hour!
In bad traffic, this might be true if you're measuring from downtown PA to downtown MV. But that's because downtown PA is at the northern tip of PA (there's Cal Ave and Midtown further south, and much closer to MV) and downtown MV is toward the southern end of MV.
If you were to cherry-pick an alternative stat, you'd point out that downtown Palo Alto is just a 5 minute drive from downtown Menlo Park. There's also Caltrain, that takes 10 mins to get from MV to PA or PA to MP.
Palo Alto has terrible access to highways, areas of pretty bad congestion because of an excess of concentrated office space, and a 25mph speed limit on most streets, even arterial ones (Middlefield, Alma, Charleston). A trip between any number of destinations in Palo Alto and Mountain View is 15-20 minutes without traffic.
Yeah, there are a surprisingly small number of 40+ MPH zones in the area, and this does add to travel time. I think the reason is that most streets (including all of the ones you mentioned) are in residential areas, and neighbors don't want to have high-speed traffic right in front of their homes.
Lots of negative comments here but the author's personal experience resonates with my own.
I would add that I found it personally stifling to be in an environment where there's a lot of pressure to be constantly upbeat and positive.
It feels related to the culture of competition, but not feeling free to express anything negative made me feel socially suffocated when I was in California. Maybe it's in part because I grew up in an environment where sardonic humor was a go-to coping mechanism, but pretending that bad things aren't there makes me feel worse about them.
I think there's a balance to be had: I'm grateful that the experience forced me to think more about when I use negative humor (or just complaining/saying negative things that aren't funny), how it can affect people in different ways based on their personal backgrounds and personality. But I don't think California is for me.
I live in So Cal, but, I remember getting an unusual activity alert for my Amex-- someone had just charged $2000.
I step into a conference room to call my wife to ask if she had done it, and she says, "Yes, it was a retainer, I'm divorcing you."
The weirdest thing was going back to work and pretending nothing was going on. I was dead inside for two weeks at least. Couldn't take time off. Couldn't afford to quit. Just had to sort of sit there and pretend everything was fine.
That's so rough. I lost my dog while in training for a job as a young man. I stayed through tears to finish this stupid test as I had been told if we left we would be fired no questions asked during the training and OJT part of intake which was about one month. I was supremely pissed when I saw people being allowed to leave/not show up for various reasons with no problem. My dog had been my best friend for my entire life until that point and I was broken inside. I decided to never again let a job come between my life and my happiness/health. No job I've ever had was worth that, even when I owned my own company. My ex-wife did me dirty, ended up closing up shop to focus on getting myself right. Still think it was the right decision.
I hope you are in a better place now, but if not, you'll get there.
It is quite funny how remarkably similar some of the seasons have been the last few years. One of the cooler summer days feels no different than the warmer days in winter. Contrast that to other areas and you know immediately what season it is... Here, it can be hard to tell and sometimes does make things blur together a bit. Sometimes I feel like seasons leads to novelty and leads to a better sense of time and memory. Maybe that's why some of the last years seem to be a bit of a blur and why some novelty has been lost.
This feels accurate to me. I recently moved back to Portland from Silicon Valley, and the extreme cost of living, the lack of culture, lack of good food, and workaholic culture were a big part of it. If you live in Cupertino, Campbell, Sunnyvale, I struggle to even think of things like a decent bar.
It has gotten a smidge better in Cupertino because of the "Main Street" area that popped up, but it's all in only one place, a tiny one compared to how big Cupertino is. Before that, there was pretty much nothing.
"Main Street, Cupertino" is mostly condos, high-end Asian family restaurants, a Meet Fresh (a cavernous chain business selling Taiwanese slushie desserts to kids), and a high-end chain bar. Oh, and a Philz. My mind boggles at the thought that Main Street is an improvement over the panoply of mom-and-pop businesses that dot Cupertino all over.
> If you live in Cupertino, Campbell, Sunnyvale, I struggle to even think of things like a decent bar.
I mean - is anyone really looking for that in places that are definitely known as places that people move to in order to raise children? It's a really weird complaint. If you wanted booze and the kid vibes - guess you could move to San Carlos.
I wonder if the people complaining about lack of good food are mostly talking about good food at a certain price point or just certain cuisines - because I don't have many issues finding good restaurants here whereas in some other major cities it can be a real struggle to find anything that is at the same level.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the Bay Area, and I too hate that it’s not like Europe. Europe is so much better (except that we are stuck in our low paying shit jobs of course). /s :)
That's silly. I am a Frenchman, moved to SF in 2000, moved to London in 2019 (for family reasons). California living is very different from European, or even most American lifestyles. That does not make it inferior. And sweltering as I am here in 32°C weather without AC at the moment, San Francisco's perfect weather is one of the things I miss the most...
Why? I grew up in a rural area, moved to a city for a few years and hated it, and now live happily in a suburb. I get fresh air, see trees regularly, don't hear neighbors fighting or stomping, and can still drive into the city if/when needed.
A lot of pro-urban discussions come from the perspective of single people and young couples. Exciting, spontaneous, etc.
I would appreciate more perspectives from parents and families. Do you use strollers (and take them on the bus) or just carry babies everywhere? If you need to buy things at the market, do you take your two-year-old or leave them at home? Do you buy furniture or only rent furnished places? If you have a big family how do you find a big enough place? Do kids practice their musical instruments at home, or does that bother the neighbors?
European cities: yes, strollers and baby carriers, babies are everywhere; some countries are mostly empty flats and buy/bring your own furniture, but the Easter you go the less this is prevalent (cost savings); define big enough, but there are usually a lot of sizes on the market, if you need bigger you move, usually out from the center, and you pay the same. Yes kids bother neighbors, but it's the same everywhere (in rural areas dogs bark, neighbors wake up at the first crack of dawn to just do an hour of chainsawing, etc..)
Thank you for writing this. It resonated deeply with me, I spent 2 years in the SFBA and left in the end because I had this nagging feeling that something wasn't right but could not verbalise as clearly as you have. Your blog post has given me some sort of catharsis.
Much like there are some people in this society/world that we will have personality clashes with regardless I believe there are cities in this world that we will have the same personality clashes with. It grates, it wears you down and after a while you have to leave. I often feel affinity or antipathy within minutes of leaving the airport of a particular city. The SFBA was a 'wtf have I done by moving here, ok I'll give it a couple of years to warm to it' and although there was lots to love I never connected on a deep level. It's a subjective personal thing for which there is no wherefore.
- Weather: The Bay Area has none. The changing seasons and large variations in weather they brought was something the writer missed.
- Culture (or lack thereof): The Bay Area has none. The main leisure activities in the Bay Area are centered around enjoying nature and food . There is no music, or art scene of any sort.
- Public Transport (or lack thereof): The Bay Area has none. This means that many weekend hours are spent getting to a particular place where the leisure activity (which is already not to the taste of the writer) will occur, and this also entails advance planning!
- Variety (or lack thereof): There is a lack of variety, whether it be in the type of people encountered, the conversations, the cities/suburbs, or the scenery.
- Affordability (or lack thereof): Flimsy, modest houses cost north of a million bucks minimum. Everything that requires human labor is stratospherically expensive.
- Politics: Even though the writer is ostensibly of a similar persuasion as most Bay Area residents (left-leaning liberal), the actual policies and attitudes of Bay Area residents are heavily arrogant, technocratic, plutocratic and short-sighted.
All of the observations ring true. But the overall impression I got was that the author really did not or could not change himself, and expected something the Bay Area never offered in reality.
reply