South Bay was probably the cheapest place to buy land at the time, it's only so expensive because now so many companies are headquartered there. I'm still not convinced that east bay is cheaper than south bay now, despite your assertion.
Berkeley is hardly cheap (more expensive than Seattle, for instance)
I mean, in general, the east bay is cheaper than the peninsula and south bay. You can even see how the prices sorta stay high in fremont then go lower as you go north. And particularly when you get to the tri-valley, land is a lot cheaper (relatively speaking, of course :)
I pay $4700/month for an architecturally magnificent 5BR 2200 square foot house on the block east of the Berkeley Bowl. I suppose it's not cheap on an absolute scale, but a comparable house in SF would be $8000/month at the very minimum and in Pacific Heights or the Marina or a neighborhood I don't want to live in. I think you're underestimating the cost of San Francisco right now.
Berkeley is more expensive than Silicon Valley, but it has all of the amenities of a major metropolis (except late night anything) while being quite small in the scheme of things. It's still absolutely not a place to go for a way cheap alternative to a city, as it's still one of the most expensive areas in the USA.
Bay Area's real estate is actually pretty cheap, considering how much economical output the area has and how desirable the location has been historically.
Look at Vancouver, Hongkong, Shanghai, Moscow, Tokyo, all have waaaaay lower average household income than San Francisco Bay Area, yet wil much more expensive realestate price.
I just bought a house in Berkeley. I wanted to buy a condo in SF, but for the same price of a 2 bedroom condo in SF with 1200 sqft I could buy a house in berkeley with 6700sq ft lot size with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms and a huge backyard all to myself. Even if I had all the money in the world, I'll buy rather buy a house in berkeley over a condo in SF.
There are plenty of restaurants around berkeley, and many places to hang out. The only thing I'm missing out if I live in Berkeley is all the awesome tech events in SF.
Not a refutation of your broader point, but I just want to point out there are outlying areas around the bay that aren't as expensive, too - though I don't know prices in either area well enough to do a thorough comparison.
Fair enough, but where? Back in the 80's when we bought our house in Sunnyvale, we could have bought one for much less either Livermore, Fremont/Milpitas, or South San Jose for much less but the commute would be high. Pretty consistently the outlying areas are about half the cost of the cities actually by the bay. Would love to hear more data points.
It's not really true in my experience. If you can live in the East Bay, there are definitely still really nice and affordable places to be found. Yes, the prices have gone up significantly over the past few years in the East Bay too, but it is still cheap enough where it probably will make the high Bay Area salaries financially worthwhile.
Is that actually true? That's absolutely true in SF, but the Bay Area is bonkers for lots of reasons, housing prices is a well known one so I want to be careful about extrapolating from there.
Berkeley is hardly cheap (more expensive than Seattle, for instance)
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