As a 4th generation Californian this article really hits the mark. I spent a majority of my life in the sfbay area and moved out of there when the pandemic started and will never move back. Everyone of my friends and my Wife's friends left along with the last of my direct family as well.
It really boils down to alot of things, cost, dysfunction and environmental degradation. For me I know that life is short and I don't want to live in a crime infested dump that costs a fortune and is extremely crowded where everyone is miserable and has overreaching laws for decent people and lawlessness for criminals.
We had packages stolen off our porch, liquor bottles/trash thrown on our lawn, cars broken into, illegal fireworks being fired off almost every night(scaring our dog to where she was having serious issues), driving anywhere I saw huge piles of trash, homeless camps and shopping carts. Oh and all houses run about $1.3M for a non dump and schools are terrible. And I didn't get into the non-stop fires that have happened the past few years(which has really never happened in California before).[I lived in San Jose]
This sounds like what happened in the SFbay area(south bay/pennisula), I grew up there and it used to be a great place to live, center left politics, lots of families and a diverse set of industries with many middle class opportunities. right around 10-15 years ago things started to change dramatically for the worse, housing and costs everywhere skyrocketed, homeless population exploded, politics veered hard left. Most of my friends from high school(90%) were forced to leave due to rents going from $1k a month to $3k a month for a 1-2 bdrm apts. Those that owned houses also moved as they were fed up with crime and could get a way better house somewhere else. Middle class jobs all disappeared from the area, families also left, the neighborhoods I lived in San Jose (rose garden/willow glen) had barely any kids for my daughter to play with as there were no families anymore, the rose garden neighborhood had 0 kids on the street, the willow glen neighborhood had 1 family w/ kids who moved away during the pandemic.
I was lucky and making really good money in tech but was devastated by how the area I grew up in had turned into a nightmare and everyone I know (even family) leaving the area. I too ended leaving as the cost vs. quality of life didn't make any sense and I couldn't see my family living in a place I didn't even recognize anymore. Most people don't talk about it but there is a huge diaspora of bay area residents due to the stuff mentioned above and it breaks my heart to think we will most likely never return and familiy/friends I expected to spend the rest of my life with all leaving.
People are finally realizing that all those taxes that California collects gets them effectively nothing over places like Texas or Florida.
The Bay Area is beautiful, but after being panhandled every day, stepping around shit and fresh piss on the way to work, paying an outrageous amount for BART (which always has issues), paying thousands a month in rent for a shitty house from the 70s, etc. people are tired.
Now with the fires, and the shutdown, everyone wishes they would have sold and moved to Houston, where a brand new 3000 sqft house only runs $350k.
Yep. Unless you have Prop 13 and can afford the cost-of-living and taxes, then GTFO. I was born there in the late 70's but left in 2020, mainly because most Californias were either out-of-touch (the 2% of the rich, sociopathic bastards who will hit-and-run anyone in their Bimmers) or angry-unfriendly ready to explode (90% of people). The middle-class in California is almost nothing but a slim segment of baby boomers and software developers. In addition, the SF Bay Area is, in a sense like Man Jose, full of dudes. Furthermore, the people who have migrated to the area pumped up real estate prices and displaced long-time residents. It's now (or was, pre-COVID) a place where people come to make tech money and leave, not put down roots; so most people come and go, and don't invest socially or in any community sense.
I escaped the south 16 years ago and I never want to fucking go back.
Further the bay area is home to many unique cultures that are sadly seriously distressed thanks to the housing situation, yet tenaciously persist as best they can.
I'm a pretty pessimistic individual, at least my wife tells me so, but I am actually very optimistic about California and the Bay Area. I think COVID will end up being the kick in the pants it needs to start dealing with many of the problems in the state and region. A scare or two about companies fleeing the state is necessary to get the state/counties/cities to cut back on suffocating red tape for small businesses. And if there is one place in the world setup to fight a big climate problem like fires, it is the academic and technological hive mind of California.
Back to the bad takes: from what I've read the takes are all from people who moved out of the Bay. Some people come here, start their careers, then have the luxury of leaving and working from wherever. That's great, but there will always be a batch of new grads looking for work and honestly the concentration there is so high they could lose 20% of the companies by market cap and this would still be the place to start out, along with a few other large metros. Just because you leave doesn't mean the city stops.
This is a reddit-grade defense and strikes me as a weird rationalization. Are you suggesting that the Bay Area is destined to be some insulated District 1 that perpetually laughs at quality of life, economics, market forces etc?
In any case there's nothing to debate, the exodus has been happening for years and has only been accelerated and highlighted by the Covid news cycle.
I live in the Bay area - I cannot find a single thing appealing about this place except 1 - weather. But that can be had at many cities in California.
Things that suck in Bay Area:
1) People. I don't like to hang with AI engineers and arrogant people. Humbleness is hard to come by here. This is usually brought up as a positive, I couldn't disagree more.
2) Homelessness - Some areas feel like it's Somalia
3) Unkept, unmaintained infrastructure - Pretty much pot holes everywhere, roads ruin tyres and rip apart suspension systems, even if a road is recently built, it has major quality issues. Infrastructure in Bay area is below par that of places like China, Korea, Japan, EU, Switzerland, England, and pretty much any developed country and many parts of the US. Texas has the best roads IMO. I've been to all these places and infrastructure (Alameda county) just reeks of awful people running this place, lack of care for quality and attention to detail, and perhaps mismanagement of funds.
3) Housing - self explanatory
4) Bang for the buck - Cost of living does not match the standard of living. People automatically assume that cost living is proportional to the quality of living. Not even close in the bay area.
5) Micro-analysis of Food culture: I cannot go out and hang with people without someone trying to analyze between 4.8 and 4.9 stars on Yelp. You forgot the purpose of us getting together. This probably exists everywhere in major cities, not just the Bay area.
6) Transit - sucks, expensive and unmaintained. Rampant theft on BART, you generally feel unsafe.
7) Traffic - before this pandemic, it was difficult to go anywhere without taking 3 hours off.
8) Crime - I've had my car broken into 4 times (the city) in the course of 8 months.
9) Way too many laws - Regulation in California will cut you by thousand cuts. Wanna grab a lot and build your own house? Good luck with 18,000 pages of law that govern what you can and cannot do with your land. This is the same in Oregon and Washington state.
10) Wanna form an LLC? $800/year. Why!? What costs are involved in providing a registration for a company? It is $50 in some states, free in many other states.
11) Taxes - I am a centrist and IMO california has way too many taxes (count) and way too much (amount) of your income, property, tolls, estate, utilities, etc. I am fine with high taxes if that results in a better quality of life, but I feel like I am robbed off.
12) Extreme sensitivity towards race, gender, minorities, etc. Shops like this should not exist: https://www.shopwomenmade.com/ - Yep, this is in Berkeley. This is a hot topic but IMO ultra liberalism is playing into their own agenda.
13) Intolerence to anything but extreme left in politics. Oh god, you're doing exactly what extreme right is doing - not listening to other views.
Why the hell am I here? I am looking to get out of the bay area and never return, even for pleasure. SF Bay Area is one of the worst places to live IMO having lived in half a dozen cities in the US and expat in Asia.
Advice to entrepreneurs in the bay area: Find a place in other parts of California, it's a gorgeous state with many cheap cities - perhaps you can help build those small cities into better communities. If Magic Leap can form a 3000 people tech HQ in Ft. Lauderdale in Florida, I am sure you can attract talent in Monterrey, Redding, Bakersfield, etc.
I grew up in Sacramento - well, one of its suburbs, aside from a brief time after my parents split and my dad moved to Sacramento proper (and then eventually moved back after meeting my now-stepmom and her daughters / my now-sisters).
One thing the article doesn't seem to mention at all is the 2008 financial crisis. The Sacramento area got hit hard, especially suburbs like mine. My specific hometown, Elk Grove, rapidly expanded from being mostly farmland when I was a kid to being the poster child of suburban sprawl when I was a teenager. The population exploded, the housing supply exploded (and got outstripped by demand), and then in 2007/2008 it all came crashing down, with foreclosures and vacancies and squatters everywhere. I can imagine other Central Valley cities got hit similarly hard.
The article mentions people commuting from Central Valley cities to coastal cities. My dad was one of 'em for awhile, commuting from Sacramento to the Rite-Aid he managed on Van Ness in SF. He wasn't rich, and at the time neither was my mom; living closer to SF was out of the question even back then (especially after they divorced). My stepmom and her parents had emigrated from SF to Sac before meeting my dad, and she worked at the same store, making the same commute (and that's how they met, and were soon happily married 'til death did them part when he passed in May this year). It was indeed a long commute, leaving home before sunrise and getting back after sunset.
All in all, even Sacramento was kind of a shithole, let alone the rest of the Valley. Now it's an even more expensive shithole. I ended up leaving to work my first job (because few employers in Sac were willing to hire a high school graduate when they're being flooded with college graduate applicants), and I haven't really looked back; decent memories, but neither the present nor future are appealing - especially when it looks like we're on the verge of another 2008.
Yes, these and related issues combined with the insanely high cost of living are causing a lot of people I know to leave (or plan to soon leave) the bay area to work remotely. People have lost hope things are going to improve because the policies the local government enacts to 'help' fix things keep triggering second-order consequences that make things even worse.
I don't live there anymore but used to like visiting quite often. Now I avoid it whenever I can which is sad.
I lived in the Bay Area for five years, and I'm so glad I got out. On paper, the area should operate very similarly to New York City: good public transit, relatively active building, and a variety of neighborhoods and places to live that are relatively safe.
In reality, it's effectively impossible to get around in the bay area deprived of housing with no new building, no solution to public transit (good luck getting the peninsula towns to allow for BART to expand there), and from what I've read the property crime rates are higher than NYC in the 90s.
Of course, New York has its own problems, and the Subway is rapidly degrading. With that, local politics in the Bay Area are out of control, and it seems there's no real easy solution to the political clusterfuck of the various towns. Individuals can only really vote with their feet: move out. There are plenty of other attractive towns for tech.
It's crazy. The Bay Area used to be probably the most desirable place in the world. Now it's descended into something much, much worse.
It's hard to see how the descent can stop. Short of very firm "cleanup" measures, things will probably get worse. But a great many of the citizens would oppose such measures.
I usually see things in a positive light, but this is a hard one. I'd love to be wrong and see the Bay Area thriving in 20 years.
c'mon, I also live in the Bay and I think reality is somewhere in the middle between the original doom and gloom message and your rose colored glasses view. We have HUGE homelessness and untreated mental illness issues around here, and most urban centers are absolutely filthy cause of those.
This is a place that has big issues, no matter how much you manage to ignore them on your way to the nice restaurant for dinner with your friends.
It really boils down to alot of things, cost, dysfunction and environmental degradation. For me I know that life is short and I don't want to live in a crime infested dump that costs a fortune and is extremely crowded where everyone is miserable and has overreaching laws for decent people and lawlessness for criminals.
We had packages stolen off our porch, liquor bottles/trash thrown on our lawn, cars broken into, illegal fireworks being fired off almost every night(scaring our dog to where she was having serious issues), driving anywhere I saw huge piles of trash, homeless camps and shopping carts. Oh and all houses run about $1.3M for a non dump and schools are terrible. And I didn't get into the non-stop fires that have happened the past few years(which has really never happened in California before).[I lived in San Jose]
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