Great comment! Another trend from then 80s at least was to start out in SF and then move to Silicon Valley when you became a couple (the commute became a killer). In fact that was us (well SV->SF->SV). I learnt about this from a single friend who moved to Palo Alto and realized he couldn’t date any more — all the single guys were up in the city.
SF doesn’t have great kid infrastructure any more so I imagine this will continue, though spread more to the east bay as well as the peninsula is pretty crowded.
Even if you have a bunch of young people in one area, it doesn't mean they will mingle with the rest of the city. Stanford for example keeps within it's own bubble for the most part. There are PhD students who never even go to university street in Palo Alto for example. A Stanford alum I dated for a few months confirmed the same thing. It's only been relatively recently that many tech startups have been moving to SF. It used to be the south bay where many startups lived.
You live in SF/Berkley as a single person, you move down to the south bay to raise a family in stable suburbia with 'good schools' vs. the dice roll that is SF. That is the pattern. More tech companies and mostly male tech workers wont solve it. Downtown SJ is already a bit dense as it is.
SF also seems to be Mecca if you're gay, at least a certain kind of 20-35 year old gay man, too, which has a huge crossover with tech workers. I know it's been a great way to recruit at previous companies -- find the gay kid who is a developer or designer stuck in some crappy midwestern/southern town and help him relocate to San Francisco with a good job. But most of the older gay people I know later end up becoming boring and move to Walnut Creek or whatever to have a family, just like other people as they get older. Presumably NYC has the same thing going on.
I've only ever really been in the dating scene in the bay area for a month or two a couple times, and ended up with girlfriends rapidly. I guess being involved in the rave/party/etc. scene, and being interested in smart/confident/etc. vs. a lot of other things = easy mode for dating? But I don't really have anything to calibrate against other than MIT.
I wonder if what you're describing is that broad, or perhaps a slightly different phenomenon:
A huge amount of the growth of SF's (the city proper) tech scene seems to be driven by companies staffed primarily by very young (straight out of college, <30yrs) people. Similarly, much of the migration to the city seems to be driven by young folks (under 30/without family).
Back in the old days (when I was growing up on the peninsula), one of the big reasons people wanted to live in Palo Alto/Mountain View/Cupertino was that they were family-friendly towns with good schools and communities. Companies sprung up on the peninsula for many reasons, but people at or near child-rearing ages (~30+) had their priorities set.
I'm unconvinced that this rationale has changed in the intervening years. Gentrification and high demand have made living in the 'ideal' parts of the peninsula more difficult, but people still choose Palo Alto to start a family. Similarly, tech companies that tend to have slightly older workforces still prize their peninsula locations.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I think studying the demographics of SF growth may tell us more. That said, I don't think that the suburbs[1] are being marginalized at all.
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[1] While cities on the peninsula might be suburban in a way, they are quite different from suburbs in the rest of the country. It's a bit strange calling Mountain View a suburb when it is so different from a city like Needham (suburb of Boston) or the various suburbs of Seattle or Houston for example.
Just the opposite. SF (and Silicon Valley) has the highest ratio of single straight men to single straight women in the country. It's a very, very difficult place to date as a straight man.
And the abundance of male techy immigrants means that women who are attracted to geeky men are the most in demand and most likely to be already taken.
If you're single (and male) and you'd like to be paired up, make it happen before or after your time in SF.
Well, I'm happily married and my wife is a Silicon Valley native, so ultimately I "succeeded" at the dating game.
It was pretty miserable while I was in it, though. Silicon Valley is not really a place where the culture encourages "branching out a little", nor does it attract people who are interested in that. This is self-reinforcing: people who were born here and aren't interested in tech tend to move up to SF/Berkeley/Oakland while they're single, which have greater cultural diversity.
I was in some sense lucky: I met my wife when she had recently moved back from Peru and was re-establishing her career here. Another year or so and she probably would've moved to Berkeley.
The dating scene is messed up for men in the Bay Area because eligible men vastly outnumber eligible women. It's as simple as that. All the unnatural relationship dynamics flows from this fact. More men study computer science, math, physics, and engineering than women do. Silicon Valley is a magnet for people in those fields. Silicon Valley ends up with way more single men in the 20-40 age bracket than single women.
If you a straight single male, you have an important decision. If you value the immense professional opportunies of the Bay Area more than finding a partner, then do move there. If you think that finding a partner is also very important, then consider finding your job someplace with better ratios. If the Bay Area 20-40 dating pool is something like 3 male to 1 female, that means 2/3 of single men will be without partners.
I have a lot of friends in SF. At least in the tech industry, it seems that the main reason people live in SF despite the significant downsides is for career options and pay. So I'd guess that the SF dating pool is already strongly skewed to people who choose career over all else.
>Hasn't this already been forecasted as part of a regular cycle? All of those tech yupsters in SF will eventually start families (maybe later than sooner), and will move back to the suburbs to have kids instead of deal with the space/schooling issues of the city.
Only this doesn't make any more sense now than it did sense.
People are born every year, not in spurts.
Thus the flux of "tech yupsters" coming into SF should be as constant as those getting married and going to the suburbs -- keeping the state steady.
If that isn't the case, it's not because "those tech yupsters eventually started family" (which every generation does at some point anyway), but because the influx of young tech people to SF had peaked at some point in the past.
This is also a silicon valley problem. Lots of people move there to get the big job and make money. It attracts a certain kind of people. People who prioritize their career and income above other things. You also have the challenge that a lot of the people moving to SF might only stay a few years, so you have lot of turnaround. People are not focused on building long-term friendships and relationships because know that they or others might leave. You also see this on the dating scene. I found silicon valley to be an unhealthy living environment on multiple levels.
Does anyone have a counter to the SF pile-on? This is heartbreaking to hear as someone who wants to work in tech in the Bay Area (and is resigned to live in the city as a single)
I first came to the Bay Area in the mid 80s, when Silicon Valley ended north of Menlo Park and San Francisco was an unrelated world, a residential city with people commuting south for the jobs, with needles on the street and homeless people crapping there too. By 89/90 when the tech boom collapsed, never to return (or so people said), the magazines were full of articles about how people were fleeing California, that the new world of modems would make remote work possible, and that would be the end.
In other words, every decade the same article, over and over. Yawn.
(Definitely there was a change in the late 90s when people came for the money rather than the sheer technical fun, but as that same impetus had produced SF in the first place (god rush of '49) it was hard to complain, even if it did change the culture for the worse. Sadly those people didn't all flee with the dot com crash nor the 2008 crisis. Well, we can't have everything.)
I'm a relatively new software engineer who grew up in the Silicon Valley.
I moved out the day I graduated high school and am never planning on coming back (I'm 21 now). I haven't used any of my contacts from high school in order to land myself a job.
I feel like my general quality of life has improved since I left. The bay area is a really boring and expensive place to live. It is also very homogenous (not race-wise but ideology and career wise), which could be a pro or a con depending on what kind of person you are.
Also there are a lot of stuck up assholes that live in the valley (I thought this was just how people were until I left - huge relief). The dating scene is almost nonexistent compared to other places. And there's a huge filter bubble there. I found it very suffocating.
New York, LA, probably others all have very fast growing tech scenes. And the worse things get in SF, the less of a lead the Bay Area has over these other cities. It is more expensive to live in San Francisco than in a nice part of New York, and way more than a nice part of LA. On top of that, San Francisco is a super lame mono-culture, increasingly comprised of mostly white and asian dudes between about 25 and 40.
More and more I hear of prominent engineers moving out of the Bay Area (Steve Klabnik is the most recent that comes to mind). I think that in ~5 years, the perfect storm of municipal disfunction (aging and already shitty public transit, insane rent and minimal new construction, strong lack of diversity) will cause San Francisco to quickly become much less attractive for companies and employees.
You don't have to trust Friends. You can just Google this yourself or trust your instincts. But barring that, it's well established that younger people tend towards cities.
As for jobs following people or not, your article points out that it's a chicken and egg thing, and that high talent people may attract jobs, but they also beget more jobs.
In The Bay Area, throw in startup culture and VC/Angel funding and you add more fuel to the fire.
YC's stated reason for moving from Boston to Mountain View was actually because the investors were in CA.
You could say that initially maybe it was talent from the top local schools (Berkeley, Stanford), and semiconductor research, that attracted the VCs here. Then it created jobs from companies seeking those VCs, but today, in the current state, people are coming here for the jobs. It's a feedback loop but I wouldn't put most people's ambitions for moving to SF being the quality of life offered in the city itself.
Rather than arguing aimlessly in this thread I'll rephrase threwawasy1228's thesis and my rebuttal:
San Francisco is going to be in decline because of lowering quality of life (poop on streets, crime, etc) repelling some talent.
My rebuttal: These were never the reasons attracting people to come to SF in the first place. It was the availability of jobs, opportunities, and VC money and startup networking. If these things disappear, perhaps due to remote work opportunities, then yes SF would tend to decline due to the loss of local advantages. Otherwise, as long as these attractors exist it's going to keep the area a hot-spot. Of course, SF's rent isn't going to rise forever. Eventually it will reach equilibrium where enough people like threwawasy1228 will decide it's not worth the job/opportunity and this cooling down will be hailed as the "end" or "decline" of SF.
The sexy, consumer-focused startups are in SF and where people want to be. Down in Mountain View & Palo Alto is where the VCs, unsexy B2B startups (Box), and accelerators (YC/500) are thriving. 20 something bachelors & DINCs want to live in the city where it's fun and happening whereas mothers/fathers would rather raise a family in the suburbia of the peninsula. I won't deny the trend towards SF as VCs and accelerators are making a presence there but most are not replacing their HQs in the peninsula.
Dating is horrible in the Bay Area unless you grew up in the Bay or don’t work in tech.
If you’re an outsider you’re considered a gentrifying techie so you already eliminated mostly anyone who is from the Bay. So now you have to date other outsiders and guess what, most of them work in tech. Most people who work in tech are male.
SF doesn’t have great kid infrastructure any more so I imagine this will continue, though spread more to the east bay as well as the peninsula is pretty crowded.
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