vikingsail

Indeed I call it the circle of life. Have you ever noticed that when you kill 5 rats five more move in! Opportunity always abounds but it does not make it palatable.

carcajou

The San Francisco Bay area has changed massively in the last 30 years. It didn't gain its current reputation of a technology cradle until about 15 years ago, with the tech companies reaching a critical mass a few years prior to that. It's reputation nationally as an ultra-left-wing political centre began about that time as well (Berkeley was always regarded that way but only in the last 15-20 years did that reputation spread out of Berkeley to apply to the whole area).

At one time San Francisco was even seen as a gritty port town with not much going for it . . .

You absolutely can live well in the Bay Area on a combined household income of $200,000. Somehow 6 million people in that area get by on less! But you have to approach it like you would living in New York City - ie, you will pay a massive, massive premium for location, but if you are willing to drive an hour each way, you can find something very decent and reasonable. Are you willing to live in Oakland, etc?

carcajou

Yes. There is a larger trend towards coastalisation in US society. Some of that is because of how identity politics have exploded; some of that is also things like the decline of manufacturing but also (this is often overlooked) farm economics. Farms are getting a lot bigger because with technology you can do a lot more, with a lot less, and don't need nearly as much labour as you once did; so farmers are buying out their neighbours and so on.

That also means you don't need the myriad collection of farm labourers that you once did either.

So whereas teens and young adults in Michigan, Pennsylvania etc don't see the same future that their parents had of graduating high school on Friday and starting a career in the local plant on Monday, kids in the Midwest don't see a future on the farm the same way their parents and grandparents did either, and are also leaving.

The populations of Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska combined have only increased by about 3 million in the last 100 years!

Say to a young American what lucrative professions are out there - the default answers are banking (New York) or tech (San Francisco). Not surprisingly where does the wandering and somewhat aimless Millennial end up?

New York City, too, not all that long ago was viewed by Americans as a gritty port town with high crime and not a lot going for it . . . and rehabilitated itself about the same time that San Francisco did.

Giantaxe

I disagree. I arrived in the 80's and, along with Rt. 128 outside of Boston, it was very much the US's high technology centre back then. Heck, the dot com boom started around 20 years ago...

Again, I disagree. Since at least the start of the AIDS crisis in the early 80's, SF has been pretty much "ultra left wing". I do agree that California, in general, has become much more left wing in the last 15-20 years.

Well, yeh, back in the 1930's maybe.

johnwoo

I arrived in the Bay Area in 1970, when almost all the jobs were not Tech jobs, there were some few like IBM in San Jose, Fairchild, H-P and others. Three companies I worked for, not tech companies, closed down in California and moved out of state. Now we have a situation with some tech workers making $150k to $200k and up. Where does that leave everyone else?
My neighborhood is at a tipping point where most of the residents are immigrant Asian Tech workers. With starer homes selling well for over $800,000.
In my opinion Silicon Valley has not been good for the Bay Area, especially for the majority who are not part of it, and a disaster for low income Americans.

carcajou

Most of the jobs were not tech jobs in the 1970s??!!! Well, actually, I knew that but you better tell Giantaxe.

Personal computers did not reach a critical mass in terms of household use in the US until the mid-1990s, and the Internet until the late 1990s/early 2000s. Before that Americans associated San Francisco much more with the 49ers and Rice a Roni than they did technology. Especially since in the 1980s, Apple's competitors in the home computer market were IBM (headquartered in New York though as Johnwoo pointed out, with offices in California), Texas Instruments and Commodore (which was Canadian). Americans didn't associate it with a particular geographic region like they do now.

And, yes, San Francisco did have a reputation as a gritty, and somewhat rough, port town. By the way New York was also seen as a pretty undesirable place to live in the 1980s and early 1990s as well due to perceptions about crime and drugs. A lot of things get credit for turning that around, it is often credited to Giulani but he was in many ways just in the right place at the right time.

Nutmegger

Not really. Things were bad in the areas like the South Bronx, but that didn't put anyone off living in the rest of the city -- it has always remained vibrant.

Giantaxe

Odd, because I made no mention of the 1970's (!!!)

This is simply incorrect. For example, IBM has been here since the 50's and Santa Theresa Labs was built in the early 80's. HP, has been here forever. Intel was founded in '68. Xerox Parc research lab - cause of many startups including Apple and Silicon Graphics - was founded in '70. Tandem was founded in '74. Apple was founded in '76. Oracle was founded in '77. The other then major relational database players (Informix, Ingres and Sybase) were all founded in the 80's. Sun Microsystems was founded in '82. Cisco (hmm, wonder where that name came from...) was founded in '84. The Sand Hill Rd VC firms got rolling in the '70's; Kleiner Perkins, for example, was founded in '72. As this article says:

"In the 1980s, Silicon Valley became the widely accepted center of the computer industry."

History of Silicon Valley in one animated timeline - Business Insider

Which has no bearing on whether the Bay Area was the dominant tech area prior to that. Clearly it was: when I arrived in the Bay Area in the late 80's, the place was crawling with tech opportunities (and everyone was moaning about house prices...).

malch

On the plus side, the Bay Area offers:

* A year-round climate that is as good as it gets.
* A lot of superb and highly paid job opportunities.
* Some beautiful scenery.

On the down side, the cost of living is astronomic. Transportation is a total disaster (road or public transit).

It sounds like you have very very young children. I definitely wouldn't want to raise my kids in San Francisco. When you move farther afield, keep in mind the areas with the best schools also have the highest property/housing costs. Having kids is expensive here. Want your child to learn a musical instrument, take some classes or camps over the summer, participate in some sports. Trust me, it's easy to spend $1000 per month per child on that stuff.

You can certainly live here on $200k. I'd say you can live comfortably on that kind of income. I live frugally on considerably less. However, it depends on your definition of comfortable. We spent some time with friends yesterday who consider themselves "comfortable" in their $3.5 million 3-bedroom home. And they have a combined income of close to $500k.

Assuming a 3 bed home in a decent neighborhood, a couple of Toyota Camry's (or similar) and some daycare, you're not going to have a much left over for luxuries and discretionary items.

carcajou

It's incorrect that computers didn't become household items in the US until the 1990s? Really? What planet are you from?

You don't seem to be able to follow what I am saying to you. I am not disputing that San Francisco was a tech "hub." I am disputing that the city was seen in that way in the popular consciousness. It wasn't, and that didn't start to change until the late 1990s and early 2000s. Americans didn't view any particular place as being the "capital" of the tech industry until around that time anymore than they see a particular place as "capital" of the medical services industry or "capital" of the insurance industry, in contrast to how Detroit is tied to cars, New York to high finance and Seattle to airplanes (before Microsoft et al . . . yes believe it or not there was a "before" the computer industry and Microsoft is another company few ever had heard of in the 1980s).

Giantaxe

A strawman. That's the second one you've posited in this discussion.

Ahem. Let's see what you actually originally claimed rather than your attempt to "move the goalposts" to something different:

Nope. That's completely inaccurate on both counts. As the link I posted pointed out

"In the 1980s, Silicon Valley became the widely accepted center of the computer industry."

If tech companies didn't reach a "critical mass" until a little over 15 years ago, it's "peculiar" that it was the "widely accepted center" of the industry 30 or more years ago.

carcajou

The context of what I wrote was in the public consciousness - that should have been abundantly clear when read with my other posts - and in that regard what I said is correct. If you can't understand the difference in what an industry lifer thinks vs what the public at large thinks than I can't help you. Few Americans had computers in the 1980s and even fewer had ever heard of the companies you listed except for Apple and IBM. By the way - tech also used to be seen as the realm of dorks and social losers as well at that time. It was the opposite of "cool." That obviously has changed too.

The Bay Area has changed massively in the last 30 years. I find it bizarre you can't or won't see that.

Giantaxe

Still waiting to hear how Silicon Valley became the "widely accepted center" of the computer industry over 30 years ago if it only reached a "critical mass" of tech companies a little over 15 years ago. Obviously, the answer is that your claim is bogus and has nothing to do with "public consciousness". Of course, that doesn't mean the high tech industry hasn't grown since then - of course it has - but your characterization of the industry prior to 15 years ago is way off the mark. Did you live in the Bay Area back then?

Another strawman; three strikes and you're out.

TimFountain

I've been in high tech for nearly 30 years, and for all of that time the major tech companies have had significant presence in the Bay Area. It's not a new phenomena. Stanford, NASA, HP and Intel anyone?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley

Also I don't equate SF and the Silicon Valley as synonymous. They are separate centers with a different focus

johnwoo

I think the point is those companies did not dominate the local economy in he way they now do. Tradition manufacturing and production jobs have all but disappeared. Most if not all Tech companies have there stuff manufactured overseas. Companies like Ford, GM, Caterpillar have long since move out of state. We were told when a plant I worked for moved to Illinois, "why should we pay someone in California more for the same job than we do in Peoria"
The Bay Area has become split between the have and have not. OK if like most of the BE your a one of the haves.