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0 pointstheptip3y ago0 comments

> If people are fleeing a state that often means that the problems are so bad

But much of the outflow is quite easily explained by the Covid shift to remote work allowing everyone in the Bay Area to take their high salary savings and buy houses wherever they fantasized about living.

You can’t really directly compare to previous migrations because those all involved making a career-impacting change. This one required merely overcoming the activation energy of a house move. So the signal about the “cost of staying put” is much weaker than in the past.

This is not to claim that Silicon Valley / SFBA doesn’t have problems, just that the analogy to Detroit probably doesn’t work without significant caveats.

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kneebonian3y ago· 3 in thread

It's not a problem immediately but that's the thing when you are talking at scales like this it is a matter of decades not years to forecast issues. If the remote work hypothesis holds true that means the biggest advantage silicon valley had, a high concentration of engineers and founders is no longer there it's dispersed all across the country and the competitive advantage begins to evaporate at the same time VC money is drying up because of an economic contraction.

You can continue to believe and argue that it isn't happening and that Cali is still a great place and continue to cover your ears and scream at the reality but the fact is that when I moved a year or so back the new church I started attending was composed about 1/4 of people that had left California in the past few years, with it moving to 1/3 if we include Oregon and Washington. (And no it's not some sort of sampling bias that Californians love my Church) all of them described the various problems with CA that make it sound pretty much unlivable. So continue to believe there is no problem. It seems that Silicon Valley insists on relearning the lessons of the rust belt.

theptipOP3y ago

I think you have to remember to apply marginal thinking and consider sampling bias.

At the margins, the people who move away are the ones who were already unhappy with “issue x” but had not actually left.

Now that “cost of moving” decreases, or “cost of staying” increases, the cost/benefit of moving becomes positive for those marginal residents, but stays negative for those that love where they are.

Clearly plenty of people don’t find it to be unlivable, indeed it’s still objectively ($/sqft to buy) one of the most desirable places to live in the country even despite the problems.

This is also completely consistent with small towns seeing a large influx of people fleeing CA; it doesn’t take a high % of the most-populous state leaving to make a substantial difference in all of the small desirable towns.

I do agree that the remote trend needs to be followed closely; it’s great for senior engineers at big companies, but I wonder if startups and juniors at large companies are soon going to realize that mentoring and rapid collaboration is really hard remote, and we’ll see the pendulum swing back a bit. Or maybe we will solve those problems and the agglomeration effect of the Bay Area fully dissolves.

lttlrck3y ago

hyperbole like "unlivable" needs to be expanded. The obvious California problems of expensive and homeless don't make it unlivable.

wslh3y ago

But, is it comfortable to live in the valley with so many homeless people around? What city is the best to live there now?

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