It breaks my heart every single day to be here, having spent my entire childhood wanting to live in a city that disappeared by the time I was finally able to move here, and now I spend an incredible amount of time and energy trying to figure out where to go from here.

You did. For now, and the foreseeable future. It's still an awesome city on a bunch of levels... but in my twenties I'd go up there to play in bands and see friends and I remember really tripping out on the diversity of social groups. There was clearly massive socio-economic variance in small area but a general consciousness that those weren't the lines at which to draw social boundaries along. Lots of gaggles of friends at bars or coffee-shops with wildly different backgrounds, jobs, and outlooks.

Now it's a sea of fucking bearded hipster macbook pro startup dev nerds. To be clear: I'm a bearded hipster macbook pro startup dev nerd. I don't get credit for not being that. I DO get credit for not piling on by joining the cultural dog pile.

Personally I consider it close to a cultural and professional imperative to avoid living in the bay as a developer, for a whole host of reasons.