What it will take to make Silicon Valley affordable again | Hacker News Reader

What it will take to make Silicon Valley affordable again

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7 pointsMilnerRoute6 comments

I'm fortunate(?) enough to have spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley; cumulatively ~9 months of my life in the past few years.

I used the word fortunate because my time there has only convinced me that it's somewhere I would never want to live, being as crowded and expensive as it is. It also reminds of Washington DC where everyone wants to know what you do for a living right away. It seems like everybody's got a plan; it's kind of like Nashville with a tan.

I hear all these arguments like 'talent center' and 'network effects' and 'efficiency', but then look at the results of cramming all that talent into such a tiny area: stress and misery. We can go on and on about building more houses or condos. In fact, they could build thousands more houses and condos and make it all perfectly affordable for everyone.

But then what? Who wants to spend 3 hours getting over 17 just to go to Santa Cruz? What about parking once you get there? Do you want to wait for an hour for a chance to get one of the spots at the tiny parking lot above the water? Long lines for ice cream and water. It would be like the Hamptons in summer, which is to say it would be dreadful.

Even if you can afford it, who wants to live that kind of life? Just so that billionaire so-and-so can have another jet or another yacht or another mansion?

It just doesn't make any sense to me at all. I think it would be much more efficient to have multiple tech talent centers all over the country. I think most network guys would also say that such an arrangement would be more fault tolerant. I'm a programmer, so I guess I would say that it would make tech more loosely coupled.

Out of curiosity where else have you lived?

I've lived in Seattle my whole life.

Do you think the culture is affected by one specific industry being so prominent? For instance, in New York people might ask where you live because it might be too difficult to even understand what someone else does. (Someone's address in NY isn't just some clever proxy for asking their income, since it could be related to how savvy they were at some point in the past, and could be an opener for talking about specific restaurants, etc)

Yes, the culture is affected, for better or worse. Lately it seems like it's been for the worse. To me, the crowding and traffic are the most significant problems. In addition, it's been proven time and again that over-reliance on specific industries is very, very bad for cities and regions. See also: the steel industry in the Eastern United States, aerospace in Seattle, and the tech crash of 2001 in the Bay Area.

That's why we should distribute tech. Yeah, there are benefits to clustering, but at a certain scale the negative affects start to outweight the benefits and simply induce misery. See also: what's happening in SF, Seattle, and other areas where tech has far too much influence on how everyone in a city/region else has to live.

As a programmer, I'm certainly not against tech, but I think industries should have some sort of collective ethics about taking over certain places.

when the Planning and Transportation Commissioner resigns because she can't afford to live there, you know things are bad.

Reference: http://sf.curbed.com/2016/8/10/12426244/palo-alto-commission...

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