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Comment by themitigating | Hacker News Reader

For cities in general there's much more to do compared to low density areas. Restaurants, entertainment, other people. All of this within a decent traveling distance.

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Sure, but most who leave SF will choose a smaller metro area, not a rural area. What I have found in my time in the Bay Area is a general ignorance of how many smaller metro areas have developed more vibrant urban centers over the past 10 years. The people from these cities who went home for the first time in a decade are finding surprisingly livable metros waiting for them, closer to aging family.

A lot of smaller cities have developed gentrified cores. Mind you, these cores can be pretty small. You may have a relative handful of restaurants and bars you like and they may lack some of the cultural amenities of a larger city. But I know a couple who just sold their presumably very appreciated house in a major metro and moved somewhere smaller.

I've definitely thought about finally leaving the Bay Area, previously I'd written off a lot of places because I want to be close to the coast and I love the relatively mild weather. More recently I ended up talking with a park ranger about life out here (he's from Truckee). He was real attracted to the Oregon coast but aghast at the white supremacy issues that are still ripe up there. There's always a catch.

Now? Politics and infrastructure put me off of huge chunks of the country (especially Texas and Florida). I don't really care if Austin is a vibrant metro area when the state government is trying to ensure women have subhuman status at most even if they've got to gut our judicial system to do it. Small town Texas? Absolutely fucking not, doubly so if I actually wanted to raise a family. Then again the Bay Area is my home.

Yes, you’re certainly wrestling with a different circumstance than many others, if not most, if you’re from the area.

For someone from a place most people from the Bay Area would never deign to visit, I’m more than happy to go back and do the hard work to make it better. Work politicians and voters in California are incapable and unwilling to do.

What does being "woke" have to do with this situation?

I think you replied to the wrong person because neither I nor the parent said anything about "woke."

You said "Work politicians and..." I thought you meant woke because otherwise the sentence doesn't make sense

I understand your confusion. You can mentally insert "which" or "that" between "Work" and "politicians" to make sense of it. Making that its own sentence was probably a mistake on my part for this audience. My statement is politically neutral. Not sure which angle you're coming from, but I'm not interested in that discussion. It's not helping anyone in the community I grew up in.

I think one thing that keeps me in the Bay Area is economic opportunity, although it remains to be seen how larger macro-economic forces will effect this.

For the last decade though, if you write code in the Bay Area, there is just this massive backstop of companies looking to hire. I've lived here since 2011 and worked for all of 3 startups that entire time, so this isn't so much about job hopping. Instead, because of all the competition for talent in the area you get to enjoy a degree of job security, high pay, and benefits that are pretty nice. It is also a major relief to know that if your company does have to let you go for whatever reason or you just get sick of the work you are doing and want to quit, there are a ton of other places hiring.

With remote work I imagine being physically close to the Bay Area is less of a requirement, but it seems like there is some amount of drive to get people back into offices, so we will see how long that remains viable.

This is really the main reason I stay in the Bay Area, I moved out to the Greater East Bay a few years back and was able to find a nice house in a nice enough area for a reasonable price.

Having easy access to so many employers provides a peace of mind and an implicit pile of leverage that's pretty great.

Sure. Cities lend themselves to different sorts of activities and have different pros and cons than do rural areas. Personally I get all the city stuff I want in short visits. I can see a play in a large city that is an hour drive away without living there.

That's fine but the parent implied it was objectively worse than living elsewhere

I think the parent was me :-) I actually like SF but some of the most expensive housing in the country is a high bar if you don't either have enough money that it's a non-issue or have to live there for employment or other reasons. There are many cities with solid city activities that aren't SF.

I'm aware there are options. It's subjective

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