Particularly knife-in-the-gut to those of us who adored trips to SF in our youth specifically because of the seemingly endless number of artists and musicians that populated the city.
Precisely my sentiment as well. It's possible that the articles on this site give a narrow view of what's happening there, but I doubt it. I can't help but feel as if I forever missed the opportunity to live as an adult in that vibrant and thinking city I once knew in my youth.
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.
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.