A lot of really-early-stage startup activity (eg. solo engineer working on a project, or 3 guys working out of an apartment) seems to be happening in Oakland and the East Bay generally. It's the last place rents are affordable, so it's naturally attractive to people who need to go without income for a while.
The commute over the bridges is terrible, so with the bulk of investment capital and experienced engineers living on the peninsula (and oftentimes more down by Palo Alto & Menlo Park than in SF), it remains difficult to scale East Bay companies. Unless you're someone like Elon Musk where you can just invest $100M of your own capital and need more semi-skilled manufacturing workers than skilled software engineers. Fremont/Milpitas is coming up as a bedroom community for mid-career engineers though (because if you work at Facebook it's just across the Dumbarton, while if you work at Google/Apple you can take 237 and avoid the bridges), so that may increase the engineering supply along the East Bay BART corridor.
The East Bay really hurts from BART & Caltrain being two separate systems; it's easily BART accessible, but much of the peninsula's population only has Caltrain access, so you need a very time-consuming transfer to get there without dealing with the bridge traffic.
I think tech employment in downtown San Jose is going to blow up for this reason, once the BART tunnel goes in. Combined access from electrictrified Caltrain/BART/ACE/VTA/Amtrak is going to be killer for bringing in people from all over who don’t like being stuck in traffic. Google sees this coming and is building the new campus there. And that will push up prices for homes near any of those rail systems.
It will also be possible to commute from SJ or Santa Clara to Oakland via BART, which may marginally improve recruiting there.
It would be fantastic if Caltrain or somebody rebuilt the burnt-out rail bridge next to the Dumbarton, but that’s wishful thinking. It would be useful to integrate ACE, Caltrain, and Amtrak.
I don’t have any hope for system integration without a major culture shift in the government, but I do think that the expansion projects that are in progress are likely to be completed eventually.
> The commute over the bridges is terrible, so with the bulk of investment capital and experienced engineers living on the peninsula (and oftentimes more down by Palo Alto & Menlo Park than in SF), it remains difficult to scale East Bay companies.
The reverse commute (peninsula to east bay in the morning, east bay to peninsula in the evening) is perfectly fine, as long as you don't have to take 880 anywhere. If you can avoid 880, that reverse commute can be serene and almost surreal (as you whiz past gridlock coming in the other direction every day).
There are a bunch of industrial parks right over the bridge in Newark that seem like great places for a new small company.
Yeah, there are plenty of "good" reverse commutes in the bay area still. The only problem is it only takes one chunk of "bad" road (eg, as you mention, avoid 880, or going the 'wrong' direction on any piece of road, or being near a major interchange) that not THAT many people have a truly 100% reverse commute. Ours is, and yeah, it's pretty funny to cruise at 90 while the traffic coming the other way is stopped.
It's possible but has it's own challenges. If the benefit of moving to Oakland is lower costs, than that has to be made up for partially by lower salaries (most of a startup's costs are in people.)
Being near BART is fine, but not if your employees are coming from SF. Then they still need to pay SF salaries to make up for cost of living.
Living in Oakland can be less compelling due to the housing stock. Oakland has many single family homes, which I personally feel is a good thing, but less compelling for many workers.
(We can, of course, debate whether the kinds of workers who aren't in the life-stage to want/need a single family home are the right kinds of workers to go after, but that's a separate conversation.)
agree with most of the other comments in this thread, but would add
- BART is an extremely filthy and dangerous transit system by any 1st world standard, and I say this as a lifelong transit rider.
- Oakland, Berkeley, & Richmond govs/regs are business unfriendly & tech hostile. It's a traditionally poor working class area undergoing massive housing displacement & the political class is all old money or non-profit types.
- BART is an extremely filthy and dangerous transit system by any 1st world standard, and I say this as a lifelong transit rider.
This is hysteria. I have many coworkers who ride BART on a daily basis for 15+ years and not a single reported incident from any of them, other than stinky homeless people that very rarely ride during peak hours.
slightly depends on your entry/exit stations but I would regularly see crack/heroin use, defecation, deranged meth heads screaming and/or picking fights. I doubt I am alone in this.
Definitely not Hysteria. I have inhaled second-hand crack smoke walking up the stairs at Civic Center, watched a man defecate on a crowded train, and saw a person get stabbed in the past 5 years of riding BART. It's not this bad in NYC or LA and I couldn't even dream of seeing things like this in Europe or Asia.
Have you personally taken BART on a consistent enough basis? I took it two days a week for a significant length of time and calling it filthy is not hysteria at all.
Seconding a couple of other replies here: it is not hysteria. In the 20 years I've lived in the Bay Area, BART has gone from tolerable to completely revolting.
I don't ride it often and haven't seen any violent crimes, but I've seen police remove quite a few people. Last time we had to wait a while as the police asked the guy to pick up his own used needles.
I grew up in SF, now live in Toronto and spend a lot of time in NY. Pretending that Bart/MUNI arent on a completely different level than other major cities is ridiculous.
Square just took the building Uber was building out, all 356,000 sqft. This is going to make them the largest tech company in Oakland.
And some company named Marqeta just put their name on a building...no idea how long they have been here but they now have enough money to have their name on both sides.
Hot tip for startups: A lot of ppl who work for the big co.s (me included) live or have migrated to the east bay for housing over the years but hate the commute.
Hot tip? How does this solve anything? People who work at big tech companies migrate to Oakland pushing those who have been there out by driving rents higher.
And you think those companies will forfeit their offices in the city/SV?
Maybe you can kindly migrate back to where you came from?
The founding principle of North America is displacing unwanted people. Although the shift from John Locke's "justified" massacres to the somewhat less violent market forces is an improvement I suppose.
An improvement in the way living in an ancient car is an improvement over sleeping in small pox blankets.
But blaming an employee for living where he works is misguided, they're not the ones asking outrageous prices.
Take this with a grain of salt, because I'm from Canada and have only been to SF once, but:
If I had to guess, I'd say race and class conflict. I wasn't used to how heavily divided a culture could geographically be, and it seemed to me that Oakland was far more heavily multi-ethnic and financially poorer than the rest of the area.
Before the hate poors in:
- Yes, Canada still has a racism problem. But I don't know of any areas around me that are strongly of one ethnicity versus another. The major exception being "Indian" reserves, which is a whole other topic.
- Yes, it's ridiculous for me to comment after only one visit. But that's how strong the difference seemed to be. Every cab and uber driver I had was from Oakland.
- SF was beautiful and I don't mean any disparagement. You're all wonderful people and I love you.
Multi-ethnic is not a problem in the Bay Area. Most of the people with money & skills are also immigrants, and many of them are various shades of brown or yellow.
Poor is. The Bay Area is one of the least racist places I've lived in in my life, but it's also one of the most classist. There's still a big class stigma based on where you live. (Though sometimes gentrification flips this on its head - the Mission and EPA used to be poor, crime-ridden areas, but now they're rich, crime-ridden areas.) It's very strange - I think that people who are used to the race & class social systems of much of the rest of North America don't really know what to make about the Bay Area, because in some ways we've busted out of those social systems and just replaced them with other ones which are...weird.
I'd like to add that this isn't restricted to the bay area. All of America has a huge classism problem, and it's often misdiagnosed as racism (not saying the latter doesn't exist at all, of course).
> The Bay Area is one of the least racist places I've lived in in my life, but it's also one of the most classist. There's still a big class stigma based on where you live. (Though sometimes gentrification flips this on its head - the Mission and EPA used to be poor, crime-ridden areas, but now they're rich, crime-ridden areas.)
The rich get crime-ridden places, too? Sounds less classist than most places.
Yup, they do. Most of the Google engineers I know who live in the Mission have been mugged or had their car/house broken into at least once. You just learn to not carry a lot of money or expensive stuff with you.
The reason I say it's classist is that because you have both millionaires and people who are dead broke in the same space, people have invented a lot of subtle social signaling cues to understand just who they are dealing with. Like when my wife & I go house hunting, every realtor asks "Where do you work?", and we answer "Los Altos" and "from home", and then my wife says afterwards "I think they meant which company do you work at?" Or the time I met a black dude on Muni who had a bet with his girlfriend that he could identify techies by sight, because he asked me "Excuse me. Are you a techie?" and then got it right (apparently it was the Columbia fleece that gave it away, which is odd to me because it cost me < $20 off Amazon). Or the realtor who first took me around when I moved out here, showed me a kindy dumpy midtown Palo Alto apartment, then said "It's got a Palo Alto zip. That's important to some people."
Undoubtedly this happens in the rest of the U.S, but it's different in the Bay Area, precisely because wealthy and poor live in such constrained spaces. Many of the social signals of wealth in the rest of the U.S. don't apply here because they're stupid - if you park your Lambo in the Mission, it will get taken for a joyride, if you wear an Armani handbag it will get lifted from your car, and there's no room for your gated community outside of Atherton. Our billionaires are too busy coding, raising capital, rollerblading, and kiteboarding to worry about things like their wardrobe or car. You get startup founders who own companies worth tens of millions and yet use a 5-year-old iPhone with a cracked screen.
Re "It's got a Palo Alto zip. That's important to some people.", my parents tell the story that when they were looking for housing in New Jersey in the late 1970s, the real estate agent said things like "This house has a Princeton address", and "This house has a Princeton phone number."
3 out of ~7-8 people I know in the Mission (uncertainty is because of different definitions of "know" and "the Mission" - is Dolores Triangle part of the Mission? Bernal?) have gotten mugged. One was on 16th & Folsom, another around 24th or 25th & Mission walking home to Bernal Heights, a third around 22nd & Van Ness. This is also over a fairly long period of time - over 10 years or so, though the people in question largely don't live in the Mission anymore.
It seems like the East side of the Mission (Folsom & Van Ness) is significantly less safe than the west side (Valencia & Guerrero) - I'll walk down Valencia and feel perfectly safe, while I'm always looking around me between Mission & Folsom.
Not that there aren't plenty of signals of wealth, but yeah, it's far more infrequent to see flashy cars in the bay area than, say, los angeles. The thing about the 5 year old iPhone with a cracked screen is spot on. Most of the exec types I know from tech companies give off a "too busy to even bother replacing my busted old phone" vibe.
"It's got a Palo Alto zip. That's important to some people."
It was important enough for the Four Seasons hotel by 101 when new that they initially lied on their website and letterhead that they were in Palo Alto, not East Palo Alto. EPA isn't even in the same county as PA.
>Yup, they do. Most of the Google engineers I know who live in the Mission have been mugged or had their car/house broken into at least once. You just learn to not carry a lot of money or expensive stuff with you.
It's incredible that this could ever be considered "normal". And all in the name of political correctness, no less.
Oakland is a difficult town to characterize as it is much larger than SF. Parts of Oakland are dangerous. But other parts of Oakland are actually nicer and cleaner than SF. Rockridge, Oakland Hills are examples. House prices there are comparable to the peninsula.
I hate essentially all of San Francisco (so I am biased), but Adam’s Point, Rockridge, Jack London, and a few other neighborhoods are ok in Oakland.
Berkeley is the really underrated place, IMO. Somehow they went from being the city with the whacko leftist government as a negative outlier, to actually being relatively sane as a city in the area. Emeryville is the only really good government in the are, though.
I live in Oakland and I see more tech activity there every day. LaunchDarkly, VSCO, etc.
It's an interesting discussion because the city is huge and has many good and bad parts. West Oakland along Broadway is basically SF west. Go east of Lake Merritt and things get bad pretty quickly.
We (Fivetran) moved to Oakland over a year ago and it's been fantastic. Great office right next to BART, great restaurants, and it's a big recruiting advantage. SF sees itself as the center of the universe, but most of the people in the Bay area actually live over here.
Startups with office space have VC money, and can afford SF (in theory).
Tons of small shops, including consulting, freelancing, etc, in Oakland. Companies with people who need to go to SF on a semi-regular basis and who work best in person but don't need to be in SF.
In general, I have observed socially that East Bay people are willing to take BART to SF, but SF people mostly won't come to the East Bay for any reason.
Because it's rare, when an SF person does come out here to visit, I feel really loved. :)
Oakland is dangerous and gross compared to SF, and that's saying something as I found heroin needles next to a bench eating lunch in a beautiful office courtyard.
I was accosted outside of the Oakland station in broad daylight and local police couldn't have cared less.
"The violent crime rate in Oakland, California, is 1,421 per 100,000 residents. Forty-nine people were murdered in the city in 2016."
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-most-dangerous-cities-i...
Please let's make smarter choices about where to move businesses to, given numerous options. Oakland definitely should not be one of them.
Wouldn’t moving some businesses there eventually lower the crime rates?
Violent crime is twice higher in Oakland, but property crime is about the same: 5,983 per 100,000 in Oakland [1]; 5,715 in SF [2] (6,168 according to [3]).
How would moving more businesses there lower the crime rate?
Poverty is always touted as the source of crime in communities, but businesses moving from SF to Oakland wouldn't be employing Joe/Jolene poor person. If anything, doing so would just rehash the standard complaint about gentrification and alienation of current residents.
49 people seems dramatically low for Oakland. For context Chicago had 500 murders in 2016 or 2017 I believe. Although Chicago has a higher population but not 10x Oakland
Because Oakland is sketchy (way more so than gentrified parts of SF) - people want to live in SF, that's what the blog post alludes to also. Some parts look post-apocalyptic with dozens of tents in a single encampment. I bet you if city manages to clean up the homeless and finish the bike line across the Bay Bridge there will be an explosion of startups because it's a perfect place to be in otherwise.
There are huge portions of Berkeley and Oakland which are awesome and where houses are as expensive as the peninsula. Piedmont, Montclair, Rockridge, Claremont etc
The commute over the bridges is terrible, so with the bulk of investment capital and experienced engineers living on the peninsula (and oftentimes more down by Palo Alto & Menlo Park than in SF), it remains difficult to scale East Bay companies. Unless you're someone like Elon Musk where you can just invest $100M of your own capital and need more semi-skilled manufacturing workers than skilled software engineers. Fremont/Milpitas is coming up as a bedroom community for mid-career engineers though (because if you work at Facebook it's just across the Dumbarton, while if you work at Google/Apple you can take 237 and avoid the bridges), so that may increase the engineering supply along the East Bay BART corridor.
The East Bay really hurts from BART & Caltrain being two separate systems; it's easily BART accessible, but much of the peninsula's population only has Caltrain access, so you need a very time-consuming transfer to get there without dealing with the bridge traffic.