[GrayTextIsTruth]

>what's hampering Silicon Valley innovation right now is the outrageous cost of living.

I wish a “remote hub” concept would become popular. Where you work remote but need to be close enough to come in once a week or for big meetings. This would allow people to move a little further away and would possibly allow areas right outside the bay to become an extension of Silicon Valley.

[jedberg]

Part of the reason the Valley is so successful is because after work you can pop over to a meetup about your very niche expertise, or meet up for coffee with some old coworkers.

If you only come to the office once a week and otherwise live outside of the valley, that gets a lot harder to do.

I live in the south bay and already feel the pinch, as most of the meetups I'd want to go to are in San Francisco, about an hour's drive away. When I worked in SF, it was no big deal to stick around for a meetup or a drink. Now it's 1/2 a day's outing.

[nine_k]

Are these meetups any useful?

I ignore 99% of such events, and keep communication almost exclusively online. Am I missing much? (I'm an engineer, though, not an entrepreneur.)

[rmason]

I live far from the Valley but every single time I'm in SF I make it a point to attend a meetup three or four nights a week. As a coder I meet the people who wrote the books or headline the conferences. I can walk up afterward and ask for advice.

I meet founders, some of whom will eventually be household names and others not. I've kept up email correspondence with a few of my fellow user group managers and I try to take them out to lunch when I return.

Probably will be in SF in April if any HN'ers want to hit me up, especially those interested in the No Code space.

[foota]

This would be trivial if we had more effective mass transit

[lotsofpulp]

That would require far more dense housing.

[foota]

In general I disagree with this, if we spent a fraction of what we do on car transit on mass transit we'd be able to support mass transit basically anywhere, except large cities with ridiculous spread, like Phoenix.

In particular here though I was just talking about better commuter trains and (the existence of) HSR, neither of which is really dependent on density.

[lotsofpulp]

Who would support mass transit? If everyone has the option of low density housing with the luxury of their own cars, they're going to take that option instead of mass transit. The proof is everywhere.

[foota]

Everyone that lives in the downtown of a city?

[nine_k]

Mass transit becomes slow when it has to make many stops and goes for long distances.

NYC subway is only efficient because Manhattan is so dense, and much of areas around it are reasonably dense.

Commuting from further away, like a couple dozen miles into NY or NJ, becomes massively more burdensome, because a train has to go all this distance, and the station is not close to home. Of course, you can spend this hour or two reading, or maybe writing or even sleeping on the train, unlike driving.

[mrep]

That's why you make it multi-track. I grew up in the suburbs of chicago and the rush hour train could take you about 30 miles into downtown in 35 minutes as it just picks you up in the suburbs and then hops over to another track where it can drive the rest of the way without stopping.

[3fe9a03ccd14ca5]

I love this idea. You work remotely 4 days a week.