[e5india]

It's hilarious to me how hard people keep pimping this notion of people abandoning the SF Bay Area. As long as I've visited this site there's been a constant rotation of here's why people are leaving.. Feels like a good portion of the population is forever waiting for California's comeuppance for whatever reason.

[nealabq]

I left. In 1982. I was shocked when my friend bought a cute little house in Berkeley for 162K. Just 10 years earlier my parents had sold their 5-bedroom Palo Alto house for 34K and bought a 4-bedroom in Sunnyvale for 42K. I was too smart to buy into a real-estate bubble which was sure to pop soon.

[thorwasdfasdf]

It's the CA dream, to be able get out and escape from the Bay area and CA but no one has been able to realize it. But, with covid-19 and the subsequent possiblity of work from home, it reignites the possibility of that dream.

[geebee]

Fascinating. I'm pushing 50, and I've lived almost my entire life in San Francisco. It really wasn't that long ago that the benefit to working in tech was that you get to live in San Francisco. In fact, people considered the livability (and social tolerance) of San Francisco to be key factors in why SF became the center of the tech world.

Now, it seems like the dominant narrative has shifted: the downside to working in tech is that you have to live in San Francisco. Brutally high housing prices and severely deteriorating mental health and addiction conditions on the streets are big factors in this, I'm sure.

Nonetheless, there are few problems so severe that they are completely resistant to hyperbole, and you get a lot of that in the "I hate SF" rants. Much of SF's extraordinary livability remains. I still have beautiful days here.

To me, though, SF's advantages have eroded. First, the uniquely urban pleasures are diminished by street conditions in many of the very urban neighborhoods that set SF apart from everywhere in the US outside New York (which exists on an entirely different urban scale). The diversity and cultural options that were once hard to find outside SF are more more widely available in smaller, more livable cities (try to get a good espresso west of the Mississippi a couple generations ago, and you'll find North Beach is more than a historical curiosity - in 2020, you can get this in a strip mall). SF's opera is pretty exceptional for a small city, and again, outside NY, it may be the best (and NY is a long way from the west coast). But cultural options have expanded in smaller cities, even if they are somewhat more limited, and how often do you go to the opera, really?

And SF has become so, so, so expensive. I just think the good life is more attainable elsewhere - and high rents limit your life and creativity in serious ways, and quite a bit of what SF had to offer is largely available elsewhere. Maybe not all, but quite a bit.