[foxtr0t]

San Francisco, the city in a perpetual death spiral.

The number of bad "SF's gonna die!" takes on HN/twitter is so absurd I now read them with a "So bad it's good" type mindset. The number of times WSJ opinions alone have declared California dead is probably 20+.

The thing that will stop the oft remarked upon "death spiral" is, ahem, the fucking CA housing market. Where there are fluctuations in expensive asset prices, people see opportunity. If housing prices in SF drop by 5%, it's not like all the wealthy individuals who can buy just sit on the sidelines. Younger people with lesser means see opportunities to get rent control at a decent price etc. I'm looking forward to retractions of all these level zero takes when rent prices spike in July.

This is of course nothing new, for instance NY has gone through many ups and downs of its own and all along many in the media claimed "NY is dying!"

[mikestew]

The number of times WSJ opinions alone have declared California dead is probably 20+.

Where I first heard the idea that CA will collapse because "everyone is moving to NV to avoid CA taxes" was the WSJ...thirty years ago. I see that CA is still there, and far more populated than it was 30 years ago. A stopped clock might be right twice a day, but I'll be dead before the WSJ (or anyone) finally strikes gold with their "everyone is leaving CA" prediction.

[ballenf]

This is a dynamic system with politicians changing economic policies for the better and worse over time. If the articles are written during "worse" times for businesses, then they might have been 100% right even though the predictions never come true.

It's like predicting that a ship is going to hit an iceberg if and only if the pilot doesn't/can't/won't change course in time.

Attacking these predictions with "haha weren't they stupid" is about as helpful as attacking various failed climate predictions which have been forestalled by environmental policy changes and technological advances, among other course corrections.

In reality it takes much longer than 30 years to topple empires as large as California (or the Bay Area) and it will often appear externally healthy right before the crash. Afterward we all know the drill where politicians will claim that "no one could have seen it coming", it was just an unlucky confluence of events and there was really nothing they could have done to prevent it.

[foxtr0t]

You clearly don't frequent the WSJ opinion section. Try searching for "site:wsj.com california" on Google and let us know what you get. Dig a little deeper and you'll find that what's actually happening is the Murdoch's are allowing a Fox Newsification of the opinion section, essentially a compromise between the actual journalists there and trash/gutter opinion pieces intended to push a narrative. There's even news about this news[1]. So no, this isn't some game of 19 dimensional chess, its just a stupid false narrative being pushed by people with power, vested interests, massive jealousy, thin skin, and many grudges.

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/159953/will-wall-street-jour...

[dcolkitt]

The difference is that there's a hell of a lot more bandwidth available to the average remote worker than there was 30 years ago.

[nostrademons]

I suspect the next big tech wave is going to be software-enabled hardware (think 3D printing, or drones, or robotics) or software-enabled biotech (think Verily, Calico, or DeepMind's protein-folding breakthrough today). Neither of those can be done anywhere with an Internet connection; they're going to require close collaboration between software developers, data scientists, electrical/mechanical/biomedical engineers, and actual scientists (physicists, chemists, biologists, and material scientists). The Bay Area is excellently situated to take advantage of this, having 2 world-class universities, a number of smaller colleges, thriving industries in all of these, and lots of capital. Much of the rest of the country, not so much.

I suspect that the days of SaaS and pure web or mobile app developers are numbered. That field is increasingly getting commoditized.

[throwaway0a5e]

>I suspect the next big tech wave is going to be software-enabled hardware (think 3D printing, or drones, or robotics) or software-enabled biotech (think Verily, Calico, or DeepMind's protein-folding breakthrough today). Neither of those can be done anywhere with an Internet connection; they're going to require close collaboration between software developers, data scientists, electrical/mechanical/biomedical engineers, and actual scientists (physicists, chemists, biologists, and material scientists). The Bay Area is excellently situated to take advantage of this, having 2 world-class universities, a number of smaller colleges, thriving industries in all of these, and lots of capital. Much of the rest of the country, not so much.

This comment is a great example of the SV bubble mindset. The Midwest, Northeast and gulf coast have far better existing infrastructure and workforces if your goal is to create products that have a physical existence in excess of what it takes to represent ones and zeros.

I'll be the first to tell you that I'll vote for any despot who promises to screw the people of Boston but even I have to admit that if your goal is to do some BioMed thing the existing industry there is far better poised to take advantage of it than SV is. The Gulf coast is where you go if you want to do things with chemicals. The eastern midwest is where you go for heavy industry type manufacturing. Specialty composites, aerospace, electronics manufacturing capability is sprinkled throughout the area east of the Mississippi (though sprinkled less densely in the more agricultural parts of the south and midwest).

It's just laughable that you think that SV, a place that's spent decades driving out anything that doesn't have tech-size margins, has the existing workforce and infrastructure to compete against the places that already have these industries.

[nostrademons]

I'm not talking about doing biomed better than Boston, or chemistry better than the Gulf Coast, or manufacturing better than the Midwest. New Jersey (AT&T / Bell Labs) used to be the place to do telecommunications. Silicon Valley is not in the telecommunications industry, it's in the Internet industry. I'm talking about which industries will replace BioMed, chemistry, and manufacturing.

Silicon Valley is really good at 3 things:

1.) Eating our old.

2.) Replacing humans with computers.

3.) Thinking we know better than everyone else.

Makes us kind of insufferable, but that's precisely the mindset you need when your goal is to replace large segments of the economy with machines and take all the spoils for yourself (and your co-conspirators). If you're going to play nice and respect established wisdom, you'll never even bother embarking on such a project. SV's greatest strength is the large number of people who can be convinced to apply their technical knowledge to a project that sounds crazy and doesn't exist yet.

[NoRagrets]

I don’t know if you are being facetious, but there are other reasons Silicon Valley is unparalleled to (almost) any other region in the USA.

Weather. Creativity blooms when you don’t have little nitpicks stealing your time. Winter snow takes a huge toll on productivity. Not to mention the time suck of travel time, salted roads, leaking roofs, heating costs.

And I can tell you exactly how it works..because I farm, this is my religion. 8 months of three glorious seasons without a single drop of rain AND no drought. It’s a miracle. In the farming universe, this is heaven. This is why CA is the golden state.

While many do complain about the cost of living in California, it is high only because we subsidize a very fat chunk of people who can’t afford to live in the golden state. Our population is 40 million. (For comparison Canada is 20..NZ is 5, Sweden is 10, India is 1300 China is 1400)

A very small percentage of California takes care of almost most of the service sector and public sector and pensions and public school system through property taxes. It is the high cost of living here that ploughs money back into the economy to create capital and more businesses and more building and new roads.

A city prospers when it has economic churn. We did it for the region and to a less impressive extent, for the whole state. When everything is still and stable, there will be no economic prosperity. This is the basis for why capitalism works to rise millions out of poverty. Even in quasi non capitalistic economies.it is the difference between Russia and China.

Winter freezes all churn. We all know how much sunlight has an effect on humans and productivity. With both physical and mental activities. This is nothing to sneeze at..

Back to California, when the supported 99% has been encouraged to be spiteful and ungrateful to the golden goose of tech SV that was the 1%, the downside of this is going to be painful to watch. All the public school socialism taught by unionized teachers to weaponise entire generations is going to backfire.

The majority of the creme de la creme of SV were mostly educated OUTSIDE of California public education system. What does that tell us? I wish someone would do a study of that at UC. California SV benefitted from reverse brain drain. What does it say about our public school system? When kids are talking about privilege and colonization, that’s fine. I guess that’s an education too. But that is not going to pay the unfunded pension liabilities of their teachers’ Union.

California has been conspired against and murdered. This demise will be longer lasting than most.

[dangus]

Everyone predicting a mass-remote trend is kidding themselves. Don’t underestimate how fast human minds will forget about this pandemic in a time span of less than 5 years.

Covid will end and the majority of employers will want you back in the office at least some or most of the time.

The only reason employers are okay with full remote right now is because of legal liability.

Sure, there are full remote culture employers but they are in the minority.

If bandwidth was the only issue then you’d have seen Silicon Valley spread to smaller/cheaper American cities a long time ago. In reality the network effects of industry hubs are significant and they exist throughout the world.

Saying that Silicon Valley tech is gonna pack their bags and dip out of town is kind of like saying the Ohio State Agricultural Science program is going to move its campus to New York City to attract more students.

[subsubzero]

It is laughable with the number of articles that state this recently, I do think things are different as large name brand companies have moved out very recently:

Pinterest paid big money to break its lease to move out of SF, Stripe is moving out, Charles Schwab and McKesson, and Bechtel also moved their HQ out of SF and CA in general.

These moves were all done pre-covid but as a bay area resident the past year has been horrible like none other, fires raging all summer and toxic smoke, pg&e shutting off the power all the time, crime is really, really bad. I had stuff stolen from my house, a first of living an entire lifetime in the bay area.

[foxtr0t]

I'm a pretty pessimistic individual, at least my wife tells me so, but I am actually very optimistic about California and the Bay Area. I think COVID will end up being the kick in the pants it needs to start dealing with many of the problems in the state and region. A scare or two about companies fleeing the state is necessary to get the state/counties/cities to cut back on suffocating red tape for small businesses. And if there is one place in the world setup to fight a big climate problem like fires, it is the academic and technological hive mind of California.

Back to the bad takes: from what I've read the takes are all from people who moved out of the Bay. Some people come here, start their careers, then have the luxury of leaving and working from wherever. That's great, but there will always be a batch of new grads looking for work and honestly the concentration there is so high they could lose 20% of the companies by market cap and this would still be the place to start out, along with a few other large metros. Just because you leave doesn't mean the city stops.

[zapita]

> crime is really, really bad

Actually violent crime is at an all-time low. See this article about homicides for example: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/With-41-killings-i...

It looks like you were thinking of property crime, but I wonder what the statistics say about that, too.

[dcolkitt]

> This is of course nothing new, for instance NY has gone through many ups and downs of its own and all along many in the media claimed "NY is dying!"

The same could be said of Detroit. Until the 1960s, it was unquestionably the fastest booming major metro in the US. But at one point or another, the "price discount of a lifetime" just becomes an attempt to catch a falling knife.

[jgwil2]

The weather alone will ensure SF never becomes Detroit.

[foxtr0t]

Detroit is an interesting comparison, it is hard to imagine right now, but I won't count anything out completely. Obviously the factors there were very different. Detroit collapsed because consumers went elsewhere, not the labor.

Edit: clarification/wording

[rllearneratwork]

what do you expect? The city to actually disappear?? Of course not.

But the quality of life in the city is in death spiral. A lot more crime and a lot more homeless and infrastructure is in disarray

[foxtr0t]

I expect Detroit at the very least.