[threwawasy1228]

There is VC money in NYC, Chicago, Boston, and Seattle, and I can work at Google or Facebook from most of those cities. I will never move to SF in the condition it is in, and I'm sure many other people feel the same. These opportunities exist elsewhere.

[chrischen]

So... why did the people move to SF? To step in poop? Those jobs exist elsewhere, but not at the numbers they exist at in SF and the surrounding area. Most young people who move to The Bay Area would then end up moving to SF because it's the closest "real" city.

[threwawasy1228]

I'm a "young person" who chose not to move to the Bay. The market will eventually even out based on the policy and perception of a given city on generational-timescales. SF didn't become tech/VC capital overnight, and it won't decline over night either. It will decline one junior or midlevel dev at a time going to one of the cities I mentioned or Austin/Miami/etc.

[chrischen]

Except that jobs don't go where young people are... Young people go where jobs are, and they tend to want to live in cities as well. For example, see the TV show Friends. As bachelors and bachelorettes, they lived in the city for dating, social life, etc, but by the finale they moved out of the city to settle down.

[psychomugs]

Actually, research shows that this effect is mixed, and even in support of "smart and creative" jobs following highly educated people [1,2]. Granted, this is in Europe and I don't see any mention of age demographics in a light skim of the paper, but I'd take this over Friends (frankly, I'd take many things over Friends).

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00343404.2016.1...

"Distinguishing between the smart sector and the main sector, the data support jobs follow people and not people follow jobs (as suggested by the aggregate analysis). In the smart sector, the effect appears to be large. In the main sector, the effect seems to be smaller and less precisely identified."

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-30/do-jobs-f... - article version summarizing the paper.

[chrischen]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-28/u-s-mille...

You don't have to trust Friends. You can just Google this yourself or trust your instincts. But barring that, it's well established that younger people tend towards cities.

As for jobs following people or not, your article points out that it's a chicken and egg thing, and that high talent people may attract jobs, but they also beget more jobs.

In The Bay Area, throw in startup culture and VC/Angel funding and you add more fuel to the fire.

YC's stated reason for moving from Boston to Mountain View was actually because the investors were in CA.

You could say that initially maybe it was talent from the top local schools (Berkeley, Stanford), and semiconductor research, that attracted the VCs here. Then it created jobs from companies seeking those VCs, but today, in the current state, people are coming here for the jobs. It's a feedback loop but I wouldn't put most people's ambitions for moving to SF being the quality of life offered in the city itself.

Rather than arguing aimlessly in this thread I'll rephrase threwawasy1228's thesis and my rebuttal: San Francisco is going to be in decline because of lowering quality of life (poop on streets, crime, etc) repelling some talent.

My rebuttal: These were never the reasons attracting people to come to SF in the first place. It was the availability of jobs, opportunities, and VC money and startup networking. If these things disappear, perhaps due to remote work opportunities, then yes SF would tend to decline due to the loss of local advantages. Otherwise, as long as these attractors exist it's going to keep the area a hot-spot. Of course, SF's rent isn't going to rise forever. Eventually it will reach equilibrium where enough people like threwawasy1228 will decide it's not worth the job/opportunity and this cooling down will be hailed as the "end" or "decline" of SF.