[timr]

The current San Francisco influx is unsustainable. If you're somewhere else in the world and thinking about coming here to do a startup, I wish I could convince you to change your mind.

San Francisco is incredibly expensive. Rents have shot up by ~50% since 2008, office space is following the same trend, and competition for (even mediocre) programmers is intense. Worse, a lot of the cultural diversity that made San Francisco interesting has been driven out by the high prices -- it's a much more homogenous city than a few years ago, where mom-and-pop shops and other neighborhood amenities have been replaced by places selling $10 "artisinal grilled cheese" sandwiches and "mixology" bars where you can buy your choice of $15 cocktail. SF feels increasingly like a city for wealthy yuppies, because...it is a city for wealthy yuppies. Living here on anything less than a good engineer's salary is becoming a tall order.

Which brings us to a very important point for all the young programmer dudes: when you all crowd into the same tiny city and bid up the rents into the stratosphere, your available dating pool shrinks to a puddle (yet another consequence of the skewed gender balance in tech. sigh.) All the pour-over coffee in the world doesn't make you happy when you can't get a date, and those artisan cocktails are far less cute when you're jockeying for position at the bar in a crowded room full of guys. If you're a 20-something male programmer looking for a date in SF, I feel badly for you. Hope you like BART, because you're going to Oakland (if you're lucky!)

Once upon a time it was only a mildly bad decision to locate your startup in San Francisco, but you could justify it with the appeal of a diverse, cosmopolitan city. Right now, there's a very real financial penalty (rents, salaries, taxes), and the cultural benefits are waning. There are a lot of great cities in the US, and on the internet, you can work from anywhere. Try those instead.

[pkinsky]

>Which brings us to a very important point for all the young programmer dudes: when you all crowd into the same tiny city and bid up the rents into the stratosphere, your available dating pool shrinks to a puddle (yet another consequence of the skewed gender balance in tech. sigh.) All the pour-over coffee in the world doesn't make you happy when you can't get a date, and those artisan cocktails are far less cute when you're jockeying for position at the bar in a crowded room full of guys. If you're a 20-something male programmer looking for a date in SF, I feel badly for you. Hope you like BART, because you're going to Oakland (if you're lucky!)

So what you're saying is San Francisco is now highly optimized for homosexuals? (part of why I want to move there from Boston, to be honest)

[timr]

Hah. I don't think you'll find a city in the world that's more highly optimized for gay men...but that was true before the tech boom, too.

[x0x0]

castro is really pretty small; I think you're better off as a gay man in nyc.

[wcfields]

Better idea would be to do a Media/Advertising/Entertainment focused start-up in West Hollywood in Los Angeles.

[heydenberk]

The high cost of living in San Francisco means that any demographic group that isn't defined by its high income is being marginalized, so this isn't the case.

[zobzu]

to be honest i keep bumping into homesexuals (of either sex) in SF. I think its a pretty large part of the population, compared to other cities. if you swing that way, I'm pretty sure the dating scene is quite above average.

note: im straight

[auctiontheory]

This is totally wrong. Yes SF has a ridiculous cost of living, but it still has an amazing ratio of single women to straight guys. Unlike the Peninsula, you do not need to be rich to meet and date attractive women in the City.

If you are an employed (white?) guy who can't get a date in SF (not to be confused with Palo Alto), you need to get out more, or just get on okC. There's a whole lot more to the City than yuppie bars in SOMA or the Marina.

[davidw]

Like anywhere, it can help to stand out a bit, and being a straight white guy without tons of money who works with computers is about as far from 'standing out' as you can get in that area, from my experience. I was a lot happier from that point of view when I got out of there and moved to Italy, where I ended up meeting and marrying a very smart and beautiful woman.

On the subject of "gay", something that I liked about the bay area was that gay is pretty common, and of course accepted and so it's just something that is, rather than someone's "defining attribute", so it's not this big deal. That's how things should be.

[stephencanon]

You have clearly never been to NYC or LA. One can get a absolutely get a date in SF, but the ratio is terrible compared to other US cities.

A single friend of mine in SF (who actually does quite well for himself) is fond of saying "any single man who moves to SF either is gay, has an asian fetish, or is crazy." It's crass and hyperbolic, but there's an germ of truth in there somewhere (FWIW, he's crazy).

[nols]

It's been the best place for homosexuals for decades. I can remember a character from The Way of the Gun calling it a "Mecca for homosexual migration".

[refurb]

The character was refering to LA in the movie!

[Crake]

Gay men, maybe. Lesbians, probably not so much.

[debt]

It is becoming quite homogenous here. There's just a ton of really wealthy, well-paid business/engineer types.

I've heard varied reports on dating. Some friends are very successful, others no so much. This seems to be more a personal situation then dependent on the culture of the city as a whole. You just gotta get on that tinders or cupes or grindr if that's your thing and play the game just like any other city.

It's a fun city, but it's increasingly become a fantasy for rich white people.

Like parent says lots of "lifestyle" shops; I'm going to arrange a store so it looks like my home but everything is for sale. It's all bullshit though because the rent for these lifestyle shops must far outweigh what they're bringing in. It's hobby businesses for the wives of rich white C-level execs. I don't know I just made that last part up, but you get the picture.

[rayiner]

People have been saying for decades that NYC is unsustainable, yet it's still the center of the country for finance. San Francisco could well become the next New York: software engineers getting paid $300k/year and talking about how they're not really "rich" because they can't even afford to buy a 2 bedroom condo.

[pacaro]

Or it could become the next Detroit when the tech industry decides that it doesn't "need" to be in the Bay Area.

I doubt that there'll be that dramatic a change because there are too many actors, Detroit was more vulnerable because it depended on such a small number of anchor employers

[bruceb]

Detroit is freezing cold during the winter and doesn't have the same scenery. Even if tech declined SF will be a hot destination.

[dredmorbius]

Detroit's early draw was its access to transportation and raw materials: iron ore, coal, the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway. For heavy manufacturing, these were all advantages.

San Francisco has appeal for weather, scenery, and an excellent harbor. Disadvantages include earthquake hazard, and an increasingly unreliable water supply. The latter isn't critical yet, but could well be.

[rayiner]

The car industry didn't move from Detroit. The work got automated away and growth got captured by foreign competitors. If that happened to finance, New York would suffer the same fate. But by the time robots can program themselves, all bets are off anyway.

[busterarm]

The finance industry is entirely dependent on proximity, even more so with the increase of algo. At the highest level of business-dealings, your company has to be within "10 minutes midtown mid-afternoon traffic" distance from the people you meet with (clients and other financial companies) in order to be taken seriously. This is why NY hedge funds tend to be clustered around Midtown East and banks are around Battery Park.

The tech industry doesn't really have such requirements. People are comfortable with working remotely and using video conferencing; more importantly, the tech industry doesn't have regulatory requirements like the financial industry does that require people to conduct business from a physical office.

Whether SF is sustainable or not, well, I lean towards not, but in the long-term it looks pretty bad socioeconomically. Personally, I have no desire to live in the bay area and look for work elsewhere.

Signed: Former hedge fund employee and New Yorker.

[aarondf]

Your comment about "artisinal grilled cheese" earned my upvote. Who knew such a thing existed? Better yet: why?

[mixmastamyk]

It's more typically called Panini, which is Italian for "$9 grilled-cheese."

[carlob]

Panino is Italian for sandwich, it literally means small bread.

Panini is something I first experienced in France, where it's made with a special semi-raw bread. I've never seen anything quite like it in Italy, though.

[hussong]

I'll bite: panini is simply the plural of panino.

[carlob]

Grammatically, yes. But it's really a different type of sandwich outside of Italy.

[monkeynotes]

Panini and Panino are pretty much synonymous. Panini is just the anglicized word, although it seems the Italians don't generally grill them. I've had Panini/Panino in Italy, France, the UK, and Canada.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panini_(sandwich)

[danmaz74]

The Italian for "grilled chees" is actually "formaggio arrosto". "panini" is just the plural of "panino", ie, a sandwich.

[mixmastamyk]

It's a joke... I'm surprised at the lack of imagination from the four guys above.

[danmaz74]

Well, perhaps it's just difficult to understand it as a joke when you used the word "panini" all your life!

[mixmastamyk]

Ok, I'll give you a pass if you are from Italy, for example. However, the story was about the Bay Area... and growing up in California I noticed a trend that exploded about 10 years ago.

Fancy, casual restaurants stopped selling sandwiches and "grilled-cheese", upgraded the bread, and started calling them Panini. The price was also increased by $5 dollars/per for a marginally better product.

Coffee has had a similar retail transformation.

[noarchy]

Some people are looking for places to spend their relatively-high incomes. Ditto for other, oddball things that have come along, of late, like super-expensive shaving equipment (first thing that came to mind).

[bosie]

can you link/name some of that super-expensive shaving equipment please?

[blario]

I suspect he/she is referring to Bevel. Although I think the commenter fails to realize the value add of the product.

[noarchy]

By all means, I'd love to know what kind of value it adds. Up to this point, I've assumed that this, and products in this category, are some sort of hipster fad.

[bosie]

hipster fad? double edge safety razors have been around since at least 1930. not really a 'fad' ;)

they normally provide a better/closer shave, much much cheaper blades (compared to gillette), greater selection of blades/razors. there are probably more advantages.

http://www.dovo.com/_english/merkur.html

[bosie]

Thanks, didn't know about Bevel. What is the value added by Bevel? Looks like a regular safety razor.

[jmcmichael]

I assure you we have artisinal grilled cheese here in St. Louis as well:

http://www.bigcheesestl.com/

[DrJ]

People eat them, I believe the one the parent is referring to might be this one? http://theamericansf.com/

but there are too many of these (how odd that sentence sounds).

[timr]

There are at least three different purveyors of fancypants grilled cheese in the city. One has multiple locations.

[joshrotenberg]

Because people will buy them.

[dkl]

Rents have shot up by ~50% since 2008

More than that. Rents for apartments have doubled in the last year in Oakland, says my friend who owns a lot of diverse properties in the East Bay, so you know it's much worse in SF.

[zem]

not necessarily; the relative desirability of oakland might have increased faster than the relative desirability of san francisco, compared to their respective 2008 values

[vinceguidry]

> when you all crowd into the same tiny city and bid up the rents into the stratosphere, your available dating pool shrinks to a puddle (yet another consequence of the skewed gender balance in tech. sigh.)

Women don't live in SF?

Or are you just talking about women in tech? They're rare everywhere.

[seniorsassycat]

Tech workers have a low female population, SF has a high tech worker population, therefore SF has a low female population.

I don't know if that's true, but I think that's what the commenter was saying.

[mixmastamyk]

Yes, combined with the fact that California has a low female population.

[blisterpeanuts]

SF used to be known as good woman-hunting territory, because of the predominance of gay males. Has that changed because of the tech influx?

[timr]

That was always a little exaggerated IMO, but in the 20-something demographic, yes. SF feels like a giant frat party right now. At an all-boys school.

If you're 30+ things are less bad just because of the basic demographic realities of single life. But my friends from NYC still laugh at the dating scene here.

[pyoung]

A buddy of mine had a theory that the lack of acting and fashion industries (compared to LA and New York respectively) had a significant negative impact on the overall attractiveness and gender balance of the general SF population.

[kpennell]

Excellent comment.