The City is way too generic of a name. Bay Area people would only recognize this as SF--here in O.C., "The City" means Los Angeles. In NY, "The City" means NYC, so on and so on.
"The City" makes sense when you are near a large city. I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and you would hear "the city" a lot. When I moved to Oakland, you heard SF described as "the city" a lot. When I go visit friends in Brooklyn and they say lets go into "the city", its a generic name, but we all know what they mean.
San Fran...the runner up to Chicago about how to not run a city (end of politics).
Complaining about San Fran as a nickname is...odd or idiotic/strange (why the objection?). It's unique, everyone knows what you're referring to, it's not derogatory - merely a truncation, why the objection?
Chicago's nick as the 2nd City is a reference to the rebuilding after the great Chicago Fire of 1871 (and the source of the MLS team of the same name - and a source of pride).
Now, our nicknames for Columbus, OH are intended to be derogatory (Detroit south). But, I don't get the objection to San Fran...
I was debating San Fran vs SF in order to fit the title limit, but was worried that not everyone would know what SF is. Based on the number of replies, I shouldn't have worried. Now I know for next time!
Oddly enough my pet peeve is people calling it "The City". Something so grating an arrogant about it, like other cities in the area don't exist, so of course you must be talking about SF. Also, I am pretty sure people from NY would probably laugh hearing people referring to SF as "The City"
I think this is common in and around any major city. I've lived in or near five major cities in the US and the only one that didn't have some use of "the city" was in Minnesota, where "the cities" is used instead to refer to Minneapolis/St. Paul.
Yes I know, although growing up in the bay area, I don't really remember people calling SF "The City" until relatively (maybe last 10-15 years) recently, but maybe I just missed it when I was younger.
> some tech companies can't convince employees to move
I have outright blacklisted San Fransisco for potential employers. I would avoid travelling to SF even for consulting work for limited duration. I am surprised why tech companies want to setup shop there in first place.
Not going to SF even for a limited time sounds a bit extreme. You can rent a cheap AirBnB and buy groceries from Safeway if you really want to control your costs. If its the homeless issue that bothers you, don't stay in SoMa or the Mission. You can actually get around the city for cheap using MUNI. Uber Pool and Lyft are also affordable options.
I think it is mostly because of traffic, lack of free parking space and bad roads. I like to drive myself and also have eating habits that require me to visit specific places only.
I know your comment is probably tongue-in-cheek, but that answer sounds like a band-aid at best. More seriously, people who aren't used to spending $15 for a quick lunch and whatever a month on rent aren't going to jump at that opportunity. I moved to New York from Pittsburgh, and paying 3x for rent really took a while to get used to, despite an increase in income that afforded me rent in New York.
I don't know if it is a band-aid, rather it is part of the system.
Specifically you're a company and you're trying to hire people to fill roles. If they are are required to be at the company you have to pay them enough that they can live near you.
You set up a series of constraints on hiring:
1) Compensate[0] enough so that someone from outside can enter the local economy effectively.
2) Compensate enough to convince someone who is already in the local economy to change from where they work to working for you.
3) Compensate enough that someone working for you won't go work somewhere else.
Within that system to have to operate a business model where the value you capture in the market has to cover not only your operating costs (which include compensation for the employees creating that value) but allows for you to fund maintenance, depreciation, and some R&D efforts for new product development.
If you can't find a solution set that works you have to improve the business model (generally add revenue or cut costs). Not really rocket science of course.
I keep watching to see if some large presence in SF ends up moving to the east bay or even Reno as a way of changing the cost parameters. If you look at job changing as brownian motion you can watch an environment parameters start to change which results in people (the particles in this case) start changing where they are likely to be.
Personally I would love some quantitative data collection that helped map out the weights of the various factors. It would help predict the next 10 years.
[0] Compensation is also a complex thing, more than just dollars per week/month/year there are things like free food, bus rides, and other services in addition to environmental plusses and minuses and work demands.
I think the other complicating piece of compensation is the potential for equity to be worth something someday. It seems to me people in SF are here to take a shot on the startup lottery much more so than other places. It's also a city where you can easily play a few lottery tickets over a few years, which is not the same elsewhere.
Absolutely. Although in my experience it is a better deal in an already public company than a startup. Even when the stock is going down if you have an employee stock purchase plan where you can set aside money that will buy stock at fixed times for a percentage discount it can be huge win.
Companies usually can't afford cash, so they compensate in stock. Vesting stock is usually taxed at ~46% and short-term taxes on top of it if you sell. So paycheck wise there won't be much difference.
> Vesting stock is usually taxed at ~46% and short-term taxes on top of it if you sell.
I'm pretty sure that vested stock for public companies are taxed just like bonuses and wage-raises. I think the real reason why companies don't just "pay more" is because... well... they don't want to pay more. They either don't have the money, or they prefer to keep the money/stock for themselves.
Zero incentive to move to SF. The cost of living has reached a point where I'd end up taking home less disposable income even with a significant increase over my current base salary and signing bonuses get eaten up by moving expenses. Barely escaped the housing bubble crash in south Florida a few years back. No way I'd want to run the risk of experiencing another market adjustment.
Around 2005 or 2006, I got a call from a headhunter that wanted to shop me out in finance in NYC. Told him I wasn't interested, but he persisted and inquired what it'd take for me to relocate (from Chicago suburbs) and it was simple: triple my salary. I'm not a city person; I like the outdoors (I prefer real wilderness, but plentiful forest preserves around Chicago suffice). I figure 3x was a reasonable figure to do one of two things: either sacrifice my lifestyle to have a reasonable commute or put up with an absurdly long commute to have the lifestyle I wanted. That was the last I heard from that recruiter. I'm not disappointed.
Costs indicate it is full. Going there is like going to Disneyland when it is over occupancy, too expensive and not enough efficiency at that scale to have a good time. The housing/rental market of SF is screaming "get out", unless of course if you own real estate property.
All SF tech companies promote how with technology you can be anywhere, but apparently there is a single point of failure on physical work locations, or on the flip a nice real estate funnel for above market rates. SF is part tech play part real estate, the smartest investors are investing and collecting the rents of those investments and salaries.
The city of SF is half as dense as Brooklyn and there are a lot of empty lots here. There is a lot more room for development. The problem is that the current political situation makes it easy for people to block new housing.
As an example - there is a 600-acre empty lot near the Bayshore Caltrain station. The developer wants to build 4400 units. The city wants to build 0 units and build an office park instead. Which will get built? It's not clear - the 5 people voting on it will probably be swayed by how many people show up to the meetings and advocate one position or another. I showed up last Thursday and one city resident said we should not build housing there because an earthquake may cause the buildings to fall over.
"Full" is a really meaningless term. It would be pretty easy for rents to rise a further 20%.
I am just pointing out that tech workers are generally apathetic about the housing supply and the local politics, because we can outbid everyone.
At some point the high prices will become a problem for the tech industry as a whole. It's already a problem for me.
I also want to point out that we have agency in this situation; we can lobby for SF supervisors and city council members and state senators that will implement more pro-housing legislation, and we can show up to the meetings where new housing gets denied and lobby for it.
The city of SF is half as dense as Brooklyn and there are a lot of empty lots here. There is a lot more room for development. The problem is that the current political situation makes it easy for people to block new housing.
This is quite an oversimplification, on multiple fronts.
For one, the reason Brooklyn has higher density has far more to do with historical building patterns than the current political situation, by any calculation for example. In Brooklyn, already by the 1930s, they built multistory housing throughout a much greater portion of available lots than they ever did in SF, for example. And then came the all the massive, federally subsidized housing projects in the 40s-70s (again, at a much greater scale than in SF).
The current political situation may not be helping much (from a growth perspective) -- but that's the just the current velocity you're talking about, not the starting point (i.e. the vastly greater stock of historical housing in Brooklyn over SF).
I showed up last Thursday and one city resident said we should not build housing [at the Baylands site] because an earthquake may cause the buildings to fall over.
Sounds like you're trying to paint this person as some kind of nervous nellie (or just another kneejerk NIMBYist). And yet it's easy to verify[1] that the lot you're referring to lies in a high-susceptibility liquefaction zone. So his concerns don't sound misplaced at all.
So again (and again, and again with these debates): Yes, NIMBYists exist, and the political situation isn't very particularly fun and often feels counterproductive, etc. But these aren't the root causes of the problem. Building (at scale) in mature, established cities is just, well, "complicated". And building in cities with a wealth of historic (and never, ever to be rebuilt) historic architecture -- which also just so happen to straddle one of the most dangerous fault lines on the planet -- even more so.
> Sounds like you're trying to paint this guy as some kind of nervous nellie (or just another kneejerk NIMBYist). And yet it's easy to verify[1] that the lot you're referring to lies in a high-susceptibility liquefaction zone. So his concerns don't sound misplaced at all.
The resident in question was a woman.
I agree that liquefaction is a potential problem. But the developer is also aware of the problem and has a vested interest in ensuring that the condos they sell don't fall into the ground; I'm pretty sure that they won't sell condos that will fall into the ground.
> Building (at scale) in mature, established cities is just, well, "complicated".
Buildings on the East Coast are much older than San Francisco and yet they get referred for additional review much more rarely than San Francisco; in general it's much easier to build a new project as long as it fits the zoning guidelines. They also are not subject to CEQA lawsuits.
But the developer is also aware of the problem and has a vested interest in ensuring that the condos they sell don't fall into the ground; I'm pretty sure that they won't sell condos that will fall into the ground.
Like the developer of that tower downtown that's been slowly sinking since the day it was built, you mean?
And seriously -- are you really saying we should take the recommendation of the condo developer of that of the USGS on matters like these?
BTW "fall into the ground" is hyperbole of course. I think you're aware of the fact that all kinds of nasty things can happen to you if you're in caught in a large building during a liquefaction event, even if the whole building doesn't outright "fall into the ground." Either way, there just wasn't anything out of line with the observation that resident brought up.
If anything a building sinking into the ground is more signal that developers need to take this seriously. It's unfortunate, but people in the building have already filed a lawsuit and it's not clear that they are not going to get a good resolution from this.
The resident was using that argument to say "we shouldn't build," I think it should be at best a warning to the developer to build carefully. If the developer builds and people want to buy there it's not clear where the market failure is.
It also ignores that the city wants to get a deal done and either housing or offices will get built. As far as liquefaction matters it needs to be an argument for offices or for housing. The land isn't going to sit empty.
The city is not full. Cost indicates that supply has been artificially restrained for a long time. San Francisco has the same size as Paris for a third of the population.
> Until you have an idea of where to put that additional 200% of our current population, yes, SF is full.
At the margin, there's a lot that could be done - density bonuses, putting teeth into the Housing Accountability Act (SB 167), approving 4400 units in the Baylands, upzoning along transit corridors, approving ADU's (granny units).
Developers have lots of ideas about where to put people but are generally blocked by NIMBY's at every turn.
It may be that one of the things about SF that makes it attractive for OP is that it is expensive. Keeps the riff-raff out. Not that anyone in SF would ever admit that publicly.
70% of SF's homeless had homes in SF before they were on the street, and there's good evidence that high housing prices correlate with high homelessness. Decreasing home prices will probably help with homelessness.
> ...high housing prices correlate with high homelessness. Decreasing home prices will probably help with homelessness.
Nice weather, good infrastructure, funding for city services, and disposable income in the area could be driving both.
Pool of affordable housing might provide a better signal for homelessness than median housing costs in an area this expensive.
ie, There's probably not a large percentage of marginal homeless in SF, who could afford a $1.03 million home but not the current median $1.15 million home.
Either way, average rent is trending slightly downward, and Zillow predicts home prices in SF to fall 0.5% next year, so maybe we'll see.
I don't think these marginal shifts, even if magnified 10 times, will really be a substitute for something like housing first or mental health programs.
> It may be that one of the things about SF that makes it attractive for OP is that it is expensive. Keeps the riff-raff out. Not that anyone in SF would ever admit that publicly.
This is really inaccurate, and especially discouraging on a message board for "entrepreneurs", who should really be in favor of cheaper housing close to venture capital, so new businesses are more viable.
Is housing in tier 1 cities like SF a giffen good (where demand rises with price)? Possibly [1]. That said, it wouldn't be unique to SF if true and wouldn't detract from your other policy points.
When I was in downtown San Francisco the streets were lined with homeless people. I had never seen so many homeless people in one area. Maybe there are not so many homeless in other parts of the bay area, but not from what I saw.
I was forced to move here to find a job. It's expensive; the weather is both monotonous and never great; the culture feels homogenous (just young professionals); salaries feel much smaller when adjusted for cost of living than any place I've ever lived.
If I didn't have equity to vest I would have zero reason to live here.
I'm not here to convince anyone that SF is cool. Just sharing my own personal opinion.
FWIW, I have a relatively low "tech" salary, so I don't disagree with you on the relative cost of living.
I understand there are a lot of young professionals here – and you may disproportionately exposed to that demographic – but there is certainly a lot culture and diversity in this city.
I agree with you, I would never consider living in a car centric American city. New York is my favorite American city (just as expensive) and I am lucky that lived there before moving to SF. Maybe I will move back one day but for now I am enjoying SF.
I can definitely agree on the climate but I can absolutely not agree on the city. To pick a few reasons off the top of my head: homeless, cleanliness, transportation, parks, walkability.
There are some good things about San Francisco, like the incredibly strong job market for tech workers but other than that I couldn't bring myself to live there.
Why is it San Diego never makes these lists? Proximity to LA? Oakland's on there, and it's a lot closer to SF. Doesn't have a thriving tech scene like all of the others? Like Miami?
Poorer salaries relative to cost of living. San Diego has what we refer to as the "sunshine tax" so employers feel that they can get away with paying less.
The startup scene is pretty much moribund for the 20-something:
The dynamic people left Qualcomm years ago--it currently resembles DEC or IBM of old.
Med/biotech is long term--if you're a 20-something who wants to get rich that isn't a great path. (Side note; biotech salaries seem to suck--it's part of the reasons why we have so many microbreweries--if you're going to be underpaid doing microbiology anyway, you might as well brew beer. LOL.)
Culturally San Diego is kind of a suburban wasteland--that means very little "Social Network Foo Yahooglezonsoft(tm) Buyout Bait". The "cool kids" are going to want to be in NYC, SF, or Austin with possibilities in LA or Chicago.
Kind of sad given that it's a pretty nice, clean place with some fun stuff to do downtown. Maybe it's a lack of vision given that it's a bit more, as stated, on the conservative, suburban side. The company I work for is helping redesign some office space just outside of town. The "branding" efforts are trying to tout it as a tech-friendly building with stereotypical signposts - yoga, cycling, etc. At the end of the day, it's a suburban office campus, with little to no good access to public transit, and not near anything walkable when you want to get outside the buildings.
I don't know if anyone has studied the benefits of this but I have to say it's so nice to just be able to walk out the door of the office at lunch and wander around, sit on a bench, etc. Escape for 45 min - 1 hr and be refreshed. I think that's the appeal in more 'happening' city areas, even if we don't acknowledge or necessarily know it consciously.
I love where I live (CO) and, factoring in the cost of living difference despite higher market salaries, moving to SF would be a significant pay cut--and I'm far from the only one.
I don't know about the other cities in the table, but a studio apartment in Chicago does not cost $1490 a month. Even downtown you can find a few studios for around $1200, and in the rest of the city it's more like $1000, maybe even less. I live in a 2-bedroom for less than $1490.
I lived in Chicago for 8 years. The best decision I ever made was to leave. I moved to Dallas and Chicago is a dump by comparison. San Francisco may be expensive but there are better alternatives (San Diego, Austin, Seattle...)
I got out of Seattle 25 years ago when I saw the writing on the wall. I don't regret it. SF has always been worse in terms of cost, density, self-importance, etc.
I almost purchased a condo in East Palo Alto back in 2013 for $300K. That same 1-bedroom is now selling for $680K; biggest missed opportunity of my life. Here it is on Zillow:
Either way, consider that between buying costs, potential upkeep, selling costs, property taxes and capital gains taxes, you probably would not have made out with very much.
I live in NYC right now, but you couldn't pay me 5 times the salary to move to SF. NYC knows how to build housing. While it can be expensive in the newest buildings in the most convenient areas, if you go to the outer boroughs, you can find plenty of spacious housing for decent costs and a 30 min subway ride to Midtown. SF needs density, and fast or they could keep driving out the average citizens. But tech workers probably don't make good firefighters, police, or trash collectors.
People have different lifestyles and they should choose where they move according to that. Lots of people move to SF from smaller cities and expect to continue living a suburban life.
I (barely) tolerate the bay area to get to do the work I love. It's a permanent game of weighing pros and cons and doesn't feel sustainable long-term even working at one of the best-compensating companies on the planet.
When 40% of the people in your city want to move away, you know there's a problem.
94 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadComplaining about San Fran as a nickname is...odd or idiotic/strange (why the objection?). It's unique, everyone knows what you're referring to, it's not derogatory - merely a truncation, why the objection?
Chicago's nick as the 2nd City is a reference to the rebuilding after the great Chicago Fire of 1871 (and the source of the MLS team of the same name - and a source of pride).
Now, our nicknames for Columbus, OH are intended to be derogatory (Detroit south). But, I don't get the objection to San Fran...
I vote for bringing back Frisco. It's a lot easier to say and write.
[1] https://thebolditalic.com/amp/p/5c14348d49c
I have outright blacklisted San Fransisco for potential employers. I would avoid travelling to SF even for consulting work for limited duration. I am surprised why tech companies want to setup shop there in first place.
Specifically you're a company and you're trying to hire people to fill roles. If they are are required to be at the company you have to pay them enough that they can live near you.
You set up a series of constraints on hiring:
1) Compensate[0] enough so that someone from outside can enter the local economy effectively.
2) Compensate enough to convince someone who is already in the local economy to change from where they work to working for you.
3) Compensate enough that someone working for you won't go work somewhere else.
Within that system to have to operate a business model where the value you capture in the market has to cover not only your operating costs (which include compensation for the employees creating that value) but allows for you to fund maintenance, depreciation, and some R&D efforts for new product development.
If you can't find a solution set that works you have to improve the business model (generally add revenue or cut costs). Not really rocket science of course.
I keep watching to see if some large presence in SF ends up moving to the east bay or even Reno as a way of changing the cost parameters. If you look at job changing as brownian motion you can watch an environment parameters start to change which results in people (the particles in this case) start changing where they are likely to be.
Personally I would love some quantitative data collection that helped map out the weights of the various factors. It would help predict the next 10 years.
[0] Compensation is also a complex thing, more than just dollars per week/month/year there are things like free food, bus rides, and other services in addition to environmental plusses and minuses and work demands.
I'm pretty sure that vested stock for public companies are taxed just like bonuses and wage-raises. I think the real reason why companies don't just "pay more" is because... well... they don't want to pay more. They either don't have the money, or they prefer to keep the money/stock for themselves.
All SF tech companies promote how with technology you can be anywhere, but apparently there is a single point of failure on physical work locations, or on the flip a nice real estate funnel for above market rates. SF is part tech play part real estate, the smartest investors are investing and collecting the rents of those investments and salaries.
The city of SF is half as dense as Brooklyn and there are a lot of empty lots here. There is a lot more room for development. The problem is that the current political situation makes it easy for people to block new housing.
As an example - there is a 600-acre empty lot near the Bayshore Caltrain station. The developer wants to build 4400 units. The city wants to build 0 units and build an office park instead. Which will get built? It's not clear - the 5 people voting on it will probably be swayed by how many people show up to the meetings and advocate one position or another. I showed up last Thursday and one city resident said we should not build housing there because an earthquake may cause the buildings to fall over.
You have agency in this situation.
I wrote about this a little more here: https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/sf-housing-politics/
I am just pointing out that tech workers are generally apathetic about the housing supply and the local politics, because we can outbid everyone.
At some point the high prices will become a problem for the tech industry as a whole. It's already a problem for me.
I also want to point out that we have agency in this situation; we can lobby for SF supervisors and city council members and state senators that will implement more pro-housing legislation, and we can show up to the meetings where new housing gets denied and lobby for it.
This is quite an oversimplification, on multiple fronts.
For one, the reason Brooklyn has higher density has far more to do with historical building patterns than the current political situation, by any calculation for example. In Brooklyn, already by the 1930s, they built multistory housing throughout a much greater portion of available lots than they ever did in SF, for example. And then came the all the massive, federally subsidized housing projects in the 40s-70s (again, at a much greater scale than in SF).
The current political situation may not be helping much (from a growth perspective) -- but that's the just the current velocity you're talking about, not the starting point (i.e. the vastly greater stock of historical housing in Brooklyn over SF).
I showed up last Thursday and one city resident said we should not build housing [at the Baylands site] because an earthquake may cause the buildings to fall over.
Sounds like you're trying to paint this person as some kind of nervous nellie (or just another kneejerk NIMBYist). And yet it's easy to verify[1] that the lot you're referring to lies in a high-susceptibility liquefaction zone. So his concerns don't sound misplaced at all.
So again (and again, and again with these debates): Yes, NIMBYists exist, and the political situation isn't very particularly fun and often feels counterproductive, etc. But these aren't the root causes of the problem. Building (at scale) in mature, established cities is just, well, "complicated". And building in cities with a wealth of historic (and never, ever to be rebuilt) historic architecture -- which also just so happen to straddle one of the most dangerous fault lines on the planet -- even more so.
This really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
[1] http://gis.abag.ca.gov/website/Hazards/?hlyr=liqSusceptibili...
The resident in question was a woman.
I agree that liquefaction is a potential problem. But the developer is also aware of the problem and has a vested interest in ensuring that the condos they sell don't fall into the ground; I'm pretty sure that they won't sell condos that will fall into the ground.
> Building (at scale) in mature, established cities is just, well, "complicated".
Buildings on the East Coast are much older than San Francisco and yet they get referred for additional review much more rarely than San Francisco; in general it's much easier to build a new project as long as it fits the zoning guidelines. They also are not subject to CEQA lawsuits.
Yeah, meant to correct that but got distracted.
But the developer is also aware of the problem and has a vested interest in ensuring that the condos they sell don't fall into the ground; I'm pretty sure that they won't sell condos that will fall into the ground.
Like the developer of that tower downtown that's been slowly sinking since the day it was built, you mean?
And seriously -- are you really saying we should take the recommendation of the condo developer of that of the USGS on matters like these?
BTW "fall into the ground" is hyperbole of course. I think you're aware of the fact that all kinds of nasty things can happen to you if you're in caught in a large building during a liquefaction event, even if the whole building doesn't outright "fall into the ground." Either way, there just wasn't anything out of line with the observation that resident brought up.
The resident was using that argument to say "we shouldn't build," I think it should be at best a warning to the developer to build carefully. If the developer builds and people want to buy there it's not clear where the market failure is.
It also ignores that the city wants to get a deal done and either housing or offices will get built. As far as liquefaction matters it needs to be an argument for offices or for housing. The land isn't going to sit empty.
At the margin, there's a lot that could be done - density bonuses, putting teeth into the Housing Accountability Act (SB 167), approving 4400 units in the Baylands, upzoning along transit corridors, approving ADU's (granny units).
Developers have lots of ideas about where to put people but are generally blocked by NIMBY's at every turn.
You can call your supervisor about all of this.
The hard part is not where to put all these people, but to invest in the infrastructure to serve them.
https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/sf-housing-politics/
If you mean keeps the riff-raff out of homes and onto the streets, then yes.
Nice weather, good infrastructure, funding for city services, and disposable income in the area could be driving both.
Pool of affordable housing might provide a better signal for homelessness than median housing costs in an area this expensive.
ie, There's probably not a large percentage of marginal homeless in SF, who could afford a $1.03 million home but not the current median $1.15 million home.
Either way, average rent is trending slightly downward, and Zillow predicts home prices in SF to fall 0.5% next year, so maybe we'll see.
I don't think these marginal shifts, even if magnified 10 times, will really be a substitute for something like housing first or mental health programs.
https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-san-francisco-ren...
https://www.zillow.com/san-francisco-ca/home-values/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First
This is really inaccurate, and especially discouraging on a message board for "entrepreneurs", who should really be in favor of cheaper housing close to venture capital, so new businesses are more viable.
https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/sf-housing-politics/
[1] http://www.businessandeconomics.mq.edu.au/our_departments/Ec...
If I didn't have equity to vest I would have zero reason to live here.
FWIW, I have a relatively low "tech" salary, so I don't disagree with you on the relative cost of living.
I understand there are a lot of young professionals here – and you may disproportionately exposed to that demographic – but there is certainly a lot culture and diversity in this city.
There are some good things about San Francisco, like the incredibly strong job market for tech workers but other than that I couldn't bring myself to live there.
The startup scene is pretty much moribund for the 20-something:
The dynamic people left Qualcomm years ago--it currently resembles DEC or IBM of old.
Med/biotech is long term--if you're a 20-something who wants to get rich that isn't a great path. (Side note; biotech salaries seem to suck--it's part of the reasons why we have so many microbreweries--if you're going to be underpaid doing microbiology anyway, you might as well brew beer. LOL.)
Culturally San Diego is kind of a suburban wasteland--that means very little "Social Network Foo Yahooglezonsoft(tm) Buyout Bait". The "cool kids" are going to want to be in NYC, SF, or Austin with possibilities in LA or Chicago.
I don't know if anyone has studied the benefits of this but I have to say it's so nice to just be able to walk out the door of the office at lunch and wander around, sit on a bench, etc. Escape for 45 min - 1 hr and be refreshed. I think that's the appeal in more 'happening' city areas, even if we don't acknowledge or necessarily know it consciously.
That's...interesting? I always figured this was an industry phenomenon - not a city one.
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/East-Palo-Alto-CA/cond...
There are no 1 bedrooms from Santa Clara to Burlingame for < $350K, and only one two-bedroom for less than $500K.
Either way, consider that between buying costs, potential upkeep, selling costs, property taxes and capital gains taxes, you probably would not have made out with very much.
Then I realized, I'm almost 40, no startup wants to hire my geriatric ass.
When 40% of the people in your city want to move away, you know there's a problem.