It blows my mind that the internety tech industry, of all industries, is so heavily concentrated in a handful of physical locations around the world. There's this vicious cycle where companies think they need to be in one of these places to attract the best talent, and employees think they need to live in one of these places to have the best career options.
Sometimes when I'm at Red Door in SOMA, overhearing twenty different conversations about startups, I want to scream "We have this thing, it's called the internet, it makes it super easy to communicate from anywhere! Let's go! Let's disperse across the globe!"
I mean, I get it. Face-to-face in-person communication is powerful for building trust, and the valley runs on trust, but still.
It's easy to complain about zoning, tax policies, NIMBY-ism, lack of investment in public transit, etc. etc. But the reality is that you could turn all sorts of dials to increase the supply of available housing over the course of years and decades and you'd still have a situation where not everyone could live in an affordable condo/apartment in whatever $TRENDY_CITY.
I suspect that the current concentration of certain sectors of the tech industry in the Bay area is just unsustainable. There's an upper limit to how much companies can afford to pay for employees relative to other areas, how much employees can afford to pay for housing, and how long commutes they'll tolerate.
For sure. And the reality also is that people can take job offers and/or move to new cities a lot faster than builders can build housing.
I don't think building more is a panacea that would suddenly mean two-bedrooms in Cow Hollow rent for $1,000 in 2017. That said, restricting market rate construction certainly only makes things worse. And building more would help at least a little.
Sometimes when I'm at Red Door in SOMA, overhearing twenty different conversations about startups, I want to scream "We have this thing, it's called the internet, it makes it super easy to communicate from anywhere! Let's go! Let's disperse across the globe!"
I mean, I get it. Face-to-face in-person communication is powerful for building trust, and the valley runs on trust, but still.