Forbes: Why The Bay Area Should Have 11 Million Residents Today
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In the Bay Area its not uncommon to drive through large swaths of undeveloped land that separate larger population centers. The East Bay and Peninsula both have tons of developable land that should have made way for tens of thousands of homes. I read an extremely interesting book in the Moraga town library several years ago when I was kid. It was from the 1930s and it was a regional blueprint for development. Planners back during that time envisioned a sea of development across the entire East Bay Hills all the way to where the San Ramon and Diablo Valleys are now. There was supposed to a second "Caldecott Tunnel" and major freeway that ran from present day Danville thru the East Bay Hills that burrowed its way out to where the Oakland Zoo currently sits, and so on. They actually predicted that the Bay Area should have had 13 million people by 2000(or 1990, cant remember). You look at the Bay Area's intensely robust economy which at last count is over half a trillion dollars($544 Billion in 2010) and one gets the impression that our economy is actually supposed to support many more people that what we currently have. Furthermore, if we expand out of the Bay Area and look at the 100-120 mile radius around Downtown SF, we see that there is a large megalopolis-like region that is currently home to 12 Million people. Here's a chart I made a while back regarding supercommuting comparing the number of persons commuting into the 11-county Bay Area Combined Statistical Area vs those commuting into the 5-county Los Angeles Combined Statistical Area: http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/983...ommutersca.jpg I created this chart in response to a recent report about 'super commuting' cities where a report put together by a group from a NY university hypothesized that Los Angeles actually had 35,000 persons from the Bay Area commuting there, and I knew that this was a flat out inaccuracy, so I researched the data and it became clear that not only was there data inaccurate but also, the Bay Area has twice as many persons commuting in the bay area to work than the far larger LA Area(of course we need to keep in mind that the LA Area has 33,000 sq miles so if LA counties were tiny like NorCal counties, places like Temecula and Adelanto and Santa Clarita might be considered outside the CSA borders so LAs numbers would probably increase exponentially), nonethess the Bay Area is the supercommuter capital of the West Coast but their report stated otherwise. I eventually had a cordial exchange with the author of the report. My findings confirmed what I already suspected, that based on county-to-county flows, the Bay Area had twice as many SUPERcommuters from within California than the Los Angeles Area. At least it did in 2000. Here is the data for each county in CA: Los Angeles Area to San Francisco Bay Area: 9,178 Los Angeles 5,099 Orange 1,909 Riverside 812 San Bernardino 791 Ventura 567 San Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles Area: 4,984 Alameda 847 Contra Costa 896 Marin 237 Napa 82 San Benito 29 San Francisco 642 San Mateo 451 Santa Clara 946 Santa Cruz 157 Solano 362 Sonoma 335 Remaining California Counties Bay Area: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Benito, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Solano and Sonoma Counties Los Angeles: Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura Counties Alpine Bay Area 10 Los Angeles 2 Amador Bay Area 470 Los Angeles 24 Butte Bay Area 1,143 Los Angeles 131 Calaveras Bay Area 1,100 Los Angeles 30 Colusa Bay Area 114 Los Angeles 5 Del Norte Bay Area 9 Los Angeles 0 El Dorado Bay Area 1,688 Los Angeles 180 Fresno Bay Area 1,729 Los Angeles 530 Glenn Bay Area 112 Los Angeles 0 Humboldt Bay Area 315 Los Angeles 60 Imperial Bay Area 24 Los Angeles 846 Inyo Bay Area 0 Los Angeles 161 Kern Bay Area 300 Los Angeles 9,022 Kings Bay Area 113 Los Angeles 108 Lake Bay Area 2,933 Los Angeles 15 Lassen Bay Area 42 Los Angeles 4 Madera Bay Area 382 Los Angeles 145 Mariposa Bay Area 237 Los Angeles 17 Mendocino Bay Area 1,504 Los Angeles 46 Merced Bay Area 4,899 Los Angeles 121 Modoc Bay Area 7 Los Angeles 12 Mono Bay Area 15 Los Angeles 188 Monterey Bay Area 15,988 Los Angeles 225 Nevada Bay Area 922 Los Angeles 52 Placer Bay Area 2,712 Los Angeles 249 Plumas Bay Area 22 Los Angeles 27 Sacramento Bay Area 10,930 Los Angeles 764 San Diego Bay Area 2,293 Los Angeles 28,759 San Joaquin Bay Area 34,117 Los Angeles 439 San Luis Obispo Bay Area 603 Los Angeles 981 Santa Barbara Bay Area 259 Los Angeles 4,224 Shasta Bay Area 630 Los Angeles 78 Sierra Bay Area 41 Los Angeles 13 Siskiyou Bay Area 105 Los Angeles 21 Stanislaus Bay Area 13,761 Los Angeles 236 Sutter Bay Area 484 Los Angeles 14 Tehama Bay Area 173 Los Angeles 14 Trinity Bay Area 118 Los Angeles 7 Tulare Bay Area 275 Los Angeles 442 Tuolumne Bay Area 765 Los Angeles 72 Yolo Bay Area 4,920 Los Angeles 71 Yuba Bay Area 197 Los Angeles 29 |
Going by that standard though, practically every large metro area in the country with a higher-than-average cost of living "should" have more people than it does. Hell, that means the New York Metropolitan Area should be as populous as Greater Tokyo then.
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Clearly, the housing supply has failed to meet demand in the Bay Area for decades. NIMBY-friendly zoning should absolutely be changed to allow denser development, especially in flat, low-rise suburban areas like the South Bay.
Yet the author's projection of eleven million people here is off the mark, based as it is on using early-1900s Detroit and contemporary Phoenix and Las Vegas as models for calculating possible Bay Area growth if only we didn't have a history of such restrictive zoning and raging NIMBYism. The Bay Area is literally named for the huge inland body of water that occupies a vast amount of space in the heart of the region, and there's yet another large bay (and a major river delta) for good measure. Around the bays and delta are wetlands that flood occasionally and are not suitable for development; beyond that are narrow bands of flat land framed by mountain ranges. There is ocean on the other side of one of those mountain ranges, and yet more mountain ranges north, south and east. Flat land is cheaper to develop, and easier to connect to the larger metropolis. When a region has a lot of contiguous flat land, like Phoenix and Las Vegas, they can grow quickly and affordably; when a region is hard up against the ocean and riven by bays and mountains--not so much. Only the South Bay has a large-ish amount of contiguous flat land, and I absolutely agree we could and should build that area up to urban densities. But there's just no way I can see how the Bay Area could have physically integrated another four million people--affordably or not--using only the tools we have now (and had in prior decades). |
Cost is only part of it. I personally have no desire to live in the Silicon Valley because I've been there and it just felt like one long strip mall. And sure, San Francisco is just an hour away, but why on earth would I want a guaranteed hour commute in order to have an urban lifestyle.
I'd move to San Francisco for the right job, just like I'd move to Manhattan for the right job, but I'm quite happy living and working in central Chicago and I'm not about to have a guaranteed reduced lifestyle for a far-from-guaranteed better job. My perception of the Silicon Valley job market for mid-career types is that there are either jobs that pay above average but have very little likelihood of hitting it big because they're with big, stable companies, or there are jobs at no-name companies that require insane dedication to work for survival-level pay for what *might* turn into a decent payday. There are only so many people who can, let along will, take the second kind of job, and the first kind of job basically means people who take them really want to live the (nice but) suburban lifestyle of the Valley where prices are so high you still only really enjoy a middle-class life even on upper-middle-class pay. Many families would rather make a little less in some place like Austin. |
Maybe the capital should go where the talent is, instead of the other way around. If the Bay Area is truly approaching its capacity, then the investors will have to look elsewhere, either by funding startups in other cities or by finding a different type of investment.
The investors are the ones who can best shoulder the costs of relocation, not the starving young college grad with skills and ideas. |
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There is some increasing tech startup activity in cities like NYC and to a lesser extent Chicago, but there are a very limited number of cities in the country that can attract the best talent. |
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At the end of the day, if you want to change the world, you probably need to be in the Silicon Valley. If you want to change a major industry, you probably need to be in one of the other cities I mentioned. If you just want to make a company that helps new mothers trade advice and get good deals on baby supplies, you'll probably have better success outside of those areas since you don't need top-tier talent and the costs that creates, and you can keep your other costs much better controlled in smaller markets, too. Most people won't have world-changing ideas or even industry-changing ideas. Most people have ideas that can happen anywhere, and while maybe those ideas can blow up faster in the Silicon Valley, it doesn't mean they're any more likely to stay big there than in other markets. |
The "jobs at no-name companies that require insane dedication to work for survival-level pay" of Silicon Valley really don't exist in large numbers. The only folks doing this are founders or employees at places in a pre-VC stage - and really, that can be done anywhere in the US (and is). It's when you're ready to move on to the VC stage that you might need to move to the Bay Area.
If you're an employee of these companies after the first round of funding, you don't have to live in your mom's basement to survive - any startup that has already attracted VC (or even angel) money pays a decent salary in addition to a small equity stake. It won't be the same salary that that person could get at a Google or Microsoft, but it won't be "survival-level". For example, I lost a relatively decent engineer (Pylons/Django specialist) late last year to a startup in the first round of VC funding with around 10 employees. He was taking a huge cut in salary (he worked for me as a consultant to many VC-stage startups) in exchange for equity and a potential big payday - but he was still going to be making $80 -100k. Not enough to buy a house, sure, but he's not going to have to eat Ramen noodles to survive. |
The article took a couple of logic leaps that kinda make the end point ridiculous...
First, that the nation as a whole has a high unemployment rate does not mean that there are a lot of computer engineers that are unemployed. In fact, that isn't true at all. Second, markets like Atlanta, Phoenix and Vegas grew by leaps and bounds because they were attracting low skilled labor to build houses. And that's why those areas also suffered the worst of the worst from the housing market fall out. |
i honestly don't know beans about california politics but given the amount of california people i see and meet who have fled the ship for very unsunny oregon, id say not all is well in other parts of paradise too. nobody single wants to try to move to the bay area because is fucking expensive. that whole mantra of gen x, move where you want and the money will follow died in denver....
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Why The Bay Area Should Have 11 Million Residents Today: Because Forbes says so.
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