I lived in Menlo Park for 8 years with my family. When I moved there the startup I went to work for was a 5 minute walk from my house. My current startup is also in Menlo. A year ago my wife and wanted a larger place. We looked in Menlo and PA. $3M for a teardown / needs tons of work. After thinking about it we started to look outside of the area. School district was a key factor of course. We ending up going as far up the mountain from Los Gatos as we could and still be in the school district. $1.3M+500K remodel. Half of my companies employees are remote. We use G-apps with Meeting and Slack. It works well. I drive into the office 2 days a week timing the drive to be outside of traffic hows. 50KM drive outside of traffic is 30 minutes, with traffic is 1.5 hours. I have friends that moved to Morgan Hill, Gilroy and take the CalTrain in. We other developers relocate out of state because of the cost of living. The cost of housing in the main areas is stupid, even if you can afford it. Menlo and PA are doing NOTHING to support the high density housing required to make things better.
I agree there is something unique about being able to have everyone around you in the same line of business (tech) and it is great for making contacts, etc. However the cost are really starting to outweigh the benefits.
The bay area needs to look to places like Tokyo as an example of how to build out from the trains to the housing.
Been meaning to checkout Morgan Hill. I hear downtown Morgan Hill is pretty happening these days.
I also noticed that there is a self-driving car company down there:
http://velodynelidar.com
Are there any other interesting tech companies down there?
Nice thing is that if you live near downtown you could take the Caltrain up to downtown MTV or PA.
Morgan Hill / Gilroy area is fantastic - small town feel, slower pace of life, diverse population, significant rural element, growing dining/entertainment options.
Housing is certainly less expensive than the peninsula but by no means cheap compared to the rest of the state/country. I would still plan on spending $1 million plus but you will get a big new single family home instead of a 50 year old 1200 sf beater.
The downside is, of course, the commute. There are some alternate transportation options, e.g. Caltrain, some companies like Apple run buses down to Morgan Hill, but this will limit the geographic area that you can reasonably commute to. IMHO San Jose, Santa Clara, & Cupertino are doable, Sunnyvale & Mountain View are pushing it, and Palo Alto is too far. There are a few companies in South Santa Clara county (and hopefully this will dramatically increase over time) but you'd still probably be commuting north.
Looks to be about 35 minutes to downtown San Jose via Caltrain. That's do-able. The younger employees could live downtown in San Jose and the employees with kids could live in Morgan Hill.
If YCombinator (and Zapier) were to move from Mountain View to Downtown San Jose that'd be a huge symbolic move for San Jose.
> I agree there is something unique about being able to have everyone around you in the same line of business (tech) and it is great for making contacts, etc. However the cost are really starting to outweigh the benefits.
There is also a cost to having everyone around you in the same line of business, both in terms of correlated economic risk, and also in terms of loss of perspective.
I feel the same way. Maybe this just points to an ambivalence on my part about my career, but when I hear about the density of tech workers in the Bay Area, it makes me feel claustrophobic.
I agree there is something unique about being able to have everyone around you in the same line of business (tech) and it is great for making contacts, etc. However the cost are really starting to outweigh the benefits.
The bay area needs to look to places like Tokyo as an example of how to build out from the trains to the housing.