Is SF considered the best place for young people looking for a mix of excitement and proximity to Mountain View?
If so, seems like I would rather just take the hit and live in the burbs for the first time in my life.
You have to think of the bay area as a massive, sprawling, empty suburb. Rich and poor have lived there, but the poor are being kicked out in droves because of all the tech money being funneled in there.
I personally really hated living here because of how suburb it was. Ironically, I'm from a burb in LA. However, I feel like LA cities just have an energy that keeps going. It's probably because of the people though. We Angelenos love to party. :P
The bay area loves to live in a place of feigned ignorance about it still having a sense of being in a "small town" like Palo Alto or something. Sure they're small towns, but the amount of money going through makes them anything of the sort. So the issues are that they restrict density and restrict public transport. Just look at how idiotic the break in BART is on the peninsula and how it's seem-less in the east bay. The people from the rich parts don't want the unseemly (homeless) going into their cities.
Wait San Jose gets insulted? I was trying to figure out where do most of the young people who work in Mountain View live, and I assumed it would be San Jose.
The young people work in all directions, as long as they can afford it. Most people who don't want to be associated with SJ flock to its neighboring cities like Cupertino, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale. Although they're really not
that much different . . .
However, the young people in the bay area (who are from the bay area) pretty much just do house parties or go to local bars on occasion. They really don't do much else. Mostly because there isn't much else to do.
Everyone else just goes to restaurants or the bars that close at 11 . . . Like Yard House or places in downtown Palo a lot or Mountain View.
From my experience living in SJ a year (yes, just a year, so take it as you will):
- As you can tell Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, etc are the "nicer" areas. Anything lower than that are the "not-so-nice" areas. (The other nice areas are around Los Gatos and Saratoga in the south. So they kinda circumscribe SJ)
- I think it's been historically known to be a "cheaper" place to live that's outside of the east bay (see #9)
- San Jose is the largest city in the bay with about 1 million people and a downtown that houses several 30-40 story buildings. It's the most "city" out of all the cities around because of . . . height limitation reasons??? Seriously, besides SF and Oakland there are no sky scrapers anywhere. However, unlike other cities that have tall buildings, these don't really give the city any life. People just sleep in their expensive downtown apartments *shrug*
- The city's borders are probably 5x larger than any of the cities around it. It could honestly be divided into 10 different cities if you go by the stats of 100k in the surrounding areas (eg, 120K Santa Clara)
- There is no sense of community. I feel like there would be some if the town was smaller and had different identities . . . but then again no one really says anything about Milpitas or Fremont other than they smell
- It also has homeless problem around said little downtown
- It's not a place most people want to go
- There's nothing of cultural importance there, not that the bay has much of this :p
- Like the rest of the bay, it's dead after sunset (8pm)
- Prices historically were a little bit lower than other parts of the bay (as far south as it goes), but it's become incredibly expensive over the last few years
- People who live north of SJ probably never go into SJ unless they work there
I think that last one has to do with Google buying up a lot of land near Diridion Station and planning to build a 20,000 seat complex. So SJ is going places, but we'll see if it escapes its being a waypoint and not a destination.
Also, I take it you didn't go to EPA
Darryl M R. EPA is a disgrace to the Peninsula, especially considering how close it is to the big bois on the block (FB, Google), all the VC firms up in Sand Hill.
I was actually pretty close to renting out a room in East Palo Alto, but then the whole place got rented out. It would have been . . . interesting. Kinda reminded me of the places in East LA or the Inland Empire.
However, it's also going through a price hike, so I imagine over the next 10 years it will be gentrified AF.
If they're in MV? Probably.
East Bay is where it's at, but you'll still get some of those feelings. SF just...isn't what people think or see from the outside. I'm not a big fan.
Where in the East Bay? All I hear about the east bay from people in the south and peninsula is this: