Downtown Oakland was sadly ignored. The nice side of Lake Merritt, as well as downtown and Jack London Square are generally overlooked. Maybe that's a good thing for my rent. I pay $1900 for an 1100 ft^2 2br/2bath right next to jack london square, with a pool, a hot tub, and soon with a 100mbps synchronous connection that will cost $45/month. BART is 4 blocks away and door to door I'm downtown in 30 minutes. I'm looking at downtown office space now and it's incredibly cheap, plus the business taxes are a lot cheaper.<p>The food scene isn't as great as Berkeley, but rent is 30% cheaper, and there are far fewer yuppy moms walking around with kids in strollers, which makes me happy. There has been a pretty solid core of hackers moving here in the past two years, generally people like me in our early '30s who have been in SF for a decade+ and have finally stopped drinking
the "San Francisco is worth $4k for a 750 ft^2 apartment" koolaid.
It's interesting that he didn't include the Financial District. I know of a number of startups there, including some YC startups. He did make this a couple years ago though, and it may be that that's a more recent expansion as it's gotten harder to find reasonable options in SOMA.<p>I worked at Cloudera's office in FiDi over the summer and liked the area a lot. Super-convenient via BART (less convenient than SOMA via Caltrain, but one could always transfer to BART at Millbrae). Right in the middle of everything. Good food options. Felt pretty safe walking to BART after dark because there's enough people around.
Santa Cruz can be a good option for some kinds of things.<p>Pros: Lower housing/office rental costs than most of SF/SV, nice ocean, less crowded coffee shops, lots of UCSC students willing to work as cheap summer interns in return for not having to commute across the hill, lower salaries for senior engineers for the same reason if you find one[1], substantial local indie-gaming startup scene (Team Meat, Chronic Logic, Gaijin Games, Graeme Devine), laid-back lifestyle.<p>Cons: Further from the VC and most of the tech/meetup action, SF/SV people consider it infinitely far away, harder to find senior engineers, few local peers if you <i>aren't</i> in the indie-game space, laid-back lifestyle.<p>[1] There are a <i>lot</i> of engineers who live in SC, either because they prefer it to living in the Valley, or because they already established families there back when there were more tech jobs (SCO, etc.). Most now commute to Mountain View, San Jose, or Cupertino, but many would take a substantial paycut to not have to make that commute every day, which seems like a potential arbitraging opportunity for the right startup.
Re: Dogpatch / Potrero Hill<p>The area around 3rd and 20th is actually pretty well connected transit-wise (near 22nd st caltrain, the T line, and three or four bus lines), is a 30 minute walk from soma, and is still pretty cheap. And although the real estate prices are going up (along with the rest of the city) there's still a lot of underutilized land to expand into that should act as a buffer on rent prices. If I were looking for a place to start an office I would look there first.<p>google maps: <a href="http://g.co/maps/dqmrn" rel="nofollow">http://g.co/maps/dqmrn</a><p>walkscore: <a href="http://www.walkscore.com/score/3rd-and-20th-st-san-francisco-ca" rel="nofollow">http://www.walkscore.com/score/3rd-and-20th-st-san-francisco...</a>
this is very cool! I came to the area recently and settled in Berkeley based on a PG essay, and I think it deserves the good review that it gets on the map. I thought being in the Gourmet Ghetto area would be too far away from the bustling student-y area with cheap food, but it's nice to see it got mentioned.<p>Travel to SV via public transit is a 2-2.5 hr trip door-to-door (maybe a little more, depending where, and if you need to walk). If commuting is only a once in a while thing, it's not too painful with a Clipper Card but maybe expensive.
I'm not much of a businessperson, but I wonder why startups cluster in expensive places like South Park. You could move to a loft in the East Bay, not too far from BART, and save enough to pay a whole other salary, maybe two.<p>pg's thesis about Silicon Valley is that it's mostly the about the investors. I assume that the talent pool is willing to do a BART ride to the East Bay for the right startup. So is being smack dab in the middle of the cluster that vital to success? How does the math work out?
I'd look at downtown Sunnyvale as well. Nokia moved in a while ago, and Apple will be moving in later this year. Murphy street has a little bit of life, although not as much as University in PA or Castro in MV. But the rents are lower than PA/MV and Sunnyvale is a Caltrain bullet stop. Lots of startups in Sunnyvale too, although many of them are over in the Plug and Play Techcenter place which is far from everything except the skate park.
The area to watch right now if you want central location, access to Bart, and an up coming startup scene is around Civic Center, between 6th and 10th and market / mission. It's still VERY sketchy there, but not for long - Twitter is coming soon, and this should start to gentrify / startupify things. Lots of classic, old SF office buildings there too.