<i>Now everything’s changed. In 2016, the San Francisco metro area was the top location for venture capital investment in the country, hauling in $23.4 billion—more than triple the VC investment in Silicon Valley proper.</i><p>Interesting numbers, what seems to be evidence of inflation chasing inflation. There's no logical justification for such a concentrated purse of investment dollars benefiting so few people. Furthermore, it would seem that it's benefiting the same people over and over ... the most obvious driver here is turnover. Probably there are a lot of PMCs in SF who absolutely bet on (hope for) the failure of most of the companies getting these investment dollars, the second they've signed their leases. Because who doesn't lose out when a startup fails and has to shutdown? The rent takers, the leaseholders prepared with aggressive litigation... everybody else loses. (As a side note, I'm pretty sure this is how the current US president's family empire was built: <a href="http://www.citypaper.com/blogs/the-news-hole/bcpnews-trump-s-son-in-law-is-a-baltimore-slumlord-and-that-s-not-even-the-worst-of-it-20170523-story.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.citypaper.com/blogs/the-news-hole/bcpnews-trump-s...</a>)<p><i>In the 1980s, I was part of a team doing research into the geography of the high-tech industry. We couldn’t find a single significant high-tech company in an urban neighborhood. Instead, they were all out in the suburbs—not just Intel and Apple in Silicon Valley, or Microsoft in the Seattle suburbs, but the Route 128 beltway outside Boston, and the corporate campuses of North Carolina’s Research Triangle.</i><p>Because companies in the 80's were smarter. They knew that if you wanted to build a company that can build equity, you cannot be beholden to the lease holders and the rent takers. They built in the burbs because that is where they could establish equity. Today the "barriers to entry" for owning in SF are just too high for most; the continual delusion of people who think they can build a sustainable business model while being based in SF is mind-boggling to me.