Why I'm Moving My Business From San Francisco To St. Louis
The current San Francisco influx is unsustainable.  If you're somewhere else in the world and thinking about coming here to do a startup, I wish I could convince you to change your mind.<p>San Francisco is incredibly expensive.  Rents have shot up by ~50% since 2008, office space is following the same trend, and competition for (even mediocre) programmers is intense.  Worse, a lot of the cultural diversity that made San Francisco interesting has been driven out by the high prices -- it's a much more homogenous city than a few years ago, where mom-and-pop shops and other neighborhood amenities have been replaced by places selling $10 "artisinal grilled cheese" sandwiches and "mixology" bars where you can buy your choice of $15 cocktail.  SF feels increasingly like a city for wealthy yuppies, because...it <i>is</i> a city for wealthy yuppies.  Living here on anything less than a good engineer's salary is becoming a tall order.<p>Which brings us to a very important point for all the young programmer dudes:  when you all crowd into the same tiny city and bid up the rents into the stratosphere, your available dating pool shrinks to a puddle (yet another consequence of the skewed gender balance in tech. sigh.)  All the pour-over coffee in the world doesn't make you happy when you can't get a date, and those artisan cocktails are far less cute when you're jockeying for position at the bar in a crowded room full of guys.  If you're a 20-something male programmer looking for a date in SF, I feel badly for you.  Hope you like BART, because you're going to Oakland (if you're lucky!)<p>Once upon a time it was only a mildly bad decision to locate your startup in San Francisco, but you could justify it with the appeal of a diverse, cosmopolitan city.  Right now, there's a very real financial penalty (rents, salaries, taxes), and the cultural benefits are waning.  There are a lot of great cities in the US, and on the internet, you can work from anywhere.  Try those instead.