patrick.net

Yeah well certainly explains the massive dumbing down of the area with the few newcomers showing incredibly poor business sense to go along with their poor choice of moving here. All the smart people leave while the dull ones stay and even duller emigrate here on their richer families buck back home.

Kinda like my own great grandparents from Europe in the 1910-30s, all of them were low pegs in rich families who struck out to america to try and not be so mediocre; but just ended up mowing through their parents substantial wealth. This is the same exact story as my next door neighbors from Vietnam who payed 1.4 million for a mcmansion in 2004, and god knows what on a resturant; and only staved off bankruptcy on the house from another mega loan from the parents back home. I am privy to this personally.

Also the same story as my boyfriends family, they are from very wealthy store owners in Sriracha and Chonburi thailand; well the son of these rich store owners has lost somewhere around 8 million of family finance trying to run a dream hotel in Pacifica.

FYI I do not pay rent and have been house sitting for the past year, even with a significant bump in income I would not consider staying here. Its simply not financially prudent unless you make over a $250k a year.

I left the Bay Area in....1973?

San Jose still had plenty of fruit farms then and US Steel had a hulking plant in Fremont. I lived in the big house that had been the center of the old Niles nursery in Fremont--anybody here remember the Niles nursery? And in the bay flats of Fremont grew large acreages of brussels sprouts which stank to high heaven when it rained.

I like San Francisco, but I have always found the Bay Area itself to be peculiarly depressing. Don't know why.

Almost 40 years ago....I've never missed it.

Been back plenty of times. I still don't like it.

This is what I have been saying. Chinese immigrants who have treated their house like investment in China are treating the house here in Silicon Valley like an investment. If it weren't for immigrants who have a little to no regard to the fair market value of the house, the price of housing should be coming down.

Yeah true. Many immigrants feel at home there-especially tech ones. It seems tech companies only give jobs to contractors these days and those are filled with H1B folks. They seem to plunk all their dough into an ugly McMansion and think they have made it.

I remember a decade or so ago, a friend of mine had bought 10 acres with fencing, an in law house and a mobile house for help, an arena for the horses and barn all included for less than 250k in Tracy. Then a bunch of folks I knew bought McMansions for 600k+ in Tracy. I knew something was wrong-I mean look around-there is land everywhere.

Same thing happened in Florida. It seems like a pattern. A region offers a lot, everybody starts moving there, and the population density increases the cost of living while lowering the quality of life. Eventually people figure out that the place is overhyped and no longer a good deal, and they stop coming. Meanwhile, people who moved there late and didn't get the benefits of when the place was cheap, start moving out.