The home of multiple world-defining companies vs the capital of some glup shitto province of China

Tech jobs should not be centralized in one place. We should be able to work remotely anywhere in the world. Also, California is a bad place for data farms. Not enough water.

please

i visited Disney California Adventure last month, and one of the lands is "San Fransokyo Square" (after the setting from Big Hero 6) and i'm like "okay, this is a bit silly (particularly the suspension bridge with torii for towers), but yes, please, I'll take one of these"

I'm literally in that picture, and I would like more Tokyo please!

None of them played the right games as children

It should look like Shenzhen istg

Long time residents already feel that Silicon Valley is on the cusp of being Hong Kong

More reasonable long time residents would say that Silicon Valley feels like it is already on the cusp of being Little Manhattan

The dystopia we were promised at least had innovation and industry. THINGS were built: weird foodstuffs, gargantuan skyscrapers, flying cars, pneumatic tubes as people movers, wearable med-tech. The dystopia we have is a clear-cut subdivision. We have ad space for AI ads. Blech.

Personally I lean toward Barcelona for it, it can keep the Hispanic architectural vibe

we need a lot more neon and 200 foot tall naked dancing hologram girls if we want this to be a proper dystopia

Okay but specifically the one from the beginning of Akira

I’ll watch Bladerunner and be like “hey at least California built housing”

TFW Star Trek shows future San Francisco and it takes you right out of the movie because there's no way they'd ever approve that much housing development.

me with cyberpunk 2077

Street food scene also looked pretty good

Writers in the 80's couldn't think of anything worse than aa bigger city. Should reinvent the genre, but the whole planet is paved over because of zoning laws forcing everyone to live on 4 acre lots minimum

Not particularly pleased that we’re getting cyberpunk dystopia but also only low-density suburbs, somehow

In the book, the cities are all emptying out, moving to the offworld colonies, and that's why the apartment building in the movie is empty. But they have vibrant street scenes anyways, not gonna complain lol

Wait bladerunner is based on a book??????????

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K Dick

Always has been

Total Recall and Minority Report also if you are interested His short story collections are absolutely amazing

And The Man in the High Castle

One of those does not seem like the others lol

That’s PKD fer ya. Oh also there’s A Scanner Darkly

To be fair (🎶 to be fair 🎶), the movies are often quite different than the short stories. Especially Total Recall vs We Remember It For You Wholesale.

Paycheck was a good short story but not a great movie

People always leave out the Ben Affleck classic, Paycheck.

Yes! Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

I think i read that when i was like 10 and i did not connect that to bladerunner, probably because i was 10

Movie has more of a noir vibe than the book.

The movie left out the best scene in the book, where Deckard gets taken to the OTHER police station.

Funnily enough, it used to be even more overt until there was substantial rewrites, which Dick roasted the hell out of.

Is there much street life in the book? I just remember a lot of shuffling around between apartments

Yeah not at all. I think he didn't want the whole movie be people talking to each other in apartments and at SFPD lol

I think Blade Runner is also thematically different enough from Do Androids Dream to make the depopulation of Earth less central. The book is a lot more focused on what humanity has lost and trying to find meaning in a ruined world. Movie is more interested in the humanity of the replicants

the book focused more on people having electronic pets, I think they live mostly solitary lives with their fake pets (or real if you can afford it)

With many addicted to empathy boxes that provide communal experiences of persecution, struggle and pain. Everyone their own personal Sisyphus-Jesus without leaving the bed.

It’s filmed in the Bradbury which is a real building in LA! Idk if it’d still be legal to build that today (the ziggurats are definitely not up to code)

Maybe the people who live and work there don't WANT Tokyo.

Yeah maybe that dog WANTS to eat that pile of shit, who are you to disapprove

So true* bestie *live: (verb) people who own homes

I could afford to live in Russian Hill with a couple of roommates in the 90s. Do I get a say on what the Bay Area looks like?

Hey I lived on Russian Hill in the 90s, too! My rent was $690 on a waitress’s salary.

Look what they've done to our boy!

Rude!

Tokyo is the best city in the world. Why would anyone not want to live like in Tokyo? Or if that’s too extreme for you, maybe you’d consider Paris level density. Lots of famous places Americans enjoy on vacation are much denser. If you want to live spread out move to Wyoming.

heck even montreal density would be a big step up, especially if you ignore the farms and look at somewhere like NDG

That's the thing about living in a society. It isn't an Ayn Rand novel.

I mean … it’s kind of getting there.

Oh, it's very much what they think they want (except they also rely on the government teat, like Ayn, but not like her characters).

They do.

I was born and raised in San Francisco and I would like it to be a little more like Tokyo so that maybe I could afford to live in my own hometown someday.

I waited out in corporate housing in San Jose for 6 months in the late 90’s while my visa for Europe was being processed. Trained. Did San Jose stuff. Came from Boulder. SJ is a dump. Whole area is a dump. Had another offer in SJ but moved to Amsterdam on 50% pay cut. I won. I live in Italy.

Maybe they don't want minorities either, so what?

This is California, everyone is progressive and loves minorities. They just hate anyone who doesn't want to live in an imaginary quaint farming village

LA County has more Trump voters than Iowa and Kansas combined, and California has almost as many Trump voters as Florida. We have plenty of neo-confederates and they’re constantly seething about minorities and crime, and in Silicon Valley, the wealthy have all the ideology just a different party

Should say it's NorCal. I'm sure there's an equivalent to the OC somewhere around here but don't know where it'd be. Marin has the RFK people but they're different

I mean, presidentially it's about a 75/25 split (between 35 & 20% for Trump in Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara), but I think people really underestimate the raw numbers of lurking fascists in the state, especially since California was America's fascist breadbasket from the '30s through the '90s.

They might "love" minorities but NIMBYism hurts minority communities way more than white communities so whether they love them or not, their mindset hurts them.

make the bay area a playground for the rich, but leftistly.

Robert Moses -- now with more Richard Florida!

Sure, but why should their preferences be weighted so much more heavily than literally everybody else's?

Paying $1.5 million for this 80 year old piece of crap is definitely ideal. www.zillow.com/homedetails/...

They can move to Davis

i live and work here and i want tokyo, boomer scum sitting on their multimillion dollar ranch homes and throwing tantrums about bike lanes be damned. what now.

So many people in their 70s complaining about destroying the neighborhood. Like dudes, in a few years you aren't going to remember what neighborhood you even live in, get out of the way.

Tokyo is amazing and infinitely better than the nightmare of overpriced suburban sprawl that is SV.

Interesting theory, why not legalize Tokyo style urban design and test it out?

That only works if you have a city that’s grown organically over hundreds of years and been through multiple events that flattens the city and allows for rebuilding.

ooh, you mean like driving out the thriving black community and turning their land into a park, that kind of flattening and rebuilding?

I was thinking more along the lines of ‘ruthlessly bomb a populated area that you know is majority wood-construction using firebombs’ but that works too! (Neither of those are good to be clear!)

other cities have managed their versions of Tokyo without having to resort to either, somehow ;)

Why don't we firebomb it first

I live and work there and want tokyo

Low-density sprawl is a policy failure not a lifestyle choice

What about the people who want to live and work there?

The people who live and work in SV will get Tokyo and they will like it Inshallah

I used to dream of moving to SF for tech and then just stayed in Atlanta because, while it isn't cheap, it's at least typical big city prices SF will be like, oh, you want to buy a 2br starter home? That will be eleventy bajillion dollars, please.

Oh come on... things aren't *that* expensive! A little elbow grease and this house that sold 2 weeks ago will be great!

If you act fast, you can snap up this cute charmer!

For comparison, this is available in a very nice part of Detroit www.zillow.com/homedetails/...

most very large houses sell for less bc of the cost of upkeep you don't even want to know the heating bill for that thing

The main floor of my house is ~1500 sq ft plus a big deck where we do our entertaining, and it's too much upkeep for me :( We arent the kind of family that should have light colored carpet.

I work in real estate, I am very well aware of how crazy the upkeep costs are, especially on an older house. Still, would you rather pay $3 mil for a shitty tiny ranch house surrounded by other shitty ranches or $1.5 mil for a gorgeous old mansion on a giant lot?

neither but the maintenance and HVAC on a 12k sq ft house could easily be $3k+ which is a LOT of mortgage

Also, this one is in the same neighborhood for a much more reasonable per square foot price www.zillow.com/homedetails/...

Someone added a living room to their garage!

👀

It's not the house It's the land The price of that house is 90% due to the land it sits on. It could be made of cardboard, no difference.

If that house were cardboard, it might've sold for a bit more since the demolition cost would've been a magnitude less.

I don't know much about demolition, but I bet it's similar to other industries, that complain of being burdened by safety and health regulations that generations of citizens have worked out, and while the customers consider the costs unbearable, the laborors are living humbly, and prices make sense.

Yeah I remember meeting an engineer in Google Mountain View for lunch and she said "I need to get promoted to Staff next cycle, or I won't be able to continue affording my (two-bedroom, shared with a roommate) apartment", which is ridiculous.

Googler I know had left Microsoft and they weren't entirely joking when they said if was because of hte commute; moved from Seattle to Mountain View because they were fed up of commuting by plane once a week for meetings; house they could afford had a LONGER commute than they'd had in Seattle

Housing here drains more wallets than crypto crashes.

Why don’t they move to Tokyo?

I was born and raised in the Bay Area and I want Tokyo.

head of Bay Area Residents For Tokyo here to say: wrong, we're sick of housing shortages ruining absolutely everything, and we want Tokyo

they'd be wrong, Tokyo is amazing

I’ve never had a better transportation experience than when I was in Tokyo for two weeks.

Most of the people who work there don't live there because "people of means" call the shots regardless of what anyone else wants.

I lived there for a long time. I was never given a choice. I eventually left because I came to hate living in a place where you couldn't do anything without getting in your car. Tokyo probably wouldn't suit me, but it's closer to what I want than 2,000 sq miles of freeway and tickytacky.

Bonus points for the Malvina Reynolds reference.

That song was written about Daly City, which is now a part of the very soulless urban sprawl we've been talking about.

these days the ticky tacky houses are some standout architecture!

Maybe they shouldn't have a veto on what their surroundings look like.

Why build Tokyo when you can just pour cement over literally everything

Why wouldn’t you want a city to be like Tokyo?

I live and work there and I do want Tokyo. Give me a 30 m^2 apartment that costs <$1000/month and is within a 10 minute walk of a train station that goes to within a 10 minute walk of my office and I'll happily take it. I'll also vote for it and against anyone who stands in the way of it.

Make it legal & see if people choose that you coward

try asking the people who got driven out of the bay area by housing prices for their thoughts lol

As one who saw rents double and triple as SF leadership sold-out to the tech bros-and people started sharing basement dungeons-it wouldn’t even have to be Tokyo-just have some sane housing plans that don’t require people to live in their cars-and yes the NIMBY’s are to blame..

SF housing turned survival mode on hard difficulty.

💯

I had to leave 7 years ago because of housing prices. Bring on the Tokyo-ification.

Then there'd be no harm in legalizing Tokyo, would there?

Got ‘em

Who wouldn’t want to live in an endless sea of subdivisions and strip malls?

Lol. Lmao.

Hong Kong

With such a name, I expect it should be futuristic & full of high rises. Damn those NIMBYS!

SV should look like a pile of rubble (because we've finally found a way to redevelop it and destruction comes before the new glorious 100M population plan just now being worked on)

zoning is a big part of it but yeah it makes no sense that the PNW generally has so few high rise apartments.

The ideal is to maximize green space and human access to it. In theory, individual dwellings don't need proximity to the foundation. Why have 100 acres of two-story homes and no room left for trees when you could have one high rise and a whole little forest?

This is what Korea looks like outside big cities—miles of farmland, then a small cluster of high rises. It’s awesome.

just seems so sensible. i've lived in suburbs, smaller cities, and now a rural area and i feel like in the US, each of those manages to take all of its possible advantages too far.

u mean neo tokyo

Why change your mind when you're only speaking the truth?

Truke

The Rednote folks were talking about how gross and disappointing LA was compared to the cyberpunk megacities back home.

The megacities back home are just as gross but they’re still actual cities as opposed to giant suburbs which makes up for it, this also applies to (most) of Chicago and NYC

Tokyo is pretty awesome, man

You don't understand, Silicon Valley is in an *earthquake zone*! /j

It’s actually a legit argument for older construction But Japan is pretty clear evidence that you can construct high rises in a quake zone now

I was living there during the Loma Prieta quake in 1989, the one that did so much damage to San Francisco, Oakland, and Santa Cruz. Silicon Valley itself escaped mostly unscathed because of all the new construction followed strong earthquake codes.

My apartment building in Mountain View was hit by a shock wave strong enough to slosh half the water out of the swimming pool. But there was no real damage to the building.

Tokyo should look like Hong Kong

bsky.app/profile/alfr...

the bay area should be 50million people ive been saying for years we have some of the best weather in the country and plenty of land, its currently all just used for strip malls and sfh

Fun fact: before it was silicon valley it was known as "Valley of the Heart's Delight"

Yeah, there's a stroad on the southern edge of San Jose called Blossom Hill Road, so named because it was originally a rural road you could drive down and enjoy the flowering orchards in the valley. The last orchards were just being dug up when I got there in 1981.

Funny, drove that road for years wondering where the blossoms were..

Revealed preferences dot jpg

I always assumed this was how it looked:

You mean built for people instead of cars? Hard to disagree. I was first there in 1974, and lived and/or worked there 1981-2011. Watched it change from orchards to sprawl. Inevitable when you have rapid growth in a region with dozens of towns that exist mainly to thwart urban planning.

I might’ve moved there and f*cked up my life.

Sure, but have you met the NIMBI must have a yard folks that live here? I live here and every chance we get to make the place better is a 20 year fight to just get something mediocre if we are lucky.

We could have orchards again if they’d build higher

I think the only ration argument is the geological nightmare fuel that is Northern California? Otherwise it should.

not sure if you’re aware of the geological situation of japan but uh maybe not an excuse

I am very aware having lived through numerous earthquakes there.

If only, instead we're NIMBY central. It's embarrassing that smaller cities like Atlanta completely smoke San Jose in terms of urbanism.

this is how you get nimby homeowners learning bombmaking skills

SV is almost twice as rich (PPP gdp per capita), and this is in the current state of affairs, with expensive construction and insufficient agglomeration. It should look WAY cooler!