FILE- Golden Gate at dawn surrounded by fog
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Stanford Rosenthal left the Bay Area eight years ago for the reason many people leave — he wanted to buy a house. He returned to his hometown of New Orleans and purchased a duplex, something he said he never would have been able to do in San Francisco.
But as we spoke in early October, he was on a cross-country drive back to San Francisco to start a new chapter in one of the places he said truly feels like home. His original reason for moving back to the city — helping to co-found a startup — had fallen through, but it didn’t matter. He’d made up his mind.
Rosenthal is one of five people SFGATE spoke with who decided to move to the Bay Area recently, some for the first time and some returning after years away. All were relocating due to the Bay Area’s reigning tech industry, but no, they’re not all working in artificial intelligence, and yes, they’re all sick of the “doom loop talk.”
“I hear ‘doom loop’ mentioned all the time, and it seems to me like the local media is more talking about it than anyone else is,” Rosenthal said, noting that unrest isn’t abnormal in San Francisco.
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When he left in 2016, that unrest showed up in protests against tech shuttle buses and other displays of anti-tech sentiment. But the problems he’s reading about today are ones he said he also saw in New Orleans and Asheville, North Carolina, where he lived for a few years. “The problems you hear about like the open-air drug markets and the unhoused, Asheville and New Orleans had an uptick in that while I lived there. It’s not an SF problem,” Rosenthal said. “Every city is facing the same problems. I think they’re national problems.”
File: Neighborhoods and the bay are viewed from the Observation Tower at the de Young Museum on June 16, 2023, in San Francisco.
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Rosenthal had dropped out of college to join a tech startup in San Francisco in 2012, spending five years living in San Francisco and Oakland. Now that he’s back, he’s renting in the Inner Sunset and, after owning property, said he’s actually looking forward to being a renter again. He’s also glad to be back in a more liberal state — he said some of the conservative policies in Louisiana contributed to his decision to leave.
While the company that was his original reason for moving back to San Francisco already folded, Rosenthal is now working on a climate startup aimed at helping people unsubscribe from postal mail. He said he felt that the Bay Area was the best place to be if he wanted it to be successful because it allowed him to surround himself with like-minded companies.
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Toward the end of 2022, right when the excitement around AI was really growing, she said she knew it was time to move. She said she felt like Miami was a great place to be during the pandemic when her company was in the early stages of building the business, but if she wanted access to talent and networking opportunities, San Francisco was the place to be. “Your chances of success are so much higher when you’re around like-minded individuals who are, you know, working hard and have big, big dreams and aspirations,” Hoover said. “To be around that energy has been really awesome.”
Hilly streets make for great views in San Francisco, Calif., but traffic headaches can keep drivers from enjoying the perspectives.
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The first time she visited San Francisco, she stayed downtown and admitted she felt a little unsafe. Once she got to know the city and its people better, however, things changed. Plus, she said she feels like with each passing month, downtown feels more vibrant. “There is a lot to love, and there’s a lot of positive things happening in the city,” she said. “I think that the way it’s depicted is not the reality of actually living here.”
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Hoover wasn’t the only one lured to Miami by venture capitalists and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez frequently posting on X, formerly known as Twitter, beckoning tech companies to set up shop in Florida. Christine Simone was living in Toronto in 2020 building her fintech company Caribou and was ready to make a move. She decided to join in on the hype and relocate to Miami in early 2021. “[The X posts] created a real buzz in the environment, but then it died about a year later,” Simone said.
Most of the people she met were focused on crypto and blockchain, she said, and when she’d explain that she was starting a more traditional fintech company, people weren’t interested. She also felt a lot of people said they were living in Miami but, in fact, were doing so only part time. She realized the company would need to move again if it wanted to build a bigger team and establish an office. She was also hoping to be surrounded by investors and other founders. “I learn so much from other founders, and when you don’t have that around you, it’s hard to learn,” Simone said. “The Bay is the best place. It’s where the serendipity happens.”
A report from the Brookings Institution, a think tank, identified the Bay Area as the epicenter of the emerging AI industry, calling it the nation’s “superstar” hub, and Stanford University’s 2023 Artificial Intelligence Index Report showed that California had the most AI job postings of any state. The AI industry could be boosting the number of people moving to the Bay Area: A LinkedIn study from earlier this year showed that San Francisco was the most moved-to area out of all the major metros, except for Austin, Texas.
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Roman Puzhlyakov considered moving to several different places, including Texas, before deciding to move to the Bay Area. He’d been living in Vancouver, Washington, where he grew up, when the pandemic hit and his job went remote. He took the opportunity to start traveling and spent some time in Miami, thinking he might want to move there, especially after hearing about its burgeoning tech scene. He had started a company, and his co-founder was living in Houston, so he visited Texas as well but decided it wasn’t for him.
The duo decided they wanted to move somewhere together to jump-start their business. They considered Seattle, Los Angeles and New York but ultimately settled on the Bay Area after spending some time in an accelerator program based there. Even so, Puzhlyakov ultimately decided he didn’t want to live in San Francisco because he was concerned about the crime in the city. “We decided to stay away from that,” he said, focusing his home search on the peninsula and ultimately choosing Santa Clara. “I wanted to, but it didn’t feel safe.”
People hang out in Dolores Park in San Francisco, Calif. during a warm weather day on October 4, 2023.Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
Crime overall has decreased in the past five years in San Francisco according to city data, but certain crimes, like burglary and motor vehicle theft, have shot up. Alex Lashkov has two kids and said he didn’t feel safe raising them in San Francisco based on what he’d heard, so he chose to live on the peninsula when he moved from Miami last year. He commutes into San Francisco from Redwood City a few times each week and goes to events and meetings there frequently.
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Lashkov said Miami “was too vacation-like” and that he thinks that’s part of why its tech community didn’t quite measure up to what he’s seeing in the Bay Area. He said he’s made much more progress on his AI business than he would have in Florida. “As a founder, I felt like the networking opportunities and talent pool in Florida wasn’t good enough to speed up the development of my business,” he said.
“It would be nice if it felt safer but we get what we get,” he said. “There’s always a trade-off. There’s no ideal place to live in the world.”
