When I was looking for places to live out here, I wasn’t having a lot of luck. I’d go and meet the property owners, and I’d come close to begging them, and still they’d never call me back. This was before the “economic slowdown” really started, though, and Web 2.0 staffing was still in full swing. For a moment, I was convinced I’d been transported to New York City, except there were no cabs, decent delis, or Korean corner groceries to be found.
After I gave up on the individuals posting properties on Craigslist, I was looking at the larger commercial complexes. Some of the places were downright dingy, and I was afraid I was going to end up someplace sketchy. I started plugging apartment complex names and addresses into search engines. The review sites didn’t have a whole lot of data, and almost all of the postings were bad. I’d always wondered if love or hate was a more powerful motivator, and on the rental front, it looked as if negativity had won out.
The other thing I’d find was patent applications. On a half dozen addresses I checked out, I would get hits back from patent filings. People that invented things lived in places where I might live. While none of the applications really stand out as something world-changing and you can patent pretty much any damn thing nowadays, I still thought that was really cool. I wasn’t getting hits from the police blotter, or listings for yard sales; I was finding proof of the tradition of invention that made the greater Bay Area famous.
While the 90 miles between San Francisco and the end of Silicon Valley aren’t paved with gold, they are littered with crazy ideas and the crazier people that came up with them. Very few other places can compete with that.