No. I've been in the Valley since the Netscape IPO. It's always been like this since at least the mid 90s.
You don't know because you came out of school at essentially the nadir of the dot-com bust, you only know how things went from shit to great to bubblicious in the last 10 years. Sure, rents have gone insane in the last 2-3 years, but rents have always been high. From 2001 to 2004/5, rents were low, traffic was great, etc, because of the sheer number of jobs lost. Per capita, the number of jobs lost in SV from the bust was worse than Detroit.
But during the dot com bubble, it was definitely like this, and the one thing you also don't realize is that the house prices were not affected by the bust, money moved from the stock market into real estate in the Bay Area. House prices went nuts during this time, until the housing bust and only now have prices surpassed 2007 prices.
But SV has always been about greed and making money.
You don't know because you came out of school at essentially the nadir of the dot-com bust, you only know how things went from shit to great to bubblicious in the last 10 years. Sure, rents have gone insane in the last 2-3 years, but rents have always been high. From 2001 to 2004/5, rents were low, traffic was great, etc, because of the sheer number of jobs lost. Per capita, the number of jobs lost in SV from the bust was worse than Detroit.
But during the dot com bubble, it was definitely like this, and the one thing you also don't realize is that the house prices were not affected by the bust, money moved from the stock market into real estate in the Bay Area. House prices went nuts during this time, until the housing bust and only now have prices surpassed 2007 prices.
But SV has always been about greed and making money.