Ho John Lee’s Weblog

The front page of this morning’s San Jose Mercury News announces that Silicon Valley is ranked last among 8 high tech areas in quality of life.

Unfortunately, you can’t view the article without registering on their site.

Here’s a similar article from the San Francisco Chronicle.

The report was put together by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, and looked at 8 regions in the US, and excluded regions in other countries such as India and China. The report isn’t on their site yet, but is supposed to be posted on Wednesday next week.

Here’s how we stack up:

Unemployment Rate - Fairfax County #1, Silicon Valley #7
Housing Affordability - Raleigh-Durham #1, Silicon Valley #7
Traffic Congestion - Raleigh-Durham #1, Silicon Valley #8
8th Grade Math Scores - Boston #1, Silicon Valley #8
Electrical Costs - Portland #1, Silicon Valley #6
Health Insurance - Boston #1, Silicon Valley #6
State Tax Rate - Seattle #1, Silicon Valley #6

The overall ranking for US tech regions with best quality of life:

#1 Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina
#2 Fairfax County, Virginia
#3 Seattle, Washington (tie)
#4 Boston, Massachusetts (tie)
#5 Portland, Oregon
#6 Austin, Texas
#7 San Diego, California
#8 Silicon Valley, California

I don’t have to drive much, so I mostly dodge the traffic issue. I like many of the areas on the list, but have to say that I have never even considered living in Raleigh-Durham. Perhaps it’s different than I remember, I haven’t been there in some time.

On the positive side for Silicon Valley, the same article notes that a typical employee here 2.5 times more productive than the national average, the valley receives about 1/3 of all US venture capital, and 10 percent of all patents issued in the US. This is a great place to do new stuff, but a terrible place to build up huge labor-intensive organizations.

Plus we have Barcamp, and the ability to form projects, companies, and communities at the drop of a hat.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 16th, 2005 at 11:17 am and is filed under Business, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.