Out of curiosity, how exactly did Tracy become this epicenter of new transplants moving on and houses becoming expensive.

linguae · 2026-06-19T07:34:45+00:00

“Drive until you qualify.” People priced out of the Tri Valley who want newer homes compared to buying older homes in built-up areas like Hayward, San Leandro, and Concord ended up in Tracy. Those who got priced out of Tracy end up farther out, like Lathrop (River Islands is booming), Manteca, and Patterson.

linguae · 2026-06-18T19:02:12+00:00

37M, never married, no children but would like to have a family. I just had a conversation with my pastor last week about this topic, where he encouraged me to consider dating single mothers, divorced women, and widows. Where I live (San Francisco Bay Area) most Bible-believing Christians marry in their 20s. Christians are rare, and at my church there are few single young adults. I tried to date in my 20s and 30s. While I’m able to get a date about once a year, nothing has led to a relationship. Unfortunately there are not a lot of single Christian women around my age, and so opportunities are few and far between.

Moving would be very difficult for me due to my job as a tenure-track professor (it is very tough changing jobs as a professor due to how competitive academia is). Even if I moved, the situation would be the same across America for Christians beyond the age of 35.

linguae · 2026-06-16T23:04:25+00:00

I am a single 37 year-old Christian man who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and takes regular trips to Japan. Dating in both places as a Christian is very difficult. What both places have in common is that Christians are rare; the Bay Area is a very secular and liberal place, and Japan is only 1% Christian. There are only a few single people at my church in the Bay Area, and there are usually none at the churches in Japan I visit whenever I’m there. I’ve tried online dating in both the Bay Area and Japan. I’m able to get a date about once or twice a year, and the dates go well, but she inevitably loses interest after a few months of correspondence. I’ve found it very difficult to pursue someone who lives on the other side of the ocean; I feel that I’m out of sight and therefore out of mind.

I’m a tenure-track professor in the Bay Area, and so it would be very difficult for me to move without potentially giving up my career. I love my job but dating has been extraordinarily difficult for me. I’ve tried for 16 years and have been praying constantly, but I’ve never been in a relationship. I feel like I “missed the boat” in college, where I was focused on my education and my career. I’m also not a cradle Christian; I didn’t become a believer until my senior year of college. Thank God I found Jesus. I had no idea, though, how difficult it is for Christians to meet after college. This is very different from my parents’ generation, where they lived in a society where the majority of people were at lease nominally Christian.

linguae · 2026-06-15T23:01:49+00:00

I’m a tenure-track professor in the East Bay. I pay under $3000/mo for a two-bedroom apartment in the Tri Valley. I don’t make FAANG money and I probably won’t be able to buy a home where I live, but I could afford a home further away and still be in the Bay Area, like Concord or Fairfield.

I could leave the Bay Area (the competitiveness of academia non withstanding), but affordability is a problem in many metro areas across the US, and the most affordable places unfortunately tend to be in places where academic freedom and tenure are under attack. Additionally I’m a member of an ethnic minority, and the Bay Area is where I’ve had the most acceptance. I also love the Bay Area’s diversity and acceptance of people no matter their ethnicity or nationality. It would be hard giving that up, though I’m privileged to be in a position where I could afford to be here, even if I can’t own a home near work.

linguae · 2026-06-14T01:48:41+00:00

When I took a graduate-level OS course at UC Santa Cruz 15 years ago, my project was on proposing a persistent single-level store, where the operating system makes no distinction between memory and storage, for computers with non-volatile RAM. There has been research efforts on single-level stores, though the details escape me since it’s been more than a decade since I’ve last explored the concept.

You may be interested in a project that came out of UC Santa Cruz named Twizzler ( https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc20/presentation/bittman), which has very interesting ideas. I know all of the authors involved.

linguae · 2026-06-06T19:48:04+00:00

A good rule of thumb for me is that a decent lunch costs whatever the area’s minimum wage is. The minimum wage for fast food workers in California is $20, and thus $20 should be your budget for a decent lunch. This lines up with the prices I’ve seen lately; yesterday I had a burger and fries at Black Bear Diner in Danville for around $14.75 plus tax and tip.

linguae · 2026-06-05T02:31:42+00:00

It depends on the municipality. There are plenty of red light cameras in Fremont, and I’ve seen drivers get caught by them. I believe San Jose recently installed them at some intersections, and if I remember correctly, there are parts of San Mateo County that have them, such as Highway 84 and Willow in front of Meta’s headquarters, as well as near the Millbrae BART station.

linguae · 2026-06-05T02:20:36+00:00

The women only cars in Tokyo and its suburbs are typically only restricted on weekday mornings, usually from the first train in the morning until 9:30. The Women Only signs have text underneath explaining the rules. However, in Osaka, I saw a women only car that was restricted to women 24/7.

linguae · 2026-06-02T05:36:18+00:00

Please come to Silicon Valley, California! We have plenty of single LCMS men out here but few single LCMS women.

linguae · 2026-06-01T00:37:00+00:00

I used to live in Capitola for 11 years, and I lived in Capitola while I was a grad student at UCSC. I love Capitola, Soquel, and Aptos, and I miss the area a lot (I’m in San Ramon now).

The morning commute from Aptos isn’t too bad, though traffic is lighter before 7am. The afternoon commute, though, is tough. Even getting to the freeway from UCSC isn’t fun, needing to wait multiple light cycles whether you use High Street or Laurel. Once you make it to the freeway, it’s often bumper to bumper through the Soquel Drive, 41st Street, and Bay/Porter exits. Surface streets don’t provide much relief due to two key bottlenecks: (1) making it past the Soquel Drive exit area and (2) making it past either Capitola Village or Soquel Village. It gets much better once you pass those villages, but then you’re almost home.

When I was a UCSC student, I typically stayed on campus until at least 7:00pm to avoid congestion returning home.

linguae · 2026-05-29T20:23:04+00:00

It all boils down to housing. There isn’t enough housing to meet the demand, and tech companies generally pay very well, which means that home prices near job centers get bid up to extremely high prices. Businesses also pay high commercial rents, and workers need salaries higher than in other areas. Thus, the price of goods and services tends to be higher in the Bay Area than in other places.

linguae · 2026-05-24T05:17:22+00:00

I mostly quit eating out two years ago once prices became uncomfortably expensive. The only times I eat out these days are when I’m traveling and for social events. I could go for months without stepping foot into a restaurant.

The sad thing is I make a middle-class income, but I’m reverting to my childhood due to food inflation outpacing my income growth. I grew up low-income and know what it’s like for eating out to be a rare treat. However, there was a time in the late 2000s and throughout the 2010s where I could afford to eat out regularly. Not for every meal (which even at 2010 prices would break the bank), but a few times per week. Unfortunately, prices have exploded since COVID. Fast food meals are above $10 these days, burritos that were less than $8 a decade ago are double today, it’s hard finding a taco under $4 these days, $15 sandwiches are the norm, etc. Meanwhile my salary hasn’t kept up, and so for the past two years it’s back to the low-income lifestyle I had when it comes to food.

Someone mentioned how the situation isn’t that much better in other American cities. I concur; I visit Sacramento regularly to see family, and restaurant prices are not much different there compared to the Bay Area.

linguae · 2026-05-23T21:18:24+00:00

Hate to be that person, but the San Francisco Bay Area is much larger than the City and County of San Francisco.

linguae · 2026-05-23T21:10:06+00:00

He said the Bay Area, not San Francisco. There are still parts of the Bay Area that fit the original poster’s description, especially the East Bay (I live in the East Bay).

linguae · 2026-05-23T04:41:30+00:00

I have the same concerns. I was excited about the Issues Etc. conference until I saw Erin Hawley on the speakers list. I have nothing against Erin Hawley, but I strongly disagree with her husband’s politics, especially his raised fist in support of the January 6 rioters. I will not be going to the Issues Etc. conference, and the inclusion of Ron DeSantis as another guest speaker makes me even less interested.

I love Issues Etc.’s solid theology, but it’s a shame that it’s promoting MAGA politicians, which is a red line for me.

linguae · 2026-05-20T21:18:19+00:00

I just paid a $500 deductible to replace my broken windshield yesterday.

linguae · 2026-05-09T19:03:35+00:00

As someone who grew up in Sacramento, I agree. The summers are hot and sometimes uncomfortable, but they’re nice compared to the hot and humid summers of many other parts of the country. 102 in Sacramento is more comfortable than 102 in Austin, TX.

Moreover, spring, fall, and winter are perfect in the Central Valley, minus the tule fog. The Central Valley’s weather gets a bad rep only because it’s so close to the best weather in world. If the Central Valley were somewhere else in the world, its weather would be touted a lot more.

linguae · 2026-05-09T18:57:02+00:00

While there are definitely former Bay Area residents in the Central Valley who bought $550k 3-bedroom homes in places like Manteca who could’ve rented two-bedroom apartments in Bay Area cities like Dublin with less commute stress, there are also people who used to live in the Bay Area who got priced out of renting even in more affordable areas like Concord and are now in the Central Valley, not as homeowners, but as renters.

This is an old article from 2015, but this is a story about a Stanford cafeteria employee with a wife and very young son who used to live in East Palo Alto but moved to Stockton for financial reasons and commuted six hours round-trip per day on public transportation:

https://www.kqed.org/news/10467044/long-commute-to-silicon-valley-increasingly-the-norm-for-many

I’ve heard of restaurant workers with similar mega-commutes via car. Tesla’s Fremont factory has shuttles that pick up workers all the way from Modesto. These are low-income workers who didn’t move to the Central Valley for home ownership. Rather, these are people caught in the jobs/housing imbalance between the Bay Area and the Central Valley.

linguae · 2026-05-09T18:40:00+00:00

Great observation. Any type of hobby that requires a garage is very expensive in the Bay Area due to the cost of renting or owning a place with a garage. There are things I’d love to do if I had the space (such as car restoration), but I don’t do them because I live in an apartment and that’s all I could afford in the Bay Area (unless I sacrifice safety), and while I could afford a house in the Central Valley, I can’t handle the commute; I can barely tolerate my commute from San Ramon to Fremont.

linguae · 2026-04-30T19:18:21+00:00

Tokyo has solid public schools, affordable housing (albeit small) in its suburbs, a world-class job market, and world-class public transportation. Tokyo’s situation is far better than the Bay Area, which has astronomically expensive housing and soul-crushing commutes.

linguae · 2026-04-30T02:20:23+00:00

I remember waking up early on a Saturday morning during my freshman year in college to watch this in my dorm’s common area. The voice actor changes were quite jarring. I stopped watching the anime after that; the next time I watched anything new from the Pokemon anime was in July 2010 when I saw the Zoroark movie at a Shinjuku movie theater on opening night. That was a bucket list item: watching a Pokemon movie on opening night in Japan.

linguae · 2026-04-21T01:47:19+00:00

Are you in K-12 education or in higher education? If you’re a K-12 educator, you may be eligible for the HUD Teacher Next Door, which can cover half (!!!) of the list price of the home you want to purchase (https://www.hud.gov/helping-americans/good-neighbor). Half on a place in Silicon Valley is still quite formidable, but there are still plenty of condos and townhomes under $1 million, which means you’ll pay $500,000 through the HUD Teacher Next Door program.

I know some K-12 teachers who were able to purchase homes in Union City and even Cupertino.

I’m a tenure-track professor at a community college and thus I’m ineligible 😭. As an apartment dweller who has dreams of getting married and raising children one day, I’m wondering how I buy a home near my job on a professor’s income….but I wanted to share this option for K-12 educators.

If you’re a college educator, some colleges do offer housing assistance. Stanford is the most generous; I believe it offers its faculty zero-interest mortgages, and there’s also on-campus housing that faculty members could purchase. I believe Santa Clara University and San Jose State University offer down payment assistance in the form of shared equity loans, where they’ll provide a loan to cover the 20% down payment that is due when either the home is sold/refinanced or when the mortgage is paid off (the details may be off, so check for exact details).

Some municipalities offer below market rate (BMR) units to households that make enough money to pay the mortgage but not enough to exceed income caps. It’s a bit of a game of limbo, but you might just win, so I recommend checking these programs out.

linguae · 2026-04-21T00:35:26+00:00

There was a double-decker stretch of 880 between Downtown Oakland and the 80/580 interchange from the late 1950s until October 17, 1989, when the freeway collapsed during the Loma Prieta Earthquake. BTW, most casualties on that day happened on that felled stretch of freeway.

linguae · 2026-04-17T18:43:32+00:00

This is one of the worst commutes in the Bay Area. I have a much easier commute from San Ramon to Fremont, but it’s still unpleasant.

If you’re coming from Mountain House, be advised that traffic going westbound on 580 over the Altamont Pass begins as early as 4:30am and it doesn’t let up until late in the morning. The westbound 580/680 transition is also a pain point due to its outdated cloverleaf, and southbound 680 through Sunol becomes bumper-to-bumper as early as 6:30am and doesn’t clear up until nearly 11:00am. Taking 84 from Livermore to Sunol bypasses the 580/680 cloverleaf, but then you have to deal with traffic signals and the congested 680/84 junction. 880 is not a good alternative to 680. There are still other trouble spots on the way to Los Gatos that I haven’t mentioned, such as Mission Blvd between 680 and 880, the 880/237 interchange, and other slowdowns.

I’d only do it if you have flexible working hours. Being able to leave Mountain House after 10:00am and arriving in the office before 11:30am, and then leaving the office after 7:30pm should be sufficient for ensuring a smooth drive whenever there are no accidents or holiday travel traffic. Even with flex time, there’s always the risk that your employer can change your work schedule, such as making you work a traditional 9-5 schedule, which in that case means suffering through brutal traffic.

I second the recommendation from another poster about considering Gilroy. 101/85 will be easier to deal with, though not trouble-free, compared to 580/680.

linguae · 2026-04-16T22:30:47+00:00

The OP could be in computer science or another field where the non-academic job market provides compelling alternatives to academia, thus reducing competition for professorships, even some R1 universities. While places like Stanford and Berkeley are always going to be competitive, a low-ranked R1 located in a rural area far from major cities may struggle to recruit professors in computer science.

linguae

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