Reminiscing about living near Caltrain
I lived in the SF Bay Area from 2011 to 2015. I left in 2015 because I could see a future coming toward me that I didn't like - decades stuck in the lowest-earning career track at any company I worked for. It was a region where all the funding and opportunity in game dev was going to companies that make games you play while sitting on the toilet... not games that need robust plots, characters, or VO. I looked around me and could not imagine a future where I wasn't eventually struggling to make ends meet.
When I lived in the region, I lived in San Jose, Sunnyvale, and eventually Mountain View, and worked in Palo Alto about a block away from University Avenue. It was an extremely expensive place to live, and my first few sets of roommates were also people living at the bottom of the "professional" salary ladder for the area. My first room cost 600 USD a month - a subletted room in a condo with two other people. My extremely Christian landlord banned all men, and entered constantly without permission to rifle through our mail. (Other cool fact: one of my roommates made kale smoothies in a blender without a lid on, covering the entire kitchen in a film of green slime.) My place in Sunnyvale was 800 USD a month, another single-room sublet in a house with two other people. My landlord and I got along well. He owned the house, and lived across the hall from me; he rented the other room out to a roulette of NASA interns, and eventually, a hard-right-wing flight attendant who would scream on the phone about hating Obama, and would frequently leave her enormous, sad dog with us all weekend, without asking. My final place in the Bay Area was in Mountain View, a few blocks away from its downtown Castro Street area; that was a much more normal roommate situation where the rent was somewhere just north of 1000 USD for each of us.
Crucially, I was walking distance to the Caltrain station there. It was my first experience using public transportation heavily, and I absolutely loved it. There was nothing better than getting a seat high up on the second level of the car, where the central gallery space opened up to the seats below, and just chilling with a book. It's not a great way to design a train, but it's a pretty fun way to ride.
So it was surprising and informative for me to watch the latest video from Citynerd, which covers the exact section of the Caltrain corridor where I used to live. I was pretty shocked to see little snippets of the world I used to see every day, both preserved and changed.
The biggest changes I noticed in this video involved the aggressive pedestrianization of the downtown areas where my friends and I used to meet up all the time to eat. The pedestrianization seems pretty recent. I'm very glad that these cities have been able to pull it off.
It also seems like these areas have become even more expensive than they used to be. It's impossible to call it "gentrification" when the "cheap" version of these places was already so expensive I could barely live there 10 years ago. But I do remember these places having little restaurants on the side streets where you could get a good meal for, like, a completely normal amount of money. I remember getting my parents great sundubu on Mountain View's Castro street for, like, 10 bucks. I'm looking at Citynerd's B-roll now and wondering whether anything like that still exists - any scrap of daily life accessible to someone who's living like I was living back then.
One of these cities has a pedestrianized street with minigolf on it. The whole place looks a bit like a theme park.
Anyway, check this out if you want to see what level of infrastructure safety rich people choose to build when they have the money to do it. Walkable, bikeable, well-served by train, with expensive pedestrian overpasses and immaculate bike lanes. It makes me feel completely insane that places I commute through in the LA area - places with just as much wealth - are refusing to do the same.