Which East Coast City Has The Most West Coast Vibe? (2015, job openings)
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What's a West Coast vibe? In the LA itself (never mind the metro, just ONE part of the city), Hancock Park and Koreatown have a different vibe and demographic from one another despite being right next to each other.
Is there something that I'm missing here?
I think most C-D posters would probably break it down like this.
East Coast vibe = "fast-paced," elitist, Type A, career-obsessed, neurotic, more rigid and formal
West Coast vibe = "laid back," liberal, easy-going, less formal and more open to experimentation
Given how DC posters go on and on about how DC is so fast-paced, much much faster than Chicago or Philly, and only 2nd in neuroticism after Manhattan, you would think there'd be no way it could have anything approaching a "West Coast vibe." But such is City-Data. Next week I'm sure there will be a thread about how hard-charging people in the DC area are, which places it into the same category as Lower Manhattan.
Let’s be real here. No one is talking about NoVa and comparing it to Oakland nor SF city for that matter. When people are talking about “vibe” in this thread they’re not talking about how many people like to roll a blunt and spit rap like E 40. They’re speaking on the suburban culture and business culture around these two regions.
No worries anyway as I was already planning on opening a similar thread this week comparing NoVa and Silicon Valley. You sir are an inspiration.
And posters are primarily focused on NoVa, not DC. The point could be made that NoVa is a faster paced, better transit related version of WC burbs. You clearly understand the points being made in the thread.
I think people think different things when they think of a "West Coast vibe." I personally think of G-Eazy and just a more laid-back attitude overall.
NYC, IMO, is "laid-back" in the "do whatever you want" sense. Wanna walk down the street with rats and salamanders on your shoulders? Okay, whatever. Wanna try your new comedy routine out on the A? Okay, whatever. Wanna wear a bone through your nose and not have people look at you twice? Okay, whatever. The city is still a grind though, so it's not laid-back in the sense that most people think of Los Angeles or San Diego being laid back.
DC is not laid-back in either sense, which is why it's perplexing to me why anyone would think it has any similarities to the West Coast as far as "vibe" goes. NoVa especially is as buttoned up as it gets.
DC also has less grafitti than Oakland or Los Angeles.
More like downtown DC (Foggy Bottom, Golden Triangle, Metro Center) is not laid back in either sense. There are parts of DC and the downtown that are laid-back in the "do whatever you want" sense. There will obviously be more anonymity and more of a idgaf attitude of what the next man/woman is doing living in a city of 8 million versus 712,000.
As for NoVa, you are right. I see it as plain with less soul compared to it's other Northeast counterparts and it's WC counterparts.
More like downtown DC (Foggy Bottom, Golden Triangle, Metro Center) is not laid back in either sense. There are parts of DC and the downtown that are laid-back in the "do whatever you want" sense.
There are parts of DC that are "laid-back" in the "I'm not a career-focused robot and do have some personality" sense but none in the "do whatever you want" sense. What you are calling the "do whatever you want" areas of DC are places that people would call normal in Pittsburgh, Philly, Chicago, Baltimore, etc.
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Originally Posted by hipcat
They aren't 100% similar. But NoVa is the Silicon Valley of the East and has similar demographics to the Bay Area with large Asian and Hispanic populations. And unlike the other East Coast cities. Most Hispanics in NoVa are Central American rather than Caribbean Latino. And the White populations are largely Limousine Liberal yupsters. San Francisco is not the city of Danny Tanner anymore. That's an outdated view of the current Bay Area. Which is dominated by the Tech industry.
Another interesting tidbit is that the DMV area is the only part of the East Coast that has Safeway supermarkets. The largest number of Safeways are in the Bay Area.
Safeway is Vons in SoCal and in Las Vegas, same company
In places on the East Coast with high concentrations of Protestantism, you will find people who have similar dispositions and temperaments to people on the West Coast (e.g., Northern New England, non-urban Southern New England, the North Country and Southern Tier of New York, Northern Pennsylvania, the Eastern Shore of Maryland, non-urban Virginia and most of the Carolinas and Georgia).
There are parts of DC that are "laid-back" in the "I'm not a career-focused robot and do have some personality" sense but none in the "do whatever you want" sense. What you are calling the "do whatever you want" areas of DC are places that people would call normal in Pittsburgh, Philly, Chicago, Baltimore, etc.
There is one way that I find DC similar to Silicon Valley, and another poster mentioned something similar a few pages back: these are the two nerdiest and most work obsessed US cities that I have been to. In both places life revolves entirely around work and career. Every interaction in DC ends up devolving into trading notes of the most important important people that you are connected with. Similarly, every conversation in Silicon Valley revolves around tech, whether that be discussing the latest startups or your opinion on software engineering practices. In both places, 90% of people fit into the same mold. If you do not work in the particular field for that city you will find people completely insufferable.
In NYC, on the other hand people tend to have a much more diverse set of interests from my experience. (SF used to have this as well, but it has now been largely eaten away by the tech people). Boston people aren't quite as interesting as NYC people, but there are still the Sox, beer, and food to discuss. While work is certainly important to people in these cities as well, I feel like people still separate it from their social life in a way that people in the Bay Area or DC do not.
Beyond that, I don't find DC having a west coast vibe in any way, and the idea that DC is the "Silicon Valley of the east" is absurd. NYC is by far the biggest tech hub on the east coast, and Boston is distant second place. DC is really not on the map. If you go to the Bay area and start one of the aforementioned tech-conversations about your work back in east, you will find that nobody there thinks of the government-related work in DC as being anything like the (sarcasm) incredibly important, world-changing work in the valley. NYC at least has a large startup scene to go with high tech hedge funds and giant offices for Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Its tech scene in general is much more valley-like. Boston has the Cambridge and MIT area, which is probably more similar to Palo Alto and Stanford than any other place.
Truthfully, this original question is hard to answer. First of all the two coasts are fairly different from each other, but also the west coast itself is not uniform at all. If I had to answer I would pick NYC. I say this not because of the tech scene at all, but more that NYC, LA, and to a lesser extent SF represent the coolest places in the US, with the latest fashion trends, the best art and music, etc. All people who identify as being creative feel pressure to move to one of those places in a way that doesn't compare to anywhere else. So that's similar, I suppose.
Another candidate might be beach or mountain towns in the Carolinas. That beach bum culture is really what I personally think of as "west coast" moreso than Silicon Valley, but it's still a stretch.
For perspective, I work in a very large Valley-based tech company in Austin, TX, so I don't really have a dog in this fight. In general I would say that Austin and also Denver feel much more like the west coast than any east coast city does.
None. NoVA has an ethnic mix of Asians and Latinos, with fewer white Catholics than Philly/NY/Boston, that can feel a little more West Coast. But the lack of natural scenery and conventional, gov't contracting, Crystal City cube jockey corporate culture couldn't be further from the West Coast. Anyplace where lots of people wear ties to work, or worse, golf shirts tucked into khakis, is nowhere near anything on the West Coast.
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