The California Bay Area. The home of Silicon Valley is a hustle culture like none other. In the bustling city streets and isolated, rural communities of this sprawling megatropolis, people of all types and backgrounds fight tooth and nail to find success, stability, and inner peace.
Here you are working hard, making it rich, or pushed out onto the streets.
Contractors from Illuminated San Francisco
Are portable, and may play in Contracts in other Playgroups.
Illuminated San Francisco grants 6 Experience points to GMs who achieve the Golden Ratio.
Map: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bc/Bayarea_map.png/800px-Bayarea_map.png
Summary
The California Bay Area is a thriving metropolitan complex in northern California consisting of several closely-placed cities. It first grew to prominence during the gold rush of 1849. In 1980, "sillicon valley" became the tech capital of the world, driving technological innovation in microchips, software, and internet businesses.
California's bay area has a population of about 9.71 million people (slightly less people than Portugal, more than double the population of Louisiana). It has an area of 10,191 square mi (1/3 the size of Portugal, 1/4 the size of Louisiana). 32% of the bay area's population is foreign-born.
The bay area is anything but a monoculture. Despite its reputation of being radically liberal, it also contains every shade of conservatism. It has major cultural influences from Asia, Latin America, and Spanish colonialism. Many languages are spoken, but almost everyone speaks English as well.
The climate is fair throughout the year.
Housing Crisis and Gentrification
Thanks to regressive construction policies and the absolutely massive influx of tech money, housing prices in the bay area have shot up an extraordinary amount in the past few decades. Educated people from the USA and abroad flock to the bay area to make money on the new gold rush of the tech industry. Housing has become absurdly unaffordable for most non-tech, non-rich residents, and so the newcomers have steadily displaced those who grew up there and perhaps lived there for generations.
This has caused a great amount of animosity towards the new, more-educated, more-international, wealthier residents who are labeled as "gentrifiers."
At the same time, the bay area's relationship with its growing homeless population sits in an uncomfortable middle ground. They have too much empathy for the destitute to cut services or simply bus them somewhere cold to die, but they are too greedy to build housing to home them. So the homeless population has grown quite large, and once you get on the streets, it is extremely, extremely difficult to get off of them.