Who’s buying these big-ticket New York City homes? In San Francisco, it’s the Silicon Valley people. : The good news is, men and women from all over the U.S. wish to live here, at least for part of every year. Who’s buying these big-ticket New York City homes? In San Francisco, it’s the Silicon Valley people. Conventional wisdom has it that when the IPOs go through, all the newly minted multi-millionaires will upgrade their homes in the city by the bay, making that enormously expensive real estate market even more enormously expensive.