The firm offers over 31,000 online guides on how to fix everything from broken iPhone screens to torn jeans. Luke Soules, a founder and a Cal Poly graduate, said the company is a 10-minute bicycle ride from campus.

“We have a lot of employees tired of the Silicon Valley pace and come to raise a family,” he said. “The biggest contention we have is not having enough bike parking spaces.”

The expansion of the start-up community has also contributed to a housing shortage in the city. Based on its clean environment, walkability and access to healthy food, San Luis Obispo is consistently ranked as one of the happiest cities in the United States, said Dan Buettner, the founder of Blue Zones. At the same time, it is considered among the 10 most unaffordable places to live in the country, according to independent surveys from RealtyTrac, WalletHub and Magnify Money.

Several recent decisions by the city should help offset the shortage. For instance, it has approved more than 2,000 new homes and housing units over the next 10 years, Mayor Heidi Harmon said.

But residents have already started to grumble about the newcomers encroaching on their quiet town.

Allan Cooper, a former city planning commissioner and a founding member of the Save Our Downtown citizens’ coalition, said there was no doubt the tech community was growing. As rising housing costs force people to live outside the city and commute into town, he expects that the quality of life will suffer and traffic problems will escalate because of “the failure of our city to pay for the infrastructure such as roads, sewer and water that would be required to accommodate our growth.”

And Gary Dwyer, a former Cal Poly professor who taught urban design for more than 30 years, said the tech workers were using San Luis Obispo as a playground to surf and ride mountain bikes.

“The techies are building and buying secondary homes they can use as time shares,” he said. “They are already here, and more are on the way.”