Fearon and Laitin are great, but Yale has a pretty strong group on political violence: Kalyvas, Wood, Sambanis, Blattman, Lawrence, Darden (and maybe Lyall or Wilkinson if you believe the rumor boards). Not to say one or the other is better, just different.
Having lived in both places, I actually like New Haven a little better than the Palo Alto end of the Bay Area. The weather is worse, certainly, but New Haven has I think better food (Modern, The Pantry, Sally's and Pepes, decent Thai food), is a more diverse and vibrant place to live, and is effectively as close to NYC as Palo Alto is to SF (that is, it's just far enough to make it seem like a pain in the middle of the semester). I'm from the East Coast, though, so I'm partisan.