I really hope the next wave of 'we should fix that'ers is a bunch of high salary earners convincing each other to donate to good causes rather than a bunch of disconnected high salary earners advocating for regressive high taxes and minimum wage increases.
Are you saying you know how to spend the money these people earn better than them?
Or, to force you into a false dichotomy, are you saying that back when hotdogs cost $0.05, increasing the minimum wage from a few pennies an hour two $2.00 an hour made all the difference in the world?
Pretty sure people need money in order to have them decide how to spend it, and that most people can't personally save their way into affording million-dollar cancer treatments.
I don't particularly trust cutthroat employers, who have demonstrated their desire to do everything they can to undercut the salaries and benefits of their employees to expand a bottom line, to properly value and choose to provide the necessary income to give their employees humane standards of living.
Though I do think that a fixed minimum wage where you have to have to have heated debates every time cost of living changes about what it should be set to, is silly. If it's supposed to reflect the ability to achieve a minimum standard of living, let's at least set it dynamically against the price of a typical basket of goods; or use a different mechanism than a minimum wage altogether to achieve that minimum standard of living.
haha. San Francisco is awful. That title is misleading and uninformed. Grew up there. Got a degree in math and comp sci and returned to work. Lasted a year before being so disgusted by the self quarantining of the rich.
It’s a tech distopia. I’m not even talking about having to step over human feces 3 times per block. I’m talking about the utter lack of ethics and values of the people who have descended like rabid vultures to manipulate the tech utopian thinkers and then run with the money. The damage is done and we’re just now starting to see the impact it’s had on the people that haven’t been taken along for the ride to the top. That place is a lost cause.
I guess it would have been cool to be there during the Alan Kay xerox parc days. Probably intoxicatingly inspiring environment. But now... I hope it burns. I’ll show up to repair and rebuild.
I do enjoy the Marin headlands though. And I suppose I’ll take a Taqueria SF burrito most days of the week. And the punk scene in Berkeley was great, and growing up skating there was awesome, but... meh the bad outweighs the good.
> the utter lack of ethics and values of the people who have descended like rabid vultures to manipulate the tech utopian thinkers
a lot of these people, having destroyed SF as a livable city, are now moving on to Seattle. Which is rapidly also turning into a city with feces laden sidewalks and a tech dystopia.
Seattle has the 1/3rd largest homeless population and the city wanted a $500 per employee tax from amazon. Amazon said they’d move their business and also haulted construction on new building. 40k employees, that’s 20million a year. They then lobbied and got it repealed after city lowered to $250/employee.
He than turns and donates millions/billions ONCE, but that’s specks of sand compared to what would be generated over time yearly and consistently.
So... no faith in that city either and no faith in tech in general. Super sad.
It seems perfectly legitimate for Amazon to question how much the extra $10 million would actually help. If homelessness could be solved just by throwing money at the problem, SF and its $40k per homeless person would be clean as a whistle.
People get the Seattle tax story wrong. The money was not a problem. USD 250 is a negligible amount for an employee that earns above $100K a year.
The problem is taxing job headcounts regardless the amount. That creates a horrible precedent for any company trying to do business in a city. It's basically telling business owners that the jobs they are creating are not welcomed. It's penalizing the core of what makes an economy productive.
Let's put Amazon out of the picture for a minute. Since the head tax was meant to tax large employers, it's kind of hard to see in the micro context what imposing a job headcount tax actually means. So for the sake of the example let's say that the head tax applied for any business owner (not hard to imagine since implementing it for large employers create precedence for taxing small employers).
Let's imagine that the business that we are talking about is Mommy's Bakery. The head tax in Seattle was the equivalent of telling mommy to pay a USD 750 ransom for her three employees or to fuck off. Mommy is already collecting and paying taxes and fees.
She is employing people that are putting money back into the local economy, but the city feels that the act of job creation is adding to their problems. So they decide that they want to tax those headcounts.
This is more or less the equivalent of you helping a friend or relative with some money and they coming back and telling you, "hey thanks for the hundred bucks, but because I'm gonna get wasted tonight and gonna spend it all on drinks, I'd need 6 bucks more to get back home".
Yeah sure, six bucks are not too much but just asking for them after you gave them a USD 100, it's utterly ridiculous.
This is how the Seattle city employers felt when the head tax was proposed. They already contribute millions of dollars to the city economy in taxes and jobs, but the city still wanted to get more to justify their gross incompetence when it comes to dealing with the homelessness crisis.
Oh, Flying Spaghetti Monster for all his pasta goodness, I wish we could stop this trope.
San Franciscans, Californians in general, and "transplants" writ large did not cause this problem. We did it to ourselves with quite a few different inputs.
Ultimately what people who live here--in Seattle, I mean--is that we cannot stop new arrivals from, well, arriving. Freedom of movement is a right in the United States so they're coming, whether we like it or not. And that means we have to scoot over a bit, make a little room, and say hi to our new neighbors. That we've not done that is a huge reason why our arts, our humanities, and our not-white-collar-professional jobs are all decamping to the next cheap place.
However, it's not just housing. Seattle is a city having to go it almost alone trying to fix all of the region's ills, from traffic to mental health to substance abuse to tents on WSDOT's medians. It's not something Seattle can do alone and it's not a burden Seattle taxpayers should bear all by ourselves.
But it's also not the fault of the new arrival from San Francisco. She has a reasons to suspect we'd have our act together, and we've failed her just as much as we've failed the person who winds up in a tent next to the onramp to highway 520.
Freedom of movement has caused quite a few issues for Seattle, with many people moving here from a variety of backgrounds.
One of my exes actually came here from Spokane, as its much easier going out here as a homeless gay 17 year old then living with his abusive brothers. Many suburbs and towns are all too happy to encourage the least well to do to head towards the nearest major town, generally involving the police corralling those less fortunate than us and giving them a ride towards said major town.
I hear Tacoma is still relatively inexpensive and nice, one of my old professors moved down there and finds it rather decent. Not sure how many not-white-collar-professionals will continue to be able to afford to live in and around Seattle (outside of a handful of "Affordable" aka heavily subsidized housing complexes).
I don't think these problems are related to tech. Metro areas that engage in these policies--tech or no--have had the same problems. NYC in the 70s to 80s was the same boat and had dramatic turnarounds during the Giuliani tenure.
> According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, the Seattle metro area spends more than $1 billion fighting homelessness every year. That’s nearly $100,000 for every homeless man, woman, and child in King County, yet the crisis seems only to have deepened, with more addiction, more crime, and more tent encampments in residential neighborhoods.
That statistic should shock people who think that the problem is insufficient government spending or a type of rabid, rich eating the poor Dickensian dystopia.
That article also mentions "pathological altruism", which roughly translates into paying $ for guilt in a way that harms the people who are supposed to be helped. It's sad too, because most tech workers I know would not advocate behaviors/policies for themselves that they advocate for the homeless. Any tech startup that basically was content with no standards, endless spending, and no accountability in the corporate or personal sphere would be bankrupt.
Just for context, this article was written by Christopher Rufo, a very conservative politician who ran for the Seattle City Council against Mike O'Brien (district 6, Ballard, Loyal Heights, Crown Hill) for roughly two weeks until Rufo dropped out while accusing "O'Brien activists" of "extreme harassment."
Rufo's platform, just before he enter-exited the race, can best be described as "arrest them all and do it enough times that they move to Eugene." He's only one in a long line of brief candidates who want to immediately ramp up all kinds of law enforcement activity while we "consider proper funding levels" for social services, with no professed idea for what happens when the people we've arrested for vagrancy walk out of the King County Jail in downtown Seattle.
The one thing he and I agree on is that the outputs for our inputs are not at all acceptable but I don't agree at all with what little he proposed to do about it.
Ad hominems aside, do you think spending $100K a year per homeless person--and having a dramatically increasing homeless population--is reasonable? Might there be some logic to that article?
Yes? No? I don't know; I'm not an expert in these matters. It is entirely possible that spending $100k/year per homeless person and still having an increase in the homeless population is reasonable if the costs are staggeringly high and the underlying problems still exist--perhaps even at an increasing rate--that drive people into homeless.
I didn't say that Mr. Rufo was incorrect in his numbers; I said I vehemently disagreed with the proposals he made in his brief campaign. I agree with Mayor Durkan that we need a comprehensive understanding of what the money is being spent towards and the results it is having, something her office is supposed to be working on. But we can't just say "spending is paused until we figure that out." We also can't continue with Seattle being the only government entity spending appreciable money on the problem while surrounding cities and counties cluck their tongues in disdain. This is also the State of Washington's and King County's problem, if nothing else. They should act like it.
One last bit, I did not engage in any ad hominems against Rufo; I called him no names (unless you mean "very conservative," which is a label he adopted for himself in his campaign). I denigrated his policy proposals and related an observer's view of what happened to his campaign.
I think your "Just for context" provided no context at all to the statistic provided or anything to do with my observation that tech workers' treatment of themselves is different than that they advocate for the homeless.
You brought the character of the person making a claim about a statistic into a tangent that had nothing to do with my comment. That's an ad hominem.
With respect to the $100K a homeless person, I quite frankly find that absurd. If it was a spending problem, you could pay them the money directly and they'd be richer than most Americans.
Have you really thought about that $100k number? I live in Seattle and I can tell you from a close friend's experience that an uninsured ambulance ride and emergency visit for a serious condition is ridiculously expensive, even after negotiating the cost down with the healthcare providers. We're talking tens of thousands for a concussion and I don't even want to know what the costs are for drug over doses, psychiatric holds, and the multitude of medical problems that result from roughing it in Washington winters. Throw in the cost of police responding to reports of vagrants, social workers, and all the other infrastructure and 100k a year seems very reasonable. We're talking about less than 1% of the population in the most extreme living circumstance that usually find themselves in that spot because all other systems have failed. Of course it's going to be crazy expensive helping that last (quite literally) marginalized group.
Thats why Utah just started paying for housing. They figured out that the follow on costs to homelessness were huge and for many subgroups of the homeless population it's much cheaper to just pay for their shelter than to pay for all the other things that are certain to go wrong that will require state intervention anyway.
I liked that medium post, because I'm also one of those people who said goodbye to a number of friends who had moved away - until I decided I've had it with this town, too, and it's time to move away as well.
But the post throws a bunch of softballs. It mentions rising costs, hipster drinks, etc. And yes, the _relentless_ costs are a huge factor. But it's not just the costs that changed, it's the entire tenor of the place. The focus on money, valuations, investments... it's like working for Wall Street, with all the nonsense and none of the benefits of being in NYC. And a lot of people are looking at themselves and asking: is this what I want to do with my life? (Except for those who did...)
But on the plus side, moving away is not such a bad thing. Unlike what the post author suggests, the transplants will not "ruin" other cities. At least not the large ones: Pittsburgh, Chicago, Boston, NYC, there are great cities out there with a fun tech culture, much more housing (so it's cheaper), and they've been absorbing newcomers for a hundred years without any danger to their existing culture. (I'll leave Austin and Portland out of it - they might be too small to survive a mass migration of Californians. ;) )
"To the angry locals of Portland, Seattle, Denver, New Orleans, Kansas City, Phoenix, Austin, and elsewhere, please hear this defense: The Californians who are coming in and “ruining” your cities are not snobs. They don’t have trust funds. They aren’t entitled. They are the opposite."
That may be true, but I've met too many people who sold a one-bedroom garden shed in California for $1.2B and moved to a shiney new 11,000 square foot mcmansion in Hyde Park. They're just passing the ruin along.
I haven’t been there in over 20 years but I thought it was the hills around Austin being ruined by McMansions built by transplanted Californians. Hyde Park was for charming bungalows that weren’t that cheap.
As someone from the Rust Belt, the "San Francisco is awful" mentality is puzzling to me. Awful compared to what? Seattle? Some other world class city? If it's so bad why don't you move somewhere cheap like Cleveland? Oh wait, you don't want to, because Cleveland is worse. For the record, I like Cleveland, I grew up there, real estate is affordable, it has a lake, but it is no San Francisco. That said, I'd still never call Cleveland awful, it's better than where most of the world lives. Have some perspective.
I think if you figured out a way to compare Cleveland to SF while factoring in cost of living, or just real estate, Cleveland would do pretty well in a showdown.
SF is picked on because people pay such a premium to live there (including employers via the necessary high wages), and it is becoming less and less worth that premium as tech extends out of the bay area.
I don't know. Maybe mostly because I have family I'm very much consider moving back to at least NEO after I finish working at my current job for a year and that's with knowing I'd take a pretty big pay cut. Certainly if I could make the same money anywhere I wouldn't stay in SF.
I don’t get the taqueria craze. I’d rather have a flour crepe, a rice-dough bao or a naan/rothi/parhata instead of a corn taco. The inside isn’t that much tasty as well, no spices. I went to this famous taqueria and I thought it was really underwhelming.
It’s just to say that wealthy people use their money to create greater distance between themselves and people with less. Re-enforcing the “them” mentality and stigma. Rather than truly integrating into the San Francisco, they’ve planted themselves and created a moat. Google buses would be an example of how a company can add to that. They should have improved public transportation.
Buying a house with an HOA to keep the property values up, setting up NUMBY committees to keep new developments out, google buses as someone mentioned, corporate recruiting pipelines that pull from a handful of select schools, etc.
Same general idea as the Old-Money Boston-Brahmin or NYC types, just with better marketing.
Studied in Berkeley, got bunch of 6 figure job offers in SF, instead left Bay Area for Boston. SF is a beautiful city, but it's not worth it. It has way too many problems. Maybe in the future I can come back, but I had to take a break.
I don’t know how recently you’ve been here, or how closely you’ve looked, but it is very much not a beautiful city. It is literally gag-inducingly disgusting.
I feel like this is a common sentiment: San Francisco is beautiful in the abstract, but disgusting in detail. I feel like this is a pretty common trope for most "grade A" cities—someone will always hate it, people who love it will always explain it away.
- NYC is expensive and has failing transportation, but people love the unparalleled cultural diversity and gritty tenacity of the city
- Paris is dirty and unfriendly, but the city's romance and character make it a great place to live
- London is expensive and out of touch, but its job opportunities and multiculturalism make it a better place to live
...and so on and so forth.
Someone's always going to dislike SF for a valid reason and someone's always going to hit you back with a valid reason why it's a good place. They're probably both correct.
I studied in Boston and then lived in SF for several years, and also needed a break.
SF is incredibly beautiful - land's end, the presidio, twin peaks, the fog, hwy1 in either direction - but I started to feel like the natural beauty was one of the only positive (non-professional) bits of living there.
Anyways, after a bit of travel, I'm considering Boston again for grad school. It's a really awesome city - super diverse, and the winters aren't as bad as everyone says they are. Enjoy!
I did my undergrad in Boston, and then visited for a reunion and then a friend's wedding into an extended trip where I just worked from cafes in different corners of the city -- the last of which really disenchanted me with the city after the two prior visits surrounded by friends.
Boston's academic scene is super diverse. Having the very best educational brands in the world (many of which take pride in their meritocracy and inclusive admissions) means every kind of person dreams of entering that academic scene.
But among the postgrad professionals? It becomes eerily white, with a few pockets of Asians that can be traced back to a professor or other highly respected profession centered in Boston. The chinatown is more of a chinablock. There's half a street with anything Korean. There's a reason so many people who studied in Boston end up in CA or NYC and feel happier, whether they consciously attribute it to the diversity or not (among other reasons). Boston's diversity is not diversity like what London or New York or Seattle provide. SF is barely better, just due to tech being similar to Boston's academic scene and wooing people from very diverse backgrounds, but is a wider professional field with more resources to bring people in.
That said, Boston has its perks. It's beautiful in every season in a unique way, with cobblestone streets and tree-lined avenues, quaint rustic stores, proximity to EU for an international trip, proximity to other east coast hubs like pittsburgh/DC/NYC with a bus/train ride, etc. And if you're going for grad school, there's still plenty of diversity, although self-selected by your program/school.
But diversity and affordable rents are not the perks I would consider Boston for a long-term stay post-grad.
San Francisco has never appealed to me. When I’ve told people that in the past, they’ve looked at me like I have two heads. For anyone who doesn’t live or spend much time there, the romantic notion of SF is pretty great. It’s got a lot going for it - a unique geography, it’s full of landmarks and architecture and history - but the day to day reality of what it’s become is just sad. It’s a pretty unliveable place unless you are a true millionaire,and the character it once had is quickly evaporating.
If a city is nice, then crowds will arrive until it is not nice. There are two main kinds of "not nice", prices and the annoyances of your fellow human beings.
The end result is that locations that are physically nice will be occupied by people who have a relatively high tolerance for those two not-nice attributes and a relatively high desire for the physical niceness.
So if you like cool weather and pretty hills and the ocean, and you don't mind violent crime or hepatitis or $2,000,000 houses, then you'll be happy to wedge yourself in like a chicken in a factory farm. It takes a certain type of person to decide that this is the best choice.
There are plenty of examples of nice places that remain nice even as people move in. It's up to the city to be dynamic enough to adapt to a changing environment.
In concrete terms, that means: building sufficient housing and infrastructure to keep life affordable and smooth; designing (or shepherding emergent patterns of) functional, livable neighborhoods; and addressing social problems as they arise.
You might be surprised to find that you can still get a studio in Tokyo within 45 minutes of the city center for ~$400/mo (bump up to ~$600 if you want to be 15 minutes away), that it's easy and efficient to get around to nice urban and natural amenities, and that there are endless quiet, peaceful, and utterly charming neighborhoods, parks, and temples right next to all the hotspots. You'll never see any feces on the street, you never see anybody shooting up needles, and nobody will ever beg you to spare a dollar.
Part of that is cultural, but most of that is by concerted effort.
But positive outcomes like that can only happen if a city successfully adapts to changes—which San Francisco (and virtually every American city to varying degrees) has abysmally failed at. As another commenter pointed out up the page, San Francisco's public policy has been very nativist, and the physical form of the city has remained more or less unchanged for decades, which spells disaster for one of the most coveted places to move to in the world.
It's great the same way the view of the bay from some of the cells on the top floor of Alcatraz was great. Some prisoners loved having a view; others said it was worse to be reminded of such beauty while you were in a prison cell.
I feel like a lot of my friends who are about to start a family or get married have started moving away from big cities like NYC, SF and LA. You just end up wanting a bigger place, a quieter street, and proximity to a Trader Joe's.
A big part of this is that San Francisco attracts people that don't actually want to live there, they're just there for the jobs. Once they've had enough, or find a more desirable opportunity elsewhere, they leave.
Also they only hire one type of person (engineer) which has created a monoculture of people not predisposed to being outwardly friendly. (I know this is a stereotype, but sometimes stereotypes are true).
I think part of that lack of outward friendliness is both transplants generally as well as those people that don't actually want to be there. But yes, the monoculture is the key problem. I was considering moving to SF because I loved the SF of 10-20 years ago (not without its problems but had so many things still right) but all of the other cultures that made SF great have been suffocated by the tech industry moving in. No longer a top option anymore for that reason alone.*
* I've spent a limited amount of time in SF so grain of salt.
Most people don't live in SF, the rent is ridiculous. I doubt they contribute to much to the so called culture, nor the engineers have time to enjoy much of the existing culture anyway.
> But what this “native” Bay Area kid won’t do is start blaming the guy from North Carolina or Wisconsin or Boston—basically every other person in the bar—for propelling the rents into the sky and inadvertently forcing the “locals” to flee.
The author hasn’t been to a Berkeley (or San Francisco, or a Penninsula town) city council meeting... there is a lot of very blatant resentment in the Bay Area directed (mostly unfairly) at transplants.
The first time I went to work here a few months ago I got out of the Lyft around 9am and two meters away a homeless man was injecting something into his veins. My office is in the Mission.
Some parts of San Francisco are very dirty and the homeless issue is not exaggerated. Everybody knows about the Tenderloin at night.
With that being said, I drove across the US two years ago and if you keep your eyes open you realize it is all over - Portland and Seattle are no better, just less talked about.
My rent is $1300, I live with one roommate on Russian Hill. I'm flexible and lucky so this is not representative. A girl I know who works at Google lives in inner Richmond (arguably a less desirable area) by herself and pays nearly triple for some reason.
It is hard to find a proper gym for less than a Benjamin and food is above average for an American city but hilariously expensive. Good way to gauge is pick some fast food chain and compare, Dennys is x2 here than the rest of the country.
All in all this place isn't the shiny happy city you'd imagine from watching Full House or or the counter culture epicenter of hippie times gone by. It doesn't suck, I'd definitely visit for a week or two if you have never been, and there's a lot of history here but in the end it is no longer a very remarkable place to live.
>With that being said, I drove across the US two years ago and if you keep your eyes open you realize it is all over - Portland and Seattle are no better, just less talked about.
It's not that it's not talked about, it's that other cities manage to not have it right in the middle of the city.
Seattle is every bit as bad as California. Interestingly enough, when California started getting bad, Washington was where they moved. Now? Hellloooo TEXAS!
I ended up getting a tech job in south Orange County (working at a satellite office of a SV company) because I couldn't bring myself to pay Bay Area rent.
I can't even imagining owning a house _here_, let alone in the bay. Buying a house is generally something adults in America aspire to doing, but in California it's basically a mark of wealth. The amount of cash you have to stuff away for a down payment of sufficient size to not be fleeced by the banks is astronomical.
I'm really considering transferring to Austin at some point.
Shrug. Most regions have natural disasters. Floods and hurricanes seem just as bad if not more. Tornadoes are no cup of tea either. And most Orange County metros probably have less fire risk due to the geography of that area.
If you're commuting in a Lyft/Uber, you're part of the problem. That aside, for better or worse, most of us city-dwellers are numbed to shocking! displays of hard drug use.
"... and food is above average for an American city ..."
The food in San Francisco and Marin is the best food in the world, by a fair margin.
In 2018, food, food venues, eating environments and every other aspect of dining, the world over, is being invented and reshaped in San Francisco.
Go anywhere else in the world, at any price point, from the first class lounge at Hong Kong airport to the mall food court in Granada, Spain, and everyone is inspired by, or directly copying, what is being done here.
EDIT: my parent spoke not of a particular restaurant, but the food of the city, generally. That is what I am talking about - not who has the best BBQ joint in your favorite BBQ genre, but which city has the best food (as opposed to "above average for an American city").
I stand by the assertion that food(ie) culture, worldwide, is being driven by SF.
That's a very bold statement, and frankly demonstrates the insular, self congratulatory circle jerk of the Bay Area. Amazing food, of course, but I've been to an open air Tejano restaurant in a garden outside of San Antonio that beat anything in the Bay, roaming chickens and all.
The proprietors could give a shit about SF. And oh yeah, your BBQ sucks. Sure, I can get decent brisket, but for triple the price and half the portion.
Rudy's was hands down the number one thing I missed in moving from SA to SF. Eventually I found solace at Everett and Jones in Berkeley, but even that'll never come close to Texas BBQ.
That would be news many people (e.g. El Bulli graduates in Spain) who are really innovating in food.
Sure, Bay Area (although not so much SF itself) has some good, even great, if vastly overpriced, food, but "best, by a fair margin" is a gross exaggeration.
The average Marin resident doesn't eat at these places.
These are the places for the finance CEOs, high profile landlords, and the tech commuters. There's no post hippie commune or even yuppies here anymore. Just greedy fucks eating overpriced food on undersized plates.
This is unnecessarily inflammatory. Several cities around the world are having an impact. I've spent plenty of time in SF (some of it with my partner who has been a semi-professional food reviewer for 10+ years) and yes, it's great. But Melbourne and Sydney in Australia – which are similarly cosmopolitan to SF – would have to count as rivals and also have a strong influence internationally, as do cities in Asia and Europe. There's no need to argue that one particular city is leading the world "by a fair margin". It's a subjective claim that is impossible to prove and thus only leads to futile arguments.
I am not a CA native and I don't live in SF (although I do live in Marin). I do, however, travel all over the United States and the world and I see that there has been a global, emergent food culture (perhaps a monoculture ?) and it seems clear to me that San Francisco is the root stock - from the ambience and the lighting to the food sourcing and the coffee list.
I'm sure it's a repeat of "American Food" before it and "French Cuisine" before that. It won't last forever.
> I stand by the assertion that food(ie) culture, worldwide, is being driven by SF.
Lay off the kool-aid kid, it's bad for you mental health. Who told you that the global foodie culture is driven from SF? Not here in India for sure. And I really doubt it is affecting anywhere else in Asia.
"My rent is $1300, I live with one roommate on Russian Hill."
Sorry this pricing is not realistic for other viewers here. A two bedroom in Russian hill for $2600 is probably a passed down rent controlled unit (A decade?). A typical 2 bedroom (without problems / not nice / no parking / 800sqft) is about $4500.
If you are outside of SF and look at prices, remember many people are on rent control. And your best bet is finding someone who is.
So you are saying OP got lucky to rent a rent controlled apartment, rather than the exorbitantly higher normal prices? Am I missing something? I think it just goes to prove the OP’s point further
Because it is expensive, and because I don't feel the quality of living there justifies the expense to be paid. Bad traffic, and a city wide hygiene problem.
My sample is limited, but not a lot people around me have good opinions about SF. Guess it is a mutual selection as well.
It’s very expensive today but in five years time when people look back they’ll say it’s cheap. I remember looking at expensive houses in San Jose back in 2010. Now that price (750k$) isn’t available any more.
I do wonder if there's a breaking point where people won't be willing to pay the premium. Current rents are already severely stretching the budgets of your average entry-level techie.
I'm curious on why people love to set up their companies in the city or live in the city. I mean, there are plenty of office space in Fremont, for example, and living in the Bay Area is much more pleasant than in the city. I was wondering what's so enticing about city life. Bars? But bars are so noisy and anti-social. I never get it.
To color it in with an anecdote as a 27 year old who grew up in the suburbs and spent the last 7-ish years of my life in city centers: my personal preference is just that I like the presence of other people.
I don’t feel bothered by lots of people walking around the streets, hearing their conversations, living in proximity to others; and I only feel marginally bothered by crowds and packed trains, definitely less than I enjoy the bustle.
In fact even if I don’t talk to a single person or enter a single establishment it just makes me feel energized to be around it. Bars are antisocial and I don’t go often, but even when I’m just walking past one on the way home, the atmosphere around them makes me feel happy (and you can be social at a reasonable volume with all the smokers and loiterers outside if that’s what you like).
There’s something deeply depressing to me about the American suburban life I grew up in: always deserted, copy-pasted strip malls; giant, humanless roads clogged with hurtling metal death traps; cul-de-sacs of strangers spending large fractions of their lives solitary in cars.
(I do acknowledge it can be different to some extent—the ethnic suburbs in LA are vibrant in pockets, for example—but even in the best cases they’re still pretty desolate to me.)
Where I came from in the Midwest, my life involved never talking to anybody within a 20 mile radius of my house except in business transactions, and only rarely even seeing my neighbors. As a child I didn’t mind, but after having lived differently there’s no way I’d choose to go back unless it’s prohibitively expensive to choose otherwise (which is, to my knowledge, a major driver of people moving out of cities into suburbs).
Separately, I personally dislike driving and greatly prefer public transportation. It’s far more comfortable (not much acceleration and far more space than a tiny car unless it’s rush hour), I don’t have to pay attention to anything except where I’m getting off, it’s super cheap, no risk of accidents or headaches from other drivers incompetence, I don’t have to ever find nor pay for parking, I don’t have to worry about the safety of my personal property, I don’t have to worry about my car breaking down out of nowhere, I can drink and not personally endanger myself, the list or positives is basically endless to me but I’ll stop there.
But that all said San Francisco isn’t that dense (in my opinion), has such glaring social issues, is ludicrously expensive and doesn’t have particularly good infrastructure/transit. Given that I can get all of those things automatically by living in pretty much any major east Asian or European city, that’s my preference, but the one and only thing drawing me back is the concentration of jobs and money.
I weaned myself off San Francisco and lived in east Asia for a couple years, but I found myself back now for a job. Hopefully not too long from now I’ll be able to head back over, or at least work remote for a significant part of my time.
This is an echo of my thoughts, as a 29yo. I grew up in a podunk Middle Eastern "city" (it was the national capital, but...) which can be geographically approximated by an american suburb lining a single, not-so-important highway.
I realized I loved the city (for exactly the reasons you mentioned) only when I spent a month in the countryside of Thailand after 2 years of SF. I then spent a considerable time in the major East Asian metropolises, before returning here to rejoin my cofounders. I am far happier than I would be in any non-metropolis, but I can't stop thinking of all the ways SF is just subpar in all the things that make a city great except for interesting conversations with intelligent people, pro-entrepreneurial vibe (minus the VC/fundraising noise), and technical prowess.
Being near my cofounders is invaluable and my heart may be in SF for being the first metropolis I got a chance to get attached to, but I am eagerly looking for a way to live 9 months of the year in a more functional metropolis like NYC, and come here on workations while crashing with friends.
Yep I think we see eye to eye on all of that. With a clarification that SF is great in particular for having professional, tech- or entrepreneurial-focused conversations, but that social scene is pretty weak otherwise. I've found that, except with those close to me, my conversations in the Bay Area very quickly transform into talking about what you're working on or what credentials you have. People here generally don't seem to want to talk about much else, whereas my experience chatting up strangers in Tokyo and Shanghai is that people actively avoid talking about their work, and my friends in Bangalore compare the social scene there vs SF like night and day.
And as far as I can tell a lot of my friends have the same thoughts—it's not just Bay Area natives who can't afford the cost of living who leave the Bay Area for greener pastures, but also tons of disillusioned techies themselves—so the people deriding Californians in this article might rightfully complain about that group.
Thankfully being in software provides a benefit inaccessible to most—the flexibility to work remote. So I think that lifestyle is definitely doable, and I intend to make it happen one way or another.
Yeah agreed on all counts. Most other metropolises have more diverse social interaction value propositions than SF, which is mostly technical, ideological or entrepreneurial, with a strong tendency to become circlejerking.
On a related note, I am very interested in facilitating a location-independent lifestyle for those with the flexibility to work remote. I have spent a long time researching logistics, and I really want to orchestrate a system where two people each pay the average of rent between two cities, and coordinate trading places a few times a year. Feel free to DM (contact in profile) if you're interested in talking more about this!
I’ll tell you: you don’t need a car. Everything is right there, you name it. You want to meet up in a bar to see your friends? Watch a movie? Eat out? Just walk. There is a meetup after work? It’s fine you’re not far away, you can stay late.
I've lives a while in Seattle (childhood to 2010) and San Francisco 4 years ago to present. My take on it is that San Francisco isn't really significantly better or worse than comparable dynamic cities. It's got good cultural, social, and economic opportunities. But it's nothing super special, and it largely doesn't justify the cost unless you're getting paid a premium to live there (thus why it's dominated by higher paid workers mostly in tech).
I'm not so sure whether it's fair to say that this is the wealthy people deliberately imposing exclusory policies. It's mostly long time residents that are anti-development and favor nativist policies like rent control. Most of the tech workers I know want the city to build more housing and remove nativist policies. But some, like proposition 13, are enacted by the state and our ability to remove them is very limited.
The only people who benefit from rent control are long time residents that were fortunate enough to start ending a long time ago. Everyone else is subsidizing those people. This is why rent control is a nativist policy. Not to mention, rent control suppresses willingness to build more housing thus contributing to the chronic undersupply of housing in places like San Francisco that have extensive rent control. People would be a lot less eager to shoot down development proposals if they felt the impact of rising rents. But currently, only ~30-40% of the renter population is affected by rising rents.
A lot of onlookers into cities like SF think "absolute rent control" when rent control is mentioned -- that the rent prices of certain units are locked/fixed increment set by the government regardless of anything. This is low income housing. LIH is not rent control. Rent control is a discriminatory practice that creates a secondary market that is insulated from most of the people who truly need it, because while a sitting tenant is "protected", a new move-in is not (and every "sitting tenant" becomes a "new move-in" whenever their housing needs change, but some are better connected to a possible new rent controlled opportunity they can piggyback). It's fundamentally orthogonal to the benefits intended by a rental economy, which is to allow many consumers freedom of choice without discriminatory pricing.
The solution is to build enough housing such that the market rate is affordable. Then, landlords need to keep rents low enough to be competitive with other apartments.
San Francisco is awful. Recently a homeless person mindlessly threw their bucket of shit onto the hood of my Uber. This was in SoMa so not even Tenderloin where you might expect something like that.
A month ago I took the bus in emeryville, bunch of kids started slapping passengers randomly. I thought I was going to have to fight against them. They ended up ignoring my gf and I.
A week after I take a bus around 2pm. In the mission a guy just jumped on a girl and pulled on her phone for like 10s until she released it. Then got out of the bus and ran away. Frightening stuff.
That and the weird homeless jumping at you randomly in the street to give you a scare. I don’t understand why any tourists would come here. It’s really unsafe, especially if you have children.
PS: I also feel so bad for these homes with homeless people sleeping on their porches... or all these shops, restaurants, bars and cafes that end up being swarmed and surrounded by the crazies. Life suck for a lot of the people here. I’m happy I can afford to cab everywhere and avoid the craziness most of the time.
After 20 years in the Bay Area, I left just over two years ago. I moved across the world to Saigon, Vietnam. I had never lived outside of California before.
I did not leave because I hated SF, I left because I wanted to do something else with my life. In a way, for the same reasons I stopped going to Burningman after the 5th time. There is other things to do in life than just experience one city.
One thing about the bay area is that it definitely goes through cycles. I went through that many times. You can't take it personally that your friends want to do something else with their life. The expectation that we stay in the bay area until we die seems obtuse to me.
I was back recently for a work trip (consulting) and I did not miss it at all. I realized that at the end of the day, I was doing it wrong for myself. I was leading a consumerist lifestyle of click buying things I did not really need on Amazon or paying $20 for lunch every day. Now that I have changed those patterns, I am much happier and more free.
Every time there is one of these threads about SF, the topic of human feces seems to be a big part of it. People defecating everywhere, people throwing feces at each other, just filth everywhere.
WHY does the city not just install portapotties all over the place?
I bet they could even plumb the portos into the actual sewer eventually, but it seems like just installing portos and having trucks pump them a few times a day is something that could happen tomorrow.
"WHY does the city not just install portapotties all over the place?"
I can clarify what is happening - this might help others too. There is a large drug scene around Edddy & Turk & Market in San Francisco. Mainly crack or heroin (currently). To earn money these addicts pan handle around market street.
What happens is the addicted users often get belly sick (crack guys from eating food while high and heroin guys from being 'dope sick'). They don't have the physical capacity to move quick enough to a restroom. AND they occupy the most heavily trafficked areas for money (powell/market).
It’s not just for the homeless, others have to go when they’re out of their place as well. I never understood why people get mad at me for pissing in the street when I don’t have much choice.
It's not just San Francisco. The whole state has been on a steady decline since... wait for it... the state turned blue. It's very sad because the California I grew up in was the place to be, not just in the US but in the world.
I lived in the state from 1967 until 2006 and I can tell you 1992 was pretty much the pivot point.
For the rent of a small studio in SF, ten years ago I left the bay area and got a mortgage on a modest house on a few acres in rural New Mexico. Now the mortgage is paid and all that cash not going to a landlord or a bank makes a big difference in my lifestyle and peace of mind.
For me living far from a city is a bonus, and without remote work I'd be hosed here, so it's sure not for everyone. But I'm not tempted to go back.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 83.6 ms ] threadFTFY
Or, to force you into a false dichotomy, are you saying that back when hotdogs cost $0.05, increasing the minimum wage from a few pennies an hour two $2.00 an hour made all the difference in the world?
I don't particularly trust cutthroat employers, who have demonstrated their desire to do everything they can to undercut the salaries and benefits of their employees to expand a bottom line, to properly value and choose to provide the necessary income to give their employees humane standards of living.
Though I do think that a fixed minimum wage where you have to have to have heated debates every time cost of living changes about what it should be set to, is silly. If it's supposed to reflect the ability to achieve a minimum standard of living, let's at least set it dynamically against the price of a typical basket of goods; or use a different mechanism than a minimum wage altogether to achieve that minimum standard of living.
It’s a tech distopia. I’m not even talking about having to step over human feces 3 times per block. I’m talking about the utter lack of ethics and values of the people who have descended like rabid vultures to manipulate the tech utopian thinkers and then run with the money. The damage is done and we’re just now starting to see the impact it’s had on the people that haven’t been taken along for the ride to the top. That place is a lost cause.
I guess it would have been cool to be there during the Alan Kay xerox parc days. Probably intoxicatingly inspiring environment. But now... I hope it burns. I’ll show up to repair and rebuild.
I do enjoy the Marin headlands though. And I suppose I’ll take a Taqueria SF burrito most days of the week. And the punk scene in Berkeley was great, and growing up skating there was awesome, but... meh the bad outweighs the good.
a lot of these people, having destroyed SF as a livable city, are now moving on to Seattle. Which is rapidly also turning into a city with feces laden sidewalks and a tech dystopia.
He than turns and donates millions/billions ONCE, but that’s specks of sand compared to what would be generated over time yearly and consistently.
So... no faith in that city either and no faith in tech in general. Super sad.
The problem is taxing job headcounts regardless the amount. That creates a horrible precedent for any company trying to do business in a city. It's basically telling business owners that the jobs they are creating are not welcomed. It's penalizing the core of what makes an economy productive.
Let's put Amazon out of the picture for a minute. Since the head tax was meant to tax large employers, it's kind of hard to see in the micro context what imposing a job headcount tax actually means. So for the sake of the example let's say that the head tax applied for any business owner (not hard to imagine since implementing it for large employers create precedence for taxing small employers).
Let's imagine that the business that we are talking about is Mommy's Bakery. The head tax in Seattle was the equivalent of telling mommy to pay a USD 750 ransom for her three employees or to fuck off. Mommy is already collecting and paying taxes and fees.
She is employing people that are putting money back into the local economy, but the city feels that the act of job creation is adding to their problems. So they decide that they want to tax those headcounts.
This is more or less the equivalent of you helping a friend or relative with some money and they coming back and telling you, "hey thanks for the hundred bucks, but because I'm gonna get wasted tonight and gonna spend it all on drinks, I'd need 6 bucks more to get back home".
Yeah sure, six bucks are not too much but just asking for them after you gave them a USD 100, it's utterly ridiculous.
This is how the Seattle city employers felt when the head tax was proposed. They already contribute millions of dollars to the city economy in taxes and jobs, but the city still wanted to get more to justify their gross incompetence when it comes to dealing with the homelessness crisis.
San Franciscans, Californians in general, and "transplants" writ large did not cause this problem. We did it to ourselves with quite a few different inputs.
Ultimately what people who live here--in Seattle, I mean--is that we cannot stop new arrivals from, well, arriving. Freedom of movement is a right in the United States so they're coming, whether we like it or not. And that means we have to scoot over a bit, make a little room, and say hi to our new neighbors. That we've not done that is a huge reason why our arts, our humanities, and our not-white-collar-professional jobs are all decamping to the next cheap place.
However, it's not just housing. Seattle is a city having to go it almost alone trying to fix all of the region's ills, from traffic to mental health to substance abuse to tents on WSDOT's medians. It's not something Seattle can do alone and it's not a burden Seattle taxpayers should bear all by ourselves.
But it's also not the fault of the new arrival from San Francisco. She has a reasons to suspect we'd have our act together, and we've failed her just as much as we've failed the person who winds up in a tent next to the onramp to highway 520.
One of my exes actually came here from Spokane, as its much easier going out here as a homeless gay 17 year old then living with his abusive brothers. Many suburbs and towns are all too happy to encourage the least well to do to head towards the nearest major town, generally involving the police corralling those less fortunate than us and giving them a ride towards said major town.
I hear Tacoma is still relatively inexpensive and nice, one of my old professors moved down there and finds it rather decent. Not sure how many not-white-collar-professionals will continue to be able to afford to live in and around Seattle (outside of a handful of "Affordable" aka heavily subsidized housing complexes).
An article I read recently (https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-homelessness)
> According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, the Seattle metro area spends more than $1 billion fighting homelessness every year. That’s nearly $100,000 for every homeless man, woman, and child in King County, yet the crisis seems only to have deepened, with more addiction, more crime, and more tent encampments in residential neighborhoods.
That statistic should shock people who think that the problem is insufficient government spending or a type of rabid, rich eating the poor Dickensian dystopia.
That article also mentions "pathological altruism", which roughly translates into paying $ for guilt in a way that harms the people who are supposed to be helped. It's sad too, because most tech workers I know would not advocate behaviors/policies for themselves that they advocate for the homeless. Any tech startup that basically was content with no standards, endless spending, and no accountability in the corporate or personal sphere would be bankrupt.
Rufo's platform, just before he enter-exited the race, can best be described as "arrest them all and do it enough times that they move to Eugene." He's only one in a long line of brief candidates who want to immediately ramp up all kinds of law enforcement activity while we "consider proper funding levels" for social services, with no professed idea for what happens when the people we've arrested for vagrancy walk out of the King County Jail in downtown Seattle.
The one thing he and I agree on is that the outputs for our inputs are not at all acceptable but I don't agree at all with what little he proposed to do about it.
I didn't say that Mr. Rufo was incorrect in his numbers; I said I vehemently disagreed with the proposals he made in his brief campaign. I agree with Mayor Durkan that we need a comprehensive understanding of what the money is being spent towards and the results it is having, something her office is supposed to be working on. But we can't just say "spending is paused until we figure that out." We also can't continue with Seattle being the only government entity spending appreciable money on the problem while surrounding cities and counties cluck their tongues in disdain. This is also the State of Washington's and King County's problem, if nothing else. They should act like it.
One last bit, I did not engage in any ad hominems against Rufo; I called him no names (unless you mean "very conservative," which is a label he adopted for himself in his campaign). I denigrated his policy proposals and related an observer's view of what happened to his campaign.
You brought the character of the person making a claim about a statistic into a tangent that had nothing to do with my comment. That's an ad hominem.
With respect to the $100K a homeless person, I quite frankly find that absurd. If it was a spending problem, you could pay them the money directly and they'd be richer than most Americans.
Thats why Utah just started paying for housing. They figured out that the follow on costs to homelessness were huge and for many subgroups of the homeless population it's much cheaper to just pay for their shelter than to pay for all the other things that are certain to go wrong that will require state intervention anyway.
But the post throws a bunch of softballs. It mentions rising costs, hipster drinks, etc. And yes, the _relentless_ costs are a huge factor. But it's not just the costs that changed, it's the entire tenor of the place. The focus on money, valuations, investments... it's like working for Wall Street, with all the nonsense and none of the benefits of being in NYC. And a lot of people are looking at themselves and asking: is this what I want to do with my life? (Except for those who did...)
But on the plus side, moving away is not such a bad thing. Unlike what the post author suggests, the transplants will not "ruin" other cities. At least not the large ones: Pittsburgh, Chicago, Boston, NYC, there are great cities out there with a fun tech culture, much more housing (so it's cheaper), and they've been absorbing newcomers for a hundred years without any danger to their existing culture. (I'll leave Austin and Portland out of it - they might be too small to survive a mass migration of Californians. ;) )
That may be true, but I've met too many people who sold a one-bedroom garden shed in California for $1.2B and moved to a shiney new 11,000 square foot mcmansion in Hyde Park. They're just passing the ruin along.
SF is picked on because people pay such a premium to live there (including employers via the necessary high wages), and it is becoming less and less worth that premium as tech extends out of the bay area.
Same general idea as the Old-Money Boston-Brahmin or NYC types, just with better marketing.
- NYC is expensive and has failing transportation, but people love the unparalleled cultural diversity and gritty tenacity of the city
- Paris is dirty and unfriendly, but the city's romance and character make it a great place to live
- London is expensive and out of touch, but its job opportunities and multiculturalism make it a better place to live
...and so on and so forth.
Someone's always going to dislike SF for a valid reason and someone's always going to hit you back with a valid reason why it's a good place. They're probably both correct.
I didn’t find the tourist-trafficked parts to be dirty. Unfriendliness has is just Parisians being “on-brand.”
SF is incredibly beautiful - land's end, the presidio, twin peaks, the fog, hwy1 in either direction - but I started to feel like the natural beauty was one of the only positive (non-professional) bits of living there.
Anyways, after a bit of travel, I'm considering Boston again for grad school. It's a really awesome city - super diverse, and the winters aren't as bad as everyone says they are. Enjoy!
I did my undergrad in Boston, and then visited for a reunion and then a friend's wedding into an extended trip where I just worked from cafes in different corners of the city -- the last of which really disenchanted me with the city after the two prior visits surrounded by friends.
Boston's academic scene is super diverse. Having the very best educational brands in the world (many of which take pride in their meritocracy and inclusive admissions) means every kind of person dreams of entering that academic scene.
But among the postgrad professionals? It becomes eerily white, with a few pockets of Asians that can be traced back to a professor or other highly respected profession centered in Boston. The chinatown is more of a chinablock. There's half a street with anything Korean. There's a reason so many people who studied in Boston end up in CA or NYC and feel happier, whether they consciously attribute it to the diversity or not (among other reasons). Boston's diversity is not diversity like what London or New York or Seattle provide. SF is barely better, just due to tech being similar to Boston's academic scene and wooing people from very diverse backgrounds, but is a wider professional field with more resources to bring people in.
That said, Boston has its perks. It's beautiful in every season in a unique way, with cobblestone streets and tree-lined avenues, quaint rustic stores, proximity to EU for an international trip, proximity to other east coast hubs like pittsburgh/DC/NYC with a bus/train ride, etc. And if you're going for grad school, there's still plenty of diversity, although self-selected by your program/school.
But diversity and affordable rents are not the perks I would consider Boston for a long-term stay post-grad.
The end result is that locations that are physically nice will be occupied by people who have a relatively high tolerance for those two not-nice attributes and a relatively high desire for the physical niceness.
So if you like cool weather and pretty hills and the ocean, and you don't mind violent crime or hepatitis or $2,000,000 houses, then you'll be happy to wedge yourself in like a chicken in a factory farm. It takes a certain type of person to decide that this is the best choice.
In concrete terms, that means: building sufficient housing and infrastructure to keep life affordable and smooth; designing (or shepherding emergent patterns of) functional, livable neighborhoods; and addressing social problems as they arise.
You might be surprised to find that you can still get a studio in Tokyo within 45 minutes of the city center for ~$400/mo (bump up to ~$600 if you want to be 15 minutes away), that it's easy and efficient to get around to nice urban and natural amenities, and that there are endless quiet, peaceful, and utterly charming neighborhoods, parks, and temples right next to all the hotspots. You'll never see any feces on the street, you never see anybody shooting up needles, and nobody will ever beg you to spare a dollar.
Part of that is cultural, but most of that is by concerted effort.
But positive outcomes like that can only happen if a city successfully adapts to changes—which San Francisco (and virtually every American city to varying degrees) has abysmally failed at. As another commenter pointed out up the page, San Francisco's public policy has been very nativist, and the physical form of the city has remained more or less unchanged for decades, which spells disaster for one of the most coveted places to move to in the world.
* I've spent a limited amount of time in SF so grain of salt.
The author hasn’t been to a Berkeley (or San Francisco, or a Penninsula town) city council meeting... there is a lot of very blatant resentment in the Bay Area directed (mostly unfairly) at transplants.
Some parts of San Francisco are very dirty and the homeless issue is not exaggerated. Everybody knows about the Tenderloin at night.
With that being said, I drove across the US two years ago and if you keep your eyes open you realize it is all over - Portland and Seattle are no better, just less talked about.
My rent is $1300, I live with one roommate on Russian Hill. I'm flexible and lucky so this is not representative. A girl I know who works at Google lives in inner Richmond (arguably a less desirable area) by herself and pays nearly triple for some reason.
It is hard to find a proper gym for less than a Benjamin and food is above average for an American city but hilariously expensive. Good way to gauge is pick some fast food chain and compare, Dennys is x2 here than the rest of the country.
All in all this place isn't the shiny happy city you'd imagine from watching Full House or or the counter culture epicenter of hippie times gone by. It doesn't suck, I'd definitely visit for a week or two if you have never been, and there's a lot of history here but in the end it is no longer a very remarkable place to live.
It's not that it's not talked about, it's that other cities manage to not have it right in the middle of the city.
I can't even imagining owning a house _here_, let alone in the bay. Buying a house is generally something adults in America aspire to doing, but in California it's basically a mark of wealth. The amount of cash you have to stuff away for a down payment of sufficient size to not be fleeced by the banks is astronomical.
I'm really considering transferring to Austin at some point.
The food in San Francisco and Marin is the best food in the world, by a fair margin.
In 2018, food, food venues, eating environments and every other aspect of dining, the world over, is being invented and reshaped in San Francisco.
Go anywhere else in the world, at any price point, from the first class lounge at Hong Kong airport to the mall food court in Granada, Spain, and everyone is inspired by, or directly copying, what is being done here.
EDIT: my parent spoke not of a particular restaurant, but the food of the city, generally. That is what I am talking about - not who has the best BBQ joint in your favorite BBQ genre, but which city has the best food (as opposed to "above average for an American city").
I stand by the assertion that food(ie) culture, worldwide, is being driven by SF.
The proprietors could give a shit about SF. And oh yeah, your BBQ sucks. Sure, I can get decent brisket, but for triple the price and half the portion.
Sure, Bay Area (although not so much SF itself) has some good, even great, if vastly overpriced, food, but "best, by a fair margin" is a gross exaggeration.
The average Marin resident doesn't eat at these places.
These are the places for the finance CEOs, high profile landlords, and the tech commuters. There's no post hippie commune or even yuppies here anymore. Just greedy fucks eating overpriced food on undersized plates.
I am not a CA native and I don't live in SF (although I do live in Marin). I do, however, travel all over the United States and the world and I see that there has been a global, emergent food culture (perhaps a monoculture ?) and it seems clear to me that San Francisco is the root stock - from the ambience and the lighting to the food sourcing and the coffee list.
I'm sure it's a repeat of "American Food" before it and "French Cuisine" before that. It won't last forever.
Lay off the kool-aid kid, it's bad for you mental health. Who told you that the global foodie culture is driven from SF? Not here in India for sure. And I really doubt it is affecting anywhere else in Asia.
Sorry this pricing is not realistic for other viewers here. A two bedroom in Russian hill for $2600 is probably a passed down rent controlled unit (A decade?). A typical 2 bedroom (without problems / not nice / no parking / 800sqft) is about $4500.
If you are outside of SF and look at prices, remember many people are on rent control. And your best bet is finding someone who is.
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/d/san-francisco-larkin-...
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/d/san-francisco-edwardi...
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/d/san-francisco-russian...
(Former resident)
My sample is limited, but not a lot people around me have good opinions about SF. Guess it is a mutual selection as well.
EDIT: some early evidence to that speculation: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/10/19/bay-area-rents-...
I don’t feel bothered by lots of people walking around the streets, hearing their conversations, living in proximity to others; and I only feel marginally bothered by crowds and packed trains, definitely less than I enjoy the bustle.
In fact even if I don’t talk to a single person or enter a single establishment it just makes me feel energized to be around it. Bars are antisocial and I don’t go often, but even when I’m just walking past one on the way home, the atmosphere around them makes me feel happy (and you can be social at a reasonable volume with all the smokers and loiterers outside if that’s what you like).
There’s something deeply depressing to me about the American suburban life I grew up in: always deserted, copy-pasted strip malls; giant, humanless roads clogged with hurtling metal death traps; cul-de-sacs of strangers spending large fractions of their lives solitary in cars.
(I do acknowledge it can be different to some extent—the ethnic suburbs in LA are vibrant in pockets, for example—but even in the best cases they’re still pretty desolate to me.)
Where I came from in the Midwest, my life involved never talking to anybody within a 20 mile radius of my house except in business transactions, and only rarely even seeing my neighbors. As a child I didn’t mind, but after having lived differently there’s no way I’d choose to go back unless it’s prohibitively expensive to choose otherwise (which is, to my knowledge, a major driver of people moving out of cities into suburbs).
Separately, I personally dislike driving and greatly prefer public transportation. It’s far more comfortable (not much acceleration and far more space than a tiny car unless it’s rush hour), I don’t have to pay attention to anything except where I’m getting off, it’s super cheap, no risk of accidents or headaches from other drivers incompetence, I don’t have to ever find nor pay for parking, I don’t have to worry about the safety of my personal property, I don’t have to worry about my car breaking down out of nowhere, I can drink and not personally endanger myself, the list or positives is basically endless to me but I’ll stop there.
But that all said San Francisco isn’t that dense (in my opinion), has such glaring social issues, is ludicrously expensive and doesn’t have particularly good infrastructure/transit. Given that I can get all of those things automatically by living in pretty much any major east Asian or European city, that’s my preference, but the one and only thing drawing me back is the concentration of jobs and money.
I weaned myself off San Francisco and lived in east Asia for a couple years, but I found myself back now for a job. Hopefully not too long from now I’ll be able to head back over, or at least work remote for a significant part of my time.
I realized I loved the city (for exactly the reasons you mentioned) only when I spent a month in the countryside of Thailand after 2 years of SF. I then spent a considerable time in the major East Asian metropolises, before returning here to rejoin my cofounders. I am far happier than I would be in any non-metropolis, but I can't stop thinking of all the ways SF is just subpar in all the things that make a city great except for interesting conversations with intelligent people, pro-entrepreneurial vibe (minus the VC/fundraising noise), and technical prowess.
Being near my cofounders is invaluable and my heart may be in SF for being the first metropolis I got a chance to get attached to, but I am eagerly looking for a way to live 9 months of the year in a more functional metropolis like NYC, and come here on workations while crashing with friends.
And as far as I can tell a lot of my friends have the same thoughts—it's not just Bay Area natives who can't afford the cost of living who leave the Bay Area for greener pastures, but also tons of disillusioned techies themselves—so the people deriding Californians in this article might rightfully complain about that group.
Thankfully being in software provides a benefit inaccessible to most—the flexibility to work remote. So I think that lifestyle is definitely doable, and I intend to make it happen one way or another.
On a related note, I am very interested in facilitating a location-independent lifestyle for those with the flexibility to work remote. I have spent a long time researching logistics, and I really want to orchestrate a system where two people each pay the average of rent between two cities, and coordinate trading places a few times a year. Feel free to DM (contact in profile) if you're interested in talking more about this!
I'm not so sure whether it's fair to say that this is the wealthy people deliberately imposing exclusory policies. It's mostly long time residents that are anti-development and favor nativist policies like rent control. Most of the tech workers I know want the city to build more housing and remove nativist policies. But some, like proposition 13, are enacted by the state and our ability to remove them is very limited.
A lot of onlookers into cities like SF think "absolute rent control" when rent control is mentioned -- that the rent prices of certain units are locked/fixed increment set by the government regardless of anything. This is low income housing. LIH is not rent control. Rent control is a discriminatory practice that creates a secondary market that is insulated from most of the people who truly need it, because while a sitting tenant is "protected", a new move-in is not (and every "sitting tenant" becomes a "new move-in" whenever their housing needs change, but some are better connected to a possible new rent controlled opportunity they can piggyback). It's fundamentally orthogonal to the benefits intended by a rental economy, which is to allow many consumers freedom of choice without discriminatory pricing.
A week after I take a bus around 2pm. In the mission a guy just jumped on a girl and pulled on her phone for like 10s until she released it. Then got out of the bus and ran away. Frightening stuff.
That and the weird homeless jumping at you randomly in the street to give you a scare. I don’t understand why any tourists would come here. It’s really unsafe, especially if you have children.
PS: I also feel so bad for these homes with homeless people sleeping on their porches... or all these shops, restaurants, bars and cafes that end up being swarmed and surrounded by the crazies. Life suck for a lot of the people here. I’m happy I can afford to cab everywhere and avoid the craziness most of the time.
I did not leave because I hated SF, I left because I wanted to do something else with my life. In a way, for the same reasons I stopped going to Burningman after the 5th time. There is other things to do in life than just experience one city.
One thing about the bay area is that it definitely goes through cycles. I went through that many times. You can't take it personally that your friends want to do something else with their life. The expectation that we stay in the bay area until we die seems obtuse to me.
I was back recently for a work trip (consulting) and I did not miss it at all. I realized that at the end of the day, I was doing it wrong for myself. I was leading a consumerist lifestyle of click buying things I did not really need on Amazon or paying $20 for lunch every day. Now that I have changed those patterns, I am much happier and more free.
WHY does the city not just install portapotties all over the place?
I bet they could even plumb the portos into the actual sewer eventually, but it seems like just installing portos and having trucks pump them a few times a day is something that could happen tomorrow.
I can clarify what is happening - this might help others too. There is a large drug scene around Edddy & Turk & Market in San Francisco. Mainly crack or heroin (currently). To earn money these addicts pan handle around market street.
What happens is the addicted users often get belly sick (crack guys from eating food while high and heroin guys from being 'dope sick'). They don't have the physical capacity to move quick enough to a restroom. AND they occupy the most heavily trafficked areas for money (powell/market).
So this is a perfect storm.
Of course, most are commandeered into shooting galleries or places to turn tricks.
Portapotties need a lot of maintenance and have odor issues.
I lived in the state from 1967 until 2006 and I can tell you 1992 was pretty much the pivot point.
For me living far from a city is a bonus, and without remote work I'd be hosed here, so it's sure not for everyone. But I'm not tempted to go back.