Yeah, my first reaction was: you're fleeing what? SF is not California. It's not even the Bay Area. It's one city. This is what a lot of incoming people never seem to grok, regardless of how much time they spend living in SF. CA is a huge state, the Bay Area is large, and it's not all exactly the same.
OTOH we have too many people anyway, so if they want to leave because of "$17 salads", that's fine. Maybe we can eventually drive places again, without traffic jams. A man can dream.
So San Francisco is not in the... San Francisco Bay Area?
Strong disagree with this one. It is part of the urban conurbation. Sure, it might be "different" from the rest but yes, it is part of the Bay Area. Even San Rafael and Richmond are SFBA technically if you look in the map.
They said SF != The Bay Area, not SF ∉ The Bay Area. Your point agrees with him. The Bay Area includes Oakland, Richmond etc. which are pretty different than SF.
It is probably not accurate to extrapolate the author's experience in SF to what life is like in all of the other parts of the Bay, much less CA as a whole.
Disagree all you want but the Bay Area does not have SF in the center. That's north. Silicon Valley is really North San Jose and Sunnyvale. My house in South San Jose was at least and hour from SF and the streets were cleaner, traffic was better, crime was lower and things were cheaper. All of these places make up the Bay Area.
I left anyway after 3+ decades but not because of SF. I just wanted more for less. SF is and always has been a special pocket of gross. Some people love it and others, like me, avoided it at all costs. We're not all the same.
San Francisco has a very valuable and expensive tech labor pool. By GDP, however, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim very much is the dominant economy in California, not the Bay Area. Certainly a city as small as SF proper couldn't qualify for "is California" status in anything.
From your link, it's clear Los Angeles' GDP is growing slower (up 32% from 2012-18); SFBA is up 50% over the same period. With another decade, if growth rates maintain their trajectories, SF is eating LA's lunch: with each passing year, LA becomes less dominant.
> For those who aren’t familiar - check who SF’s DA is, google SF’s school board, daytime population decline, etc.
What did happen to SF? You're assuming everyone reading knows, then point to random posts and ask us to check who is filling them like that's meant to clarify something? The SF School Board's president seems to be Gabriela López[0], I read her profile, and I am no closer to understanding your point.
I'm not playing dumb, I really don't understand what you're trying to say at all.
Neither one really clarifies what your post above was trying to say, and actually raise more questions than they do provide answers.
You linked the entire DA's bio (the good & bad), and a news story about a specific meeting that was dysfunctional. Going from that to SF being a "sad story of bad governance" is a bit of an unexplored jump.
I invite a post actually explaining what you're trying to say.
when I was there he decriminilzed shoplifting and announced police would not respond to "quality of life" crimes, meaning defecating on the street for example. This had immediate visible impact where I was and staying was dangerous. Many stores closed around me because of shoplifting. This was all news last year as well, but it got drowned out because of the situation, even though it made everything much worse.
I find it hilarious when affluent areas complain about food costs. That 17$ salad is a product of their 10,000$/mo lease on the building, 15$/hr living wages, and healthcare for the employees.
So you're assuming the same owner owned the building for several years if not decades? You do realize real estate is a market just like any other, you buy at the market price, finance that purchase by borrowing money from banks, finally you rent it out to recover some of the monthly finance costs, taxes and maintenance expenses. To continue saying landlords this landlords that makes you sound like you discovered a hidden truth that explains away the issues related to the high prices we're seeing. In fact most likely majority of real estate investors in the Bay Area are earning very nominal returns on their investment compared to other markets, see local housing price growth rates.
I don't understand your usage of the term "hilarious". Are you just saying that the price of the salad reasonably reflects the average salary/benefits of the people in the area?
It's hilarious in an ironic sense that the decisions that SF'ians make drive food prices up in a way that they then complain about. The same way that nearly every metro area makes compassionate human centered decisions which drive the baseline cost of goods up. It's the byproduct of living in a city
The price of salad is largely the same -- the high cost derives from paying someone to bring it to your table, and the rent on the square footage your table requires
It is very much incorrect to put $15/hr wages on that list. The minimum wage is lower than it ever has been, inflation adjusted, and back when the minimum wage was actually that high, it didn’t blow up fast food prices or kill small businesses like everyone seems to fret over today. It is obviously not a problem to pay everyone a minimum wage of $15/hr nationally, and the only people who think it would be are extremely wealthy shareholders who would see slightly less capital flowing into their own coffers if they had to share any with the rabble.
A more likely culprit is the number of people walking around SF who pull down $350k+/yr, since they are willing and able to buy $17 salads, as well as overpriced real estate. It all comes down to the amount of money in flux in that location.
I didn't put the 15$/hr min wage in my comment to deride it, I think it should be even higher in metro areas. But it is no secret that 30-40% of operating costs of a restaurant are employee wages. It is definitely a factor on the price charged to customers.
Restaurants (unless you are some michelin star joint) also don't really have the freedom to charge "whatever the customer is willing". Between rent, wages, and local competition, you can pretty much guarantee that there will be an average 10% profit margin in whatever area you are at.
IMO, the biggest culprit here is the astronomical rent prices charged to these places sucking out all of the extra capital gained by these 17$ salads
This. But it would require some kind of introspection to see that the extraordinary salary which caused them to move there in the first place might be actually a contributing factor for a lot of the problems they are complaining about.
no one needs a $17 salad but this is the same type of talk which tries to convince people you cannot eat healthy by spending less than what junk food costs.
However the cost of living does bring along a feeling that if life is this expensive why doesn't it feel or appear better.
It's basically real estate costs all the way down. Restaurant wages need to be higher because it's so expensive for the workers to rent. A one bedroom apartment is at least $1000 more expensive in SF than say, Dallas. That $1000/mo is $6/hr for someone who works full time.
Literally everything you buy in SF costs more because the workers either have to afford a place in the city or have to make some crazy commute.
Hypothetically, what does California intrinsically have that other places can't?
Ocean access, proximity to Asia
Beaches, large parks, mountains (natural spaces)
World class universities
Telecom infrastructure (?)
And what are some things California has that can be duplicated elsewhere?
Innovation-fostering legal system (e.g. IP and non-compete)
Mature, developed capital ecosystem
Vibrant and youth-oriented culture(?)
Much has been made of the VC ecosystem stickiness, but wealthy people tend to be pretty mobile. Especially when there are tax incentives. And eventually, companies follow VC. And talent follows companies.
I would add parental leave, sick leave, overtime after 8 hours, requiring employees be able to sit, anti-SLAPP laws, assisted suicide, and a few other quality of life improvements at work to the list of things that can be duplicated elsewhere.
Vancouver also has a pretty high cost of living from Chinese capital flight into real estate, no? Haven't been up there in a while.
IMHO, people think about the nature of capital ecosystems incompletely.
Why haven't other places duplicated SF / LA's ecosystems?
Not because they couldn't, but because they couldn't be better enough to justify the move.
However, "better" and "enough" are relative terms. If SF & LA are executing well, that's an insurmountable barrier due to network effects. But if SF & LA decrease their competitiveness, the relative difference also decreases.
And at some threshold, it does become possible for other cities to capture that business, network effects be damned.
I think last year's Bay Area fires that blotted out the Sun for weeks have made a big impression on folks outside of the Bay Area (there's no doubt that Valley residents also got a rude awakening from that). Fires are a regular feature of life every summer, in every populated point along the coast in CA. Last year's fires were truly an aberration in that they burned huge swathes of Santa Cruz, which sits in close proximity to the valley proper: it's just over the ridgeline of the mountains that form the western and southern edges of the Valley.
In most years, the Valley barely sees any disruption from forest fires (although people who live on the periphery will disagree with me here).
Last year's fires have definitely cast a shadow over what the future holds, particularly for folks who have chosen to live in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The biggest disadvantage for SC people was a mildly inconvenient and somewhat dangerous drive down Highway 17 for access to SV proper, versus the advantage of beach access and housing that was a shade more reasonable in its cost. That equation has now changed, perhaps irrevocably, because of the fires of last year.
One crucial item is not listed - weather. For people who migrate from all over the world, including places with even better weather, CA weather is a happy compromise. It is sunny for much of the year, there is rain in the spring months, the air is dry, and temperatures rarely swing to extremes.
Virginia certainly doesn't have that.
What's VA's stance on enforcing non-compete agreements? This seemingly innocuous thing really accounts for a lot of the Bay Area's success. Innovative, fabulously successful companies have been repeatedly founded and nurtured here because of the cross-pollination of ideas and competition engendered by CA's refusal to honor non-competes.
VA has a couple things going for it, as far as I can tell:
- Plentiful network connectivity and data centers (many east-coast data centers are sited in a couple spots in VA).
- A large government sector, including many agencies that are tasked with technical work for the federal government, and the educated workforce that goes with it. Perhaps it's a double-edged sword: the region is a bit too dependent on Government largesse. What is interesting is that most no-one talks about how the Federal Government has played an outsize role in nurturing nascent technology innovations and companies (via government contracts and outright funding via In-Q-Tel and such) in the Bay Area. It goes very much against the current ethos of employee activism against DoD projects. In this respect, the Bay Area and VA share a similarity.
Ocean access, proximity to Asia, and natural spaces are found up and down the entire West Coast. Access to nature is considerably better in Seattle than the Bay Area, for example. Most world-class universities on the West Coast are in California but Washington also has one.
The main advantage of California, from a tech perspective, is its large and mature ecosystem, which isn't intrinsic. San Diego does have uniquely perfect weather but that does not extend to the rest of the State and no one goes to San Diego for tech.
I’m surprised you missed “weather” and “sunlight”.
California’s weather is famously pretty good depending on location and preferences. More interesting to me is actually “how many sunny days are there”. Wikipedia has a list of cities by sunlight hours across a range of months [1]. San Francisco is quite sunny, and gets about 3000 hours per year. By contrast, Seattle is 2169 and has a pretty brutal cloudy period, if you care about this.
Total sunlight hours aren’t themselves what matters, because I’m not saying Tucson is a strict improvement. There’s some sort of threshold though for which each person says “this place is depressing” (see also Seasonal Affective Disorder [2]).
There are places that are pretty similar though: Barcelona, Lisbon, Rome, and probably others. They’ve historically faltered on a lot of “could be duplicated” items on your list. My bet is on Barcelona, as the most likely to break out.
You completely missed the business and legal side of the benefits of California:
> Much has been made of the VC ecosystem stickiness, but wealthy people tend to be pretty mobile.
Wealthy people want their startup investments in one place, so they can visit their founders.
> Especially when there are tax incentives.
Tax incentives aren't significant for early-stage startups.
Oh, and California has reasonable non-compete laws (exception is for companies that say "they do everything.") Mass. doesn't, for example. It's very hard to unwind restrictive laws after they're in place, since they favor incumbents.
(The reason Hollywood is in California was to avoid East Coast film industry patents back in the day.)
One thing that other commenters may have not mentioned is the illegality of non-compete clauses in employment contracts. You can just ship yourself across the street to the competitor anytime you fell like it. That's not something that VA or TX has. And it's not just tech jobs that benefit from it. All people in CA enjoy that right and often flaunt it.
Aside: One thing that I've often wondered about is how Detroit pulled it all off. MI wasn't the friendliest state in terms of unions or weather back in the day. I've heard that the Miracle Mile was a big generator of Detroit's success as a lab of automotive fail-fast, but I've not thought that as the whole picture. Any good resources?
I was expecting something longer and more thoughtful, instead it is essentially: high cost of living, and crime in his area became problematic/he personally was the victim of a crime.
"We need more police. There’s a general lawlessness that’s just scary." is the kind of "hot take" I go to Facebook to read. I understand and sympathize that he personally experienced a crime, but it is wrong to extrapolate that into some wider trend without more data (and the proposed solution ("more police") even more so).
What I am saying is: This article isn't very insightful/doesn't add much to any conversation. No doubt people will use it as a springboard into unrelated conversations they want to have though.
"More police" has been on the menu for a long time. The SF police budget has increased 60% in real dollars between 2000 and 2020, and now stands at $5000 per household per year, which is absurd. Obviously, that's not working.
> The SF police budget ... now stands at $5000 per household per year, which is absurd.
It is absurd. Its so absurd that I have a hard time believing it.
Statistics in this article suggest the SF law enforcement budget is close to 10% of the city's general fund, about 700 $/citizen. Its neighbors spend a much, much larger share of their muni budget on policing.
Policing efforts scale with the size of the populace. As a fraction of the city budget, it has decreased from 13% to 10% between 2010 and 2019. If anything, that is the absurdity.
I can't imagine why you would use the nation's most-derided newspaper as a source when primary sources are at your fingertips. "Percent of general fund" is misleading to various degrees depending on the city. Some cities have dedicated taxes for police, some don't fund police from the general fund at all.
SF has a unified city/county government so the sheriff shows up in their budgets, as well as the courts and the rest of it. The whole category had a 2019-2020 budget of 1.72 billion. The SFPD alone was 692 million, so I don't know where the Chronicle came up with 606.
The number of households in San Francisco, according to the census, was 346k.
My wife and I seriously considered moving to Seattle a few years ago. (Her whole family is from Oregon coast, so that would be a lot closer than Baltimore where we were then.) She got mugged in the middle of the afternoon, as just hours after we got there. :-/
Anecdotal obviously, but the whole place seemed less orderly than you’d expect given the booming economy there.
For clarification: You're saying that because your wife got mugged you felt that Seattle was "less orderly" (I'm assuming this means "higher crime") than Baltimore (which has one of the highest crime rates in the country)?
I get that personal connections can be a thing (my sister hated Paris because some creep spit on her after she didn't want to flirt with him) but you realize that statistically that data doesn't support your statement right?
Of course not. But "this city is unsafe because something bad happened to me" is useless data to anyone other than you 5 minutes prior to when that thing happened.
I mean if someone said "would you rather move to a city with a 1% violent crime rate where you know someone who's part of that 1% or a different city with a 7% violent crime rate but nobody you know has been affected", you can do whatever you want but I'll take the first option.
(inb4 "different neighborhoods", "crime rates aren't the same across all demographics", etc)
> For clarification: You're saying that because your wife got mugged you felt that Seattle was "less orderly" (I'm assuming this means "higher crime") than Baltimore (which has one of the highest crime rates in the country)?
No, I mean "less orderly." The "mugger" was more of a drunk opportunist than a serious criminal. This sort of low-level disorder seemed quite tolerated in Seattle, even compared to Baltimore. Of course, part of the reason for the move was going somewhere safer than downtown Baltimore. But fun fact, Seattle's property crime rate, at 46 per 1,000, is higher than Baltimore's, at 43 per 1,000. The property crime rate in New York City is a third as high, at 16 per 100,000.
I'm from St. Louis, which has a much higher crime rate than Seattle, and I think I can understand the distinction. A lot of west coast cities have a sort of chaotic street feel -- lots of homelessness, open-air drug dealing and use, people yelling things in the street, and so on. Yes, St. Louis has many more homicides, but most homicides aren't random, so it's not like the baseline homicide rate affects the typical resident while walking down the street on a Tuesday. (Also: most of those homicides take place in a handful of neighborhoods you're very unlikely to be walking through, in the first place.)
But lots of homelessness and open-air drug-dealing (and so on) can make a pretty big impact on what walking down the street on a Tuesday feels like. (I'm not making an argument that one is more desirable than the other. I'm just noting that I think I understand the distinction.)
This guy is from the Midwest and has lived in SF for four years. Imagine reading a NY Times article about someone moving to New York, complaining, and leaving. Who cares?
Nobody is forcing this guy to buy a $17 salad either.
> Imagine reading a NY Times article about someone moving to New York, complaining, and leaving. Who cares?
I care. Sometimes I consider moving to other places, and these personal experiences of people living in different places are much more helpful than very limited experiences of people never been outside of NY. Even if it is only one data point and the experience is very subjective: I'll read more, someone else will write how happy they are in NY, and I'll decide which opinion is more important to me.
> Nobody is forcing this guy to buy a $17 salad either.
People expect to eat in good cafes, buy quality foods and generally expect standard of life higher than in some third-world countries.
Of course it is possible to eat cheaper, but people want to enjoy their lives, while focusing on their work, not on food budgeting. In particular, just walk in a good looking cafe or a restaurant close to the home without reading their menu prices first.
The chances of randomly walking into any SF restaurant and paying $17 for a salad is very slim. If you’re worried about prices, take the two minutes to check a menu online first.
> The chances of randomly walking into any SF restaurant and paying $17 for a salad is very slim.
If that's true, and SF prices are moderate, that's good. But that's very different from the original statement "Nobody is forcing this guy to buy a $17 salad either."
> If you’re worried about prices, take the two minutes to check a menu online first.
The point is that some people want to enjoy life, not worry about prices.
Without living in SF and having done no research on this whatsoever I can promise you that you could easily put together a list of restaurants in walking distance to wherever you live that do not include "17 dollar salads" and would allow you to "eat in good cafes".
There are still places in Manhattan, Chicago, Atlanta, etc where you can do it, SF is no different.
Now, if you want to judge a city only on it's higher priced places or whatever, that's on you. Food culture is a whole other thing, and how people want to play into it is their choice. That said, if you're trying to find steak dinners for 30 dollars(all in: tax, tip, and drink) in a major US city, I don't know how to help you.
TL;dr- "17 dollar salads" aren't a problem unless you're trying to write a disparaging blog about a city you moved away from.
> There are still places in Manhattan, Chicago, Atlanta, etc where you can do it, SF is no different.
The question is what's the median price of a salad. If median is 17, it is relatively expensive, even if it is possible to compile a list of cheaper cafes and restaurants.
Or put it another way: if you have to check for restaurant prices, that city is too expensive for you, even cheaper places exist.
> if you want to judge a city only on it's higher priced places or whatever, that's on you
I'm not saying is bad. If you want to live on Manhattan, prepare to spend a lot on everything, from rent to salad.
I think the author is saying: SF is expensive, and they cannot afford it. And that's good reason to leave. And that's good reason for other people to avoid moving to SF.
> TL;dr- "17 dollar salads" aren't a problem unless you're trying to write a disparaging blog about a city you moved away from.
Well, if for 17 dollars salad you could buy low crime and low poverty, that would be OK. But these things combined are enough reasons to write a blog.
Anyway, not going to defend SF or criticise SF, just triggered by arrogant statement "Nobody is forcing this guy to buy a $17 salad", which is not far from "if you don't have bread, eat cake".
That got to me...because I've lived/worked in multiple parts of CA as well as the Midwest. If your choice for a last meal in SFO before moving to the Midwest is an overpriced salad, that makes me less inclined to trust your judgement.
I think New York actually has worse problems with crime and homelessness than SF. Except there, the police beat (quite literally) the destitute into the poorer neighborhoods where the Twitterati don’t live. Sadly, it works.
P.S. I left NYC because I was assaulted in the subway (2018). Also, same year, there was a nodded-off man in nice clothes who probably took a bit too much after work, passed out on 14th St & 3rd Ave. I watched as over a hundred people walked past and sometimes over him. Finally I tried to wake him and, when he didn’t rouse, called an ambulance. Never seen such a cold populace.
I lived on 8th & Mission and dated somebody in the Loin for several years (protip: Hyde is better to walk than Leavenworth), so yes. My charitable contributions have in the majority gone toward SF homeless orgs. And I'm not afraid to talk to people. I really think you are conflating indigence and callousness.
The people in the mid-Market BART stations have the support of other homeless in the community. The most disheveled are generally end-stage drug users. Their methadone clinic (if that's their poison) and many support shelters are within two blocks. If they're passed out and nodded off there it's because they chose to be incapacitated in a (very relatively) safe spot, where they're not exposed to the elements and relatively out of the way of the walking path. They probably know the other homeless, and people in a bad way will be checked on. Missionaries and street outreach folks will sometimes come by with food or clean blankets. Of course, they'll also have to deal with robbers and random assaults. Life on the street is tough.
This guy was obviously not an end-stage drug user. He was dressed nicely, in a crisp white shirt and clean black pants. He was sprawled against a news stand on the corner, his legs squarely in the sidewalk, which as you know is not so wide in midtown Manhattan at 6:15pm. And he was utterly ignored.
I know the numbers, and I too used to argue them, but the apathy and coldness in "safe" New York was undeniable.
Falling salaries? That's news to me. Are you talking about IT and operations, which is a very different endeavour from building hardware/software product? Or are you talking about the latter?
As far as I can tell, core software and hardware development salaries are showing no sign of slowing down in their growth.
I dont think the authors understand what a "tech job" is. This guy is working shitty mid level management for the finance team of a nicotine startup. What a joke.
FWIW I had the option of relocating to SF a few years ago (2015 perhaps? Thereabouts). I went over on an extended visit to the local SF office for a few weeks and my wife came with me to "try it out".
The reasons in the article were largely the same as ours for deciding hell no and staying in London. Apart from stepping over human excrement in the street and the pervasive stench of piss everywhere and seeing the police point guns at homeless people on the streets for basically zero-provocation, the real decision-maker was my wife telling me one day when I got back from the office how she was verbally abused and then had a glass bottle thrown at her by the homeless people near the apartment we were renting in what felt like should have been a nice and safe central neighborhood near Market Street and Union Square.
That has never happened to us anywhere in Europe (or elsewhere in the US for that matter), unless you go out of your way to find an off-the-beaten-path sketchy neighborhood, not the common central places where tourists go and stay.
Mid-market street is an open-air insane asylum and probably the very last place that I would ever consider renting an apartment. Hard to tell that from glancing at a map, of course.
The US also has other cities. Even California has more than just SF. But europe is nice too, though with lots of old, outdated and difficult to upgrade building and houses. (I'm not a fan of steam radiator heating).
Most "officers on the beat" don't carry guns, but perhaps as a sorry sign of the times it is not uncommon to see officers packing what appear to be quite heavy weapons (at least to my eyes) - e.g.:
You'll see them at busy places like stations, shopping centres, airports, busy public squares etc. At least in London - perhaps not so much elsewhere. I guess half of it is deterrent & reassurance, and the other half if to stop any "active shooter" type things before they happen.
There is also SO15 which are the sort of para-military dedicated anti-terror type people who don't patrol but are stationed around the place and use motorbikes to cut through traffic and down pedestrian areas, e.g.:
I think the main difference in the UK is, when the situation deteriorates enough to require police with guns turn up, the guns aren't there for show to try and subdue/persuade you. They'll usually shoot to kill from what I've seen/read/heard.
Get outside of central London (and possibly some other big cities like Birmingham? I don't know, I never go there) and you'll never see armed police anywhere. I grew up in a small British town in the Southeast and I can't think of a single time in my entire childhood that I saw a police officer with a gun (or for that matter, anyone else with a gun) anywhere near my hometown, except perhaps for my rare visits to touristic hotspots in London. And again, it's only in central London, at least as far as I can tell. I live in non-central London now (Zone 3) and I never see armed police anywhere near where I live. Come to think of it, I rarely see any police at all around here, at least not on foot.
I can remember going on holiday to France as a kid and being unable to take my eyes off the guns I saw on the hips of French police, because it was such an unusual sight for someone born and raised in middle England.
I think in the UK we're so used to the idea of unarmed police that we forget how astonishingly unusual it is. In most countries the idea of unarmed police is unimaginable. We've really achieved something special by managing it, at least in most parts of the country most of the time.
I would love to see a detailed journalistic endeavor comparing moving from California to another state, and try to match up the areas. Housing is cheaper, but what about groceries? Fuel?
Anecdotally I've seen multiple people flee California due to overly restrictive coronavirus lockdown rules. Texas seems to be the most popular destination, and also Florida and other southeast states. Why wait indefinitely for California to reopen schools, businesses, and sports when other states have already done so?
The “omg everyone is leaving California and so should you!!” forced meme is getting really old. I welcome anyone at the Chronicle to go first and write about their firsthand experience :)
I grew up in San Jose, went to UC Davis, worked at Stanford (near Palo Alto), and then periodically-commuted between Mountain View and the Chico area. I left because of the fires/smoke, risks of earthquakes and megafloods, costs, worsening attitudes of people, and it just generally sucked. In Austin now, and much happier so far. Will see if it's New Relationship Energy and whether I need to move to Portland.
I never understood why anyone would want to live in unsustainable SF, no matter how "good" or "cool" it is or was, when the vast majority of people don't make anywhere near enough (>50% income to housing) to build a long-term future there.
I think we can all agree that SF as well as Cali has a problem in terms of homelessness. I think we can also agree that homelessness leads to criminal behavior. I expect if I lived on the streets I'd do whatever I had to (illegal or otherwise) to survive.
What I don't understand is why people think the solution to homelessness is more policing. I mean, just think about that, how is homelessness going to be solved with more cops?
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadOTOH we have too many people anyway, so if they want to leave because of "$17 salads", that's fine. Maybe we can eventually drive places again, without traffic jams. A man can dream.
Strong disagree with this one. It is part of the urban conurbation. Sure, it might be "different" from the rest but yes, it is part of the Bay Area. Even San Rafael and Richmond are SFBA technically if you look in the map.
It is probably not accurate to extrapolate the author's experience in SF to what life is like in all of the other parts of the Bay, much less CA as a whole.
I left anyway after 3+ decades but not because of SF. I just wanted more for less. SF is and always has been a special pocket of gross. Some people love it and others, like me, avoided it at all costs. We're not all the same.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._metropolitan_ar...
Edit: For those who aren’t familiar - check who SF’s DA is, google SF’s school board, daytime population decline, etc.
What did happen to SF? You're assuming everyone reading knows, then point to random posts and ask us to check who is filling them like that's meant to clarify something? The SF School Board's president seems to be Gabriela López[0], I read her profile, and I am no closer to understanding your point.
I'm not playing dumb, I really don't understand what you're trying to say at all.
[0] https://www.sfusd.edu/about/board-of-education/board-preside...
About School Board: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Sa...
You linked the entire DA's bio (the good & bad), and a news story about a specific meeting that was dysfunctional. Going from that to SF being a "sad story of bad governance" is a bit of an unexplored jump.
I invite a post actually explaining what you're trying to say.
I own a 5-bedroom home on 1/2 acre - my mortgage is ~$570 before escrow, and ~$900 total.
A more likely culprit is the number of people walking around SF who pull down $350k+/yr, since they are willing and able to buy $17 salads, as well as overpriced real estate. It all comes down to the amount of money in flux in that location.
Restaurants (unless you are some michelin star joint) also don't really have the freedom to charge "whatever the customer is willing". Between rent, wages, and local competition, you can pretty much guarantee that there will be an average 10% profit margin in whatever area you are at.
IMO, the biggest culprit here is the astronomical rent prices charged to these places sucking out all of the extra capital gained by these 17$ salads
However the cost of living does bring along a feeling that if life is this expensive why doesn't it feel or appear better.
Literally everything you buy in SF costs more because the workers either have to afford a place in the city or have to make some crazy commute.
Ocean access, proximity to Asia
Beaches, large parks, mountains (natural spaces)
World class universities
Telecom infrastructure (?)
And what are some things California has that can be duplicated elsewhere?
Innovation-fostering legal system (e.g. IP and non-compete)
Mature, developed capital ecosystem
Vibrant and youth-oriented culture(?)
Much has been made of the VC ecosystem stickiness, but wealthy people tend to be pretty mobile. Especially when there are tax incentives. And eventually, companies follow VC. And talent follows companies.
IMHO, people think about the nature of capital ecosystems incompletely.
Why haven't other places duplicated SF / LA's ecosystems?
Not because they couldn't, but because they couldn't be better enough to justify the move.
However, "better" and "enough" are relative terms. If SF & LA are executing well, that's an insurmountable barrier due to network effects. But if SF & LA decrease their competitiveness, the relative difference also decreases.
And at some threshold, it does become possible for other cities to capture that business, network effects be damned.
In most years, the Valley barely sees any disruption from forest fires (although people who live on the periphery will disagree with me here).
Last year's fires have definitely cast a shadow over what the future holds, particularly for folks who have chosen to live in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The biggest disadvantage for SC people was a mildly inconvenient and somewhat dangerous drive down Highway 17 for access to SV proper, versus the advantage of beach access and housing that was a shade more reasonable in its cost. That equation has now changed, perhaps irrevocably, because of the fires of last year.
And, as climate change continues to get worse, they'll eventually be seen as unremarkable.
But on the other hand, it does have proximity to DC...
Virginia certainly doesn't have that.
What's VA's stance on enforcing non-compete agreements? This seemingly innocuous thing really accounts for a lot of the Bay Area's success. Innovative, fabulously successful companies have been repeatedly founded and nurtured here because of the cross-pollination of ideas and competition engendered by CA's refusal to honor non-competes.
VA has a couple things going for it, as far as I can tell:
- Plentiful network connectivity and data centers (many east-coast data centers are sited in a couple spots in VA).
- A large government sector, including many agencies that are tasked with technical work for the federal government, and the educated workforce that goes with it. Perhaps it's a double-edged sword: the region is a bit too dependent on Government largesse. What is interesting is that most no-one talks about how the Federal Government has played an outsize role in nurturing nascent technology innovations and companies (via government contracts and outright funding via In-Q-Tel and such) in the Bay Area. It goes very much against the current ethos of employee activism against DoD projects. In this respect, the Bay Area and VA share a similarity.
The main advantage of California, from a tech perspective, is its large and mature ecosystem, which isn't intrinsic. San Diego does have uniquely perfect weather but that does not extend to the rest of the State and no one goes to San Diego for tech.
California’s weather is famously pretty good depending on location and preferences. More interesting to me is actually “how many sunny days are there”. Wikipedia has a list of cities by sunlight hours across a range of months [1]. San Francisco is quite sunny, and gets about 3000 hours per year. By contrast, Seattle is 2169 and has a pretty brutal cloudy period, if you care about this.
Total sunlight hours aren’t themselves what matters, because I’m not saying Tucson is a strict improvement. There’s some sort of threshold though for which each person says “this place is depressing” (see also Seasonal Affective Disorder [2]).
There are places that are pretty similar though: Barcelona, Lisbon, Rome, and probably others. They’ve historically faltered on a lot of “could be duplicated” items on your list. My bet is on Barcelona, as the most likely to break out.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_sunshine_d...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_affective_disorder
> Much has been made of the VC ecosystem stickiness, but wealthy people tend to be pretty mobile.
Wealthy people want their startup investments in one place, so they can visit their founders.
> Especially when there are tax incentives.
Tax incentives aren't significant for early-stage startups.
Oh, and California has reasonable non-compete laws (exception is for companies that say "they do everything.") Mass. doesn't, for example. It's very hard to unwind restrictive laws after they're in place, since they favor incumbents.
(The reason Hollywood is in California was to avoid East Coast film industry patents back in the day.)
Aside: One thing that I've often wondered about is how Detroit pulled it all off. MI wasn't the friendliest state in terms of unions or weather back in the day. I've heard that the Miracle Mile was a big generator of Detroit's success as a lab of automotive fail-fast, but I've not thought that as the whole picture. Any good resources?
"We need more police. There’s a general lawlessness that’s just scary." is the kind of "hot take" I go to Facebook to read. I understand and sympathize that he personally experienced a crime, but it is wrong to extrapolate that into some wider trend without more data (and the proposed solution ("more police") even more so).
What I am saying is: This article isn't very insightful/doesn't add much to any conversation. No doubt people will use it as a springboard into unrelated conversations they want to have though.
It is absurd. Its so absurd that I have a hard time believing it.
Statistics in this article suggest the SF law enforcement budget is close to 10% of the city's general fund, about 700 $/citizen. Its neighbors spend a much, much larger share of their muni budget on policing.
https://www.sfgate.com/news/editorspicks/slideshow/Defund-th...
Policing efforts scale with the size of the populace. As a fraction of the city budget, it has decreased from 13% to 10% between 2010 and 2019. If anything, that is the absurdity.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/After-years-of-spe...
SF has a unified city/county government so the sheriff shows up in their budgets, as well as the courts and the rest of it. The whole category had a 2019-2020 budget of 1.72 billion. The SFPD alone was 692 million, so I don't know where the Chronicle came up with 606.
The number of households in San Francisco, according to the census, was 346k.
606 was the portion taken from the general fund. 606/0.88 gets 688 megabucks. The remaining difference could just be precision on the 88% figure.
Anecdotal obviously, but the whole place seemed less orderly than you’d expect given the booming economy there.
I get that personal connections can be a thing (my sister hated Paris because some creep spit on her after she didn't want to flirt with him) but you realize that statistically that data doesn't support your statement right?
I mean if someone said "would you rather move to a city with a 1% violent crime rate where you know someone who's part of that 1% or a different city with a 7% violent crime rate but nobody you know has been affected", you can do whatever you want but I'll take the first option.
(inb4 "different neighborhoods", "crime rates aren't the same across all demographics", etc)
No, I mean "less orderly." The "mugger" was more of a drunk opportunist than a serious criminal. This sort of low-level disorder seemed quite tolerated in Seattle, even compared to Baltimore. Of course, part of the reason for the move was going somewhere safer than downtown Baltimore. But fun fact, Seattle's property crime rate, at 46 per 1,000, is higher than Baltimore's, at 43 per 1,000. The property crime rate in New York City is a third as high, at 16 per 100,000.
But lots of homelessness and open-air drug-dealing (and so on) can make a pretty big impact on what walking down the street on a Tuesday feels like. (I'm not making an argument that one is more desirable than the other. I'm just noting that I think I understand the distinction.)
Nobody is forcing this guy to buy a $17 salad either.
I care. Sometimes I consider moving to other places, and these personal experiences of people living in different places are much more helpful than very limited experiences of people never been outside of NY. Even if it is only one data point and the experience is very subjective: I'll read more, someone else will write how happy they are in NY, and I'll decide which opinion is more important to me.
> Nobody is forcing this guy to buy a $17 salad either.
People expect to eat in good cafes, buy quality foods and generally expect standard of life higher than in some third-world countries.
Of course it is possible to eat cheaper, but people want to enjoy their lives, while focusing on their work, not on food budgeting. In particular, just walk in a good looking cafe or a restaurant close to the home without reading their menu prices first.
If that's true, and SF prices are moderate, that's good. But that's very different from the original statement "Nobody is forcing this guy to buy a $17 salad either."
> If you’re worried about prices, take the two minutes to check a menu online first.
The point is that some people want to enjoy life, not worry about prices.
Median salad price makes a city cheap or expensive.
I suspect SF is more expensive than average by this metric, but I'm not sure, I didn't dine in SF much.
There are still places in Manhattan, Chicago, Atlanta, etc where you can do it, SF is no different.
Now, if you want to judge a city only on it's higher priced places or whatever, that's on you. Food culture is a whole other thing, and how people want to play into it is their choice. That said, if you're trying to find steak dinners for 30 dollars(all in: tax, tip, and drink) in a major US city, I don't know how to help you.
TL;dr- "17 dollar salads" aren't a problem unless you're trying to write a disparaging blog about a city you moved away from.
The question is what's the median price of a salad. If median is 17, it is relatively expensive, even if it is possible to compile a list of cheaper cafes and restaurants.
Or put it another way: if you have to check for restaurant prices, that city is too expensive for you, even cheaper places exist.
> if you want to judge a city only on it's higher priced places or whatever, that's on you
I'm not saying is bad. If you want to live on Manhattan, prepare to spend a lot on everything, from rent to salad.
I think the author is saying: SF is expensive, and they cannot afford it. And that's good reason to leave. And that's good reason for other people to avoid moving to SF.
> TL;dr- "17 dollar salads" aren't a problem unless you're trying to write a disparaging blog about a city you moved away from.
Well, if for 17 dollars salad you could buy low crime and low poverty, that would be OK. But these things combined are enough reasons to write a blog.
Anyway, not going to defend SF or criticise SF, just triggered by arrogant statement "Nobody is forcing this guy to buy a $17 salad", which is not far from "if you don't have bread, eat cake".
P.S. I left NYC because I was assaulted in the subway (2018). Also, same year, there was a nodded-off man in nice clothes who probably took a bit too much after work, passed out on 14th St & 3rd Ave. I watched as over a hundred people walked past and sometimes over him. Finally I tried to wake him and, when he didn’t rouse, called an ambulance. Never seen such a cold populace.
And you’d be dead wrong.
https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/public_safety/crime-sele...
I don’t know how you could even think that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/nyregion/new-york-city-cr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callahan_v._Carey?wprov=sfti1
> I watched as over a hundred people walked past and sometimes over him.
Have you ever walked through a mid-market BART station?
The people in the mid-Market BART stations have the support of other homeless in the community. The most disheveled are generally end-stage drug users. Their methadone clinic (if that's their poison) and many support shelters are within two blocks. If they're passed out and nodded off there it's because they chose to be incapacitated in a (very relatively) safe spot, where they're not exposed to the elements and relatively out of the way of the walking path. They probably know the other homeless, and people in a bad way will be checked on. Missionaries and street outreach folks will sometimes come by with food or clean blankets. Of course, they'll also have to deal with robbers and random assaults. Life on the street is tough.
This guy was obviously not an end-stage drug user. He was dressed nicely, in a crisp white shirt and clean black pants. He was sprawled against a news stand on the corner, his legs squarely in the sidewalk, which as you know is not so wide in midtown Manhattan at 6:15pm. And he was utterly ignored.
I know the numbers, and I too used to argue them, but the apathy and coldness in "safe" New York was undeniable.
SV is just this generations Gold Rush and Hollywood Star chasing excuse for moving to California.
I have been in the Bay Area for 35 years and have worked in San Francisco for the past 9 years.
"General Lawlessness" is an accurate if somewhat imprecise term for what San Francisco has become in my experience.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-21/silicon-v...
I don't consider it conclusive, so I did not post it initially.
As far as I can tell, core software and hardware development salaries are showing no sign of slowing down in their growth.
I dont think the authors understand what a "tech job" is. This guy is working shitty mid level management for the finance team of a nicotine startup. What a joke.
The reasons in the article were largely the same as ours for deciding hell no and staying in London. Apart from stepping over human excrement in the street and the pervasive stench of piss everywhere and seeing the police point guns at homeless people on the streets for basically zero-provocation, the real decision-maker was my wife telling me one day when I got back from the office how she was verbally abused and then had a glass bottle thrown at her by the homeless people near the apartment we were renting in what felt like should have been a nice and safe central neighborhood near Market Street and Union Square.
That has never happened to us anywhere in Europe (or elsewhere in the US for that matter), unless you go out of your way to find an off-the-beaten-path sketchy neighborhood, not the common central places where tourists go and stay.
We had a really nice vacation though! :)
Pulling a gun is one thing, actually threatening to use it is another. It’s a difference in how police are in the US vs UK.
That said, I keep considering moving to Europe myself. I pay crazy taxes for shit in the streets, half assed mass transit, high college tuition, etc.
Well the most salient difference is that UK police don't carry guns at all.
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/04/26/11/22FFD9CC000005... https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-0fe4637f8d1b1f981c7786...
You'll see them at busy places like stations, shopping centres, airports, busy public squares etc. At least in London - perhaps not so much elsewhere. I guess half of it is deterrent & reassurance, and the other half if to stop any "active shooter" type things before they happen.
There is also SO15 which are the sort of para-military dedicated anti-terror type people who don't patrol but are stationed around the place and use motorbikes to cut through traffic and down pedestrian areas, e.g.:
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/09/28/10/44C62468000005...
I think the main difference in the UK is, when the situation deteriorates enough to require police with guns turn up, the guns aren't there for show to try and subdue/persuade you. They'll usually shoot to kill from what I've seen/read/heard.
I can remember going on holiday to France as a kid and being unable to take my eyes off the guns I saw on the hips of French police, because it was such an unusual sight for someone born and raised in middle England.
I think in the UK we're so used to the idea of unarmed police that we forget how astonishingly unusual it is. In most countries the idea of unarmed police is unimaginable. We've really achieved something special by managing it, at least in most parts of the country most of the time.
I never understood why anyone would want to live in unsustainable SF, no matter how "good" or "cool" it is or was, when the vast majority of people don't make anywhere near enough (>50% income to housing) to build a long-term future there.