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Comment by gravity13 | Hacker News Reader

I get the sense Manhattan was established, and then tapped out, hence Brooklyn. Whereas San Francisco is neither of those. San Francisco is the hip place to be (for tech) and Oakland is perceived as the fallback for companies that can't afford to host. Which really surmounts to: I would much rather work in SF than Oakland (I really base my decision on what food & bar options I have around me, though).

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Parts of Manhattan which are popular with the very wealthy are certainly pretty well tapped out (the West Village comes to mind as a neighborhood with well-protected zoning regulations and lots of low to mid-rise buildings similar to many San Francisco neighborhoods). In other parts of Manhattan though new neighborhoods are being created from underused space (look at the Hudson Yards project, creating thousands of housing and commercial units on top of an active rail yard on the west side of midtown). Dozens of new towers are currently under construction in Manhattan.

I've lived in both SF and NYC and feel like Oakland has much more of a stigma than Brooklyn does simply because of transit access. You can live in SF and enjoy walkable local communities. You can live in Oakland and enjoy walkable local communities. But getting between the two can be a much more arduous process via Bart or bus than the many plentiful subway connections between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Visiting friends, of even the prospect of a commute, between SF and Oakland would have given me much more pause than getting over to Brooklyn. BART and the transbay buses are woefully inadequate for an area which is trying to pitch itself as a region rather than two distinct cities with a bridge between.

I think the only stigma is that BART closes at midnight while New York subways run all night long, which means people who live in Brooklyn can go out in Manhattan until 4 AM and still get home, while people who go out in SF on Saturday night can't get back to Oakland from midnight until 8 AM Sunday unless they take the bus.

The other thing is getting to BART - if you live in the Mission or within a handful of blocks of Market St; and your destination is in downtown Oakland or on the west side... you're fine. But if not, you need to coordinate your trip between BART and two different bus networks on either side of your train trip (or shell out for a car service / cab).

Not only are train lines between Manhattan and Brooklyn much more plentiful, they fan out to a much larger collection of destinations on either end. It can be a one-system trip, which makes a big difference.

BART isn't bad by any means, and SFMTA/AC Transit do a decent job, too. I've lived in Miami and around Tampa, two other large cities which do an almost immeasurably worse job with transit. But BART is still a very commuter-centric network for getting commuters from suburbs to downtowns, and isn't a substitute for a true local subway network. Thats where the stigma comes from, in my opinion.

That seems a good assessment. I suspect that there may be a bit of hindsight bias about Brooklyn, given that we know today that (parts of) it did gentrify and quite rapidly. But your point about transportation links--and, heck, a bridge you can walk over--is well taken.

I really don't understand the entire BART tube fear. You can get from fidi to downtown oakland in 12 minutes on a consistent schedule. I think it's more the bridge with it's horrible 1 hour traffic and how most of the bay area is a very car dependent place.

"You can get from fidi to downtown oakland in 12 minutes on a consistent schedule."

Yes, but that's all you can do. If you're in pac heights or the presidio or ... anywhere west ... you're going nowhere.

That is a failure of SF transit. It takes 30m to get from the west to the east side of SF already. 20m to get to the mission from pac heights with an uber, 45m with muni! For east side SF friends in the mission, oakland is closer than ocean beach.

BART can be standing room only quite often during commutes, but if you're going from Market Street to an Oakland station, its really not that big of a deal.

NYC is standing room only during most commutes too. I'd rather stand for 15 minutes than be stuck in traffic for 45 minutes any time.

You may not be aware that Oakland has an amazing and burgeoning food and bar scene, one that has arguably stolen the authenticity crown from San Francisco. Traditional restaurants also are alive and well in Oakland if that's your thing.

Well, most of Brooklyn probably wasn't all that appealing (for certain values and types of appealing) 15 or 20 years ago either. [1] At any rate, it wasn't gentrified. But Manhattan, in spite of doing a fair bit of development in at least sections of the city, was really expensive so young professionals started "settling" on Brooklyn. At the same time, some areas of Manhattan that were previously, shall we say, rather disreputable were also gentrifying.

So, yes, you'd prefer to live in SF than Oakland but 15 years or so ago, you'd probably have preferred to live in Manhattan than Brooklyn.

[1] http://www.wired.com/2015/09/photos-brooklyn-hipsters/

Your comment seems a few years out of date. SF's rents and COL is notoriously sky-high and has been for the last 3-4 years or so, and the movement to Oakland has also been taking place during that year. Not to mention, Uber, perhaps one of the region's greatest up-and-coming unicorn juggernauts, is going to move to Oakland. The ship has long since sailed towards the East Bay.

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