London vs San Francisco – back and forth
jh47.com
jh47.com
I am always, always, always shocked by the homelessness (and the mental state of those poor souls) in SF. People call London a dirty, unfriendly city but I've NEVER gotten any trouble from any of the homeless people in London apart form the usual begging, yet in SF its pretty much guaranteed you're going to get hassled/shouted-at/shoved/threatened by one of the homeless people once or twice per visit as you just go about your business.
I was considering moving to SF to work a while back. Housing is not cheap for sure, it is probably around about the same as London ... except in London if you pay $4000/month you dont get a vagrant shitting on your doorstep.
It is a genuinely shocking situation in SF. I am permanently shocked by the homelessness. It is terrible but no one seems to want/be able to do anything about it.
If I had to identify the issue, it's that there's a lot of status quo players who comfortably exist in the current state of things (after all, that's a lot of money floating around). The people who suffer worst from the state of affairs (the homeless themselves) pretty much have no political pull or people looking out for their well-being, and the rest of us get shouted down if we complain about having to step over used syringes and human shit as we open the door to our apartments every day ("you think you have it bad? Think how bad they have it!")
Last month, I was walking through SoMa with my boyfriend, and a homeless guy literally came up and punched him in the back of the head for absolutely no reason at all. He walked off, we called the police, an officer came, and his response was basically.. "well, what do you want me to do about it? There's no point in arresting him." Even though the perp was standing on the corner like half a block away.
As a city, we need to decide whether the homeless are autonomous people who can be held responsible for their actions, or whether they are desperate souls who really can't be expected to care or look out for themselves and really don't have any "rights" beyond being treated humanely and compassionately. Only the latter really makes sense in my view, but this in between place of "they can do whatever they want no matter the ill effects on the community, but we're morally required to continue to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at their self-described champions every year with no improvement in the situation" is ridiculous.
This word is used to describe a very wide range of people, some of who are not homeless. Americans are very tolerant. Many have no problem handing a heroin addict cash and actually feel really good about themselves after doing it.
I've walked Manhattan alone at all hours, I've been in the worst neighborhoods of Chicago, bad neighborhoods in Brooklyn, major cities in the developing world alone on foot at night with no other caucasian in sight, all over Mexico, along with many other places and the one place where I am very aware of my surroundings and concerned is SF. I do not live there and never have, so that is as much opinion I can give.
Anyone know who owns the majority of the city's SROs?
I'd start there.
Look, as we speak the DPW trucks are dismantling some of the tents on Division St. [1][2] However longtime residents of SF will tell you that it doesn't even merit a small applause. SF's homelessness problem isn't even dinged much less dented.
The city hall's money purses aren't kept overflowing by the likes of you and me - at least not yet in any meaningful way, although the likelihood of the emergence of a strong technology voting block / interest group isn't far away.
Until then identifying the key players who sustain this very flawed complex, is in itself a great first stab.
[1] https://twitter.com/amyhollyfield/status/704657181665169408
[2] https://twitter.com/VaughanChip/status/704702716484825088
SF spends so much on the homeless that, ironically, it attracts them. In fact, Las Vegas has sent homeless there: http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/09/11/2602391/san-franc...
http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-spends-record... shows that $241 million was spent - that's so very much for a metro area of 8 million people.
In a country of 300 million, you only need a very slight incentive and things get weird, and the SF attitude to homeless, the food they give out, the shelters, the climate, all encourage homeless to move there or, worse, get sent there by less scrupulous states.
I am never sure if this is a really nice or a really bad thing for SF. I'm kinda thinking both.
San Francisco, and Silicon Valley, have millions of inhabitants but they are not a proper city. They are a collection of a sizable provincial city (SF) and many "suburb" cities.
This, in my mind, makes the most difference.
By the way, the homelessness issue is mostly in SF and East Bay. If you go down the peninsula, you don't see it much.
Oh, last but not least: the weather in the Bay Area is generally nicer.
[0]: http://www.spottedbylocals.com/blog/alpha-beta-and-gamma-cit...
Instead you will get a vocal minority of people saying the homeless choose to live that way or that they are made homeless by rent control or public housing or excess regulation. Since this matches most American's world view, it is accepted without evidence.
It is a society that will always strive to raise housing prices not lower them, more willing to give handouts to defaulting mortgage holders than to give housing to the homeless, and more willing to jail the homeless than to house them. And so the situation worsens as it has for 30 years.
The best SF can do is put endless bandaids on a small part of a national problem.
Three weeks ago we drove (less than 1hr) to Stinson Beach, spent all day hiking the hills, spectacular views of the Bay, the City and the Farallon Islands in the distance.
Two weeks ago we drove to Monterey, took a Whale Watching boat ride for a few quid. We spent an hour watching a group of Orca hunt Sea Lion a couple hundred feet away.
Last weekend, we drove to Tahoe. Spent two days learning to ski, hung out with friends in our cabin.
This is all in February, the weather has been great. I don't know what we're doing next weekend, but it's probably not something that was in driving distance back home.
It's obviously a personal preference thing, but for me, the lifestyle matters far more than the job. Both me and my wife couldn't stand London any more. It's great for a visit, but that's my fill.
Let's just say "reasonably good"
Riders using cash slow the bus down considerably. Do you have suggestions on how to make it as fast as just tapping your Apple Watch or Oyster card on the yellow pad? :-)
You can still be anonymous using an Oyster card that's pre-loaded with cash.
I don't like buses that leave me stranded at 3 a.m. because, well, maybe it's actually not a public service and I didn't get the memo.
You may have a point about the weather though! ;-)
[NB Obviously I forgot to mention the history, culture, the festivals, an ancient castle on the plug of an extinct volcano, glorious architecture....]
Weather can be a bit grim though.... (and has been particularly miserable this winter).
I apologise for the BuzzFeed, but the pictures are worth it: http://www.buzzfeed.com/hilarywardle/edinburgh-is-the-best
Robert Louis Stevenson
http://www.winterhighland.info/
OK not the 3 Valleys but on a good day they can be great fun. My personal favourite is Nevis Range:
I live in Edinburgh and have always been able to live less than a 15 minute walk from work, often in my own flat, for very reasonable sums. Everyone I know in tech has been able to afford their own property within 6 years of starting work.
I'd choose here over London any day of the week. You sort of get used to the weather eventually...
London: gloomy, tremendously overcrowded, stressed people everywhere, binge drinking until 11pm and then you're out of luck, spineless european investors, and a cost of doing business so high due to high rents and expenses, that the Startup scene is really a non-starter.
SF: The frat boys have won, the nerds are a long-gone memory, the city is eating itself with brogrammers while america's homeless population of unfortunate veterans and mentally ill, pile up on the streets, looking in on the privileged class. The gridlocked system prevents even basic infrastructure enjoyed by most other civilized part of the world to exist (trains, housing, etc.)
Hitler vs. Stalin.
Live somewhere else. It is a wonderful world out there.
Try Prague for example. Safe, easy, cheap, full of great tech talent. Just to give one example.
Bravo! What we have in SF are the social dynamics of Mad Men with the supposed trappings of "geekdom." There's still bullying, it just doesn't happen in the locker room, and the pretexts have different texts.
The "Brogrammer" is largely fictional. (Though I really did work for "the original metro-sexual brogrammer" in Houston, but he was an anomaly!) However, the kind of disingenuous othering and aggression perpetrated by the fictional "brogrammer" is done by many in the tech community, just with different trappings. (Which makes such behavior harder to see for what it is. We are all conditioned to seeing that as "the good guys" striking a blow for something.) So you may read my comment like this: "The real brogrammer epidemic is programmers and tech workers in general succumbing to the effects of affluence and privilege." Also: "The real brogrammers look and sound nothing like brogrammers. They look and sound like us!"
There is a catch though - for programmers, London is by far the best paying city in Europe (except maybe Swiss cities).
I see no value in earning more just to pass the money directly to my landlord.
Quality of life comes down to personal preference. I'm not sure there's anywhere else I could live (at least without having to learn another language) and not feel any need to own or use a car, the pub theatre scene is probably the best in the world (likewise the museum collections), a huge range of musical performances, and it's the best place to find people for specialised hobbies (netrunner in my case, again literally the best place in the world for it in terms of the community size). Of course other places have their own selling points, but London has a lot going for it if you like that sort of thing.
But sure. I think age, kids and general lifestyle make a lot of difference; for a lot of people London delivers more of what you want when you're young, but the countryside is better as you grow older and your priorities change.
Climate wise, not so sure.
1) public transit has sucked since well before the tech boom. When I moved to SF Oracle was probably the northernmost tech company of note (not counting Autodesk in San Rafael!) and the center of mass was decidedly in Mountain View. Today center mass is probably Foster City or perhaps Burlingame. Also, because the commute was only slightly less bad (CalTrain in particular hasn't improved much over the intervening 22 years) and there was no shuttle system, very few people chose to live in SF and commute south. And yet Muni was awful -- I worked in "Multimedia Gulch" (what the area around South Park used to be called) -- and typically if I wanted to get to work in any reasonable amount of time I had to take a cab. Today you'd take Uber, but same story.
2) Homelessness / dirtiness were just as present, if not worse. The Mission corridor was much worse, and parts of the Tenderloin have made huge improvements. Not to mention the tent cities around Rincon, the dramatic difference in the Embarcadero, Hayes Valley, and the Presidio. The Sunset and Richmond are mostly unchanged, and Visitacion Valley is still a part of town no one you work with goes to. :)
3) Housing prices -- ok, this is the one place where things truly have gotten incredibly, insanely worse. My efficiency in the city cost $600/month in October 1994. An equivalent space today costs $2100/month. There's a lot of things contributing to this, but I honestly think the shuttles are a huge part of the demand side of the problem. And of course the supply side has many well-documented shortcomings.
3) The number of silly companies getting started? Well, companies are just people, and honestly the number of silly people with crazy ideas in SF feels mostly unchanged. Their motivations are dramatically different, though. Today many of the most silly ones are simply in it for the money. Back in the mid-90's the people with rich fantasy life were all artists of the starving type. ;)
Furthermore, the majority of the people I knew weren't particularly interested in living in the city. Some of that was because it would have required a longer commute. But, in general, there wasn't even a particular preference among recent grads for living in town. Some did, but it wasn't the norm or even especially common in my experience. This is partly because, by and large, US cities were not as pleasant places at that time and this in turn led to less investment in transit, etc.
Giuliani was elected mayor in 1993, which did line up pretty well with New York getting cleaned up a lot. However, this was a more general trend even if it didn't apply everywhere (e.g. Detroit).
Here's why: the people who forever can't find good talented engineers are usually the bad companies with bad ideas. Getting capital from MBA-educated VC's isn't that challenging or any significant validation of success (although still a notable one).
So you are more likely to come across a large number of the crazy ones who can't find engineers/designers during your recruiting phase coming from out of town.
Once you build a network you will start to be invited to work for good startups and smart people. Good companies recruit via networks until they reach scale.
Which all kind of feeds into why getting talented engineers is difficult here. Cause the money you raise isn't enough to pay the kind of wages they're used to in San Francisco, nor market the business quite as much.
And people are definitely more cautious here too. Over in the US, it seems people will start a business or invest in one on the off chance it might potentially succeed at some distant point. Over here, it's 'prove your business is making/will very quickly make money or get out'. And the good engineers (if they haven't moved somewhere with better wages) will probably be at larger companies, which their friends and relatives say is a 'safe' career choice.
There is a difference in company culture in the US and the non US tech-spheres. The US isn't conservative at all in its approach to get growth & this is reflected in fund raise sizes.
I tend to agree with the author. The place is lovely, it's almost like a heaven on earth with almost all ameneties, temperatures and people within a 3h driving time from SF, but for some reason London with it's grey grimey and dirty history has more appeal. Perhaps it's the fact that you can explore and get lost down a back alley, or that your friends tell you about this new bar which started up but is in zone 4 and you just have to see it.
I also like the fact that Tech is an asside and people are key. I don't want to live in a bubble but I love what I do. I admire mingling with the theatre crowd or simply watching the tourists navigate the bus timetables.
I think everyone has their preference, but both are fun for different reasons.
Now if you want a real up and coming tech city, I would suggest Berlin.
Do you ever get acclimated to the constant soggyness / dampness, the mugginess & the lack of steady bright sunlight even if you were born & raised there ?
Especially when you have to live in such small quarters without ample backyards, which are puny even by SF standards.
I don't know if Seattle gets such frequent rainfall although the total rainfall might actually be higher [1]. But I couldn't live in a place enveloped with constant dampness. It just drives me nuts. Dryness is something I've to have.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-does-it-rain-so-often-in-London/an...
Nothing about the weather in England is especially constant. On average, it rains more than some places. But mostly people appreciate the change — it's nice to have a week of clear blue skies in the winter, but it wouldn't be appreciated if the whole month was like that.
And, of course people are acclimatized to it. People are born and used to living in Greenland, or the Sahara. London is easy!
San Francisco is actually more humid in the mornings than London, year round.
Look at the bottom for average conditions (humidity etc):
Also. As if people in London have back yards...
The statistics are probably misleading - it is not raining every other day (although sometimes it is). Its not constantly soggy, but certainly damper than California. Winters can get dark really early though which is a bit annoying.
The main problem is that people don't have air conditioning, so although it sometimes gets hotter than Egypt etc in the summer, you cant cool down apart form sit in your car or go and hang out in the supermarket in the chiller sections!
I think you have to be born to it. I'm of mostly West Country and Bavarian stock; growing up in the American South, where the cooking's from Scotland and the weather's from India, was hellish for me. I'm in Seattle now, and absolutely loving the cold and damp. I expect I'd enjoy Britain still more, when and if I get the chance to visit or maybe move there, since it offers cold, damp, and history; but I wouldn't want to live in a dry, hot climate any more than a wet, hot one.
And yet, if the job market was even remotely close, I'd move to northern Spain in a millisecond, because quality of living is more about low stress and making what you want to do convenient, rather than about rain and backyards.
Awesome weather with nearby beach's, rich history and culture, really cheap when compared to London, it's way smaller and therefore more "cozy" - the only problem is the hills if you want to ride bikes.
Apart from the City, which is quite literally ruled by the finance industry. [1]
[1] http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/services/environment-and-plan...
[2] http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/business/economic-research-an...
It's not an apt comparison as firms are geographically distributed all over the bay area.
I imagine the population during the day swells more than 100 fold...
My point is still the same, not many people live in SF or in London but most of the people there during the day there, commute there.
The Square Mile is an area of offices, mostly banks and company headquarters. It's the area of the ancient City of London, the bit the Romans walled off. There are now very few residential buildings. There aren't even any national government buildings, the area was controlled by merchants and guildsmen. Most people commute to work there, but you can say something similar about any 1mi² area in the most central bits of central London — few people live and work in Soho, for example.
Canada Square is in London's second financial district — Canary Wharf.
Most people working in London do live in London. The population of London (meaning the people who pay tax towards the public transport, vote for the mayor etc) is over 8 million.
Many startup companies are not far from the City of London / Square Mile — 5-10 minutes walk.
The vast majority will simply never be able to afford a house there. The only way that could possibly be attempted would be to build massive condos everywhere like you see in some Asian cities. That would kill the character of SF. No one wants to have a huge condominium plunked down into there neighbourhood and I can't blame them.
There are probably areas in the Bay where you could build some sort of tech worker arcology if you really wanted to do so and spend enough money. But I doubt people would really want to live there.
But that's exactly what they've done in the past, look at the rows and rows of houses that people live in now and are part of "the character" of SF
Salary difference. On average Most decent experienced devs in London make around 50-60k pounds which is around 80-85k dollars. An entry level dev in SF makes anywhere between 90 - 120k dollars and most experienced devs earn at least 120k dollars with the range around 110-150k. So roughly a 30-60k+ dollar/year difference.
Healthcare. Almost all the companies I've worked for have covered my healthcare costs so I only have to pay copays - as an idea 20 dollars to see my GP and 30 to see a specialist. I had 8 weeks of physio last year and my total out of pocket was around 600 dollars including a CT scan, which I could pay using pre tax dollars. So the overall cost was pretty low. I also got to see a physio the same day rather than waiting 6 weeks+ on the NHS. My total max out of pocket is 3000 meaning I don't pay anything more than that. Given the significantly higher salary even if I were to hit my max it would still be worth it.
The cost of living is comparable although certain things are cheaper - gas, trainers(sneakers), car insurance to name a few. Food is roughly the same I reckon.
Overall working in London vs working in the US I saved significantly more money - it's not even close. Although a tin of heinz beans costs two dollars so that's made a pretty big dent in my savings ;-)
If you like Asian girls, you are in the right city. From where I'm coming from, NYC is the ultimate city for dating in the US for heterosexual men. Ignore the self-proclaimed PUA guy. They exaggerate because their identities are so tied to it, and they sink an exorbitant amount of time and mindshare, unless they are exceptionally charming/ good looking/ have really good jobs, in which case they shouldn't apply their standards or expectations to others so casually.
After a few months of that I wound up liking a girl enough for more than a first date. We were sort of living together within 3 months of meeting.
That last part happens fast in SF because rent is high and sharing rent helps.
I'm assuming the person you're relying to is excluding borderline megalomania from their calculations.
If anything, the hard part is finding someone who is willing to commit. Granted, I have a skewed sample because of how I met people, but most of my friends are facing that issue. Easy to date, hard to relationship.
I remember my first day in San Fransisco in the tenderloin district. It felt like I was walking in a real world grand theft auto with dangerous gang bangers, people yelling and each other across the streets and gangs of though guys on the corners. It was both exciting and scary.
But I also met very open minded and exciting people and went to some really nice restaurants.
But as this Londoner describes it. All sorts of transport and infrastructure seemed absolutely terrible in SF. I was surprised that this sort of tech capital of the world was so run down in many ways. The airport was an awful mess, and subway getting there was really filthy.
I've been to London a number of times. Kind of hard to compare. Despite being much bigger I actually felt safer in London, and it has great public transport. What the tech scene is like I have no idea. But I come from small town Norway so London is way too big for me. My favorite city is Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
Salaries are in the range of 7000 - 10.000 CHF / month after taxes and apartments can be way cheaper than in San Francisco.
Zurich is expensive but als tiny. Almost everyone lives "in the suburbs" where the rents are half as much and which only means a 10-15 min commute[1] to town (using the superb public transport).
I am a technical recruiter with a software engineering background and I live in Zurich. You find my email address in my HN-handle.
So unless you are an expert in some field AND a company really knows you, the chances are unfortunately low. :(
"The world is a big place, and it’s really not that unique. It’s not a utopia to be built through a technological elite. It’s a city, where people live."
Sorry, but it's just such apples and oranges and talked about at such a vague level in only 1 minute worth of content. It deserves a significantly more detailed treatment if you want to do justice to the topic.
I don't think Henson is necessarily wrong about anything he says. Hell, I actually like London a bit more than SF for some of the reasons he lists. But it came across to me like he was more homesick than anything.
I'm curious what industry he worked in, and who he spent his time with. I'm guessing tech based on the blog and the section devoted to it, but in any case, that alone greatly determines how you'll fare.
Here in London, people are polite and always love chatting up the American, but it is a little hard to make friends outside of work/housemates. The focus on pub culture - while awesome - is a large reason for this, in my opinion.
I've been debating writing more about my experience. Maybe I'll do it to give a voice from the opposite perspective.
As a Londoner, I've visited tech companies in San Francisco, but also in San Jose, Santa Clara, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino, Sunnyvale and various other places. They're not all the same.
However, in the UK, a lot of tech companies are similarly spread out around the M4 corridor. Wikipedia says: "this part of the M4 Corridor is sometimes described as England's Silicon Valley" and includes "Slough, Windsor, Maidenhead, Reading, Bracknell and Newbury". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_corridor
That seems to me to be a more useful comparison....
Even if you don't believe that, many people on this site have the choice between London and San Francisco, so it's well worth exploring the differences between them here.
The commute sucks, but I couldn't stand living in London (nor SF or the bay for that matter).
https://www.quora.com/How-does-London-compare-to-New-York-Ci...
Also 'Africa' isn't very closed off to the rest of the world contrary to what you may believe. Things have changed over the past few decades.
If you're going to generalise you might want to visit Africa before comparing her to something else, or mention a city that is a more apt comparison to Oakland.
Of course that isn't the issue where an entire continent is compared to a small American town...
Edit: Oh I see, of course I have never visited Oakland so I do not understand what is said between the lines. Unless the implication was a small town is as diverse as a continent in some kind of hyperbole.