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I recently fled San Francisco (was downtown) to Nashville Tennessee and could not be happier. I will try to stay neutral politically, but I also think it is somewhat ironic the most liberal city in the US also has the highest income "inequality", homelessness, drug, and petty crime problem in the US. It all wreaks of hypocrisy and downright poor fiscal judgement to me. I have friends that are making $160,000 a year (single no families) and not saving anything. That is absurd. Not to mention being a single self-employed LLC company in California the taxes are anti-business and constraining. California dream'in... Ehh no thanks for me anymore.

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> It all wreaks of hypocrisy and downright poor fiscal judgement to me.

I'm curious how much of it is hypocrisy and poor fiscal judgement vs. simple naïveté. Has anyone studied where San Francisco's homeless population comes from? Is it mostly long-time residents who are down on their luck (whether due to economic hardship, drug addiction, or mental illness), or does San Francisco's extreme liberalness (tolerance for tent encampments, open drug usage, petty theft) attract people from elsewhere?

The perfect weather and the strong social services attract people from around the country.

To be fair, the also essentially non-existent enforcement of rules and laws and the fact that SF is a mecca for international tourist and panhandlers can make decent money (i.e. Union Square) plays a role. Let's not factor out the economics and lack of consequences for bad behavior.

Both of these are largely myths.

How cold are the winters? 50 degrees?

Winters? It's 56 in SF right now. As to the 'come from all over the country for the excellent social services', there are lots of studies and surveys on this a google away. Statistically, nobody does that.

However attractive the weather might be, we don't have to use the axiomatic method to figure out where the SF homeless come from; the population is regularly surveyed, and is overwhelmingly local.

San Francisco has caught Nevada and New York sending people on buses to get rid of them. This is supposed to only be legal if the person has family in California they are meeting, but they just dump mentally ill people on Market Street and hope for the best. Nevada paid a large fine for this recently. Many of the people needed urgent help within hours of arriving. Truly horrific.

Do you have a source for that? Sounds pretty egregious.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-Nevada-reach-tent...

This is not unique to San Francisco. https://www.10news.com/news/team-10/team-10-man-with-extensi...

> Partin's bus ticket cost $261.50. The receipt, dated February 2, 2015, is stamped with the name of a Nashville agency called Homeward Bound. Investigators at Team 10's sister station in Nashville, WTVF, learned the agency that has oversight of the Homeward Bound program is the Nashville Downtown Partnership (NDP), a group dedicated to making the city a great place to do business.

I don't know what San Francisco caught Nevada doing, but lurid stories aside, organizations do actual surveys and censuses of the San Francisco homeless, and they're overwhelmingly locals.

irvine has also done this, dumping homeless on the next county

IMO the most insane part about SF is that something like 70% of SF rentals are rent-controlled. I've met plenty of young techies/finance types who pay well below market prices for nice apartments while making well above average salaries.

It’s insane that some people only pay $2000-3000 for a small apartment? Most of the rent controlled prices aren’t cheap but compared to the rest of the country unless you’ve been in the same place for a looong time.

My friend who works at Google pays $900/mo for a large room in a 3 bedroom apartment in Lower Haight. Yes, not the same as having your own place at $900 but still shocking to see someone pay that little for a place in SF.

My upstairs neighbor with a nicer floor plan pays $900 a month, gets 2 parking spaces in the back lot AND a garage. I get no parking spaces, let alone a garage and pay $1900 a month. They have been in the apartment for a long time and I moved in 6 months ago.

It takes mental effort to not think about the imbalance. It wears you down. It is the most likely reason I would leave the Bay Area even though I can afford the rent.

It’s correlation vs causation. The presence of income inequality makes the city more and more liberal. Politics is a dial between fairness and freedom. There are downsides to both, so elections tune the setting depending on your current conditions. CA is the state where the pursuit of happiness is most fruitful. There are 124 Billionaires in CA (only 400 something in the entire united states). Of those 70+ are in the Bay Area (most are locally grown in this tiny region of 7million people). All of Germany has 48 or something. Thus in the land of opportunity, you are either a billionaire, or act like you want to be in the future, or you push on the dial for fairness.

In Tennessee for example you can achieve the American Dream, a beautiful house by working hard in the middle class. In fact some of the most beautiful houses I have ever seen are here in Tennessee and I've lived in Santa Barbara, San Diego, and San Francisco. This is just not possible in the bay area.

beautiful houses there!

Politics is a dial between fairness and freedom.

And sometimes you get neither. SF building restrictions are both unfair in that you have to have a very high income or win the rent control lottery to afford anything, and unfree in that they prohibit voluntary transactions between landowners and would-be buyers.

SF to St. Louis here. I miss a lot of things about SF (weather, certain kinds of food, urban density) but I definitely would not move back. It's a very silly place in a lot of ways.

How are they not saving anything? $160k, so your take home is roughly $110k? They're spending $9000 a month just to live in the Bay area?

SF apartment price is a special kind of crazy. $5k for a 1 bedroom apartment per month.

This is not an accurate price. A smart renter with a little patience would pay more like $2000-3000 unless they needed a brand new condo with a gym and a doorman.

Brand new apartments actually often offer low rents to fill all the vacancies. E.g. the artsy new apartment in the Dogpatch was going for well under 3k for studios.

I have a gym and doorman and pay less than $5k. (Also not rent controlled building.)

Even assuming you pony up that much for a fancy apartment in a safe part of town, you should still be able to save substantial amounts of money on a $160k salary.

Without kids, this is a bit ridiculous. They probably have poor financial planning.

At that income, the tax rate is 28% federal, 9.3% California, 6.2% fica, plus some other stuff. For back of the napkin budgeting I assume about 40%, which is more like 95k net. Then subtract 3k for an average 1br, 1k for a new car (payment + insurance + parking). So now you’ve got 4K left over, before any other kind of savings or expenses. I’m almost being generous, it’s necessary to pay more for rent in some areas. And a startup isn’t giving you a 401k either... sure, it’s possible to save but the top line is a far distance from the reality.

Typically I don't like calling out HN, but my original post has 28 upvote points (it was at the top for a long time), then all the sudden sunk to the bottom immediately. It's funny how even though the majority of interesting comments and discussion get silenced because my political views are not palatable to a small minority of users or mods.

Likewise but to Sacramento. It's nice here.

I'd love suggestions on how to find a job there - I was recently looking at relo from seattle to a lower cost market.

What's ironic about rich people wanting to live in a great city?

That's what gentrification is (for good or ill).

The liberals are the people complaining about the gentrification.

The rich people are the liberals too..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_San_Francisco

That link doesn't back up your claim, both as it doesn't show the rich supporting anyone and as "Democrat" and "liberal" aren't synonyms.

Californias government is almost as corrupt as Illinois and it affects everything. But the huge number of rich benefit from it too much to want any change

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