If San Francisco Is So Great, Why Is Everyone I Love Leaving?
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Some parts of San Francisco are very dirty and the homeless issue is not exaggerated. Everybody knows about the Tenderloin at night.
With that being said, I drove across the US two years ago and if you keep your eyes open you realize it is all over - Portland and Seattle are no better, just less talked about.
My rent is $1300, I live with one roommate on Russian Hill. I'm flexible and lucky so this is not representative. A girl I know who works at Google lives in inner Richmond (arguably a less desirable area) by herself and pays nearly triple for some reason.
It is hard to find a proper gym for less than a Benjamin and food is above average for an American city but hilariously expensive. Good way to gauge is pick some fast food chain and compare, Dennys is x2 here than the rest of the country.
All in all this place isn't the shiny happy city you'd imagine from watching Full House or or the counter culture epicenter of hippie times gone by. It doesn't suck, I'd definitely visit for a week or two if you have never been, and there's a lot of history here but in the end it is no longer a very remarkable place to live.
It's not that it's not talked about, it's that other cities manage to not have it right in the middle of the city.
I can't even imagining owning a house _here_, let alone in the bay. Buying a house is generally something adults in America aspire to doing, but in California it's basically a mark of wealth. The amount of cash you have to stuff away for a down payment of sufficient size to not be fleeced by the banks is astronomical.
I'm really considering transferring to Austin at some point.
The food in San Francisco and Marin is the best food in the world, by a fair margin.
In 2018, food, food venues, eating environments and every other aspect of dining, the world over, is being invented and reshaped in San Francisco.
Go anywhere else in the world, at any price point, from the first class lounge at Hong Kong airport to the mall food court in Granada, Spain, and everyone is inspired by, or directly copying, what is being done here.
EDIT: my parent spoke not of a particular restaurant, but the food of the city, generally. That is what I am talking about - not who has the best BBQ joint in your favorite BBQ genre, but which city has the best food (as opposed to "above average for an American city").
I stand by the assertion that food(ie) culture, worldwide, is being driven by SF.
The proprietors could give a shit about SF. And oh yeah, your BBQ sucks. Sure, I can get decent brisket, but for triple the price and half the portion.
Sure, Bay Area (although not so much SF itself) has some good, even great, if vastly overpriced, food, but "best, by a fair margin" is a gross exaggeration.
The average Marin resident doesn't eat at these places.
These are the places for the finance CEOs, high profile landlords, and the tech commuters. There's no post hippie commune or even yuppies here anymore. Just greedy fucks eating overpriced food on undersized plates.
I am not a CA native and I don't live in SF (although I do live in Marin). I do, however, travel all over the United States and the world and I see that there has been a global, emergent food culture (perhaps a monoculture ?) and it seems clear to me that San Francisco is the root stock - from the ambience and the lighting to the food sourcing and the coffee list.
I'm sure it's a repeat of "American Food" before it and "French Cuisine" before that. It won't last forever.
Lay off the kool-aid kid, it's bad for you mental health. Who told you that the global foodie culture is driven from SF? Not here in India for sure. And I really doubt it is affecting anywhere else in Asia.
Sorry this pricing is not realistic for other viewers here. A two bedroom in Russian hill for $2600 is probably a passed down rent controlled unit (A decade?). A typical 2 bedroom (without problems / not nice / no parking / 800sqft) is about $4500.
If you are outside of SF and look at prices, remember many people are on rent control. And your best bet is finding someone who is.
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/d/san-francisco-larkin-...
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/d/san-francisco-edwardi...
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/d/san-francisco-russian...
(Former resident)
I'm not so sure whether it's fair to say that this is the wealthy people deliberately imposing exclusory policies. It's mostly long time residents that are anti-development and favor nativist policies like rent control. Most of the tech workers I know want the city to build more housing and remove nativist policies. But some, like proposition 13, are enacted by the state and our ability to remove them is very limited.
A lot of onlookers into cities like SF think "absolute rent control" when rent control is mentioned -- that the rent prices of certain units are locked/fixed increment set by the government regardless of anything. This is low income housing. LIH is not rent control. Rent control is a discriminatory practice that creates a secondary market that is insulated from most of the people who truly need it, because while a sitting tenant is "protected", a new move-in is not (and every "sitting tenant" becomes a "new move-in" whenever their housing needs change, but some are better connected to a possible new rent controlled opportunity they can piggyback). It's fundamentally orthogonal to the benefits intended by a rental economy, which is to allow many consumers freedom of choice without discriminatory pricing.
The end result is that locations that are physically nice will be occupied by people who have a relatively high tolerance for those two not-nice attributes and a relatively high desire for the physical niceness.
So if you like cool weather and pretty hills and the ocean, and you don't mind violent crime or hepatitis or $2,000,000 houses, then you'll be happy to wedge yourself in like a chicken in a factory farm. It takes a certain type of person to decide that this is the best choice.
In concrete terms, that means: building sufficient housing and infrastructure to keep life affordable and smooth; designing (or shepherding emergent patterns of) functional, livable neighborhoods; and addressing social problems as they arise.
You might be surprised to find that you can still get a studio in Tokyo within 45 minutes of the city center for ~$400/mo (bump up to ~$600 if you want to be 15 minutes away), that it's easy and efficient to get around to nice urban and natural amenities, and that there are endless quiet, peaceful, and utterly charming neighborhoods, parks, and temples right next to all the hotspots. You'll never see any feces on the street, you never see anybody shooting up needles, and nobody will ever beg you to spare a dollar.
Part of that is cultural, but most of that is by concerted effort.
But positive outcomes like that can only happen if a city successfully adapts to changes—which San Francisco (and virtually every American city to varying degrees) has abysmally failed at. As another commenter pointed out up the page, San Francisco's public policy has been very nativist, and the physical form of the city has remained more or less unchanged for decades, which spells disaster for one of the most coveted places to move to in the world.
It’s a tech distopia. I’m not even talking about having to step over human feces 3 times per block. I’m talking about the utter lack of ethics and values of the people who have descended like rabid vultures to manipulate the tech utopian thinkers and then run with the money. The damage is done and we’re just now starting to see the impact it’s had on the people that haven’t been taken along for the ride to the top. That place is a lost cause.
I guess it would have been cool to be there during the Alan Kay xerox parc days. Probably intoxicatingly inspiring environment. But now... I hope it burns. I’ll show up to repair and rebuild.
I do enjoy the Marin headlands though. And I suppose I’ll take a Taqueria SF burrito most days of the week. And the punk scene in Berkeley was great, and growing up skating there was awesome, but... meh the bad outweighs the good.
a lot of these people, having destroyed SF as a livable city, are now moving on to Seattle. Which is rapidly also turning into a city with feces laden sidewalks and a tech dystopia.
He than turns and donates millions/billions ONCE, but that’s specks of sand compared to what would be generated over time yearly and consistently.
So... no faith in that city either and no faith in tech in general. Super sad.
The problem is taxing job headcounts regardless the amount. That creates a horrible precedent for any company trying to do business in a city. It's basically telling business owners that the jobs they are creating are not welcomed. It's penalizing the core of what makes an economy productive.
Let's put Amazon out of the picture for a minute. Since the head tax was meant to tax large employers, it's kind of hard to see in the micro context what imposing a job headcount tax actually means. So for the sake of the example let's say that the head tax applied for any business owner (not hard to imagine since implementing it for large employers create precedence for taxing small employers).
Let's imagine that the business that we are talking about is Mommy's Bakery. The head tax in Seattle was the equivalent of telling mommy to pay a USD 750 ransom for her three employees or to fuck off. Mommy is already collecting and paying taxes and fees.
She is employing people that are putting money back into the local economy, but the city feels that the act of job creation is adding to their problems. So they decide that they want to tax those headcounts.
This is more or less the equivalent of you helping a friend or relative with some money and they coming back and telling you, "hey thanks for the hundred bucks, but because I'm gonna get wasted tonight and gonna spend it all on drinks, I'd need 6 bucks more to get back home".
Yeah sure, six bucks are not too much but just asking for them after you gave them a USD 100, it's utterly ridiculous.
This is how the Seattle city employers felt when the head tax was proposed. They already contribute millions of dollars to the city economy in taxes and jobs, but the city still wanted to get more to justify their gross incompetence when it comes to dealing with the homelessness crisis.
San Franciscans, Californians in general, and "transplants" writ large did not cause this problem. We did it to ourselves with quite a few different inputs.
Ultimately what people who live here--in Seattle, I mean--is that we cannot stop new arrivals from, well, arriving. Freedom of movement is a right in the United States so they're coming, whether we like it or not. And that means we have to scoot over a bit, make a little room, and say hi to our new neighbors. That we've not done that is a huge reason why our arts, our humanities, and our not-white-collar-professional jobs are all decamping to the next cheap place.
However, it's not just housing. Seattle is a city having to go it almost alone trying to fix all of the region's ills, from traffic to mental health to substance abuse to tents on WSDOT's medians. It's not something Seattle can do alone and it's not a burden Seattle taxpayers should bear all by ourselves.
But it's also not the fault of the new arrival from San Francisco. She has a reasons to suspect we'd have our act together, and we've failed her just as much as we've failed the person who winds up in a tent next to the onramp to highway 520.
One of my exes actually came here from Spokane, as its much easier going out here as a homeless gay 17 year old then living with his abusive brothers. Many suburbs and towns are all too happy to encourage the least well to do to head towards the nearest major town, generally involving the police corralling those less fortunate than us and giving them a ride towards said major town.
I hear Tacoma is still relatively inexpensive and nice, one of my old professors moved down there and finds it rather decent. Not sure how many not-white-collar-professionals will continue to be able to afford to live in and around Seattle (outside of a handful of "Affordable" aka heavily subsidized housing complexes).
An article I read recently (https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-homelessness)
> According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, the Seattle metro area spends more than $1 billion fighting homelessness every year. That’s nearly $100,000 for every homeless man, woman, and child in King County, yet the crisis seems only to have deepened, with more addiction, more crime, and more tent encampments in residential neighborhoods.
That statistic should shock people who think that the problem is insufficient government spending or a type of rabid, rich eating the poor Dickensian dystopia.
That article also mentions "pathological altruism", which roughly translates into paying $ for guilt in a way that harms the people who are supposed to be helped. It's sad too, because most tech workers I know would not advocate behaviors/policies for themselves that they advocate for the homeless. Any tech startup that basically was content with no standards, endless spending, and no accountability in the corporate or personal sphere would be bankrupt.
Rufo's platform, just before he enter-exited the race, can best be described as "arrest them all and do it enough times that they move to Eugene." He's only one in a long line of brief candidates who want to immediately ramp up all kinds of law enforcement activity while we "consider proper funding levels" for social services, with no professed idea for what happens when the people we've arrested for vagrancy walk out of the King County Jail in downtown Seattle.
The one thing he and I agree on is that the outputs for our inputs are not at all acceptable but I don't agree at all with what little he proposed to do about it.
I didn't say that Mr. Rufo was incorrect in his numbers; I said I vehemently disagreed with the proposals he made in his brief campaign. I agree with Mayor Durkan that we need a comprehensive understanding of what the money is being spent towards and the results it is having, something her office is supposed to be working on. But we can't just say "spending is paused until we figure that out." We also can't continue with Seattle being the only government entity spending appreciable money on the problem while surrounding cities and counties cluck their tongues in disdain. This is also the State of Washington's and King County's problem, if nothing else. They should act like it.
One last bit, I did not engage in any ad hominems against Rufo; I called him no names (unless you mean "very conservative," which is a label he adopted for himself in his campaign). I denigrated his policy proposals and related an observer's view of what happened to his campaign.
You brought the character of the person making a claim about a statistic into a tangent that had nothing to do with my comment. That's an ad hominem.
With respect to the $100K a homeless person, I quite frankly find that absurd. If it was a spending problem, you could pay them the money directly and they'd be richer than most Americans.
Thats why Utah just started paying for housing. They figured out that the follow on costs to homelessness were huge and for many subgroups of the homeless population it's much cheaper to just pay for their shelter than to pay for all the other things that are certain to go wrong that will require state intervention anyway.
But the post throws a bunch of softballs. It mentions rising costs, hipster drinks, etc. And yes, the _relentless_ costs are a huge factor. But it's not just the costs that changed, it's the entire tenor of the place. The focus on money, valuations, investments... it's like working for Wall Street, with all the nonsense and none of the benefits of being in NYC. And a lot of people are looking at themselves and asking: is this what I want to do with my life? (Except for those who did...)
But on the plus side, moving away is not such a bad thing. Unlike what the post author suggests, the transplants will not "ruin" other cities. At least not the large ones: Pittsburgh, Chicago, Boston, NYC, there are great cities out there with a fun tech culture, much more housing (so it's cheaper), and they've been absorbing newcomers for a hundred years without any danger to their existing culture. (I'll leave Austin and Portland out of it - they might be too small to survive a mass migration of Californians. ;) )
That may be true, but I've met too many people who sold a one-bedroom garden shed in California for $1.2B and moved to a shiney new 11,000 square foot mcmansion in Hyde Park. They're just passing the ruin along.
SF is picked on because people pay such a premium to live there (including employers via the necessary high wages), and it is becoming less and less worth that premium as tech extends out of the bay area.
Same general idea as the Old-Money Boston-Brahmin or NYC types, just with better marketing.
* I've spent a limited amount of time in SF so grain of salt.
I did not leave because I hated SF, I left because I wanted to do something else with my life. In a way, for the same reasons I stopped going to Burningman after the 5th time. There is other things to do in life than just experience one city.
One thing about the bay area is that it definitely goes through cycles. I went through that many times. You can't take it personally that your friends want to do something else with their life. The expectation that we stay in the bay area until we die seems obtuse to me.
I was back recently for a work trip (consulting) and I did not miss it at all. I realized that at the end of the day, I was doing it wrong for myself. I was leading a consumerist lifestyle of click buying things I did not really need on Amazon or paying $20 for lunch every day. Now that I have changed those patterns, I am much happier and more free.
- NYC is expensive and has failing transportation, but people love the unparalleled cultural diversity and gritty tenacity of the city
- Paris is dirty and unfriendly, but the city's romance and character make it a great place to live
- London is expensive and out of touch, but its job opportunities and multiculturalism make it a better place to live
...and so on and so forth.
Someone's always going to dislike SF for a valid reason and someone's always going to hit you back with a valid reason why it's a good place. They're probably both correct.
I didn’t find the tourist-trafficked parts to be dirty. Unfriendliness has is just Parisians being “on-brand.”
SF is incredibly beautiful - land's end, the presidio, twin peaks, the fog, hwy1 in either direction - but I started to feel like the natural beauty was one of the only positive (non-professional) bits of living there.
Anyways, after a bit of travel, I'm considering Boston again for grad school. It's a really awesome city - super diverse, and the winters aren't as bad as everyone says they are. Enjoy!
I did my undergrad in Boston, and then visited for a reunion and then a friend's wedding into an extended trip where I just worked from cafes in different corners of the city -- the last of which really disenchanted me with the city after the two prior visits surrounded by friends.
Boston's academic scene is super diverse. Having the very best educational brands in the world (many of which take pride in their meritocracy and inclusive admissions) means every kind of person dreams of entering that academic scene.
But among the postgrad professionals? It becomes eerily white, with a few pockets of Asians that can be traced back to a professor or other highly respected profession centered in Boston. The chinatown is more of a chinablock. There's half a street with anything Korean. There's a reason so many people who studied in Boston end up in CA or NYC and feel happier, whether they consciously attribute it to the diversity or not (among other reasons). Boston's diversity is not diversity like what London or New York or Seattle provide. SF is barely better, just due to tech being similar to Boston's academic scene and wooing people from very diverse backgrounds, but is a wider professional field with more resources to bring people in.
That said, Boston has its perks. It's beautiful in every season in a unique way, with cobblestone streets and tree-lined avenues, quaint rustic stores, proximity to EU for an international trip, proximity to other east coast hubs like pittsburgh/DC/NYC with a bus/train ride, etc. And if you're going for grad school, there's still plenty of diversity, although self-selected by your program/school.
But diversity and affordable rents are not the perks I would consider Boston for a long-term stay post-grad.
I don’t feel bothered by lots of people walking around the streets, hearing their conversations, living in proximity to others; and I only feel marginally bothered by crowds and packed trains, definitely less than I enjoy the bustle.
In fact even if I don’t talk to a single person or enter a single establishment it just makes me feel energized to be around it. Bars are antisocial and I don’t go often, but even when I’m just walking past one on the way home, the atmosphere around them makes me feel happy (and you can be social at a reasonable volume with all the smokers and loiterers outside if that’s what you like).
There’s something deeply depressing to me about the American suburban life I grew up in: always deserted, copy-pasted strip malls; giant, humanless roads clogged with hurtling metal death traps; cul-de-sacs of strangers spending large fractions of their lives solitary in cars.
(I do acknowledge it can be different to some extent—the ethnic suburbs in LA are vibrant in pockets, for example—but even in the best cases they’re still pretty desolate to me.)
Where I came from in the Midwest, my life involved never talking to anybody within a 20 mile radius of my house except in business transactions, and only rarely even seeing my neighbors. As a child I didn’t mind, but after having lived differently there’s no way I’d choose to go back unless it’s prohibitively expensive to choose otherwise (which is, to my knowledge, a major driver of people moving out of cities into suburbs).
Separately, I personally dislike driving and greatly prefer public transportation. It’s far more comfortable (not much acceleration and far more space than a tiny car unless it’s rush hour), I don’t have to pay attention to anything except where I’m getting off, it’s super cheap, no risk of accidents or headaches from other drivers incompetence, I don’t have to ever find nor pay for parking, I don’t have to worry about the safety of my personal property, I don’t have to worry about my car breaking down out of nowhere, I can drink and not personally endanger myself, the list or positives is basically endless to me but I’ll stop there.
But that all said San Francisco isn’t that dense (in my opinion), has such glaring social issues, is ludicrously expensive and doesn’t have particularly good infrastructure/transit. Given that I can get all of those things automatically by living in pretty much any major east Asian or European city, that’s my preference, but the one and only thing drawing me back is the concentration of jobs and money.
I weaned myself off San Francisco and lived in east Asia for a couple years, but I found myself back now for a job. Hopefully not too long from now I’ll be able to head back over, or at least work remote for a significant part of my time.
I realized I loved the city (for exactly the reasons you mentioned) only when I spent a month in the countryside of Thailand after 2 years of SF. I then spent a considerable time in the major East Asian metropolises, before returning here to rejoin my cofounders. I am far happier than I would be in any non-metropolis, but I can't stop thinking of all the ways SF is just subpar in all the things that make a city great except for interesting conversations with intelligent people, pro-entrepreneurial vibe (minus the VC/fundraising noise), and technical prowess.
Being near my cofounders is invaluable and my heart may be in SF for being the first metropolis I got a chance to get attached to, but I am eagerly looking for a way to live 9 months of the year in a more functional metropolis like NYC, and come here on workations while crashing with friends.
And as far as I can tell a lot of my friends have the same thoughts—it's not just Bay Area natives who can't afford the cost of living who leave the Bay Area for greener pastures, but also tons of disillusioned techies themselves—so the people deriding Californians in this article might rightfully complain about that group.
Thankfully being in software provides a benefit inaccessible to most—the flexibility to work remote. So I think that lifestyle is definitely doable, and I intend to make it happen one way or another.
Now, tech-wise, SF is freaking amazing and you HAVE to go there for a few years if you work in tech. It’s that magical. If you’re a tourist, I’d say avoid it.
Now if you want my opinion, it’s the US that has a huge disparity problem. SF is just the symptom of something much deeper. People are unwilling to see what’s in front of them. When I talk to people in SF or Chicago they tell me that their city is safe and that it has as much homeless as Paris or London. When I hear about prop C which tries to throw more money at the problem, people seem to be against it.
A week after I take a bus around 2pm. In the mission a guy just jumped on a girl and pulled on her phone for like 10s until she released it. Then got out of the bus and ran away. Frightening stuff.
That and the weird homeless jumping at you randomly in the street to give you a scare. I don’t understand why any tourists would come here. It’s really unsafe, especially if you have children.
PS: I also feel so bad for these homes with homeless people sleeping on their porches... or all these shops, restaurants, bars and cafes that end up being swarmed and surrounded by the crazies. Life suck for a lot of the people here. I’m happy I can afford to cab everywhere and avoid the craziness most of the time.
In fact, I've even excluded California from my last and any future job searches because as a plastics engineering manager, a company can't pay me enough for my family and I to live on there. It's crazy.
For me living far from a city is a bonus, and without remote work I'd be hosed here, so it's sure not for everyone. But I'm not tempted to go back.
My sample is limited, but not a lot people around me have good opinions about SF. Guess it is a mutual selection as well.
WHY does the city not just install portapotties all over the place?
I bet they could even plumb the portos into the actual sewer eventually, but it seems like just installing portos and having trucks pump them a few times a day is something that could happen tomorrow.
I can clarify what is happening - this might help others too. There is a large drug scene around Edddy & Turk & Market in San Francisco. Mainly crack or heroin (currently). To earn money these addicts pan handle around market street.
What happens is the addicted users often get belly sick (crack guys from eating food while high and heroin guys from being 'dope sick'). They don't have the physical capacity to move quick enough to a restroom. AND they occupy the most heavily trafficked areas for money (powell/market).
So this is a perfect storm.
Of course, most are commandeered into shooting galleries or places to turn tricks.
Portapotties need a lot of maintenance and have odor issues.
The author hasn’t been to a Berkeley (or San Francisco, or a Penninsula town) city council meeting... there is a lot of very blatant resentment in the Bay Area directed (mostly unfairly) at transplants.
FTFY
Or, to force you into a false dichotomy, are you saying that back when hotdogs cost $0.05, increasing the minimum wage from a few pennies an hour two $2.00 an hour made all the difference in the world?
I don't particularly trust cutthroat employers, who have demonstrated their desire to do everything they can to undercut the salaries and benefits of their employees to expand a bottom line, to properly value and choose to provide the necessary income to give their employees humane standards of living.
Though I do think that a fixed minimum wage where you have to have to have heated debates every time cost of living changes about what it should be set to, is silly. If it's supposed to reflect the ability to achieve a minimum standard of living, let's at least set it dynamically against the price of a typical basket of goods; or use a different mechanism than a minimum wage altogether to achieve that minimum standard of living.
I lived in the state from 1967 until 2006 and I can tell you 1992 was pretty much the pivot point.
EDIT: some early evidence to that speculation: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/10/19/bay-area-rents-...