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Comment by ilovecaching | Hacker News Reader

SF and the Bay Area are two very distinct places. The Bay Area is literally a series of midwestern towns dotted by dot com campuses. SF is a cesspool of homelessness and vanity. I love the bay, hate SF.

Also San Diego has tons of homeless too, and it has none of the tech scene. People are homeless in California because A) It has weather you can be outside in year round, especially in SoCal B) Our government is corrupt and is the cause of a serious housing crisis to keep prices inflated C) Cost of living is inflated by the housing crisis.

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I’m not sure if the Bay Area are Midwestern towns anymore than they are generic American suburbs. Their culture is not Midwestern at all.

Yeah, my description would have been more along the lines of a long line of pretty generic suburban sprawl punctuated by a few walkable town centers, a university campus, and so forth. But mostly congested sprawl.

I'm from the midwest and feel completely at home in the Bay, and no where else in Cali. It's full of transplants, lots of small towns sort of strung together, with a totally middle class feel despite the money in the area.

The kind of person who moves from the mid west and then feels at home in is not representative of the average midwesterner. The cultural values are very different and that's before you even get into politics.

There's a pretty big difference between midwesterners that grew up in rural areas and ones that grew up in cities. The cultural values might not be that different depending on where you're actually from.

> The Bay Area is literally a series of midwestern towns dotted by dot com campuses.

Midwestern? It's as far west as you can get.

And they're not towns - they're cities, all merged into one massive continuous urban sprawl for 80 miles around the bay.

I suppose by American standards they're cities, but if you're at all used to like, Seoul, they're basically towns.

The only “real” city in the USA is Manhattan. SF does not come close to qualifying as one. Let me know when I can get dinner reservations at more the 2 places at midnight. The streets roll up at around 10pm. Just for perspective I would argue the only real city in the world is Tokyo.

Very few cities in the world have the sort of late night options you talk about. London sure doesn't. And you start excluding cities like London from a list of "real cities" and you have to wonder if your criteria need to be adjusted a bit.

I can get dinner at midnight in London and Paris.

As someone who frequently flies into London relatively late at night, it's not easy to get a decent meal at 11pm, Of course, I'm not sure the options for a decent meal in Manhattan at that hour are great either. The number of fast food restaurants open don't really count and London is better if you know where some of the ethnic enclaves are.

NYC is definitely more of a "city that never sleeps" than most but its hours are not the norm for most major world cities.

Try these two links. A mix of food with last orders at 1130 up until 2am for some.

https://www.hot-dinners.com/Features/Hot-Dinners-recommends/...

https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/restaurants/midnight-fe...

Yes, I supposed if compared to the fifth largest city in the world, San Francisco isn't a gigantic, sprawling metropolis.

Come on.

They're like small towns dude. Definitely not cities.

They are cities. San Mateo is a city. San Jose is a city. Hayward is a city. Redwood City is... a city. Union City is... a city. Oakland isn't just a city, it's the eighth most populated city in the whole of California!

You're taking this way to literally. Union City isn't a city. It's a small town at best. Redwood City is like a bigger town. Fremont is also town sized. San Carlos is literally a town I've visited in Indiana. None of these places are worthy of being called cities except for Oakland and maybe San Jose.

This is a truly insane take. San Jose, the 3rd most populous city in California and 10th most populous in the entire United States is _maybe_ a city?

By global standards, yes.

Yes, America sucks at urbanization.

It's a city with a long-dead downtown surrounded by sprawl.

(SJ native here)

Since San Jose is the 10th largest city in the US by population, perhaps you aren't the best gatekeeper when it comes to what constitutes a city, and what does not.

San Jose is larger than San Francisco.

As it turns out there are actually definitions for these things, but it can differ not just by country but also by state within the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town#United_States

CA does not legally acknowledge any distinction between towns and cities. However, many states require a "town" to have fewer than 1,000, 2,000, 6,000, etc., residents (the bound varying by state). Union City has ~75,000 people, which would prevent it from being considered a small town in the majority of states that distinguish rigorously between towns and cities.

Some, like Los Gatos and Woodside, specifically incorporated as "Town of" in their name and public branding.

Fremont's population is over 215,000

When he says cities I'm pretty sure he means "urban feel/culture" all those places, apart from maybe Oakland, do not have that urban feel.

San Jose is a 1 million person suburb.

Assuming you aren't being sarcastic we have incredibly different definitions of small towns. My rule of thumb is when it becomes difficult to quickly count all the stoplights in a town in your head it often isn't a "small town" anymore. For example my wife grew up in a quinessential "small town" and it only has three stoplights.

A three-stoplight "town" is a village at best, more like a crossroads or a couple of junctions :)

Cities are urban. They have congestion, nightlife with noticeable quantities people on the streets in the evening, chance encounters as you walk around, and a general feeling of lots of stuff happening within a walkable distance.

Not in California. Source: I work for municipal government in the bay area

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

I can see how it feels like, maybe, Ohio. That's basically what Ohio is.

Ohio is basically a few hundred miles of corn, soybeans, and woods. It's not continuous urban sprawl.

Source: I grew up in the middle of it.

As someone who is living there right now, I don't think that is an accurate depiction of Ohio unless you are way outside of a city. Columbus for example is basically a 10 mile circle of sprawling suburbia centered by a relatively small downtown. Your statement is analogous to saying California is just hundreds of miles of hills and mountains and forests while discounting the major epicenters that exist.

This is what I meant. For example, the entire corridor from Cleveland to Canton is a sprawling series of small towns with no beginning or ending. Reminds me of driving down the 101.

Calling them "Midwestern towns" is really weird as they are more dense than many Midwestern cities. If you go to Des Moines (which is the most populous city in Iowa) you'll find the population significantly less dense than somewhere like Sunnyvale.

Portland has almost as big of an issue with homelessness as sf and almost no tech to speak of.

There's all kinds of tech in Portland. Source? Me, who travels to tech events in Portland frequently.

At least half of this statement is just objectively wrong.

On the other hand, SF is one of the most beautiful cities in the US with a vibrant culture and the rest of the bay is utterly boring ugly suburbs.

Berkeley is pretty great. I actually preferred it to SF when I lived there. Lots of Oakland is fantastic too.

But I agree with you for the most part. Basically all of the bay built in the last 70 years is garbage. As the writer of "Ghostride the Volvo" put it, Fremont's just a parking lot with a mayor.

  with a vibrant culture

... like a Petri dish

D) Unlike many states, California has the equivalent of a "citizen advocate" for someone who is involuntarily placed in a mental health facility.

This is good in that those without voice are not simply trampled over. This is bad in that you probably cannot hold someone long enough for effective treatment if they continuously express the desire to leave.

Most people who talk about "homelessness" in SF as an issue don't really have a beef with the homeless themselves; it comes up as complaints about clear behavioral problems such as harassment, disorderly conduct and the like. It's surprising that even when mental health is an issue, that these don't lead to some sort of court-ordered treatment.

> It's surprising that even when mental health is an issue, that these don't lead to some sort of court-ordered treatment.

Involuntarily restraining someone has a very high bar--harm to self or others. Rightfully, "being a nuisance" doesn't really cross that bar.

Someone with Alzheimer's and no family is a good test--when do you force them into a facility? And what kind of facility? And how do you pay for that? And is that actually an improvement to their life?

Disturbing the peace is more than simply "being a nuisance" to someone else - it's a recognized infraction, that may well lead to being detained in jail or being ordered to do some community service. Isn't that a sort of "involuntary restraint", too? Potayto, potahto.

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