Why I’m Leaving San Francisco: Meta study
ryanckulp.com
ryanckulp.com
The author has pared the list down to 137 blog posts, so even a fast reader would take a day to read all of them. But probably he already spent at least a day collecting that data, doing the analysis, creating the graphics, etc., so it's not crazy to suggest doing it manually. Alternatively, the list could be further cut down to 20-40 postings, which could be read in a few hours. That would result in a way more interesting (human) analysis.
EDIT: For each blog post, it would be interesting to note the sentiment of whether the person is being pushed out of San Francisco (can't afford the city, lost job, can't renew visa, etc.) or whether they are being pulled to a new location (perfect new job, girlfriend/boyfriend in different location, etc.).
Even if I trusted automated analysis of blog posts to tell why the authors of the posts are leaving, I wouldn't trust a non-systematic collection of 100 blog posts to reflect people who write blog posts about leaving, nor would I trust people who write blog posts about leaving to represent people who leave.
2) Homelessness
3) The politics.
4) Poop (although much worse now). It's not so much the poop itself that bothers me. It's the attitude of the politicians in SF. we just really disliked the way things were being handled and are currently being handled in SF. They are "progressive" in title only. there's really no progress in living standard at all. if anything, things are getting worse and worse and worse, based on the things I've read and the stories I'm hearing.
5) we didn't want to live in a city that might not even be able to provide schooling for our child.
6) Day care costs would have been astronomical (by now it's up to 3000 per month, i've heard)
"Progressive" usually refers to progress in equality & social justice. There've been many instances in American history where a small group has made significant progress at the expense of some larger outside group: initial settlement, slavery, Manifest Destiny, industrialization, redlining, the software boom. These are usually not labeled as progressive. The in-group usually labels them with terms like "destiny", "building the future", "progress" (not "progressive"), "technology", and "rationalization", while the out-group labels them as "colonialism", "imperialism", "conquest", and "corporate greed".
The other major eras of progressivism in the U.S. (1900-1929 and the Civil Rights era from 1965-1980) also did not feature rising living standards for the dominant social group. The former involved a plateau in the rate of technological development & industrialization while increasing unionization started sharing those fruits more broadly, while the latter involved an extension of basic civil rights to non-whites, at the same time that stagflation was taking root and the wages of the white working class started to plateau.
Keep that in mind: when you hear "progressive" it might not be progress for you.
You're missing the point. While it's debatable whether the theory of progressivism is working out for the homelessness, I hope we can agree that the execution has been horrible. Progressives have controlled the local government there for some time now, and since they've done so, things have grown worse. The situation hasn't been much better in Seattle, Chicago, or Detroit. Progressives like to point fingers to blame others for the problems, but there's a very real possibility that, yes, they really are in actuality regressive for everyone, homeless included.
* number of homeless people (they are everywhere)
* safety in general
* poor public transport
* cost of renting and buying
* density (it is quite an empty city and is designed for cars)
* a bit too cold
* Unsafe. 2 vehicle break-ins, 1 apartment intruder while I was home. Fortunately I own a handgun.
* Dirty
* The proportion of creepy weirdos I met got too high. When I first got there, it was something like 1 out of every 20 people I met. By the end, it was something like 1/4.
* Overpriced
* Bad transit
* Corrupt city government
* NIMBYism
Why I stayed longer than I should have:
* Rent control. I'm paying twice as much in rent now.
* The issues didn't appear all at once, they got a little worse each year.
* Cost of moving. It cost me around $15k and it took a lot of energy to pack/apartment hunt/unpack/drive with trailer.
I hope the Bay Area will right itself (although I don't have any suggestions for how that could be done), but I fear that some of the most impacted areas are going to go through a cycle of urban decay and flight and hit "rock bottom" politically before things get safer and cleaner again.
* Homeless people are rare in most of SF, but super common in the middle of downtown (Market St area). So if you live/work near Market St (especially near Tenderloin), you'll feel like homeless people are everywhere. If you don't, you probably won't
* I felt super safe in SF. Even in the Tenderloin, I never felt unsafe or heard of any of my friends being mugged or anything. Stolen bikes, yes. There are parts in and around the Tenderloin that feel very sketch, even if they're safe. You can find neighborhoods like that in most any big city. The difference in SF is that they're in the middle of downtown
* Public transportation isn't anywhere near as good as NYC, but you can get most anywhere on a bus and/or muni (metro/subway). Where I lived most recently (Haight Ashbury area), I thought public transportation was pretty convenient. I took ubers to get to my office in Dogpatch though
* I agree with point #3 - rent is expensive, and buying costs are prohibitively expensive (even with a well-paying job)
* Almost none of my friends in SF own cars. They even recently closed down the main downtown street (Market) from cars [0]. You do need to take buses/ubers to get most places
* It's sweatshirt weather pretty much year-round. Although it does get shorts-warm around October/November. If, like me, you like sweatshirt weather, you won't mind it. If you prefer seasons or hot weather months, you probably won't love the weather
For me, housing prices were the biggest issue. Buying a house in a good school district in the Bay Area is ridiculously expensive. Looking on Zillow, you see a sad number of foreclosures on people's homes who probably had a $1M+ mortgage. If the housing costs stay at these prices or go up, I'd be surprised if you don't see more and more people leaving the Bay Area. I hope that Google/Facebook's plan to build more homes actually brings prices down some [1][2]. We'll see
[0] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2020/01/market-street... [1] https://www.blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/... [2] https://about.fb.com/news/2019/10/facebook-commits-1-billion...
I saw comments (perhaps yours?) along these lines on the last HN post about San Francisco I read. This doesn't jive with my experiences in San Francisco at all. In fact a couple weeks ago I took the 38R to the outer richmond and was just shocked both by the number of vacant storefronts along Geary and the number of homeless folks around.
I felt super safe in SF. Even in the Tenderloin, I never felt unsafe or heard of any of my friends being mugged or anything. Stolen bikes, yes. There are parts in and around the Tenderloin that feel very sketch, even if they're safe. You can find neighborhoods like that in most any big city. The difference in SF is that they're in the middle of downtown
I've never had a problem in the Tenderloin and I've plenty of opportunity to, but Turk & Taylor definitely earned its reputation. It's a dirty and poor neighborhood but the junkies generally put me less on edge than the folks with more outward facing psychiatric issues like you find in Potrero.
Public transportation isn't anywhere near as good as NYC, but you can get most anywhere on a bus and/or muni (metro/subway). Where I lived most recently (Haight Ashbury area), I thought public transportation was pretty convenient. I took ubers to get to my office in Dogpatch though
New Yorkers will happily kvetch about their public transit (last time I was there I ended up talking with these women on the subway who were grousing about having to transfer or walk a few blocks because late night service was upended by construction/maintenance). And, quite frankly, you'll have trouble getting to the outer reaches (especially outer Queens + Brooklyn) on a bus/taxi/subway car.
The Haight is incredibly well served by buses and streetcars, but the Dogpatch is not. The metro past embarcadero is a shit show (by design).
Woot. I find it extremely hard to avoid them unless you live in a very very residential part of SF and you only stay there. I'm in Castro and I cross probably 15 homeless people just walking to my bus every morning.
> I felt super safe in SF
I met several people who told me this, they are all used to the city and have been here (or worse places) for a while. On the other hand I've lived in China, France, England, Canada and moving here to SF was really scary in my first couple months, I can say I got used to it though. But definitely one of the sketchier place I've ever been in the world.
Time is running out for some of the regions politicians. With hundreds of millions spent, it feels like there is almost zero impact.
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2019/jun/13/californias-213-billio...
This is roughly 1% of the annual operating budget.
Not much as $60k/person would cover just 40,000 people. Homeless advocacy/Non-profits would take a large percentage of this for administration so the per person dollar spend is far lower.
Because "Junior Software Engineer" is usually written as just "Software Engineer", "Software Engineer I", ...?
totally valid criticism tho
https://www.uhaul.com/Articles/About/19966/U-Haul-Migration-...
QED
after ~30 years of online chatting, they kind of naturally went away for me.
I find it fascinating that people who communicate largely through certain media (like SMS, or twitter) have evolved their own independent systems for assigning meaning to capitalization and punctuation. While there is a benefit to having an norms shared by all within a discourse community, it's a shame some people are so fastidious and judgemental when applying their own cultural norms to others.
perhaps as many people leave nyc, for example, but only the SF posts get shared
Not to put too fine a point on it, but 1 year to do any one of these things, let alone all three, doesn't really seem like much time at all.
Regarding politics, I wonder if another way to interpret this is people who find San Francisco too liberal (or unsupportive of Trump) and want to move somewhere more representative of how a majority of the country (however you define that) thinks.
This is absolutely valid and it's sad to see this greyed out. SF dating is a shitshow from many perspectives.
Dating in SF is… interesting, especially if you're trying to do so within the confines of the tech community. Take a look at r/SFr4r (yikes). The tech community out here is also pretty damn small. Looking on HN, facebook, or reddit I'll still run into posts from folks I've gone out with or know professionally.
From attending devops days in Manhattan a couple years ago I'd say that the NYC tech community certainly seems more diverse than what I'm used to out here.
I'll provide a personal anecdote...
I lean on the conservative side, and lived in San Francisco for a few years. I never had any particular desire to live somewhere else just to be around others who believe that the nation can be more effectively governed with lower taxes and a leaner bureaucracy; or those who believe that abortion is murder. However, in the last five years, there's been a large uptick in representation of a very opinionated, very loud, and increasingly violent minority of those associated with the left. The kind of people who will call you a Nazi for not agreeing with them, or for suggesting in any context that a person ought to be responsible for their own well-being.
I think I'm not alone in stating that was a factor in my moving away from the area. I did not even vote for Trump in 2016 by the way, and I left in 2017.
People say the same thing about Seattle, and virtually without exception they're people who have simply never lived in a major city before, and wildly misunderstand what counts as "crime."
Like the guy upthread who wanted to move because he'd experienced two car prowls.
one could argue a robbed car at 2am is not a safety issue (if nobody is in the car), but i somewhat agree with the broken window theory.
the first day i bought a new bicycle and parked/locked it outside the big mall on Market, in front of 2 security guards, my seat was stolen within 30 minutes.
etc etc. presence of crime == less safe.
SF needs to address this crime situation. So does, for that matter, Seattle. Short, medium, and long term solutions need to be developed, promoted, and delivered.
It may not be rational to see a broken car window and conclude that you are about to be mugged, but if you want to be as safe as possible you probably would prefer to live somewhere where cars are not often broken into.
Which, as it turns out, is not what I suggested, alluded to, or claimed. Just because we get earthquakes out here doesn't mean I'm going to worry about hurricanes (nor does it mean that neither earthquakes nor hurricanes are significant).
It may not be rational to see a broken car window and conclude that you are about to be mugged, but if you want to be as safe as possible you probably would prefer to live somewhere where cars are not often broken into.
Having somewhat recently relocated to the burbs, I've had more problems with property crime out here than I did in San Francisco. More homeless people, worse traffic, worse pedestrian infrastructure, much worse (and more expensive) public transit too.
Also I take exception at the "never lived in a major city before". I've lived in "major cities" for most of my life, and it wouldn't take too many car prowls to make me leave. It just never happened.
Ironically I've only been to Seattle once over a few days and on my second day got attacked by an homeless person with mental health issues. Fortunately for me, they also had the physical strength of your average toddler so I left the situation without a scratch and wondering wtf just happened.
I have a fun anecdote too -- the last time I was out in a rural area I got knocked over in a Walmart by two rednecks who were fighting. I've elected not to judge the entire area based on that one experience.
Cities aren't static entities. New York (pre-Rudy) had major issues with property crime. San Francisco has a significant problem with property crime. I'm fairly unique in my social circle in that I've never had a car broke into, but it's hard to deny the amount of shattered glass on the sidewalks.
The problem comes from an influx of people that would rather sequester themselves in gated communities, have robots deliver everything, buy food at the automat, take their self-driving cars everywhere just to avoid human interaction. There's no motivation to improve the situation.
Of course the police response to Prop 47 (let's just give up!) is also hurting the situation.
Even NYC isn't that bad depending on where you live, but it can swing straight back if people just sit back and accept it.
Oh, that one's simple enough if you assume they're part of the reason why you'd leave the country. And while we're on that topic, the same two reasons might also get factored into deciding to not come to SF or any other US city -- alongside guns, overpriced education, and overpriced healthcare.
Perhaps, because one can leave the country when you leave SF? I did.
document.querySelectorAll(`p`).forEach(el => {
el.textContent = el.textContent.replace(/[\s]i[\s]/g, ' I ');
el.textContent = el.textContent.split(/\.[\s]+/g)
.filter(sent => !!sent)
.map(sent => sent[0].toUpperCase() + sent.substr(1))
.join('. ');
})
i do have css for down-casing title etc however
spoke more in depth about this stylistic decision, with context, here: https://www.everyonehatesmarketers.com/marketing-without-bud...
However, your heuristic worked because the content of the article was crap. Or to be more charitable: over-promised with a good idea and under-delivered with incompetent data-analysis, mangled conclusions, and ax-grinding (reiterating an opinion that he admits isn't supported by his data).
Sadly, it gives us another data point: a person who doesn't follow "fake rules" and totally uses "totes" in comments didn't write a good article. not a good look
A simple way to improve the trustworthy of the analysis is having another person working with you to develop the categories, and then independently code the posts, and then resolve the differences through discussion.