Of course, the other way to look at the de-campers is that they were going to move to the burbs inevitably. Which good for them, but cities are injured, not dead.
It strikes a nerve with me because in Massachusetts a similar sentiment is expressed by Boston-Cambridge folks about Lowell, Worcester, and other periphery cities. Its simply mot true that these places are devoid of culture snd cuisine and in the age of Yelp and Google Maps it takes almost no time to find it.
But SF has more high quality restaurants within a 20min walk of my apartment than my hometown had in total. Average restaurant quality is higher too. Just because there’s more competition.
Another fun example: in SF we have 5 grocery stores within a 10min walk. Back home the nearest grocery store was a 3min walk away, great. But the next one after that was 10min. To get to a proper supermarket size grocery store ... that’s a car trip. In SF it’s a 15min walk.
Density is wonderful. There’s economies of scale that you get at 18,400 people per square mile that you just can’t pull off at 4,500.
The ultimate test for a city is this: Do you have 5 “asian restaurants” or do you have 5 south vietnamese, 3 north vietnamese, 10 cantonese, 5 ramen, 6 japanese grill, 3 sushi, 4 dimsum, etc
For example back home we had the mexican restaurant, here you have 10 for each type of mexican food.
If it weren’t for SF’s high concentration of my industry (tech), I’d likely move to NYC, London, or Paris.
I'd say Paris and London (and most > 1m people cities in Europe and many in Asia) are also more walkable than SF.
Agreed, and I think the parent was saying that LA and Fremont are less walkable than SF, not that Tokyo is.
There are exceptional cuisine resources in San Francisco, and amazing grocery stores, like Bi-Rite and Rainbow, but as a whole the situation neither benefits from the culinary community that it used to have (how many people have moved away) or from the kind of consumer that it used to have (well to-do kids just out of Stanford or a midwest school are not people who know what buffalo mozzarella is, or why you'd want to buy it, but their money rapidly became the only money that mattered).
So here’s some perspective: My entire home country has 6 Michelin star restaurants. Of those, 1 is in the capital which is the home town I’m comparing above.
SF has 7 restaurants with 3 stars.
Places with stars don't have the economic situation I discussed: they have the money to really go beyond their surroundings.
The competition means that a lot of places scraping by in smaller cities can’t make it in a bigger city. In theory that means median quality is higher.
And even a 3-star restaurant won’t survive in a place that doesn’t get enough well-to-do visitors to sustain it.
For a more casual perspective, SF has 126 restaurants on the Michelin list (not all hve stars). My entire home country has 52.
Quality food has more to do with agriculture and supply chains than money or density per se -- good salad is not something you can buy if no one is growing it -- and more and more areas in the US have made the transition to that kind of farming and production.
Now challenging SF on grocery stores -- that's another matter. They are drawing on deep roots, there.
In fact some of the best food & drink I've had was in parts of Nebraska & Missouri and Wisconsin. You absolutely don't need to be in the city to get good food & entertainment.
I wonder if there is precedent with the migration out of NYC and the like in the post-WWII/mid Century period. It was a real boom time for the West...California in particular. A lot of folks came from back East or the Midwest...
Not many tried to explicitly recreate their East Coast/Midwest life in the West...in fact they made a point of trying to create a unique California “lifestyle”. That new California lifestyle was the hot US cultural trend from, say, 1960 to 1990.
May happen again, but in the reverse direction, Californians creating a new Montanan/Utahn/Ohioan/etc. culture by engaging in the roots of their new not-California and building something better, bringing their creativity while leaving behind their California. Of course, if they try merely to graft a California-lite onto their new rootstock...well, they could be an important new source of protein for the locals...
I don’t think this creative dynamic could happen in other “tech hub cities”, because, frankly, there is no essential culture there to work with. Austin may be nice, but it seems more parasite on Texas culture than symbiont.
(Which has been a slam against California over the years too. What’s the difference between California and yogurt? Yogurt has an active living culture. More people outside of California believe that than you might think. It’s been 30 years since CA has been a dominant nationwide cultural thing, Hollywood as almost a metaculture notwithstanding. Silicon Valley? That’s getting onto 25 years old now...that’s senescent in US cultural terms.)
CA, like it or not, has an outsized influence to the whole world, to the point that it kinda becomes 'undistinguishable' as it is everywhere. I am talking about tech/SF/SV and Hollywood. They have risen to the 'metaculture' level which few places/countries have.
ps, HN, reddit, FB, started in the east coast, but had to move in the west in order to flourish. Same with the Movie industry. It started in the NYC and New Jersey suburbs, but had to move West in order to flourish.