Nobody says hi in San Francisco
noahpinion.substack.com
noahpinion.substack.com
Certainly, if one works in tech in SF, it's easy to get stuck in an industry bubble where the first questions strangers ask each other at social events is "oh who do you work for?" and it just becomes a parade of corporate logos, tech stack holy wars, weekend side projects, and comparing option offers.
Yes, I do and I think it's as Noah mentions visible in transport, and unlike Noah I think it is closely related to the 'tech' mentality.
I've been in SF but I live in London. Like NY, in London everyone uses the tube. Doesn't matter if you're rich or a poor sob, there is still public life and shared public space.
SF feels, to use tech jargon, 'unbundled'. I have never met more classist people than Californian tech workers, who seem entirely unaware of their own classism to boot.
The ideal world of the SF tech worker I think is an individual driving around in a driverless car (because that means they don't need to talk to the driver), ordering their food on Uber eats, having chats on clubhouse. And what's weird is how distinct this is from the finance driven culture of NY or London. The SF tech scene is also where I for the first time encountered people talking about 'unschooling' frequently, which is basically affluent people separating their kids from everyone else but they seemed to be convinced that this is very progressive.
Despite folks in finance also making a lot of cash, I don't think I've ever met a trader in the city of London who unschooled their kid.
I think if you want people to say "hi" to you, you have to act the part. Some single 20-something walking around with headphones and a hoodie... nobody is going to talk to you. Get a dog and a partner, and people will talk to you while you're out walking the dog. They're walking their dog, and so you have something to talk about. (The dogs will break the ice!)
Are they a nice dog owner? Do they pull the dog along their own preferred route, staring at a their phone, getting annoyed when the dog stops to sniff? Do they yank on the leash? Or do they patiently allow their dog to take in the smells of the neighborhood and leave their own messages in return, let the dog change direction in response to a smell or sound? Do they allow their dog to meet other dogs, with the other owner's permission? (As my wife says "this isn't your walk, this is the dog's walk")
Is this a responsible owner? How does their dog behaved around other dogs? If the dog misbehaves, how does the owner respond? Do they pick up after their dog?
Bottom line: a dog is an excellent asshole-o-meter.
If you are walking down the street drinking a Starbucks or eating a candy bar and you finish, do you leave the empty cup or wrapper in someone else's bin too?
Genuinely curious... I've always brought my own garbage home with me, or to the next public bin. What do you do when it's not trash day?
> There is certainly class separation and racial division in New York, but there is an inherent camaraderie to the city itself, a shared feeling that everyone is in the belly of the same vast urban beast.
Of course, that could just be something unique after the collective trauma of 9/11 (and Hurricane Sandy, etc.). You see it in pop culture depictions- "this city sucks, but it's our city!"
Again, getting random city dwellers to say hi to you is the opener of this article, it shouldn't be the last word that everyone fixates upon.
YMMV but if the author was in the more residential areas such as Marina/Cow Hollow/Inner Sunset/Noe Valley and jogged the same routes regularly, perhaps he'd have had a more small town interactions.
NYC does have plenty of homeless as well, but the cold clears them up pretty quick. By late November, NYC is too cold, and during the summer it can get too hot.
SF definitely has other major problems. It is just too lenient on crime. NYC has seen somme uptick as well, since last year (pre-covid), and the culprit might be the no-bail reform. While might seen progressive in nature, it is letting out folks that have done multiple crimes back to back, and they return doing the same. SF has implemented this earlier and the uptick in crime is reflecting it:
There was a guy that got arrested 14 times in the last 18 months for car theft. And he is still free: https://twitter.com/SFPDTenderloin/status/133728051660988416...
When you have car-thieves/robbers running free around, immagine all other lower level of criminals. They know they can operate with impunity and they act accordingly.
Ps. (I lived in SF for 7 years, and now in NYC for 6 years. NYC folks are less friendly in general, and more direct. SF-ers are more polite, but also more flakey).
https://www.bestplaces.net/compare-cities/detroit_mi/san_fra...
Most of the violent crime in Detroit is confined to a few zip codes which definitely are not where you'd locate a tech company. There are lots of video cameras installed downtown and at places like gas stations and liquor stores which used to be crime magnets.
Here's the City of Detroit crime viewer. On the left check off all the crimes under violent crimes. Be sure to set the date range or you only get the past couple of weeks. It takes a while to pan but you can see that there are fewer crimes in the downtown area than say the East part of the city.
That comes off pretty cold-hearted...
Last time this happen (a drunk guy cracked his head in front of my building, bleeding all over) I called 911, and the ems came. They knew the guy as he did drunk pass out often, and this was not his first time.
I wind him up by threatening to walk around his neighbourhood being "weird and dangerous-looking" (his unnerved words) by using friendly eye contact and saying hello to people I walk by.
This reminds me of how LA is often described, to bring up a rival city that us NorCal denizens might bristle at being compared to. LA County is a hugely diverse area, but each distinct ethnic and immigrant group has its own enclave, its own self-sustaining community. So the need for them to intermingle is lessened.
Kansas City, St Louis, Twin Cities...easy to say hi or start up a conversation.
Unfriendliness only an issue in dense cities with a high quasi-transient population or maybe a boom town. Even there, if you look for the persistent villages beneath the city...which is the classic NYC response.
Intermountain West, Deep South sans south Florida, Appalachia, Desert Southwest (maybe not Las Vegas or Phoenix or the boutique tourist towns in high season, hard to say), New England sans Boston...not really a problem.
There are certainly some people very concerned about money/status (as you will find anywhere), but SF is also chock full of weird people doing their own thing, much more than most places in the USA.
Is it really the city to start or raise a family in?
For someone who wants to have a large home workshop to build boats in, built on cheap land, yeah, it's not a great place. For someone who wants to live on a farm and grow all their own food, not so great. For a childless couple who needs a 5 bedroom house and professionally landscape-architected decorative garden to show their coworkers they have made it (I know several such people in the South Bay), not great. For a family of 7 who want each kid to have their own room, not so great.
However it is great for anyone who doesn't like making every trip by car, or who wants to live somewhere where there are constantly new things to do.
> Is it really the city to start or raise a family in?
I have a 1.5 year old and a 4 year old, have been living in SF for about 8 years and intend to stay indefinitely. So for me, yes.
But many middle class families have different criteria. e.g. there are many families who move out of SF because they feel they have run out of space in a small rent-controlled apartment and can't afford a bigger one; or they need childcare help from family who live elsewhere; or they don't want to send their children to public schools alongside working class children ('the average test scores are too low'), but can't afford expensive private schools. Etc.
In my personal opinion, for anyone under the age of 20 it is a much more fun place than almost anywhere in the USA, with a much wider variety of resources available. Suburbia sucks for young people (speaking from personal experience after growing up in a "nice" suburb). YMMV.
Not in the United States. And if you're someone "who doesn't like making every trip by car", the list of cities is rather short and can probably be counted on one hand. In fact, New York and San Francisco might be the only ones which can realistically offer something comparable to what can be found in other global cities in terms of daily walkability and household shopping. Washington, DC, Boston, and maybe Chicago come close, but it's not quite the same.
Chain stores are killing some of the walkability in San Francisco, though. A CVS, Wholefoods, or City Target can put convenience stores, toy stores, hardware stores, bakers, vegetable markets, meat markets, etc out of business across multiple neighborhoods, the same way a Wal-Mart can destroy entire downtowns in suburban and rural towns. And because transit sucks in SF (cheap and ubiquitous, but s-l-o-w), people often end up using their car to get to these higher traffic stores. This is a rather new phenomenon, though, because until about a decade or two ago San Francisco had extremely high barriers to chain stores.
Empirically, there is very high demand to live in SF, indicating that many people find it more "livable" by their own criteria than alternatives.
Sure you can find entertainment and enjoy nice things, but it won't really feel like a community.
I found almost everyone to be pretty friendly and welcoming. But it's true that walking with a child (or a dog) generally makes people more open to conversation, so YMMV.
I don't feel like I have a large tight-knit friend group, but the neighborhood feels plenty like a "community" to me, even though a substantial proportion of the people around are likely to only stay for a few yars. Maybe you have a different idea of what a community is.
Obviously the pandemic has radically changed everything; few people spend lots of time chatting with neighbors in close proximity anymore. There are also a lot of small businesses which have turned over or are likely to in the next year or two, based substantially on the lack of Federal financial support during this pandemic. We'll see how the neighborhood looks once things have settled down in a few years.
- people are friendly, but weary of the homeless and corona issues
- gay people move to SF for obvious reasons
- young people move to SF instead of the Peninsula to date
- tech people move to SF instead of other regions for the jobs
- most families move out when they have children because of the school admission and location policies (if you have 2 kids in elementary grades, they might have to go to different schools, etc.)
- if you're Republican and mention Trump in the office, you will likely have to find a new job.
The downtown was not burned by Marxists (yet), but rents are still too high for all.
I noticed no difference whatsoever between the two cities regarding how likely strangers on the street are to say hello.
I make a special effort to say HI and smile very enthusiastically during these times, see if I can break people out of their misery :-)
I've lived in North Beach for around a year. Both before and during Covid, I've found people to be super friendly and willing to have a short conversation if it makes sense to have one. A simple "hi" would be welcomed the majority of the time.
On the other hand, I used to love in lower polk, fairly close to the tenderloin (sutter st). No way would I talk to anyone on the street there, and I suspect most people would ignore or become fearful of a "hello".
Basically Tokyo builds proper housing supply so it’s easily affordable, but as a result housing is not a good place to invest money.
In the US housing is seen as an investment which creates bad policy and perverse incentives to constrain supply in order to enrich existing owners.
Housing can be affordable or a good investment, but it can’t really be both.
Tokyo does this the right way and SF (along with the Bay Area and America generally) does it wrong. Housing in Tokyo is relatively cheap.
Somewhat unrelated I found this one while looking which I loved when I first read it. It’s about a super cool tax policy Japan implemented to help rural areas that people leave for the city, it incentivizes people to send some of that money back: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2018/10/19/japanese-hometown-tax/
It depends on which part of the 23 wards of Tokyo you refer to. Central Tokyo, yes, it can be expensive, close to Manhattan rents. But farther outside of central Tokyo, you can get very reasonable rents. And there's a lot more options in Tokyo when you factor in reliable public transport and a much larger metro area than the 5 boroughs of NYC.
So, it would be odd to ‘interrupt’ somebody while they are in conversation.
It was interesting to see lots of people communicating, but with somebody not physically present.
Anecdotal, of course.
It seems like most average people were struggling and near the boiling point of discontent.
Even worse, because so many people in the SF Bay Area are semi-temporary transplants, they are often in "vacation"-mode and don't care about the area or other people as much because they're uninvested.
"I noticed that the group was one Black guy, one South Asian guy, one East Asian guy, one White girl, and one guy who might have been Hispanic. It was like some sort of promotional photo from an HR department. And suddenly I thought of the Axis powers, and their insane delusions of racial purity and supremacy, and I thought: 'How could you idiots ever hope to beat us?'"
The United States was ~90% white for World War 2 [1]. Other major allied powers, the USSR and the UK probably were even moreso. It doesn't make sense to suggest that modern diversity had anything to do with World War 2.
A better, modern example, might be comparing the modern US to modern China, which is 92% Han Chinese[2]. Only, I'm not sure US dominance against China will be as decisive as it was against Nazi Germany.
1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic...
https://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/research/online-exhibitions/his...
The war substantially changed the society: Common experience in the armed forces, people moving around the country after being uprooted by the war, subsidized college via the GI bill, etc.
But even so, many people were scandalized at the idea of a Catholic president even in the 1960s.
Make a pedantic point, get pedantic replies. I think it's arguable that the racial diversity of the modern U.S. was a natural outgrowth of the cultural/ethnic diversity of WWII era U.S.; by then, this country was already a melting pot. So there is some truth, however garbled, to the article's point. And it was a minor rhetorical observation in any case.
If it's pedantry to point out this is wrong, then that's a greater criticism of the article because the author is including a paragraph that is so unimportant it apparently doesn't matter if it's true or false.
You mention that Nazi Germany was big on supremacy and homogeneity and the US isn't, but I think that's the same mistake I originally pointed out. You are conflating modern ideals (don't care about homogeneity or [racial] supremacy) with past ideals. America of the pre-war was actually concerned with those things. I could point to the power of the Klu Klux Klan or the fact that the Nazi eugenics movement was influenced by the American eugenics movement.
It's not the case that "We" won the second world war. Our forbears did, and in some ways they were similar to us and in some different.
My overarching point is that it doesn't really make sense to use the second world war as an example of the strength of modern diversity because modern diversity wasn't in place at that time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18070300
As I stated, the author is putting the cart before the horse in attributing the Allies’ diversity as part of the reason for why they won. But he isn’t completely far off in suggesting the Allies represented more open societies, the types that would lead to racial diversity later on. Precursors to modern diversity, if you will- at least closer to it than the fascist states were.
Looking back at your earlier point about China, it’s interesting to note that despite being 92% Han, that civilization has always been not entirely homogenous- indeed the Republic of China which was the major ally in WWII Asia portrayed itself as a multiethnic state:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Races_Under_One_Union
Was Nationalist China a liberal democracy with modern conceptions of equality, let alone diversity? Of course not. But they were closer to it than Showa Japan, at least.
The more important point is just that the Nazis were explicit, avowed racists, while the US and Britain had a stronger ideology of racial equality and tolerance - though there was still plenty of racism in both those countries.
I think of ‘Mythical Man Month’ and the notion that having more humans is not necessarily an advantage.
https://www.intelligence.gov/index.php/people/barrier-breake...