You might want to try Salt Lake City: has a nice vibe, the Mormon influence myth is overblown, and you have mountains, forest, and scrub nearby just like in Portland.
Prop 13 is part of the problem, but there are lots of confounding factors. FWIW, the lack of housing is largely artificial: there are lots of empty units, they are just priced out of reach of the folks who really need them. I live in Park Merced, on my block there are at least a dozen empty homes, yet a few blocks away there are families living in RV's parked around Lake Merced. The corporation that owns PM won't lower the rents. I don't know why, but I suspect that doing so would mess with things like the appraisal value of the property?
Last month a group of squatters moved into the townhouse across the street from my house. We thought new tenants had moved in, but a couple of days later the staff were there throwing them out. (The squatters had changed the lock on the front door!) A staff member told me that this same group has been breaking into units all over the property. The police were called, but they never showed up.
Last week a van parked in the garage here was broken into and items were stolen. We've been here a quarter of a century and that has never happened before. There are video cameras in the garage, but again, the police did nothing.
That's before you get to the tent camps, the rampant and open drug abuse (literally folks shooting up on the sidewalk), the raw lawless anarchy that the Tenderloin has become, etc.
Unless you have a shit-ton of money and can afford to live in one of the nice enclaves SF is a shitty town. It breaks my heart to admit it, I grew up here and I (used to) really love it here, but the city that SF has become is sad and dangerous.
San Francisco is really 2 different cities rather than 11 counties. West side (where I live) has some minor problems but otherwise offers the best mix of culture, places to eat, parks, and transit. Downtown is rife with problems and if someday it does get cleaned up, it will wonderful since the right density and transit is there.
Get out at Glen Park and and there's a the quaint Glen Park Village.
Get out at Balboa Park and head over a few blocks up Ocean for another neighborhood row of shops.
Or get on Muni Metro and take the KLM to West Portal. Or keep riding to Stonestown and do your shopping at Target, Wholefoods, or TJs, then go see a movie at the Regal.
Hop on the N and ride all the way out to La Playa and get yourself a cup of coffee and a sandwich at Java Beach. Then walk around the Sunset and see just how sleepy the western side is!
To me it seems like a place whose best years have passed many years ago now. I suspect we'll look back at 2019-2020 as being "peak Silicon Valley" and the time after as the years in which it began to lose its status as the centre of gravity for our industry.
That's why I don't live there anymore. The Earth is bigger than North America.
In Vancouver you just hop on a small boat and get a quick trip across, I think with your bus pass
There’s a proposal to build a ferry terminal in Redwood City, but that’s still pretty far from the densest part of the south bay.
There are ferries, but they only go from a very few points in SF to a very few points in Alameda, Oakland, and the north bay.
Seems like most of the time, the places you're trying to get to aren't close to the water anyway.
Crime is at historic lows for both property and assault in 2020. I know it went in 2021 but not enough to make the data show San Francisco is worse now than in the 80s, 70s , or 60s.
https://www.ppic.org/publication/crime-trends-in-california/
My understanding is that at that time it also had a booming art scene and was going through an awesome counter culture phase that birthed Burning Man.
Maybe that's what's ahead now that everyone is leaving? Videos showing the drug problem are terrifying though...
Within a few years almost all my friends who weren't tech industry people -- or married to one -- couldn't afford to live there anymore and almost all left.
The next time I got into to SF was about 20 years later and, yeah. Wow. Not the same city. So completely different. Many of the physical trappings were the same, but the atmosphere was entirely different.
Not true in the slightest. There was little crime, you could walk everywhere safely, day or night, and the food was still incredible, and cheap.
Major parts of the city were on a roadmap towards revitalization before dotcom was ever a thing. Yerba Buena Gardens was competed in 1993, for example. No disruption required.
> Until the first dotcom boom the city was in decline, or at least that's how the story goes.
It’s the exact opposite. The city was undergoing major revitalization before the dotcom era. The first dotcom boom brought major gentrification, and with it, people who didn’t care for the values and culture of the city.
My point was a bit more optimistic but not well expressed - usually when places are considered 'bad' or 'poor' they often rebound with an awesome vibrant scene and culture. What I wanted to say was more along the lines that 'negative' reputation is usually a great cover for something special going on.
I personally do believe SF has a boom/bust cycle in it's DNA. When I was in my early 20's and living there around the late 00's, people were talking about how 'SF is over'. I vividly remember an older fellow telling me that he's been hearing that line since the 60's, and yet somehow the city always manages to evolve into something new and 'legendary'.
[1] If you understand how statistic work, and how to read critically. The censuses seem to be written by someone who thinks "How to Lie With Statistics" was an instruction manual, not a warning.
Edit:
Here's the latest pre-pandemic census: https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDRep...
On page 18, we learn that fully 30% of SF's homeless became homeless before moving to SF.
Of the remaining 70%, only 55% (so 38% of all homeless in SF) are long-time (>10 years) residents of SF. 27% of SF's homeless lived in SF between 1 and 10 years.
On page 19, we learn that only 30% of SF's homeless had a home they owned or rented immediately prior to becoming homeless. The rest were couch surfing, institutionalized, in SROs or subsidized housing.
We probably shouldn't assume zero correlation (but we don't have a better prior, because the crosstabs are not available, so...). But if we do, this suggests only around 11% of SF's homeless population were long-term renters who were kicked out.
On page 22, we learn that only 13% of SF's homeless cited "eviction" as the primary reason for currently experiencing homelessness. In contrast, "lost job" is the the most common reason, at 26%. Substance abuse is #2 at 18%.
On page 21, we learn that 65% of homeless people in SF have been homeless for more than a year.
That's an interesting statistic because that's the same percent homeless who became homeless while in SF and whose total residency in SF was more than a year. Again, the crosstabs are not made available to us, but it is suggestive that many of the people from page 18 who reported being long-term SF residents were not long-term SF residents at the time they experienced housing loss.
Not to sound conspiratorial, but my points above could be easily refuted with crosstabs from the census. The silence is deafening.