Hacker News Reader

Comment by MuffinFlavored | Hacker News Reader

As much as I like the narrative of "yay, inflation is over and we're seeing deflation", isn't it pretty hard to ignore that San Francisco's high cost of living + homelessness problem has caught up to it from the perspective of "desirable place to live" factor?

If I am wrong/that narrative that's spread all over online isn't true, I'd love to learn why the rent falling here suggests something different/is actually due to something different. Otherwise it seems like a pretty simple (boring, stupid) headline/problem/observation?

"City that isn't that desirable to live in due to terrible flaw becomes less valuable"

Maybe I should be a journalist...

View on HN

Yeah SF is such a crappy city. Everything's overpriced. Cant get around, public transportation sucks so your lifestyle is limited to a 1 mile radius, which totally defeats the point of being in a city. Could uber everywhere, that's what most people do, but that's pricey as well, and you have to deal with human interaction every time you want to go somewhere. Biking through throngs of homeless people and confusing streets also less than ideal.

There's hardly a scene for anything you're interested in either. Very small scenes for most things and a real lack of community feel for some strange reason. Maybe it's the lack of mobility around the city? The eccentricness of tech workers? In any case, it sucks.

Paradoxically, despite the lack of mobility, everything worth going to is also permanently crowded. Long wait times for food along with high prices, unnecessary taxes, and restaurants that look like they probably house some rats.

Weather is not bad compared to other cities, but still annoying. It's always just a bit too cold to walk around comfortably in a T-shirt.

It really reminds me of the experience of waiting to get into a nightclub with a mile-long line of dudes (also par for the course in SF, by the way). Walk in, take a look, wonder why anyone waited in the first place, and walk out like a revolving door.

when I was in SF about 10+ years ago, there were a lot of e-scooters/e-skateboarders. Is that still not the case?

It's simple; scenes are expensive. You need space to have a scene, you need a business for that scene/space, and that business needs to be profitable enough to pay for rent and fair wages while also supporting the scene/community.

One of the biggest things I saw in my work travels was how low vs high COL affects availability of scenes and community. Where in low cost cities like Pittsburgh and Rochester you have budding communities and scenes, but in places like Boston and NYC, those same type of scenes can't compete. So they shrink or disappear entirely, to be replaced by name brand chains/companies.

Also, San Francisco is just…small. Not that many people live there for a major city.

San Francisco is just one borough within the Bay Area with its 8M population. It’s a pain there’s no metropolitan level political body, but then neither did London between 1986 and 2000.

Scenes are cheap.

It's SFO that's expensive.

Scenes take land, and lots of it for people to live in and do things, and SFO would prefer to pack in more expensive tech workers than anything else

You want the "community feel" but don't like dealing with human interaction? I'm really confused here

Sitting in a car with a stranger isn't my idea of community.

Obviously the market doesn't agree with me, but I actually think SF is under rated. I think the truth is SF is undesirable for maybe these reasons:

* Many people were previously forced to live there for jobs

* SF doesn't do as much pushing of the homeless out of the dense parts of town as other big cities (which to be clear I think is probably morally the right choice)

* Government is bloated and trying to do too much

* A motivated political narrative trying to tear the city down

On the other hand I think SF has a lot going for it:

* It's one of the prettiest cities in the country

* It's maybe the most walkable city on the west coast

* The rents are now down compared to some other major walkable cities in the US

* Some of the highest density of parks around, it's usually not far to some pretty nature

* The weather is decent most of the time

* Not as impacted by climate change as many other costal cities

> but I actually think SF is under rated

https://www.google.com/search?q=san+francisco+homeless+probl...

What's the truth/who is lying? You, or all of these pictures on the Internet? I'm not suggesting you're wrong. It's just that... in order for you to be right (that it's a worthwhile city), all of these pictures and articles about mass homelessness in/near/around San Francisco need to be wrong.

Or you just have a really high tolerance/aren't bothered by it or its nature/exposure is overstated?

> I think the truth is SF is undesirable for maybe these reasons: [...]

> * SF doesn't do as much pushing of the homeless out of the dense parts of town as other big cities (which to be clear I think is probably morally the right choice)

I mean isn't that kind of underselling the problem? It's unlivable if you don't want to surround yourself with that kind of problem.

Why pay to be near something unpleasant?...

> The United States of America is a country between the Atlantic and the Pacific. The land has a total area of 9,831,510 km² (four million mi²) and a total coastline of 19,924 km (12,380.2 mi). This land area is about 1.3 times the size of Australia or 2.3 times the size of the European Union.

Plenty of other places to live in America.

Well, there are plenty of parts of SF with a low homeless population, for example where I live. Even some of the high density bits are quite nice. It's really unfortunate that the union square/powell street area can feel sketchy, though even there it isn't much worse than say NYC which is currently seeing surging demand

Because some people don’t make their life choices by “out of sight out of mind”.

People on this site always neglect the positives of having a large homeless population in SF. The homeless keep a lot of boring tech people away from the fun bars and clubs around tenderloin, mission, and soma. The boring people all move to the outskirts and stay there because they can’t deal with the chaos.

My point is that isn't the reality I see living in the city. It was closer to the reality I saw when I lived on the outskirts of the Mission and commuted downtown every day, but even then not as bad.

Here's some random photos I took in the past year https://imgur.com/a/Q0ZF1nH. Yes SF has some terrible bits, but just like the US I don't actually have to visit them all the time.

This was my experience too. People just love to hate sf ime. If it wasn't so cold, foggy and expensive I would have stayed. Lifestyle is nice. Easy enough to stay out of the tl

I think a lot of people who live in SF realize the solution isn’t hiding/shunning homeless people, so seeing it affects them less than people who live places where they think hiding/shunning homelessness is a solution.

Just because something isn’t happening near you doesn’t mean you’re not part of it’s cause.

How about we just stick with the dystopian hellhole narrative and not encourage anyone?

kthxbai.

I moved here from NYC about a year ago now. I have no political motive in saying this: it's really not that great.

- Public transportation is absolute garbage compared to great cities. Muni coverage is a joke, the fact that the Van Ness Corridor is the only real rapid transit bus line in the entire city is insane

- Nowhere near the prettiest city in the country. My balcony overlooks a good half of the city all the way out to across the Bay and there is so much ugly sprawl between major neighborhoods. For every breathtaking view on a hill overlooking the water there's 10 more that are just ugly.

- Bike unfriendly tracks running everywhere. I broke my leg and felt like I had done something stupid. Then every single person in the hospital was able to call out the street where I was hurt without prompting and confirmed they see people daily from the same few streets.

- The food scene is the worst parts of a major city food scene with none of the upsides. If you want diversity prepare for a pretentious reinterpretation meant to extract extra money from yuppies. For actual diverse food there are clusters of places in places like parts the Mission, but with such crappy transportation actually getting to those clusters is a massive pain.

- The city mostly shuts down at an absurd hour. Trying to run errands at 10pm feels like trying to run them at 3 am in most major cities.

- The general attitude about crime: The crime itself is a dead horse, but the actual general populace just seems to have such a depressing attitude about it, like people casually trading stories about how their homes have been broken into as if it's a badge of honor or something. NYC's loudest detractors are average New Yorkers, while SF's average populace almost seems to treat it as a taboo... I guess only fringe groups like rich people, politicians, and outsiders are allowed to hate on the situation in this city?

Overall, coming from NYC I'm used to expensive, but this city is just way too expensive for what it is. The rent is insane when you take into account the fact people are seriously asking for NYC money to live in this place.

If I had to describe this place in one sentence: Consolation prize of a city priced like it came in 1st. I really dislike it.

What neighborhood do you live in? It's interesting that this is your experience because part of what is prompting this is getting back from a NYC trip and sort of decided, and this is really shallow, but it was just way too much brick. I just like how buildings look in SF a lot more. Transit is totally better in NYC and probably many cities on the East Coast, but it isn't bad, I can get around without a car and rent one the few times I need it which is basically enough. I also have gotten around the lack of transit by biking around a lot more sense the pandemic which has definitely improved my opinion of the city as well (no crashes yet, though I did have a bike stolen). I think part of the difference is maybe some of the things I care about don't match up with you. I'm not that into food, SF has seemed fine in that regard, though definitely more expensive than NYC for what you get.

edit: and I'll add SF seemed actually significantly below NYC prices now. To get a similar level of apartment to what I have in SF I'd either pay 2-4 hundred extra or move out far enough that it doesn't seem obvious to me I'd have more amenities and public transit within say 30 minutes of me.

I live by the Panhandle, so I have access to parks, and I'm not tucked away in some far corner like the Richmond where I expected that the transportation would be so ineffectual... yet visiting my friend in Chinatown is either a 10-15 minute drive, or a 40-50 minute bus ride + walk (biking being more of an option before the whole track run-in...)

In general comparing cities will always be somewhat like comparing sports teams: everyone has a favorite, for different reasons, and there's no right answer. But too many times since I've gotten here I've seen people try to compare SF to places like NYC and LA. I don't even like LA, but I'm not going to try and compare SF to LA because that'd be like comparing an NBA team to a "G League" team. People keep asking me stuff like "SF is just like a mini-NYC right?!" upon hearing where I came from, and I humor them to be nice, but no. It's really not at all.

>visiting my friend in Chinatown is either a 10-15 minute drive, or a 40-50 minute bus ride + walk

You're describing a 4 mile journey.

A comparable journey in NYC is SoHo to Central Park.

At best, that's a 30 minute commute in NYC on transit. Probably similar in a car. In LA it's a drive no matter what.

NYC distances just feel longer because they pass more stuff (which to be fair is an argument for NYC).

Was that break on Market Street, out of curiosity? After a related incident, I discovered that I was now the 5th co-worker a friend had that had broken a wrist or leg there.

Bingo.

And this isn't some untouchable problem either: better signage and markings, better separation (I still wince driving past where I fell because people are riding just a couple of feet away from tracks that will injure them), rubber strips that trains can go over while preventing the tracks from swallowing wheels things like bikes and wheelchairs.

This honestly speaks to that problem with the attitude of most of the people who have been here for a while: they just seemed to accept that this awful problem exists, but it's almost treated like a rite of passage. In other cities I feel like there'd be real widespread outrage at the whole situation and something more would happen, yet it's absolutely effortless to find hundreds of cases per year where people are seriously injured and in some cases even killed.

Yeah SF is terrible and I really think it’s all downstream from the ridiculous housing prices and lack of good transportation options.

In NYC you can live in an outer borough and commute in for your job, eat cheap (and tasty) in Chinatown, a bodega, a slice shop, or a halal cart, not waste time driving or parking… it all adds up.

  In NYC you can live in an outer borough and commute in for your job

You can do the same thing in San Francisco, with less hassle (the late night shutdowns in New York are a colossal pain in my experience). New York has plenty of structural problems with the layout of the subway e.g.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlhQoZqKMQE

A morning commute from the Marina District to the Financial District, which is an extremely generous analog to "traveling from the outer boroughs" would take more than 30 minutes because... you have to take a bus backwards for 3 stops just to get to a subway entrance.

But if you leave at 8:30 thinking that you have a 30 minute ride, traffic backs up so badly that taking a bus 25 stops clean across the city to Market and Church, so you can then take a subway is the recommended option, turning it into a 43 minute ordeal.

In no reality would you ever need to ride 25 stops to get to a subway station from an outer borough in NYC.

That's only true if your in the closest neighborhoods of the Brooklyn or Queens to Manhattan. Jamaica to NYC is so long, and tons of Brooklyn doesn't have subway coverage.

Midtown to wall st is 30 minutes of subway riding

> A morning commute from the Marina District to the Financial District,

You’re overcomplicating the commute. Take the 132 Southbound, about 15 mins during morning rush hour.

My guess, though, is you’re not really complaining about a specific commute as much as the paucity of rail in SF, and other faster commute options than bus. Relatively crummy public transport in SF is a valid gripe.

But in larger context, it seems you’re just not happy in/with SF. Could also be you’re just not happy.

If you’re looking to improve your experience, you might do well to consider that SF probably won’t be “fixed” inside our lifetimes.

I don't live in the affected parts of the city but it sounds like you might - does the new Central line, from Chinatown Rose-Pak to Sunnydale, meaningfully affect transit along that corridor?

> does the new Central line, from Chinatown Rose-Pak to Sunnydale, meaningfully affect transit along that corridor?

I haven't had the opportunity to see let alone take that new line. I'll have to check it out.

That said, the route Marina to FiDi (mentioned in GGP) is at a right angle and about half a mile south of the Chinatown Rose-Pak station.

No.

  you have to take a bus backwards for 3 stops just to get to a subway entrance

So don't take the subway? I don't know where you're going to or from, but bussing it to Church to get to the Financial District sounds like the most awkward way to accomplish your commute.

  In no reality would you ever need to ride 25 stops to
  get to a subway station from an outer borough in NYC.

I just picked a random spot (Flushing Chinese Baptist Church, 65th Avenue, Queens) and asked for a route to Penn Station. The second route that the MTA's site spit out included 21 stops on the Q25 followed by another 3 stops (and 20 minutes!) on a rail line. Hell, getting from Ridgewood to JFK required a trek back into Manhattan even though they're both in Queens.

The NY subway does not have particularly comprehensive coverage of the outer neighborhoods.

What? No.

  Consolation prize of a city priced like it came in 1st. I really dislike it.

So leave.

  Muni coverage is a joke

Okay, what? The service standard is that all residential neighborhoods are within ¼ mile of a Muni stop. As someone who lived west of Twin Peaks for a while, I've yet to see a better connected city. Even at 3AM I could make my way home and get dropped off pretty much around the corner from where I lived. It's not fast, but Muni will get you nearly anywhere in the city nearly 24x7.

  the fact that the Van Ness Corridor is the only real rapid transit bus line
  in the entire city is insane

NIMBYs aside, why? There are only maybe two other corridors where BRT would make sense (Geary - in progress, Mission – no BRT but bus only lanes as of a few years ago). The other major Muni corridors (Judah, Taraval, Ocean) are covered by light rail, and those have seen a variety of improvements (e.g. boarding islands, transit only lanes, no left turns, etc.) in the past five years or so.

  For actual diverse food there are clusters of places in places like parts
  the Mission, but with such crappy transportation actually getting to those
  clusters is a massive pain.

Say what? The Mission is incredibly transit rich with 24x7 service along a couple trunk lines, BART (and late night AC Transit buses), etc.

  The city mostly shuts down at an absurd hour. Trying to run errands at 10pm
  feels like trying to run them at 3 am in most major cities.

I think you're conflating New York with most major cities here. Even the London and Tokyo metros don't run 24x7. Most cities, big or small, tend to shut down at night. New York is very much an outlier.

> So leave.

If you couldn't piece it together, I'm tolerating living here for things other than the sake of my enjoyment...

> within ¼ mile of a Muni stop

So is that why half of your bus lines make so many stops that they're practically unusable?

Most of your comment is about detailed improvements and rationale behind that system... I'm not a transportation planner: instead I just look at the reality that getting 2.6 miles from my neighborhood by the Panhandle to the Mission is a 15 minute drive, but a 35 minute bus ride that takes 24 stops.

And it's not that's some unusual thing, I shared the example above, that Marina District to Financial District goes from a 30 minute with ~3 miles of transit a 40 minute ride ~7 mile ride across half the city to skirt around car traffic.

That's what indicates to me that this city needs more BRT lines: Interruptions are one thing, but you're not going to find yourself needing to travel halfway across most major cities in the wrong direction because traffic messes up the direct route every single day

> I think you're conflating New York with most major cities here. Even the London and Tokyo metros don't run 24x7. Most cities, big or small, tend to shut down at night. New York is very much an outlier.

I think you're misreading the comment: The point is that for most major cities "at 3 am you expect a most things to be closed" is a such an obvious concept. But here in SF 10 pm might as well be "3 am".

  And it's not that's some unusual thing, I shared the example above, that
  Marina District to Financial District goes from a 30 minute with ~3 miles
  of transit a 40 minute ride ~7 mile ride across half the city to skirt
  around car traffic.

No, that's just you avoiding the direct route because you insist on using rail. Pre-COVID there was the 30X to shuttle marina bros to the financial district. The subway to nowhere killed off the 41 which would've also gotten you from the Marina to the Financial District without having to go all the way to the Castro. As-is there are plenty of more direct routes: e.g. Van Ness to California to cable car, F to the Embarcadero and walk, etc. If you insist on taking the most obtuse route then yeah it's going to be a ridiculous journey.

  I think you're misreading the comment: The point is that for most major cities
  "at 3 am you expect a most things to be closed" is a such an obvious concept.
  But here in SF 10 pm might as well be "3 am".

Yeah, no. New York City is often called "the city that never sleeps" precisely because it's so unusual to never shut down. Cities all around the world shut down early or at odd hours. For example: for a long time pubs were legally required to close at 11 PM in the UK. Try running errands in Germany on Sunday sometime… Try getting anything to eat in Barcelona in the middle of the day. New York is not representative of major cities around the world.

As a former New Yorker who does awful lot traveling... you're not wrong.

- The city mostly shuts down at an absurd hour. Trying to run errands at 10pm feels like trying to run them at 3 am in most major cities.

This threw me off so much. I feel like you have so many late night option choices in NYC... but that just doesn't exist in SF.

- The crime itself is a dead horse, but the actual general populace just seems to have such a depressing attitude about it,

I hate how SF doesn't try to enforce laws. Yes, we should be extending compassion to the less fortunate... but that doesn't mean we should embrace people committing crime and making it an okay behavior. I feel so unsafe walking around SF.

Nothing is like NYC. And all of California is pretty sleepy and closes early. It's not just an sf thing.

> The city mostly shuts down at an absurd hour. Trying to run errands at 10pm feels like trying to run them at 3 am in most major cities.

I wish Target stayed open past 6pm, but for nightlife if you go out on Friday, you don't have to go to sleep until midday Saturday (if your wallet is fat and you're a club rat). Not quite Berlin's Friday -> Monday morning, but that's too much for me.

  I wish Target stayed open past 6pm

What? Pretty much all the Bay Area Targets close at 10pm, but the hours have been in a constant flux during the pandemic. Before that many were open until 11 or midnight. I think, for a while, the Target on Folsom closed hella early but I just checked and all of the Bay Area Targets are open past 6pm today (Sunday). The one at the Metreon and the one on Folsom close at 8 PM, every other one closes at 10 PM.

// * Not as impacted by climate change as many other costal cities

What does that even mean? Like, what has happened to say NYC or Boston as part of climate change that has made them less desirable, vs SF?

Since SF is on the narrow tip of a peninsula and surrounded by water on 3 sides, the temperature fluctuates much less than locations inland or even just along the coast. The temperature basically hovers around 60F year-round, a few degrees cooler in the winter, a few degrees warmer in the autumn.

I didn't know this before moving here, I don't know if I'd call it _amazing_ weather but it's certainly odd to watch the rest of the country deal with insane heat and cold while SF basically just... stays at 60.

In addition to what others are saying about the naturally cool and stable climate, SF also has reliable water through long term water rights in the Sierras, fairly high land translating to low flood risks compared to a place like NYC and less likelihood of the sort of major storms that drive storm surge. Some of the surround peninsula is obviously more at risk, but compared to cities in Texas or Southern CA it seems like it will probably do pretty well

Boston is literally sinking. Some of the most expensive parts of the Boston metro such as Backbay, most of Cambridge, and most of downtown Boston are built on reclaimed land that will be flooded when sea levels rise. This has already started happened in a limited manner.

Can you elaborate on how this is starting to happen in a limited manner?

Opposite (lack of water rather than an excess) reason than GP, but still a climate change (drought is a result of climate change) induced problem. Building foundations in Back Bay will crumble if there is an extended period of drought there.

https://www.wcvb.com/article/back-bay-foundations-could-sink...

Didn't get time to finish replying/sourcing articles, but most climate projections show that the Boston area will see much more nuisance flooding and much more severe Nor'easters, specifically in low lying areas. This is a big reason for Boston's Climate Action Plan being created - as South Boston, the Harbor, and Backbay are all very flooding susceptible. There are some good articles about it in the Globe and on Boston Govt's website, but it's too much of a pain to source through that.

> SF doesn't do as much pushing of the homeless out of the dense parts of town as other big cities (which to be clear I think is probably morally the right choice)

It's not just a moral choice. It's also legal issue in the ninth circuit, which has jurisdiction over all the western states. In these states, you can't just sweep the homeless out.

It's also interesting that, up to this moment, nothing appreciable has been done to alleviate the lack of housing. This is simply organic movement of people away from SF thus decreasing demand without ever having to increase the supply.

SF invented its way out of its own reason for existing. Companies like Zoom and Google made it possible to work remote, and as the city never diversified its economy, no one really needs to live there. The absurd political situation, where it's illegal to build a house but legal to poop on the sidewalk while smoking meth, has made it also a place no one really wants to live in. It's a story of hubris and the satire writes itself https://babylonbee.com/news/san-francisco-store-clerk-confus...

The city’s economy is way more diverse than you’re suggesting. Biotech, law, finance, tourism, trade, etc. I have a feeling you have a tech-centric viewpoint at thus that’s what you see.

Pedantically, Zoom (San Jose) and Google (Mountain View), and most other Silicon Valley companies (Facebook, Apple, HP, Cisco, eBay, Intel, LinkedIn, Nvidia, Paypal, pre-move Oracle, pre-move Tesla) aren't headquartered in San Francisco. The city used to be this adjunct thing, close to the Valley. It's only until recently that it's become the focus.

I traveled about a mile down Mission street today for the first time since 2010. It's deteriorated a lot. Way more human waste, way more people clearly in a bad mental state, more tents, etc. Private guards outside lots of doors too. It felt like I was walking through a zombie apocalypse movie set.

I could live in NYC. I couldn't handle SF.

Go 1 block over and walk a mile down Valencia.

Yeah, Mission St is pretty grungy. Had me confused why people thought Mission was such a up and coming place. Then I explored the adjacent streets on either side of Mission St and it’s a lot nicer.

Valencia, for sure, but South Van Ness on the other side of Mission st isn't what I'd call nicer. Folsom (one more past South Van Ness) feels downright unsafe!

You might be right about that actually. I was probably thinking of some of my favorite restaurants and cafes there (e.g., Stable Cafe) but the street itself is a bit empty and can feel sketchy at times.

I just followed what Google Maps showed me to do given where I was trying to go; I'm not an SF local so I don't really know any better than to take what looks like the direct route. I was on a skateboard, going at fast-walk pace, and was asked for money about a dozen times in that mile, cussed out (for being a yuppie? I think?) twice, and deliberately body checked and knocked off the board once.

Back in 2010 I used to work at roughly 7th and Harrison and was generally having a better time of commuting to and within the city.

Exactly. Dolores, Valencia, Guerrero, all fairly nice, even lovely in many parts.

I think the private guards are for the marijuana shops

Rents falling due to "high cost of living + homelessness" seems self-limiting... eventually the rent is low enough to stop complaining and the homeless people get indoors. The question is does it eventually settle into an equilibrium, or just endlessly oscillate between pleasant+cheap and apocalyptic+expensive?

It will be interesting to watch the progressive establishment switch gears from trying anything and everything to get the influx of money and especially rich migrants to turn the fuck around and go home, to wailing about "disinvestment" (i.e. people doing just that) and how unfair it is that you have to be even minimally responsive to your tax base in order to fund services.

So I’ve lived in SF for almost 8 years now. It’s fine.

The great exodus that made The Narrative explode with how very dead and over the city is? A 0.15% drop in population. We have nowhere to put more people anyway. Where people gonna go if nimbys don’t wanna approve anything?

SF isn’t undesirable, it’s just full.

But also the place I moved 3 years ago was fairly medium density. Now there are 10 high-ish density brand new residential buildings within a 4 block radius. Where I used to live before built 5+ high density residential towers in a few block radius in the 4ish years I lived there.

Perhaps rents are falling because supply is increasing. Drastically and fast.

> SF isn’t undesirable, it’s just full.

Potato potahto

Well no. There’s a difference between people not wanting to be somewhere and existing people not wanting to make room for more people.

I can’t vote so not much I can do about it myself, but I’m def not leaving any time soon.

> and existing people not wanting to make room for more people

And in the process making it undesirable for other people already living there.

> A 0.15% drop in population

Are you talking about California? Because SF's population dropped by a lot. SF's population hit 834,046 in July 2022. This is down 6.5% from 881k in 2019

The data I found said 0.15% population drop in SF metro area

https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23130/san-francisco/popul...

If people aren't commuting anymore but working remotely instead, that's a pretty bad sign for the city of SF itself.

The city changes. It’s had boom/bust before (from gold rush through WWII) and when I moved here in the 80s it had an utterly dead downtown, some financial industry, a good arts scene, and was a bedroom community for Silicon Valley.

I miss its grungy period and hope it returns. It’s a little too clean and fancy for me at the moment.

But that isn't the City of San Francisco. San Francisco has a population of ~815,000 people, while the link posted has a population of 3.3 million people.

This page shows the population of San Francisco declined 6.72% from 2020 to 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco

Almost all those who moved moved to Silicon Valley or other parts of the Bay Area. Net emigration from the Bay Area itself was, as the GP comment noted, a fraction of a percent and most of those people moved elsewhere in California (mostly nearby Sacramento area or the Sierras).

You can't use the population of SF to compare how "dead" the city feels.

Something like >300k people commuted into the city every day. That's increasing the population by like 50%.

Would be curious if anyone can find reliable data on this.

Mind you the people who live in SF are also not commuting into downtown. That contributes to it feeling dead during the pandemic.

But that doesn’t mean the city died. People are still here, you just see them less. Especially if like me you’re one of those folks continuing to work from home and seeing the same few people all the time.

I mean if I judged from my personal experience I’d say there’s 500 people in the city. I even see all the same homeless folk on my runs and can tell who hangs around which block or street corner.

Totally agree with all of that, was just saying you can't use the population numbers to track how many people are in the city on a day-to-day basis.

Move to Sydney for a while and you’ll quickly see that SF is simply ‘tolerable’ due to availability of specific types of jobs

I used to live in Sydney. It's been a while, but I don't remember it being overall better, just better for different things.

Been living in Sydney for a year, and everyone who spends time here thinks "wow the food is just as good, prices are kind of cheaper, and the city is much cleaner"

Of course, it might be different if we were actual citizens and owned property here etc. etc. but as long-term visitors, Sydney is hands down nicer than SF.

And Sydney is a dump compared to Melbourne :)

Sydney-sider here - Sydney lacks a real art scene, and a culture with its own identity. Outside of down-town, it is awefully same samey with the proliferation of cheap rental housing.

Going out further countryside - things get real nice.

Though - we are pretty lucky all that being said :)

I always thought Newtown kinda fits that bill.

newtown really used to be super cool. Like everything Sydney though - its much much more gentrified - and has just turned into restaurants and bars for yuppies. 10-15 years ago - the whole inner=west was rife with awesome gigs, international electronic acts, lots of pubs were doubling as places to host electronic - but NIMBYism really got the better of Sydney.

Hard to get a coffee at night in the city even :(

I was in inner-west Sydney in 2016 for a couple weeks and it certainly didn't feel too gentrified and awful to me – there were still plenty of "counterculture" posters and murals and buskers and whatnot. Electronica isn't generally my thing but I stumbled upon some venue on King St and caught a metal show – so that was nice. And, of course, the Lazybones Lounge.

Outside of 7-11, Starbucks, and Peets (even then COVID's put a hamper on this) It's nearly impossible to get a coffee past mid-afternoon here in the Bay Area.

Yeah, I've been here 20 years, and I see a lot of people getting the vapors over The Shocking and Precipitous Decline of Our Once-Great City, but I'm not seeing it. As you say, it's fine.

To me the chatter seems like another round of the far-right panic over "San Francisco values", which has been recurring since the 1990s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_values

Full is a weird description of a low density village. "We got 10 people, and that's 9 too many people!"

Especially considering how much tent space is still available off sidewalks and the like

Huh? San Francisco is the second densest city in the US after New York.

>yay, inflation is over

The Fed chairman said the opposite today, it seems people believing that narrative have wishful thinking.

Well the actual CPI data says 0.9% price increase over the past 6 months, so 1.8% annualized. That's under the inflation target of 2%.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-rate-mo...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com