I may be in the miniority on this site - but frankly I think it's sucked for a while now. I've had much better times in other big cities worldwide.
I remember coming close to a decade ago when I'd be chastised for suggesting that SF is dumpy because there's human poop, bins overflowing with rotten food waste, large packs of rats, and junkies sniffing lines in broad daylight all over the place there, but today few here will deny this anymore.
I want to love SF, and I'm not just saying that. Yet, every time I visit, it's visibly worse and I often end up in some bizarre verbal altercation with a BART employee or resident of the streets. Los Angeles, the city where I live today, has its own issues, some of which dwarf that of SF, but not nearly as often do I arrive home at night with a story to tell. And somehow we manage to have less poop.
But if too many move in too fast, the city instead becomes like them.
SF had an abundance of jobs that paid a boat load of money, and people moved there to take those jobs.
Not because it's close to Muir Woods and has the best weather in the world, and the people at cafes wear cool t-shirts (although nearly everyone who moves to SF tries their hardest to convince themselves this is the real reason, not the job and the money).
I know we're talking about SF but the LA example is much more obviously clear: so everyone in LA _is actually in entertainment_ when they move? The servers and baristas went there "for the job" as a server and barista, but also acting, of which they already have well paying jobs in? I'm not even making sense to myself. Point is, absolutely... there's an aspirational part to moving to a big city, and yes they move for the weather, and yes they move to be closer to nature.
Absolutely false.
The refusal of NIMBYists to allow anything to get built which pushed housing costs to infinity is what pushed everyone out w/o a top-1% paying job.
Not that the Bay created a bunch of high paying jobs.