>Then they leave when they've made it, burned out, or start thinking of a family.
They then post negatively about SF online for the rest of their lives.
They then post negatively about SF online for the rest of their lives.
I think you gave a biased opinion (as we all do, that's fine). There are plenty of people over 40 in SF [1] and plenty of people who choose to live their full lives here. You may not be friends with them, but they exist.
What I also notice is that most anti-SF people need you to agree SF is bad. They are unwilling to accept that anyone could like it (despite it being one of the most in-demand places to live in America, which they hand wave away as being a jobs thing).
It's truly bizarre, because I comp it to a city like Paris which has many of the same cleanliness & "law and order" problems, but it has nowhere near the amount of people who demand you say it's bad.
[1]https://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US0667000-san-franc...
Honestly, that's why it's so polarizing - if you like the walkable layout/high density thing, you probably don't care about the better personal economic opportunities vs. Europe and if you're looking to get rich, you want a compound on the beach anyway.
Lived there for a while in 2014. It’s not as bad as people make it out to be, so people who live there are easily able to ignore it. Then when they leave, they can’t stop talking about how bad it was because it really is bad. Humans can endure/ignore a lot without saying something or attempting to fix it.
Every time I visit the supposedly 'great and affordable' cities I find myself in a car way more often, I find myself visiting homogenous chains way more often, and I generally find myself way more isolated in bubbles of my own economic class/social circle (largely due to driving everywhere).
To each their own (though, as implied, most anti-SF people think SF is an objective bad and aren't afraid to tell you that).
>Humans can endure/ignore a lot without saying something or attempting to fix it.
This is exactly the language someone like me uses to describe the horror of America's stroad-dominated landscape (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad#:~:text=The%20word%20st....)