My thoughts on SF after living here for six months | Hacker News Reader

My thoughts on SF after living here for six months

dzoba.com

41 pointszoba64 comments

I suspect that the quantity of homeless folks in the bay area is due in part to the weather. It is pretty difficult to die of exposure here given the relative narrow temperature band we stay in (30 - 95 degrees F with rare excursions outside that) A warm coat and blanket in the winter, a place of shade and fresh water in the summer, and you're pretty much protected from dying of exposure.

I found the comment about the dirt and the street repair interesting because I've heard the complaint in reverse, which is that the peninsula / south bay cities are 'too clean and neat, almost like plastic.' For those people they were looking for the 'gritty urban appeal' of San Francisco which, as the author points out, it has in some places.

It is interesting the competing memes about what a high tech utopia should look like, Blade Runner or Logan's Run? Or somewhere in the middle? I sometimes wish I could get Californians to have the same courage as the Swiss do when zoning towns which require only walking. I would love to see one of the Peninsula cities commit to that, create people mover transport to the edges and then ban cars in the interior. Imagine that your kids can ride their bike anywhere in the neighborhood or city and not be threatened by a car on its way to work? Don't have the stones for it though.

>I sometimes wish I could get Californians to have the same courage as the Swiss do when zoning towns which require only walking.

I would settle for just making pedestrian-only some small bits of San Francisco, ostensibly the most progressive city in the state.

For example: Oh what I wouldn't give to have Third Street shut down from say Folsom to Market. I walk every day most of the length of Third Street and it is an automotive hellscape.

Literally six lanes of cars all going in the same direction. And it's anarchy. At nearly every single light change, someone ends up blocking the intersection because they tried to make it across with no room. Cars nearly mowing down pedestrians as they try to turn into parking lot/hotel access roads. Cars clogging the bus lanes. And the honking, oh the honking.

Just shut it down. From the convention center through Yerba Buena Gardens, the St Regis, MOMA, all the way to Market. Giant outdoor cafes and restaurants and biergartens. Some protected dedicated bike lanes. Nice pedestrian paths. Dedicated spaces for outdoor exhibits from MOMA, the African Diaspora museum (in the St Regis) and Yerba Buena Center.

Earmark the extra tax increment for something nice, maybe for improving mass transit, or the police, or the art scene, as penance for taking away the six-lane artery of transit misery.

Then do it again on some other miserable street. And so on.

For those of us who don't have cars, this seems like a great idea (and honestly, I don't know why they even allow cars on market; as it's set up now, you already have to turn off every few blocks, even though most people ignore that and merge into the bus lane in the intersection often enough).

But really, if a road is completely packed with cars, shutting it down is not going to end the traffic problem. Those cars (and the people in them) have to go somewhere.

Also, speaking of third street, the new muni line from Powell to the caltrain station is already costing ~$1B/mile, so expanding such things is not at all cheap. Or effective, based on ridership estimates.

What might reduce traffic congestion would be throwing up more high rise buildings so people can live in the city and work near where they live. Reduced commutes means reduced traffic, reduced rents means less gentrification in outlying areas...

I don't have big problems with the sidewalk construction (what's on it is another matter), but the state of the roads is pretty shocking sometimes, and very noticeable when cycling - ideally I would be able to trust the road surface and mostly keep my head up looking for people, vehicles and traffic signals but I also have to keep checking for potholes, gratings that can swallow a wheel and cause a nasty crash, and those big metal plates sticking up a few inches that seem to left for weeks at a time covering up a hole in the street. This is particularly bad downtown.

I would disagree with the homeless comment. I live in a Canadian city with a range of -35 - +30C (-31 - +86F) and we have a sizable homeless population. You may argue that the homeless wouldn't cross the border to get to warmer climates, however, Vancouver rarely goes below 0 so I think that argument would not apply.

I am finding the narrative around homeless in SF very odd. Often people compare the situation to places like NYC and then ask why San Francisco can't do that.

Well... If by "that" you mean persecute and push homeless people out of town, state by state until they reach the border of Georgia and Florida and then congregate in shanty towns... I say forget it.

San Francisco has a lot of services, many of them centered in the TL. The weather is a big factor. It also doesn't help that NV has been sending mentally ill folks here with one way bus tickets. The AG is suing them now.

Change the narrative - just because the homeless are invisible like in most areas (did you know about the shanty towns near and around Seattle?), doesn't make the problem go away.

I think there is subtext to the main thesis of the article - that all of these really smart and rich people concentrated in one area can't even solve their own immediate and noticeable problems.

Side note - it sounds like the author is specifically talking about SF proper, not south bay / peninsula.

San Francisco and East Bay cities like Berkeley, Oakland have historically had very favorable city policies and amenities for homeless people. I think this has more to do with the volume of homeless in the Bay Area than anything else.

If I were homeless, I'd definitely want to be somewhere in that area for sure, if I could make it there. Obviously there's plenty of homeless in the DC area, but some nights it gets dangerously cold and I wonder how they cope.

I found that a very weird thing to say, given that eight people have froze to death in this area during the last month.

I wouldn't assume that surviving the cold is very easy. Hypothermia doesn't even require very low temperatures.

This from 2010: http://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/winter_weather/... Says 700 annually, 4 of 700 is a bit more than 1/2 of one percent. I believe they got their number from this paper (http://www.bhchp.org/BHCHP%20Manual/pdf_files/Part2_PDF/Hypo...) or its source material.

More recent numbers from this blog entry (http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2013/12/06/santa-clara-county-...) have the unsheltered homeless population in Santa Clara county (where four people died) at 74% of 7631 or 5647 souls living unsheltered. Four of them dying is a mortality rate of .7 people per thousand. Not a very likely reason for dying.

It isn't that surviving cold is "easy" or "hard", it isn't that unsheltered homeless folks are "ok" or "not ok", it is that death from hypothermia is a function of both exposure and duration, which is minimized in climates such as that of the Bay Area, so that the risk of death from exposure falls below that of death by being hit by a car (http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Jose-Leads-Bay-Area...) for example.

The Bay Area winters are comparatively mild, and if you're going to die of exposure it's most likely to be elsewhere. I don't dispute that.

But I don't think we can say that it is very difficult to freeze here, nor that all one needs is a coat and blanket for protection. It implies the absurdity that the people must have tried very hard to die that way, trivializes the difficulty of obtaining adequate clothing, ignores concerns such as injury/illness/addiction/age which increase risk of freezing, etc.

Incidentally, the 2010 report on homeless deaths in NYC (http://www.nyc.gov/html/records/pdf/govpub/57985th_annual_re...) says that 6 died from exposure to cold. We had a comparable number this year in the Bay Area (http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/12/18/3081571/bay-area...). I don't bring this up to start a contest or anything -- you can't draw very many conclusions from these numbers alone -- only to suggest that the risk should not be trivialized.

This reads like "I don't like big cities" which is totally fair, but not a general comparison. To each their own. Dirty, loud, expensive: It's a big city! I personally love big cities. I grew up in the suburbs, but have chosen to spend my adult life in Toronto, NYC, London, and SF. I love the kinetic motion, the bars, the rowdiness, the closeness of social classes, the camaraderie of being 'miserable'. I love it!

But, I also see how someone who only moved here for a tech job and to be financially comfortable, who previously lived in a very middle-class suburban area, wouldn't be totally thrilled. Fair enough! Lots of good jobs in lots of decent places.

I do want to throw in one small defense item in the middle of SF hating. I didn't move here because of the tech stuff (which I am a part of) or because of the weather. I moved here for the crazy, wild, weird city that SF is without technology. For the hippies, the dropouts, the drag queens, the commies, the environmentalists, the capitalists, the techies, the artists, ... the great mashup of people that make up SF as a big and wild city.

Before anyone moves to SF, they should read "Tales of the City" by Armistead Maupin. If reading that doesn't make you want to immediately move to SF, then you'd probably do better in some other city with a decent tech scene. Or, as another reader pointed out, you'd probably be happier in the Valley if you are looking for a more NC-feel.

PS: the homeless problems being right next to the rich reminds me of the Settlement Movement of the early 20th century. check it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_movement

It always cracks me up that people feel like they NEED to live in SF when they come there. I lived in the SF Bay Area for most of my life and NEVER felt the need or desire to live in SF.....at all! There is so much to do in other parts of the Bay Area that are much more affordable, less filthy, and just overall better for your sanity.

If you move to the Bay Area and move to SF without looking at other areas then you have no reason to complain. BART may not be the best thing ever but it is everywhere. People move to SF for the same reason they buy an iPhone. They want to fit in. Go to the East Bay, buy an Android phone, and be different.

Based on weather and cleanliness, I'd rather live in San Mateo than SF proper. None of that annoying fog-mist.

I was in SF for Google IO a couple years ago and was somewhat fascinated by the fog-mist. Also surprised to find that it shows up almost every day. Seems like a better place to visit than live though. Streetcars are a nice novelty, but I can't imagine commuting on that every day.

Anyone know if there are there any cities in the US/Europe that are as clean and convenient (walk-ability and public transport) as Tokyo?

>>People move to SF for the same reason they buy an iPhone. They want to fit in.

Lies & slander

People move to SF because it is the only place in the area with 1) girls and 2) culture

Not anymore - the girls and culture are all moving to Oakland!

While I live in the city and love it, his comment about not being able to make meaningful friendships made me think along the same lines as you did. I think he'd find parts of Oakland or Berkeley to be much more appealing. There's a younger vibe there from the proximity to the university and the lower housing prices that I think would work better for him. You do have to work a bit harder to feel "at the center" of the tech scene (i.e. you're less likely to hear conversations about startups and programming when you're out at dinner and tech meetups are much less convenient), but it's not that much harder. The east bay also has nicer parks, better weather and it's easier to get away on weekends (this past weekend, it took me 90 minutes to get from my home in SF across the Golden Gate Bridge).

Still, I understand the compulsion to live in SF proper. It's like living in Manhattan or the city center of a large European city...illogical in almost every way, but with that "je ne sais quoi" that makes it feel wrong to live anywhere else. It's an alternate reality wherein the pains of living here select out the people that we wouldn't want to spend time with and what's left feels like a community built on kind of shared suffering that gives us a form of pride...we can sleep through anything, tap dance around shit on the sidewalk, find a parking space where there are none, eat food from a random food truck without getting sick and walk everywhere. It's bizarre, dysfunctional and yet oddly compelling.

I moved from Cleveland to Seattle, and I would agree with most everything here (referring to Seattle of course). My only differences would be:

1) It is not as dirty. There is some level of dirtiness, but I found Cleveland to be much worse.

2) The government here isn't anywhere near as bad as SF or Cleveland. SF is NIMBY hell with a counter-intuitive positive feedback loop (They won't build, so they get gentrification, which oddly enough reduces their propensity to build), and a transit system that is so far gamed in the Transit Union's advantage that it has stopped functioning for society. Cleveland is playing the bribe-the-fortune-500 game with tax breaks that they can't afford, and city services which are mismanaged and underfunded.

Seattle has a nimby problem, a noise problem, and their public transportation is pretty weak and poorly designed. But I love it here.

I was in SF a couple of days this year and one of the biggest things that I noticed during my short visit is how clean everything seemed compared to Cleveland.

I was only in the downtown area, but even if only comparing downtown Cleveland there is still a huge difference.

+1 for Seattle. For the outdoor oriented tech types Seattle is the place to be. The access to amazing skiing, hiking, climbing, boating, mountain biking from Seattle cannot be beat. You can work until 5:30 and be skiing powder at Alpental at 6:30. In the summer you can access world class sport, trad or bouldering after work, or you can shuttle awesome MTB trails.

I too moved from RTP to SF. The two biggest reasons I had a desire to leave NC were the technical aptitude and proximity to the beautiful places. On the technical aptitude side, I remember more than one drunken conversation with Russian nationals about compilers. I remember thinking by the end of the conversation I was wholly outmatched in technical skill. Seems like more of a good thing since technical people are celebrated like gods in some areas. I loved being able to paraglide or ski on the weekends. Having real mountains that close gives you ample opportunity to do all sorts of things that aren't possible in other cities. Not to mention the ability to get a good bottle of wine and drink it on the craggy coast at sunset.

Alas, the dirtiness of the city and production that is getting groceries home on the MUNI caused my wife and I to relocate to Santa Monica. We're further away from some of the outside things we like to do, but the day to day quality of life is 100-fold better.

Three cheers for the tech life in Santa Monica! I also moved here after a short stint in SF and decided this is a much better life overall. I even have a nice hill to live on if I want to pretend I'm back in SF. Groundworks is great coffee, but I will miss Philz.

How is Santa Monica taking a step back from cool outside things to do? SM is one of the most beautiful places in the country, the weather is nearly perfect, and you are a walk or a short drive away from many outdoor activities.

San Francisco is over-hyped, possibly because of the high concentration of bloggers who live in and around the city. I prefer New York, Chicago, Boston, and Seattle.

> possibly because of the high concentration of bloggers

Or the fact that it has much better weather than those other places you named. It's not mysterious: there are a lot of people who like to spend time outdoors and prioritize weather.

Chicagoian here. It's currently 11F, with a low under ~5F over the next few days [http://weatherspark.com/#!dashboard;q=60661].

Come see Chicago in the spring, summer, fall, but live somewhere warm.

Disclaimer: Attempting to move somewhere warmer soon.

I grew up in Chicago. It was so cold. Never again.

I'm 31. Been here my whole life (besides traveling). Working on finding remote DevOps gig to work from Tampa/Key West/British Virgin Islands.

Good place to be from.

Sounds like the noob chose to live at 6th and Market. That's where you go after you lose that brogrammer edge, not when you move here to find your fortune.

I recall the advice Steve Martin's adopted mother in The Jerk gave him, "find your special purpose", and how that worked out for him. It all starts by working at the circus.

Your fortune will find you when you find your special purpose.

My city was approaching negative double-digits a couple of weeks ago.

Enjoy that SF weather :)

There's no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.

I've lived in a few warm cities, and I found they suck too, just in different ways from Chicago. Plus, all the warm cities are going to run out of water soon, anyway. May as well be prepared for the cold weather when everyone has to move back to places like here.

The weather really matters to a person like me. I find that in snow, and rain, I don't get on very well. I tend to get very sick in extremely cold weather, and my mood isn't great either.

For this reason, London, Boston, Chicago, and New York are effectively ruled out for me as places to live for a large enough chunk of the year.

I don't really like Seattle very much. Their airport uses TSA. The employers in the area that are within walking distance of any of the places I would like to live don't greatly excite me either.

San Francisco meets a lot of special requirements that are hard to meet: -Very walkable -Decent transportation options (Uber) -Temperate -Good collection of employers -Empirical data appears to show a great number of interesting people

I don't think I've read a single pro-San Francisco blog, and even if I did, someone's opinion about San Francisco would only factor into a small part of my decisions to live here.

As someone from one of the least sunny parts of the country (Pittsburgh area) I agree. Weather is one of my primary concerns when I think about moving. I would never move from Pittsburgh to Seattle even though Seattle gets a little bit more sunshine.

What is it about the bay area that attracts everyone? What is so bad about Southern California? It seems to have jobs galore and good weather almost all year.

>Their airport uses TSA.

All US airports use TSA.

There are a handful of airports in the US, SFO among them, that were/are part of a program that used private security contractors that operated according to TSA SOP. If I remember right this was just a pilot program that was discontinued, but the existing airports were grandfathered in.

That said, I haven't been treated any better by Covenant Security's (the contractor for SFO, aka "TEAM SFO" as you see on their shirts) people than I have been by actual TSA employees elsewhere. Seems like a nominal difference to me.

> I don't really like Seattle very much. Their airport uses TSA. [..]

So does SFO. Don't all airports in the US use TSA?

Also, literally every other city you mentioned has Uber available. Speaking specifically to Seattle, we also have Lyft and the other "popular" transportation-as-an-app services available.

Technically SFO is one of the very few airports (and the largest one I believe) that contracts out its airport security to a private company. The company and its operations are regulated by TSA, and for all practical purposes offers the same experience as any other airport, but the people who look at your bags and such are not TSA employees.

See: http://www.flysfo.com/about-sfo/safety-security and http://blog.tsa.gov/2010/11/airports-who-opt-out-of-tsa-scre...

I've lived in a few tech cities, and SF is pretty high up thee for not sucking. Lots of jobs if you have skills, areas around the city have less horrid rent, pretty warm without being too hot, and neat culture.

I'll give a slight edge to Seattle, because I like the geography a bit better. It's where I'll land next. But for now I've spent half a decade in Boston. Good .edu jobs, lots of startups, and Pharma jobs too. Nice folks, and living in Cambridge or Somerville is on the subway and more reasonable for housing costs. Yes we have snow, but I grew up near Philly, so this doesn't phase me. I tried NYC and Austin, but too packed (NYC), and too damn hot. (~105 in May in Austin, and rarely lower...)

> The government must be terrible. Taxes are very high. Services are terrible (particularly bus). The city is gross.

amen brother

For a city that in theory has everything in the world going for it and an endless supply of rich people to tax, it must have one of the worst city governments (albeit most highly paid) in the country.

I moved to the area about six months ago, and after living in Oakland for 3 months, moved to the city.

I'd agree with most of these points (though a lot of the upside, particularly the huge range of people who are welcomed here, are left out).

I disagree that the transit system is falling apart. The BART strikes were a huge embarrassment, but all things considered, I haven't felt handicapped not having a car since I've been here.

Also, after the dirtiness stops bothering you. Ditto on the noise (though I may be spoiled by an 11th floor apartment).

The rents and the NIMBYism (which does drive up rents) is the worst of any city in the United States. Certainly in terms of the cost necessary for the "right to build", and as far as rent goes, it's either SF or NYC.

(From 2007, but: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/a-tale-o...)

Making friends is what ultimately drove me away from SF. I went in knowing one person, whom I relied too much on socially. As he and I were both working long hours, in separate startups, it became more and more difficult to sustain myself and fulfill that personal need.

I loved the size, the atmosphere of where I was living, the noise, the weather (MN kills), the amazing coffee and food, and the lack of need for personal transportation. It was strange in that everyone I met outside of tech was great, while a majority of those who were I really didn't care for (this is being kind; although it's not my intent to state that everyone in the SF tech scene is my enemy). But again, working in a startup, with those expected hours and meeting deadlines, it would've been borderline impossible.

I love coming into the city, but I choose to live in Moraga because of some of the reasons you list here. Rent prices out here are actually down a bit from 6 months ago - you can rent a 3br house in Concord for around $2.5K a month. While that's exceedingly expensive compared to the rest of the US, it puts you within an hour and some change's striking distance of most Bay destinations, which can be valuable depending on your skill sets.

Also, it's stunningly gorgeous out here: https://plus.google.com/100735767683148801066/posts/Y2ugoKdp...

Just want to point out that it's not fair to call the government incompetent here, when the issue is more complex. I see the sidewalks being cleaned every morning only to be covered in filth again the next day. And it's hard to deal with the homeless issue when New York is buying bus tickets to San Francisco to deal with their homeless.

Well, Nevada is buying bus tickets.

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/san-francisco-sues-nevada-over...

As a NYer, just wondering where you heard this? If true, my opinion of Bloomberg just went up even more.

Because you consider shoveling those who are not as lucky in life to someone else's doorstep a solution?

More because it is a known fact that a large proportion of the homless in NYC are not actually even from NY and I don't think we should be paying to take care of people who are not actually from the area. This to me should be a federal issue, why should major metropolitan areas have to pay for all the joe smoes who move to the city for no other reason than mooching off the "better" benefits that cities provide over small towns.

"...it is a known fact blah fucking blah..."

[citation needed]

And stop ducking the question, genius. Are you really trying to tell us that the solution to your homelessness problem is to bus people who you magically somehow don't think are from your area clear across the country to a place they almost certainly aren't from?

NYC has a program to send homeless people back home with a one-way ticket: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/nyregion/29oneway.html

The article makes the program sound reasonably humanitarian, while the initial description made it sound more like "dump the problem elsewhere". With the examples of homeless people who had relatives in France or Puerto Rico they could live with, but they just couldn't afford to get there, buying them plane tickets seems like an actual solution to the problem that's good for both the people in question and NYC. And it sounds like it's only done on request, not some kind of involuntary exile (compare: http://money.msn.com/now/post--columbia-sc-to-exile-its-home...).

I have no idea if the article is cherry-picking unrepresentative positive examples, though. To determine if it's solving or just shifting the problem, it'd be interesting if there were any statistics on what % of people NYC bought one-way tickets for were homeless again N months or years afterwards, vs. in a more stable situation. Admittedly it's probably quite difficult to collect reliable data on that.

It is amusing to read about people complaining about how many homeless people there are in SF without seeming to consider the reasons why other cities have fewer homeless. This article further implies that with such high taxes we should be able to "get rid of our homeless" more effectively than other cities.

On the taxes, SF doesn't have a city income tax. So unless the writer is a property or business owner, they're not directly paying taxes to SF aside from a 1% higher sales tax. Compare this to the 3% personal income tax in NYC (on top of the taxes listed above).

Homeless factors include: good climate, fewer beatings from cops, fewer beatings from citizens, no bus deportation out of town, crazy people often head west until they hit water, better free health services for the poor, popular tourist destination means good pan-handling.

>The government must be terrible. Taxes are very high. Services are terrible (particularly bus).

Infer about state of gov't, don't bother finding anything out about it let alone get involved, then griping online? You probably deserve bad government.

6 months residency is more than enough time to become acclimated to the cities problems and be a champion of fiscally acceptable infrastructure solutions, right? No. It is not.

The author makes a very fair observation. Side note, the idea that some people "deserve bad government" is one if the single most ludicrous things i have ever read on HN

6 months residency is more than enough time to become acclimated to the cities problems and be a champion of fiscally acceptable infrastructure solutions, right? No. It is not.

It's not. But it's more than enough time to start investigating local governance beyond "must be" statements if it is a thing you care about.

"Taxes are very high." "Want to clean up areas of the city? Put a cop on every block!"

Someone elect this guy to city government, he seems to have a unbelievably solid grasp on the complexities of running a city like San Francisco.

The taxes are very high, and they are mis-spent.

I don't think we live in the same City. But it's good that you came here to follow your dream. Life is a buffet -- try a little of everything, and everywhere, and then move on.

In North Carolina the population density is much lower than SF so of course you are dealing with more pollution.

interesting blog post but could have just been titled: "my thoughts on moving to a big city"

just moved to SF from Ohio 3 months ago myself and i feel the exact same way as this guy...(its been more of a positive than a negative for me though)

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