Why San Francisco Is Not New York
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EDIT: Someone mentioned elsewhere about the high quality of food in the Bay once you leave SF. A good example of this is Michael Warring's found in a strip mall in Vallejo (yes, a strip mall in Vallejo) -- just really good food: http://www.urbanspoon.com/r/6/1691241/restaurant/Michael-War...
NYC native and mostly SF-hater here. Hate to say it but SF has us beat for food. If you want to go have a 5 star meal you're going to pay about the same and get about the same food in both cities (NYC obviously has the edge here, but not hugely), but San Francisco has NYC (especially Manhattan) absolutely dominated at the everyday eating level (ie: burritos, sandwiches, cheaper restaurants). The general ingredient quality just blows NYC away - both meat and produce.
These days, the best eating I do is when the in-laws have a big dinner, with stuff like hand-made tortellini!
Well, west coast (meaning: access to Australia and some other selling markets), good climate, etc
Access for foreign imports are important for the gourmet scene, but not necessary.
Minor correction: The San Joaquin Valley in the south half of the Central Valley, and The Sacramento Valley is the north half. The dividing line is the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta
But the way I wrote it kind of hid the point.
The day-to-day food in SF is just excellent, In part, I suspect, because they incorporate fresh vegetables of a kind that are just not available in NY for 8 months out of the year.
Also critical: The food in the greater NYC metro area is abysmal. The quality falls off very rapidly once you exit the city. Whereas if you walk into some random restaurant in some random town in the Bay Area, you're likely to get at least decent food.
Oh man is that true :( Long Island is not known for it's cuisine...
The Asian food situation is much better in south bay, but that's an hour from the city and thus limited to weekend excursions.
The only places you can get burritos are really the Mission and Redwood City. That is one of the main "everyday eating" foods that is made well. They are certainly good, but not something you want to eat super often. There aren't any vegetables to speak of in burritos or tacos.
SOMA, where most startups are, mostly has terrible food (at the everyday eating level), although it has gotten better in the last 5 years now that more people live there.
In NYC you can reliably get good pizza and bagels -- and the pizza is way cheaper than anything in SF. In SF the pizza is generally horrible.
If you compare cheaper restaurants (i.e. with waiter), then it's possible that SF has NY beat (?). But if you are just talking about walking into a place and getting food by yourself, then I think the pizza and bagels of NY has SF easily beat. SF is really many neighborhoods, and the Mission is definitely better in terms of food, but compared with SOMA it seems like there is no contest.
The floor in SF also seems to be really low... if you just walk into a random pizza or (surprisingly) Chinese place, you are pretty likely to be disappointed.
At the "everyday eating level", try Darwin, Little Skillet, Garaje, American Grilled Cheese, Source, Butler and Chef, La Briciola, Coco500, Zuppa, Holy Grill etc.
Want to go a little more upscale? Saisan. Alexanders. 25 Lusk. Prospect. Town Hall. Benu.
C'mon, don't make such broad generalizations unless you can back them up.
I lived in SOMA from 2002 to 2004, and from 2008 to 2010, so I know what I'm talking about... you do realize all the places you mentioned opened in the "last 5 years" (or have waiters and are not "every day food"), which I explicitly mentioned in my comment?
I'm guessing you don't because you just moved here, and those are the only places in SF you go to.
Now I know why pg wants to moderate comments. HN is really two forums: one for programmers, and one for industry gossip/lifestyle. The threads for programmers are still top notch, but once you venture into the non-technical parts you get randomly bitten by trolls.
I was on SOMA from '04-'06, then again from '08-present. There were some good places back then too. Some failed. Some are still here but aren't as good as they once were. If you haven't been here in 4 years, why are you spending your time claiming you know the SOMA foodie scene? And then getting all angst-y when countered?
I've never been to California, but used to live next to NYC. Could you expand on how the transit is 'classist' ? Is it too expensive? Does it not stop at places other than the suburbs?
In SF, the buses are dirty and filled with homeless and mentally ill people. Taking a bus home late at night is the plight of the commoners, the poorest class that work in the service industry and can't afford an Uber or taxi. And this class divide is why a BART strike is possible. The worst affected were those who didn't have a car too fall back on, or who couldn't work from home for a few days.
If something so critical as the NYC Subway stops functioning for more than a few hours, the MTA provides alternative buses and advance notice. A multi-day complete system outage would impact everyone, not just the poorest people unfortunate enough not to have other options.
So you're a minimum waged fry-cook or whatever in SF, you've blown 1/8th of your workday earnings just getting to-from work. You can get the monthly pass ($76.00/mo), but that's a bitter pill to swallow on those wages.
Oh, and you might not be able to take it home anyways since it shuts down at midnight, so don't get a job that does dinner service. Also, IIR, bus transfers to the Muni aren't free.
In the meanwhile the highly paid dotcommers might even get free company shuttles with wifi.
By comparison, a round trip Subway ride in NYC is what, $5? Goes pretty much everywhere, with good service even into lower income areas, transfers to buses are free. So while minimum wage is lower in NYC, it doesn't even kill 1/8th of your workday's pay to get from home to work and back.
Because coverage is so good, it's also unlikely that you'll even need a car, so you can save on all that expense: gas, taxes, registration, insurance, etc.
If you can bike (which I do), though, the calculus quickly changes.
I was astounded when I visited SF, usually seen as much more bike friendly than NY, and I saw that east bay riders still had to rely on the BART to get them into the city. The fare between West Oakland and Embarcadero alone is more than a subway ride.
When MBA culture infected the Valley, it turned it into a shitty New York: the worst of both worlds between a sleepy, semisuburban (but still beautiful and interesting in its own right) California city and the hypercompetitive pressure-cooker of Manhattan.
In 2002 it was still conceivable that a normal person would want to live in San Francisco, just because it was still an interesting place: a genuine big city on the West Coast, with less rain than Seattle and far more character than L.A. Now, all the people I like hate what's happening to Northern California.
Even tech workers are marginalized in this brave new world. How many software engineers are there that could buy a house in San Francisco at the market rate? Seven? Twelve? At typical house-buying, setting-down ages the are... zero, plus or minus one engineer who got in early on a ridiculously lucky startup, negotiated well, and over whom the founders are still kicking themselves.
It's ridiculous. Of course, that's also the fault of the NIMBYs, who should be squashed with extreme prejudice. They deserve far more hatred than anyone on Sand Hill Road. It'd be better if the insane anger were directed at NIMBYs instead of innocent Google engineers (who are also getting ass-raped by rent, thus victims of the same thing).
I don't know what the permanent identity of San Francisco is. I hope the crash will take out the nonsense and flush the entitled, Harvard-MBA culture back into the Stygian reaches from which it came. Let's have the NIMBYs thrown under that bus as well. They're certainly trying to turn San Francisco into a shitty New York knock-off, but they haven't irreversibly won yet.
I find this very hard to believe.
I don't have a dog in the fight, but I respect the right of people to help determine the kind of city they want to have. Enough people who already live in SF are saying that they don't want to be New York. What's wrong with that?
Then there's the additional problem of the most ornery and stubborn NIMBYs commanding the greatest political influence. This is also suboptimal in any economic model.
It's amusing, because this is almost the exact opposite of the typical argument I see against gentrification of lower-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn or Upper Manhattan in which most of the longtime residents are not property owners (ie, "They were here first").
Being there first is a really strong reason to respect someone's wishes. The ones who have been there have formed the place into much of what it is that makes it so desirable.
If being there first doesn't carry much weight, being a johnny-come-lately carries even less.
A growing city requires more housing to slow the rise of housing prices. A growing city requires more housing near its transportation investments (especially where capacity can easily be increased) so more people can get to where they need to go quickly. NIMBYism prevents both of those, and is the cause of many problems in the modern American city.
> the fault of the NIMBYs, who [...] deserve far more hatred
When I lived in SF, the "weird, beautiful, and edgy" older culture was very much also the anti-development and NIMBY culture. I'd be surprised if that were no longer true.
I am a NY resident but I was in SF this past summer. Regarding cleanness it depends on which neighbors you live in. If you live in Richmond or Outer Sunset like I was the neighborhoods should be pretty clean. Where I live now in NY is considered one of the safest neighborhood but with the ever increasing population the neighborhood is getting dirtier.
San Francisco shuts down at 10pm; New York truly is the city that never sleeps, and many neighborhoods feel busy and alive at all hours of the night.
True. Most local restaurants close around 10. Even those in the city closes early too. Usually I have to drive to Daly City to look for better and bigger restaurant.
But that's fine. I wouldn't want to dine too late. Now if you are looking for late night entertainment....
New York has probably the best public transit systems in the country
Also one of the dirtiest too. The problem with SF transit (subway) is that it runs on the street so they compete with cars and buses. Also SF subway trains are smaller and shorter so it can't take that many at once. So it's unfair to say SF doesn't have a good transit system.
SF's buses are quite on time, unlike NYC. I could check nextbus.com to confirm the next arrival and usually the bus can come within 2 minutes within the estimated arrival time.
The only pet peeve I have is there is very few bus sign. Looking for yellow paint mark can be tricky. When I was new to SF I was constantly asking people and looking outside the window to check whether I was approaching my destination. The only clue I had was to look at the street sign (X ave X street) and guess. Or I have to stare nextbus.com to watch for the next bus stop.
NYC also has this weird way of turning filth into part of the set piece of the city that very few places can manage.
NY has a very good public transit system. But I think I prefer D.C.'s. Cleaner and more comfortable. But both are quite good. I found London's quite good too.
The SF system is relatively nice, and regularly on time. Timed transfers are great. Shutting down so early, even on Friday and Saturday is a disaster for SF/East Bay interaction, and (on weeknights) people who work the night shift. The coverage is OK, but the fact that there's just one line on the SF side of things is a little crazy, especially given the challenge of walking long distances the hills present. Buses and MUNI are can't replace rail entirely. Finally, the variety of transit authorities makes it daunting to plan your trip or transfer services if (like a tourist might) you don't have a Clipper Card. 511 is pretty good as far as planning goes, but it'd be great to have a single map that showed BART and Muni, for example.
The DC system is far cleaner than NY, but coverage is very bad. Georgetown is devoid of Metro stops for snobby reasons, but the real desert is Northeast, which tends to be poorer and thus needs more public transit to begin with! Not being able to get to Dulles is terrible (although the silver line is nearing completion). SmarTrip works fine, but the lack of a monthly card really drove me crazy. Service is extended to 3 am on weekends, but DC is also far more walkable, and a cab ride isn't going to potentially set you back $80, even if you're in Virginia somewhere, like it would if you were trying to get across the Bay (yes, there are buses, they can get crowded to the point that they fill up and you have to wait for the next one, which can be an hour later). The Metro has peak fares, even if you are riding "the wrong way"---I commuted from DC out to College Park via the green line and paid more in the morning, even though I rode trains where everyone could find a seat. This makes no sense to me. The fare was $3.35 (the base fare of $2.65 for that trip is more than a NYC fare)---it was actually cheaper for me to drive, but the extra 40 minutes to read, do the crossword, etc., was worth the difference. If you're going to have me swipe in and swipe out and charge me based on distance, then I think you can figure out that I didn't add to the rush.
The NYC system is by far the best with respect to the problems the other two systems have, although coverage in eastern Queens and Brooklyn leave much to be desired, and Staten Island has its own set of problems, and the lack of direct airport service is a serious shortcoming. However, you can always catch a train at any time of night if you are willing to wait 20 minutes. You can buy an unlimited daily, weekly, or monthly metrocard. A fare otherwise costs a flat, time- and distance-traveled-independent $2.50. Coverage is phenomenal, in terms of the number of stations, neighborhoods serviced, express trains, and comparative resilience to service disruptions when there is construction. Finally the scale and usage are incomparable. The Lexington Avenue Line alone (ie. the 4, 5, and 6 trains) carries 1.9 million people a day[1], whereas the entire BART system carries 400,000 and DC Metro 850,000 daily[2]. My point is that the NYC subway is simply massive in a way that those other systems aren't.
I understand why NYC's system is so good: age, lack of NIMBY strength and fierce competition between different subway companies when it was first constructed, scale of the city itself, only having to deal with a single authority (now, anyway) and political jurisdiction (again, now, anyway---if the 7 ever gets extended to Hoboken, we'll see what happens). Finally, a flat fare makes sense for a city where the poor tend live far away from "important" areas (like Midtown Manhattan), and this enables logistically simpler unlimited ridership cards, whereas in DC the wealthier people tend to live in the suburbs and the poorer people in the city, so it is less regressive to charge by distance. Not sure if/how SF fits into this idea.
[0] I just noticed that the commonly used name for each of these is capitalized differently!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRT_Lexington_Avenue_Line
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_tra...
46% of NYC households own a car. I don't think that qualifies as "unusual". Or if it does, then some other things that are unusual in NYC are white people (44%) and males (47%). :-)
Even in Manhattan, which has the lowest car ownership within the five boroughs, 23% of households own a car, which is hard to describe as "unusual". Some things that are comparably rare in Manhattan: people who primarily speak Spanish at home (23%), and Black and Asian people (26%).
Car ownership in the other boroughs: 44% for Brooklyn, 46% for the Bronx, 64% for Queens, and 84% for Staten Island.
I'd say that makes NY pretty unusual.
Your comparisons are intellectually dishonest.
You get the money later when you do that, which is another big reason people in SF don't spend so much. In finance you get paid as you go, and a lot of people in NYC spend it as they go. Indeed, friends who've worked in the finance industry have told me firms have a deliberate policy of encouraging new recruits to spend all their salaries and bonuses, as way of getting them hooked. Whereas in SF a lot of people's net worth is tied up in illiquid stock.
Now one can argue about the amount of value created by these industries, or rather how much of the value created is absorbed by the industries themselves. You can also question how much value is created by yet another web app getting funded in SV, so I don't know if you're on firm ground there.
Anybody working for those people is also essentially playing a zero-sum game, in that their activity is just aiding in shifting value from one pocket to another. Which is why I no longer work in finance; I wanted to do something useful.
[1] Yes, I have actually heard traders say "Whores for everybody!" in the office. At least in the office they were joking.
Benefit of trading is increased liquidity.
However, increased liquidity is of no direct value. It only matters if people get better prices, or get deals closed significantly sooner. For a trader's participation to be positive sum, the benefit of their capital has to be larger than the costs they impose. Given that every trader is working to make the opposite true, surely many of them are negative sum. Especially given that capital can be deployed to reduce liquidity just as well as increase it.
As someone that spends time in NYC for work, lives in Boston, has lived in DC and Santa Clara the largest and most important distinction are how people measure each other.
While ideas are worthless on their own, they seem to be the currency that matters in conversations in SF. Money matters in NYC. Political affiliation and who you are affiliated with matter in DC. Boston has the most odd culture because people weigh each other on something that happened far in the past rather than in the future, the choice of school that they went to.
The thing that really makes SF stand out is that people are ambitious toward being part of something bigger than themselves and growing it to benefit many others.
For example, a Google employee that moved from elsewhere in the country to San Francisco, and takes the Google bus to Mountain View because they don't have a car has an absolutely terrifying dependency on Google that they would not have if they were freely spending their own money to get the same services.
In that sense, SF is is similar to Hollywood. And the result is that society devotes too many resources to the next big social network or the next big summer blockbuster, and not enough to, say, making comfortable chairs.
If New York were the Bay Area, then all the big tech employers would be in places like White Plains and Greenwich, while all the tech employees still would want to live in Chelsea and the Village and the usual spots. Theoretically there's public transit from one to the other, but it's really a bit of a strain when you get down to it, so they'd need to run private buses.
New Jersey would replace Oakland and the East Bay - downmarket reputation but you've got a few excellent clusters of local culture, and you can get into town from there easily enough for your commute. You just don't actually feel like integrated with the rest of town where everything is happening. Staten Island replaces Marin, eastern Long Island replaces wine country...
and the entirety of Brooklyn and Queens would be underwater. :P
So SF is bunch of gold diggers?
I am not sure I understand. Tech sector brings people from all over the world including India, China, South America and Europe.
The introduction to this article really captures this well: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/nyregion/05jackson.html
I'm always amused at people's attitudes about San Francisco, and San Franciscans. Keep 'em coming.
Its easy to understand why New York magazine would publish high-brow link-bait: the decreasing relevance of banking-- NY's primary economic engine.
The funny thing is that the importance of banking is cyclical. Banker misbehave, markets punish them, they pretend to cower, they quietly recover... and then they misbehave again.
These kinds of comparisons will diminish once it's misbehaving time again.
San Francisco is already overwhelmed with tech culture, and this sector continues to grow. Everywhere you turn, it feels like you meet people who work for startups or large software firms. There is no comparable industry in NY that is so pervasive. This lack of economic diversification breeds the other diversity deficits this article mentions.
To give an idea, companies like IBM and Pepsico (Pepsi, Frito Lays, etc.), and Kraft have a large presence just north of the city and/or in it. NYC is one of the largest cities for fashion. It is home to the finance capital of the world. It has one of the largest music scenes in the world. It has a huge advertising agency presence.
There is a lot more than just the aspects I mentioned even. That is how massive of scale NYC is - San Francisco's legacy is primarily tech.