| Spent several years in San Francisco. Hated it. Moved back to the midwest (Ann Arbor, then back home to Chicago). What don't I like about SFBay? With the caveat that it's been almost 10 years since I lived there, let me make you a list: * It's expensive. What that means is, you have fewer options on where to live, and the options aren't as nice. * Apart from tacos, the casual food options are much worse. Concrete example: where do you go for late dinner after a show, besides a diner in the Castro and Mel's? * There are very few decent music venues. Among my many complaints about SF, this is one that appears to have gotten much worse since I left; read JWZ's blog on SF's "war on fun". * It is impossible to catch a cab. * It is very difficult (and dangerous) to park. My car was towed in San Francisco and lost by the city for over a month. * San Francisco is deceptively small. Deceptive, because SFBay is a major metro area that happens to sprawl from a small urban core. What this means is that many of your friends who ostensibly live in the same "place" as you are actually an hour's drive each way to get to. * Similarly, many (technically, most) of the jobs in the "area" are actually a 1+ hour commute each way from your house. At the time, I didn't know anybody who took the train from San Francisco to South Bay; maybe that's changed, but my perception is everyone just drives and puts up with the horrible commute. 280 sure is pretty sometimes, though. * It's filthy. I've been back recently and know this to still be true: San Francisco has a maintenance problem, and it's different and worse than Manhattan. Manhattan feels like you're always picking your way through someone's gigantic cluttered basement. This alters your expectations of the environment and makes bags of garbage on the street easier to take. San Francisco is flat and open and that makes the piles of human feces somehow harder to take. * Public transportation in San Francisco, is a joke compared to NYC or Chicago or even Seattle. It achieves Houstonian levels of walkability despite a miniscule footprint. * The Haight and the stretch of Golden Gate Park right off the Haight is disgusting. I'm in favor of legalization, but if we're going to do it with red light districts, we should at least cordon them off and make that clear. * Too much of San Francisco is a tourist trap. Every big city has tourist areas, but it's more painful in San Francisco because the city is so small. In NYC and Chicago there are actual Italian restaurant neighborhoods and they aren't full of frat boys. * San Francisco doesn't have neighborhoods like other cities do. People tend to counter this by saying "but the inner sunset is totally different from the outer sunset". When's the last time they had a block party? How many of their neighbors have they entertained in their houses in the last year? * There are no seasons (ok, there's "grey" season and "yellow" season). It's about to be Autumn here in Chicago. Autumn in the midwest is amazing and I missed it, a lot. * Everyone's in tech. This makes the social scene boring and incestuous. Also, unless you build products that serve the echo chamber, it makes it harder to sell to companies, because the industries in San Francisco aren't diverse. I'm trying hard with this list not to ding San Francisco for things that other cities excel at. It's not reasonable to hate a city for not meeting the highest bars set by other cities. For instance, fine dining in San Francisco is, if you properly exclude Yountville from your definition of "San Francisco", simply not as good as NYC or even Chicago. San Francisco doesn't have world-class museums. It doesn't have a noteworthy theater scene, or (to my knowledge) excellence in any of the performing arts. But then, Chicago doesn't have redwood forests or beaches you can set bonfires on with no notice. |
[Expensive] -> Rent control and Private property restrictions. Housing supply is limited w/ endless permits and restrictions on building additions or subdividing space. And rent controls not only create artificial scarcity by not allowing price to rise w/ demand, but they also encourage people to stay in large places long after they need them. Imagine what the web would look like if you had to wait for months for a zoning board to approve your server expansion.
[Casual Food] -> Wait staff must be given minimum wage and health insurance whereas the wait staff in most other cities live off tips. What happens is restaurants become EXTREMELY expensive to run and they usually fire the wait staff at lower end places. You'll notice the order at register and take a number tag game played a lot to get around it. I know a few high end chefs who had to move their restaurants to Oakland b/c their waiters made more than them.
[Music] -> Don't have anything for you on this one.
[Cabs] -> Government set prices are too low. Demand exceeds supply at that price and there is an artificial shortage.
[Parking] -> Tickets are one of the most reliable ways to pay for all the hair-brained social experiments that take place here.
[Small] -> Fixed housing supply. See rent control / private property restrictions.
[Commute] -> I don't have an easy explanation.
[Filthy] -> Amen. We don't have a homeless problem we have a zombie problem. Your run of the mill drug addict is seen as a victim rather than a scourge. He is given food, money and shelter by the government to continue his habit. My friend worked for a non-profit in the Tenderloin that offered shelter, clothes, showers, haircuts and job help to anyone indefinitely as long as they submitted to drug tests. Their beds in 3 buildings were always empty and they shut down.
[Public Transpo] -> Make a bus driver too expensive by catering too much to the unions and busses have to get bigger. It's the opposite effect of the long tail. Instead of many small vans and more custom routes, you have few huge routes that serve nobody very well. Also the homeless ride the bus for free.
[Haight] -> In the late 60's the Grateful Dead and their followers began to get sketched out living there. Heroin and crime have been the norm there for years. It's foul and there is no police presence.
All of these policies had very good intentions. But the intention of a policy does not determine it's outcome. Furthermore, almost none of their side effects are ever measured by the government. It's fine if you want to experiment, but at least measure the result.