| SF / Bay Area: 1. Public Transit - a lot of the city isn't super walkable, and BART is dirty/unreliable/sometimes-sketchy. Something like NYC's subway system would be a game changer for me, but I tend to stay between only a few neighborhoods I can walk to, else I have to lyft (pretty quick, but usually around $8 to $15 each way). 2. No seasons - Personal preference, but I love winter and fall, and we don't really get either. Some people love this, but for me, the whole year feels like perpetual summer purgatory. 3. Yuck - The streets of SF are gross. WAY grosser than NYC. Like, human feces on every block in the areas surrounding the Tenderloin. Even in nicer areas like the Financial District, the streets are covered in trash and smelly. 4. Homeless population - It's absurd how many homeless folks there are, and the extent to which they're dehumanized on the streets of SF. Many of them have mental health issues, and some have tendencies towards getting aggressive. It's disheartening to see, and in order to survive in the city, you kind of have to come to terms with tuning it out in a way that I don't think is good for the empathetic, human part of being a person. 5. Crime / drugs - I have fairly thick skin with respect to sketchiness, but it's so bad that the police don't respond in person to car break-ins anymore (they can't afford to). You can see a whole host of people shooting up heroin directly across the street from the police station. You can find discarded needles and crack pipes in most neighborhoods. In some neighborhoods (especially the TL, lower nob hill), it can take the police a long time to check up on reported disturbances unless they're violent. 6. Not a great place for dating (for cishet men, at least. I can't speak to other folks' experiences) - There are more men in the city than women, which sometimes feels like a shortage of available women in the dating pool. YMMV |