Wondering if you'd be willing to share your reasons for why?
- The rampant homelessness and mental illness
- Cost of living
- Feces and urine everywhere
- Lots of rats and cockroaches
- Rotting garbage in the streets
- Lots of crime occurring in broad daylight that I've almost never seen in other cities like LA.
- Public employees are extremely rude and a hair away from saying "f* you" if you ask them a simple question.
It's an otherwise interesting city with great food, sights, and culture, but it's incredibly grimy and depressing. I had a good time while I was there, but the conditions are not what I'd want to live with long term.
1) Homeless encampments in our neighborhood, full of garbage, feces, urine, and needles. Increase in car theft, breakins and robbery. Various competing homeless cabals running bicycle chop shops, selling parts for drugs. Mentally ill people banging, screaming, fighting in the middle of the night. Hard to sleep through that. Explosive diarrhea smeared on our front door. That was so fun to clean up. City officials unable or unwilling to address the homeless problem.
2) Hellish commute traffic up and down the Peninsula. 280 used to be awesome. Now just a parking lot, just like 101 and 80.
3) Soaring cost of living because of insufficient housing. Anytime a new development is proposed, people are protesting against it, often the same people who are complaining about the high cost of housing. I saw a building aimed for senior citizens tied up in knots for years because of these protesters, on a site that had an abandoned warehouse with broken windows sitting completely empty.
I do miss being able to walk 10 minutes in any direction and find any type of food and restaurant that I wanted. But I started to feel that I was going to get killed by a mentally ill homeless person on that walk to the restaurant. I'm happy we left.
The Sunset and Richmond have very little of the homeless problem and I never have to watch out for feces, and they are generally clean areas. The commute is a bit worse to a lot worse depending on where you're going, but they do have bus/Muni lines that will get you where you need to go and you don't need to leave to do fun things (they are self-contained mini cities with great food, services, etc in walking distance).
If you want to have a shorter commute, Noe Valley is similar to those but slightly dirtier due to proximity to the Mission. There are tons of other great neighborhoods that are clean and relatively clear of homeless people with various tradeoffs of commute time and proximity to nature, such as Potrero Hill, Mission Bay, and Bernal Heights.
Ever since moving out of the area adjacent to Market St I've come to really love San Francisco and find that most of the criticisms I hear of it are honestly uninformed as to the real nature of the city in 70% of its neighborhoods.
And unfortunately, the votes to solve the problem are slowly moving out of state...
I also stopped using the light rail in LA because there isn't any serious enforcement against people riding without paying or the homeless insane. 1 out of 3 times I ride the red line, there's people with mental illnesses shouting at the top of their lungs and homeless people sleeping and taking up whole benches. The gold line is somewhat better, which is the one that I take every day, but I witnessed enough angry mental patients screaming and threatening people that I just didn't want to be subjected to it on a weekly basis. There were times where I called the police because there was some maniac on the platform shouting obscenities at people as they disembarked the train, and rarely did they show up. One time they did, and I saw them drive him around the corner and then drop him off around the block.