SF is indeed a nice city and better than many in terms of parks and outdoor amenities. However, the space at home, when you WFH, is pretty rough.

If you take what a typical couple pays for SF rent you can buy two houses in most of the US. So... if you're going to be spending a lot of time at home, for many people it makes sense to move out to a cheaper and more spacious locale, at least for now.

agreed -- portland is right there with very similar recreational activities and literally 25% the rent. why rent a 1b1b in SF when you can rent a mansion right on washington park for the same price?

Not everyone can stand the Pacific North West weather. https://www.reddit.com/r/askportland/comments/53okby/moving_...

That's a fair question, and the answer will depend on what people emphasize in life. I'll venture a firm answer for SF:

Though SF is no New York, it is notably more urban than Portland. San Francisco is physically more strikingly beautiful than Portland, with magnificent views of the bay and ocean from the hills. Portland is surrounded by beautiful forests and parks, but so is SF - you can get from downtown SF into the middle of a quiet redwood forest in about 25 minutes, and the coast, north and south, is far more accessible than it is in Portland[1]. While SF has a severe problem with street addiction and mental illness, so does Portland, and SF does still have extensive walkable urban and semi-urban neighborhoods. Golden Gate Park, the Presidio, and Crissy field are just a few of the outdoor options within the city. There are also plenty of options to live in lower density, SFH neighborhoods with small backyards. Culturally, San Francisco is much more diverse than Portland - SF actually ranks first among US cities in the number of languages spoken by 1000+ households. Portland is overwhelmingly white and has a historical hostility toward ethnics and immigrants (some believe that the anti-Californian sentiment has roots in hostility toward Catholic and darker skinned immigrants) - and, ironically on the other side of the political spectrum, a lot of immigrant or first generation communities are actually uncomfortable with predominantly white, left wing progressive politics. Immigrants may be more likely to find a community in SF than Portland.

[1] I surf, which makes Portland a hard pass for me, though that's a bit too niche for a general comparison.

You make excellent points -- the point related to culture is the most common I've heard from people outside Portland (particularly non-white people).

I think the only things you omitted are the differences in weather and the size of the cities.

- Portland is a fairly small city (especially inner portland) with a long history of anti-growth sentiment. The result is very rural agricultural areas _just_ outside of Portland.

- The weather patterns bring different wildlife and kinds of beauty. While the forests outside SF are quite pretty, they are also very different than the wet douglas fir forests up north. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder -- Portland also extends into the hills and provides famous views of Mt. Hood from the SW hills. The portland zoo for instance, is like going from a city into a rain forest.

The oregon coast is cold and rainy 95% of the year, not the most fun place to visit.

Portland is really nice, I've enjoyed my trips up there. I was positing an answer to the somewhat open question of why someone wouldn't leave SF for Portland. I think there are compelling reasons why someone would prefer to stay in SF, but nobody would need to explain to me why they prefer Portland! I can see all kinds of reasons someone would prefer it.

Portland is right by Hood River if you kitesurf (which, despite 17 years of regular surfing and only 2 months of kiting, I've decided is objectively better)

The positives have to out weight the negatives of high crime, a large homeless population, high rents, small apartments, etc. Having nice parks is not unique to SF.

The actual reason people are leaving the city are high rents and small apartments. How the hell do you work from home when you're sharing a place with roommates? And affording extra space for an office given current rents is a huge problem.

Crime and homelessness, while problems, aren't major factors for people in my experience. After all, those two things haven't really changed.

Homelessness is objectively worse, as in higher counts, in SF. Up 72% since 2011. And it is subjectively worse, as enforcement has dropped and homelessness has spread, become more bold, more petty crime, and caused a bigger disruptions.

https://cdn.abcotvs.com/dip/images/5380756_sanfrancisco2019....

> Crime and homelessness, while problems, aren't major factors for people in my experience. After all, those two things haven't really changed

I disagree. Its consistently brought up, along with high rent, as one of the worst parts of living in the area. In my experience, the people who stay in SF are willing tolerate it for access to all the amenities there. When the pandemic makes it difficult to enjoy those amenities, it will drive people away.

no... but neither is having a problem with street addiction and mental illness. SF has it bad, no doubt, but on recent (<5 years) to Seattle, Portland, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Milwaukee, I did see the extent to which this isn't purely a SF problem. NY was actually the best of the bunch, remarkably, though last time I was there was 6 years ago, and things have deteriorated remarkably in SF even in the last 10 years, accelerating in the last 5, so this may be less NY vs SF and more 5+ years ago vs now.

You are certainly not wrong. This is a major problem in many places in the country. It's gross. Portland and Seattle are definitely much worse than SF. LA is much nicer than what it used to be, and still better than SF, but I grew up in LA so I have the natural tendency to ignore everything bad with it.

I hear you. San Franciscans historically had an extremely obnoxious tendency to only see the negative side of LA. Seems like it's fading a bit, though, partly because SF's are too severe to stay smug, and partly because LA keeps getting more interesting. I grew up in SF but moved to LA for a while in the late 90s to work in the software side of film compositing/editing. Finally opened my eyes to how much fun it is. My guess is that with electric cars and more urbanization, LA will may well become a warm, crowded, culturally varied and ethnically diverse place with sprawling suburbs and dense urban areas, a lucrative and creative entertainment sector and somewhat smaller tech sector, clean air and water, beaches, and eternally lousy traffic.

Did you work for Dolby or RED? I've always thought it'd be fascinating to work in software for pro film production. I'd really like to hear anything you have to share about your experience.

Don't forget school districting based on Game of Thrones

And if you haven't heard, all the public school names are going to be renamed, since people like Lincoln and George Washington were terrible people who shouldn't be celebrated /s [1]

[1]: https://abc7news.com/renaming-sf-public-schools-school-name-...

I don't know why you were downvoted. Even if someone supports renaming a school called Lincoln to something else, the ... extreme nature of such a thing is a consideration for people to consider whether or not SF is a nice place to live. Because there are people in charge making decisions like this, and people in charge wield power, and if you live in SF you'll be subservient to these leaders.

I'll add, the fact there are people who downvote information is quite possibly another strike against SF.

I think the downvotes fall into two categories. Some people agree with the renaming, and others just don't care either way. In a subthread about why people might want to move away from SF, "they're going to rename some schools" is not particularly relevant, and comes off a little flamebaity.

My personal opinion is that some of the renaming is a bit over the top, but I'm glad we're re-examining our historical "heroes"; most of what kids read in their US history classes paints an idealized, unrealistic picture of these figures, and ignores real harm they caused, both by their actions and attitudes. Regardless, I just frankly do not care whether a building is named Lincoln High School or John Doe High School. If ditching Lincoln's name makes a bunch of people feel more comfortable, it's no skin off my back.

What's actually important is that we teach the truth, and all of it. When we teach kids about Thomas Jefferson, we should certainly give him credit for the statesman he was, and for what he did to free the US from England. But we should also teach how he owned slaves throughout his entire life and saw no problem with that, and how he was a rich, elite landowner who believed that only a very small, single-digit percent of the population should be allowed to vote. Even Washington, who seemed not entirely comfortable with slavery, owned a slave that was only set free upon Washington's death. And Lincoln... well, his main concern was keeping the Union together. If that ultimately meant allowing the South to keep slavery intact, he was fine with that.

I don't bring all that up to say that they were awful, irredeemable people with no positive qualities. Some of them, if born today, might grow up with very different attitudes. But I think it's reasonable to suggest that quite a few people, especially non-white people, might not be particularly comfortable sending their kids to schools named after these people. And it's perfectly ok that they feel that way.

Of course it's relevant. It says a lot about the local government, about their priorities and perhaps about the people who live there that led to it. Their attitudes on this are reflective of their attitudes on other things. The exodus is being driven at a surface level by the lockdowns, but by now the lockdowns are well past the point of being driven by leftist ideology. See:

https://www.city-journal.org/california-race-coding-criteria...

End of lockdowns in CA are being tied to vague "racial justice" goals. These things are all connected. Renaming a high school says "we consider this the most important thing we could be working on right now" which is clearly absurd when you consider the real problems CA has.

I assumed "everybody knows" that Lincoln was not a super abolitionist. And "of course" it's ok if people don't regard him as a super hero.

But despite being a lifelong Democrat there is a certain level of concern over purity that makes me uneasy. All my Jewish cousins who were in Europe mysteriously disappeared during WWII. Yet, I own and enjoy a German car whose corporate origins are very intertwined with the history of that period of time. I think the Apollo program was pretty cool, and that was fundamentally rooted in the exploitation of German expertise from rocket research involving Nazi slave labor during the war.

So, if someone is disgusted with these things and personally avoids them, that's cool. But if they are on a crusade to purify society from them, I probably don't want to be neighbors.

And you definitely don't want them as an _unelected_ committee member with authority to decide the direction of your children's educational future.

I do think a community should decide. I don't think outsiders should be telling people they have to keep the school named after Lincoln, if they want to change it, democratically.

>The names of presidents and other political and historic figures could soon be purged from SFUSD schools. This includes George Washington, Diane Feinstein, even Abraham Lincoln.

What did Diane Feinstein do? :)

Go to Tennessee and ask that. Be prepared to listen for a long time.

I think most people who leave during the pandemic aren't leaving for equal-sized apartments in other cities.

I think they're leaving for places where lower land prices mean homes with more space - which could mean the suburbs, smaller towns, or could even mean moving back in with their parents.

I know people, in London, where three 20-something couples were renting a three-bedroom house, living 2 people to a room. They barely had room to set up comfortable desks and chairs for everyone, let alone things like exercise equipment. Some of them decided temporarily moving back in with their parents wasn't such a bad idea after all...

Yes, there are good parks in the city, but even back in June I thought some were too crowded for a pandemic. You also have access to lots of nature and hiking within a reasonable drive of the city, but that only works if you have a car or trust a rental company to disinfect thoroughly.

The hard bit is the live+work space. I was incredibly lucky that I moved to a larger place right before the shelter-in-place order hit (from a loft to a condo with walls and doors!), but I know a lot of people who have been working on dining tables and sub-optimal improvised desks for the past seven months. If you live in a loft-style place with another person, the lack of personal space can really get to you.

Go to denver/boulder. You get snow on occasion, but it's gone the next day, and the whole state is a park. Plus Skiing, 300 days of sunshine, and while the housing has become much more expensive, it's still way less then California.

Colorado is horrible. Denver gets 10 feet of snow every winter. Austin is way better.

To each his own I guess.

Austin is nice, but comes no where close to the natural beauty of Colorado. I'd put it 2nd the West Coast.

Texas is just flatness and trees. The rivers are nice though.

I'm reminded of the

  SMATTERING OF QUOTES FROM THE ULTIMA VII TEAM

section in the USECODE file from Ultima VII, specifically

  "Looks like shit... could be west Texas."
  - PHILIP

...... because apparently my brain remembers free association tidbits like the above that I found while (cluelessly) digging in binary game data files ~27 years ago.

Who cares about the weather? For the price of an apartment in SF you could easily have 2 apartments in different cities. Get one in Colarado for when you want to snow ski and get one in south Florida for when you want to water ski.

Don't know about SF but the so cal parks were closed, even the beaches in some cases. Heavy fines if you are found in the park.

My favorite restaurants are all closed and you have police state ensuring you don't use public facilities. Why would I pay $4000 a month for housing with none of the benefits?

If you want access to parks and nature, you don't need to spend SF prices to get it. Other places on the west coast are warm during the winter and have parks.

And you're discounting the fact that they will still be living in a tiny apartment compared to other areas with much lower housing prices.

I’ve seen a lot of folks come to Arizona during the pandemic, and I think more will move here. Outside of the summers, which aren’t that bad because you have A/C, and in the summer you’re an hour from being in the forest with pine trees and three hours from Flagstaff where it’s great weather year round (plus a ski mountain in the winter) you got a lot of folks from California coming & staying while looking at much more affordable housing & taxes.

Especially as Arizona has become more and more liberal/left leaning, you got less folks viewing it as hostile & enjoying the fact you have a lot of hiking/outdoor activities, rivers, lakes and camping all within a short driving distance.

I'm a transplant here, and I feel like I'm living in a weird post-apocolyptic nightmare with all the Trump signs and Trump flags on their giant lifted trucks. I really hope that this state can pull it's head out of Joe Arpaio's ass, and wriggle leftwards a little bit.

I think the weirdest and most noticeable thing is people riding motorcycles without helmets.

That said; yeah, the heat is not really that bad (it took me about 2 years to acclimate), and there are options for relief. Surprisingly, I think we get more rain in Arizona than in California (not this summer though), and winters are definitely much colder in Arizona than they are in California.