I agree on almost all of your points with a few caveats. - Cars : The Bay Area is very walkable but that’s mainly SF. The tech burbs of Palo Alto , Menlo Park are not super walkable and you are relying on the BART and other public transport . But Covid has destroyed public transport and cuts in funding threaten them further.

LGBT : This is not really the 80s and 90s . Most big cities from DC, Atlanta, Austin ,Chicago, Phoenix, Miami have strong LGBT presence . And a lot of racial heterogeneity there too.

Art and Culture: Almost all artists that I met in Austin, Chicago , Miami , Portland , Asheville left the Bay Area . They were priced out by tech . Everything is tech in the Bay Area . Even artists have to align or suck up to tech .

High quality food: Yes, again a lot of other cities are replicating that.

The Bay Area is truly great and very beautiful . But I cannot constantly hustle at 45 while raising 2 kids , pay a million dollars for a shack . I am sort of tired of constantly competing and hustling . I am tired of being told that we are counter culture since we are not Wall Street bro’s but I need a million dollars for a 1950s 2 bedroom house .

> The Bay Area is very walkable but that’s mainly SF. The tech burbs of Palo Alto , Menlo Park are not super walkable and you are relying on the BART and other public transport .

Even SF is not very walkable compared to Chicago, DC, Philly, Boston, etc. (All significantly cheaper than SF.) Even by American standards, the BART is a pretty second-rate metro. (And that's not even counting the fact that nowadays it's essentially unsafe at night, for single women, etc.)

To push back a bit: SF proper must have the best bus system of any city in the US. It's possible to get pretty much anywhere in a reasonable amount of time, even late at night, with just a quick bus ride or two. I won't say MUNI is perfect but it's doing a lot of things right. Anyone who thinks BART is synonymous with SF's inner city transportation is really not making their way around the city by transit.

I don’t live in the US but have been to a few US cities for work. San Diego was horrendous without a car. DC was very good, even though when I travelled there had been heavy snow.

I’ve been to SF twice in the last three years. My impression of SF’s public transport (and to be honest, walking around parts of it too) was that I did not feel very safe using the MUNI buses, especially at night. I saw on the news that a British guy got stabbed near my hotel a week after I left the first time.

On one occasion I also witnessed a bus driver drive past a guy in a wheelchair in the middle of the day. Someone on the bus challenged them on that and I vividly remember that she said “I ain’t lettin no cripple pee pee all over my bus.”

The BART was much better but obviously is more limited in where it goes.

On the other hand, MUNI is incredibly overcrowded along certain lines now, and conditions on the buses are often filthy (though perhaps that's common in all dense large U.S. cities).

And SF wrt cars only to some degree. I know a couple who decamped to SF and sold their cars when their kids got older. They do indeed live without owning cars. They also use Ubers, ZipCars, and regular rental all the time.

I think a lot depends on what you're used to. I think a lot of folks accept the limited mobility they knew through school when they graduate. It becomes less acceptable as they get older. Many exceptions of course.

>They do indeed live without owning cars. They also use Ubers, ZipCars, and regular rental all the time.

Is there that much of a difference between owning a car and renting a car or using Zip or having a chauffer (Lyft, Uber, taxis) tote you around? I'd get rid of my car too if I could afford to have Uber haul me everywhere.

>Is there that much of a difference between owning a car...? I'd get rid of my car too if I could afford to have Uber haul me everywhere.

With reference to my sibling comment, definitively yes. I personally spent less on a handful of Lyft rides per month in Houston than I did on insurance alone when I owned a car. Never mind the cost of the vehicle itself, gas, any repairs...

Even adding in the cost of my rail and bus rides, still doesn't come close to the cost of a vehicle.

But SF is one of the most expensive living cost, so I suspect that spending for cars isn't much issue.

Before I sold my car, I spent more on parking (in my apartment) than I did in an average month if ride-sharing.

>Is there that much of a difference between owning a car and renting a car or using Zip or having a chauffer (Lyft, Uber, taxis) tote you around? I'd get rid of my car too if I could afford to have Uber haul me everywhere.

It's a difference in frequency of use. In Seattle, a lot of my friends don't have cars, but use Rideshare/rentals when they need it. If you are using it a couple times a week, pretty easy to stay under the cost of car ownership when you factor in insurance/parking/maintenance etc.

Parking in SF tends to really suck, and at least if you take an Uber you don't need to circle the neighborhood for half an hour to find a spot.

> Is there that much of a difference between owning a car and renting a car or using Zip

The cost of owning a car in California including maintenance, fuel, parking, registration, smog check, etc. can be upwards of $10K per year. At least it was for me when I owned a car.

I walk most places and use car share or rent as necessary. I do not spend $10K per year on car share and rentals.

Literally, YMMV.

I guess it still works out for them. They also rent their parking space to someone else. And he rides a bike, etc. And they use public transit. But, yeah, it's dependent on having a number of car options also available.

And use home delivery! You outsourced the car dependency to poor gig workers.

You can make a lot of things work in a lot of places. I have lived in both Dallas and Houston without a car, for example (but also Berlin, Santiago, Tokyo, so I have comparison points). If you don't have kids, and have the freedom to plan a bit around where you live and work, you won't really feel like you're missing anything. I would take a trip via Lyft twice a month to some venue that's further away than the bike/rail/bus combo could get me, but that's about all.

TBH though, I'm mostly not interested in "making things work" if I have more convenient options. At one point, I spent a lot of time in Houston and I absolutely needed a car--for my job if nothing else. But even living in New Orleans at that time I absolutely needed a car for my job.

What’s a good neighborhood or two in Houston where it’s possible to do this?

The easiest in terms of pure transit is the corridor in Midtown along the Red Line. From about Alabama up to Downtown. Second is Montrose which for some people will have a cooler vibe.

Within Midtown, the further North you go, there are a few more bars/clubs that make noise at night, so either live further South, live a few blocks East or West of the rail, or both. Huge amounts of apartment stock just came online in the last 3 years there, so you might get a solid rent deal somewhere? For me personally, being able to walk to a grocery store is always key anywhere in the world: shop every 2-3 days on the way home from work, only buy what I need, less waste. That area has two grocery stores: Randall's and Whole Foods.

Montrose is the other top spot. For me it is the #1 example of how Houston's lack of zoning can shine (versus other areas where it is a detriment). Fantastic local retail interspersed among every-other residential block. Montrose is a large-ish area and every half mile can be a slightly different "feel", but there are great options to rent newer apartments, older apartments, or rent spacious, cheap, historical houses close to things like Menil Park, or the big restaurant scene along Westheimer. Sadly the Kroger at Hawthorne is closing, but the huge HEB is dead-center of Montrose. East a bit and you're near Trader Joe's. If you're anywhere along Westheimer, the 82 bus goes to to Midtown Whole Foods and if you're along West Gray the 32 bus goes to the Kroger near River Oaks. The whole area always has things happening (check the pinboards at Inversion or Black Hole), and is next door to Midtown for even more.

If Downtown would get a larger grocery store with slightly more affordable staples (no offense to Phoenecia), and have it close-ish to where the rail lines meet, the entirety of Downtown would immediately become more viable (imo). I have friends both in Downtown, and in the Heights (solid bike culture there), but they eat out more than I do. The Heights started getting expensive ten years ago and doesn't look to stop, but it's still an option.

In about 5 years I think the Greater East End will be another great walkable/bikeable region (the actual East End, not EaDo), so depending where along the gentrification curve you prefer to live (before, during, after) it might be worth checking out now.

Thanks so much, appreciate it

Can't speak for other cities, and maybe not even Chicago today, but when I lived there, there was a lot of diversity in the loop (the downtown business district) during the workday, but beyond that it was a very segregated city.

Also, though I did own a car, I really only used it on weekend trips out of town. If I had stayed long-term, I would have sold it, because it's expensive to own one there (parking is expensive unless you want to gamble on finding a spot on the street, and there are extra city taxes on gas and registration). Chicago is pretty walkable and has usable mass transit.

Most big cities are segregated, both economically and racially—and the economic segregation amplifies the racial segregation.

The exodus of middle class Black and Hispanic people from high cost urban areas drives some crazy income distributions in places like San Francisco: https://statisticalatlas.com/place/California/San-Francisco/.... If your apartment building, restaurants, etc., are places mainly populated by those making over $100k/year, there will be a vanishingly small number of Black people in those places. (See table 10). Contrast somewhere like Atlanta, where a third of households making $75-100k/year (a very comfortable income in that city) are Black.

Chicago is pretty segregated, but the transit situation is easily the best of any major US city. A car helps you get places quicker, but an adventurous person can get all over the city easily on the buses and trains and any given neighborhood is very walkable.

The main issue is the cold. You have 3 months of amazing summer and 8 months of cold with two weeks of spring and fall on either end. If you're not from the Midwest, it can really wear on you and bring you down.

Cold is fine.

Getting robbed at gunpoint isn't. That's the real Chicago you have to contend with.

Crime-wise (and on many quality of life issues), Chicago is like 3 cities in one: - a rich, extremely safe city (broadly, greater Loop and north/northwest sides) - a poor, unsafe city (south and west sides) - a middle income, very average city (the more suburban, far northwest, south, and southwest area)

Your experience will vary greatly, depending on which areas you visit.

It also has more than triple the population of SF, or twice as many people as SF+Oakland combined, so any absolute (as opposed to per-capita) numbers aren't comparable.

Only place I’ve been robbed is SF (Tenderloin, 2002). Only place I’ve had my car broken into is SFBA (Berkeley 2008, San Jose and SF in 2018).

And Chicago has nearly 6x as many violent crimes per year as Oakland or San Francisco and still edges them out on property crime.

Is that per captia?

Chicago is less than 6x bigger than San Francisco or Oakland.

SF, yes (“only” 3x bigger), but Chicago is more than 6x the population of Oakland.

I'm just asking for accurate statistics.

As someone how has lived in both cities, I can say I felt unsafe way more often in SF than Chicago. Chicago's crime is gang related and isolated to a part of the city kind of disconnected from the main hub. But in SF the craziness is in the nice areas, I have had to deal with way too many violent mentally unstable people there, in fact I remember one of the two years I lived there a British woman randomly got a kitchen knife jabbed through her skull. In SF you're dealing with a large number of seriously mentally ill going to and from work.

As someone who has lived in several of the places topping the crime charts in the US, I want to tell you that this comment stinks of privilege.

In Chicago you were able to afford to live somewhere isolated from the reality of most Chicagoans.

In San Francisco you have so thoroughly priced everyone out that there isn't anywhere for the lower classes to go and so the bullshit is everywhere for everyone to deal with. Boo hoo.

Never happened to me or my friends. And apparently there's less poop on the sidewalks than SF.

I don't know anyone that died of Covid. I wash my hands and are not walking around in Chicago.

I have no plans to live in fear and plan to walk around downtown Chicago in the future.

Happened to a friend across the street from University of Chicago 2 weeks ago.

Agree on all counts, just putting Seattle out there as another city with a strong LGBT presence.

Is there a general belief that San Francisco is a counter cultural place?

At one time, San Francisco was very bohemian and very counter cultural. The Electric KoolAid Acid Test has its genesis in San Francisco. As do the Grateful Dead, the summer of love, and many other parts.

You can still find many vestiges of this, like all the head shops and very non mainstream things in the Haight Ashbury, but the reality is that it is far less of a counter-cultural mecca today than it was fifty, or even twenty, years ago.

The reputation is taking a long time to catch up to that reality though.

Only by some San Franciscans who've been sniffing their own farts for too long.

Everyone else thinks that The Bay is culturually homogenous.

It’s pretty dangerous to go against the culture these days. I’ve been singled out for trying to stay out of PC culture. Backed into a coroner of either actively agree with everything PC or “consequences”.

"Backed into a coroner" is, I presume, a typo, but it does very well at communicating the sense of danger...

I thought it wss a play on words for sure

It's okay, most of them don't walk the walk. They're all about it right up to the point that you suggest that poor people deserve decent jobs with a decent commute. Then they go straight to frothing at the mouth and incoherent shouting.

What I'm saying is turn it around on them.

If I said something bad about "red necks" or other such subcultures people would get angry and indignant. But somehow it's become OK to make disparaging comments like that about San Franciscans.

Rednecks and San Franciscans aren't protected classes of people.

Huh? I wasn't talking about legal stuff.

It matters. People won't make fun of protected classes because they might be cancelled and possibly even land in jail some day if some people get their way with our laws. Anything not against the law or against the cultural norms is free game for making fun of.

As someone living in the Midwest, I assure you that we do get slandered far more often than San Franciscans and no one bats an eye.

Huh, I don't think I've ever heard any bad midwestern stereotypes.

It was when half the set list for woodstock lived in Haight Ashbury.

Even smaller towns, like Asheville (where I am now), have a huge LGBTQIA+ presence. I moved from DC, which was pretty gay, and I feel like it's even more super gay here.

Presence, sure. What about legal protections around seemingly trivial daily things like bathroom use? Family planning services focusing on the needs of LGBT families? Doctors who have experience with LGBT patients, whom these patients can trust and talk to candidly? Churches that welcome LGBT members without pressuring them to change fundamental aspects of their lives? Mental health specialists that cater to LGBT needs? People who are visibly out (or trans) in the workplace and talk about their loved ones without discomfort? Support for children and adolescents with diverse identities?

There's a world of difference between "yeah, we have gay people" and being a place where LGBT people can build happy, stable lives.

Children don’t have diverse identities. I used to think I was Batman, my mate used to think he was black. Impressionable children are impressionable.

Case in point.

What a world when people can attack then rejection of child abuse and that’s socially acceptable.

Jesus.

A caveat on the caveat about cars - I live without a car in the suburbs just fine (Sunnyvale). YMMV, but for me a car would be more of a nice to have. I'll probably get one in a few years anyway after maybe buying a house here, but it's not something I view as an urgent expense.

Phoenix and the surrounding area also has a decent LGBT presence.

the article referenced was from 2016... many of the LGBT issues presented are still real concerns.

And rent is sky-high, tax is insane, homeless with needles are everywhere, the city is one of the dirtiest in the country, and bleeding-heart citizens have passed propositions increasing crime and tying the hands of police. If there’s one thing I remember about the BART it’s the overwhelming noise and the constant smell of urine. The public transport situation is archaic and pales in comparison to other cities.

You can’t park anything other than a beater in the city or it’ll get broken into, and owning an apartment is a toss of a coin with regards to whether you’ll be forced to smell weed all day or not. For some reason air conditioning isn’t a thing in California either, and I’ve never experienced as many power outages anywhere else in the US as I have here. Owning a nice house here is a pipe dream, so if you want to settle, this area was never in the cards to begin with.

Maybe it’s no surprise that the only reason most of us are here is because of the pay. I miss the quiet idyll of the suburbs, those slow and peaceful days. I miss the clean air, the scent of my lawn in the morning, and having the room to stretch. The feeling of safety. I miss being able to live life at my own languid, relaxed pace.

At least we both seem to agree on one thing - the sooner I can move out of here, the better.

Yeah I don't get it when people say SF is "walkable".

No, Toronto is walkable. It's flat, dense, everything is close by, and clean. I'd be content to walk 45-50 mins to get somewhere.

In SF, I dread having to walk, bike or take public transit anywhere. It's unpleasant, unsafe, smells horrible and there's rampant petty crime. And not just one district, it's like that in most of the areas you need to go to

SF is walkable because its tiny, yet each area feels very different because of the elevation changing your scenery in every nook. Ive been walking around the city for the past months now daily, and have not once encountered something unpleasant, unsafe, or smelly.

Now of course I avoid the tenderloin etc. area, but thats how its designed currently. All the homeless are in one place.

Look I love San Francisco, but you might want to take a COVID test if you really think the city doesn't smell.

Funny joke, but doesnt defeat my real experience off not smelling anything. What areas are you talking about?

But it cold in Toronto!

Climate change will fix that!

Not if you're Canadian :)

But clothing

Man, you're sounding just like I did 6 years ago before I left -- and I realize (with sympathy) that it's only become more intense there since that time. You'll be very happy to escape. Good luck!

Just need to save enough for a house. Where did you move to? Did you like it there?

> Every time someone mentions cheap midwest cities I have to pull up https://crossingenres.com/out-in-the-united-states-where-can... and see if anything's changed since I last checked.

This analysis is shallow and has a thumb on the scale in favor of California. The author says of same-sex marriage: “There is much talk at the federal level by the presumed GOP candidate of creating legislation that would remove this right federally. I will not relocate to a state where my marriage could not be recognized.” Even if that was possible, why doesn’t that cross California off the list? Californians went to the trouble of overturning a state Supreme Court ruling to make same-sex marriage illegal, in 2008. It was illegal right up until Obergefell wiped out all such laws in 2015.

Folks in California might be surprised about what the rest of the country is really like. For example, same-sex marriage was legalized by a decision of the Iowa Supreme Court in 2009. Unlike California, there was no public support to overturn the ruling by constitutional amendment. Iowa has had joint adoption by same-sex couples since 2008. The state has outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity since 2007. (California enacted a state-wide protection against such discrimination in public accommodation in 2005.)

I’ll also observe that categorically rejecting states that have “religious freedom” laws, without digging into the specifics of the laws, would exclude most of the EU as well. Most countries have various exemptions to LGBT discrimination laws for e.g. religious organizations and their affiliates.

> California, by contrast, reacted to an identical court ruling in 2008 by banning same-sex marriage until all such laws were overturned in 2015.

This is a cherry-picked example and a bad-faith argument.

You're trying to portray the CA Prop 8 battle as demonstrating that CA was/is regressive. It does not show that. It's more accurate to say that there was a national debate going on at the time, and the open-ness of the CA initiative process allowed it to play out here for a brief period of time. Prop 8 was immediately challenged and was never implemented.

I don't like arguing with bad-faith actors, so I won't go further than saying you're taking all context away from this to get to a conclusion you want.

> Folks in California might be surprised about what the rest of the country is really like.

I visit the urban midwest frequently, and it's simply not as socially progressive as urban California is. There are progressive pockets! There are progressive and kind people! (And in CA, there are socially regressive places.)

But the support for LGBTQ rights in urban CA goes much, much deeper than it does in Midwest cities. Arguing the point is laughable, ridiculous, and out of touch. Come on, we're talking San Francisco and West Hollywood here!

> This is a cherry-picked example and a bad-faith argument.

What’s the trend of claiming arguments are in “bad faith?” It’s like a verbal tic people have developed recently.

I didn’t “cherry pick” anything. The very first step of the author’s analysis was to exclude states that had banned same-sex marriage prior to Obergefell on the theory that federal law could be changed. That exclusion carried through all the subsequent winnowing steps of the author’s analysis, because each step built on the previous step. By the author’s own logic—that she wouldn’t want to live in a state that had banned same-sex marriage prior to Obergefell, because of the potential for changes in federal law—California should have been crossed off the list.

It’s fair to say public opinion in California has changed since 2008, but that’s true all over the country. I’m just applying the author’s own logic. And you’re incorrect: Prop 8 was implemented. A federal district court enjoined Prop. 8, but that order was itself stayed by the 9th circuit. Marriage licenses were not issued from 2009-2013. The Supreme Court dismissed the challenge to the injunction in 2013 on procedural grounds, and marriage licenses resumed. By then the writing was already on the wall with the Supreme Court’s decision in Windsor.

The premise of the article isn’t which urban areas “support” for LGBT rights goes the deepest. It’s looking at states which enacted legislation that might give LGBT people a reason to not want to live there. A large number of states banned same sex marriage in their constitutions between 2000-2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_constitutional_amen.... It’s notable that California was one of those states. Minnesota and Iowa and Indiana didn’t. Neither did West Virginia, Pennsylvania, etc., along with most of the northeast and Maryland and Delaware. These is something to be said for the culture of places that may not be “progressive” but unlike California were tolerant enough to not have jumped on that constitutional amendment bandwagon.

I think you're myopically focused on a certain reading, so as mentioned, won't engage further.

How do you go from one obstinate commenter chanting "I'm not owned" to the whole left?

The point that you started out arguing was based on policy, though. Support in San Francisco and West Hollywood does go much, much deeper than it does in Midwest cities -- and much, much deeper than in most cities in California.

Point well taken.

As a LGBT member in a red state (Florida), the idea that California's protections or perceptions of LGBT people are unique is just absurd. I'm in my early 20's and have never faced any discrimination that would warrant an interaction with the police. Amongst my friends, the police have always been extremely helpful.

The only divide that exists is between cities and rural areas. Virtually every city is going to have a large LGBT population with its own anti-discrimination ordinance and essentially be indistinguishable with SF. From the LGBT rights in Florida wiki:

>In addition, several cities and counties, comprising about 55% of Florida's population, have enacted anti-discrimination ordinances. These include Jacksonville, Miami, Tampa, Orlando, St. Petersburg, and Tallahassee, among others. Conversion therapy is also banned in a number of cities in the state, mainly in the Miami metropolitan area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Florida

There's a difference between mere acceptance (legal and social), and ability to flourish, no? And banning conversion therapy, that seems like a super low bar for LGBT friendliness. I am merely tolerated where I currently live, but when I was in the SFBA I had a whole community, recurring events, and there was much more visiblity to LGBT people than there is where I am now.

Yes, there is a difference between acceptance and ability to flourish. However, I found that ability to flourish is absolutely there and personally don't have that feeling of being simply tolerated. It's certainly possible where you live.

I'm glad you've found that. I'm sure it's possible here too, although with more effort, but with pandemic, and my general introverted nature, it's been very hard to do.

It sounds like you have spent real time in vanishingly few places in the U.S.

With regard to LGBT protections -- as a queer person I've experienced vibrant, proud and welcoming communities all over the place. Midwest (Twin Cities, Columbus, Chicago) south (New Orleans, Atlanta). Not to diminish the importance of making progress, but your actual life is highly unlikely to be affected by whatever laws are still on the books in certain areas. There are millions of happy, successful LGBT people all over the country.

I had a whole long thing typed out. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt instead, and assume you didn't mean to generalize suburbs and exurbs as racist and homophobic, artless, desolate and uncivilized places.

I live in a quaint little town by the water, a decent drive away from a major city. I'm a tech worker that chose to move, because city perks didn't outweigh the city stress.

I would say that for anyone considering the change, think about what you want out of your everyday life and move wherever gives you that. Do not lock yourself into an expensive city because it has something that you don't see yourself enjoying every day. In my town, I can walk with my daughter to a local beach that has zero tourists. I have a garden, and a detached home office, and a garage wood shop, and two cars (one for hauling family, one for hauling lumber). I live close to my suburban in-laws, who get great joy out of seeing their grandkids on the weekend. Those are things that no major city in the world could give me, reasonably, and are the reasons why I would never move back.

People who write stuff like the OP have never actually been to other parts of the country. Good! Let 'em stay in SF.

We actually do have high quality produce and food here in North Texas, too.

Pretty much anywhere other than SF can have fresher food. It’s a city, you can’t compete with farm fresh from down the road.

Uhm, there's some of the most diverse produce farmland in the country close to the bay. You get a much wider variety of farm-fresh bproduce there then in much of the rural south, for example (and yes I've lived in both).

Yet you’ll notice they’re not on the top of the list, therefore my statement stands:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/196114/top-10-us-states-...

"Pretty much anywhere other than SF can have fresher food." Says nothing about being limited to the 7 states with more farms than California (to say nothing of the different crops that are grown on these farms: Iowa grows almost entirely corn and grains, so your fresh produce is going to be limited, or you'll be getting things from smaller boutique farms, which you'll find in all states and so produce depends mostly on climate).

> you’ll be getting things from smaller boutique farms

Bingo!!

Wow. But... how do you survive long-term without Blue Bottle and SFMoMA?

Well, if you consider South Bay, that's not true. Spent one summer interning at IBM, living in South San Jose (capital expressway). Had an absolutely horrible time. Even getting a bottle of milk was 2 mile walk. Buses were once every hour.

Agreed, South Bay is a wasteland if you don't have a car. I tried really hard to bike around, but even that only goes so far, especially in the summer. I'm assuming OP meant SF proper, since even Oakland is hardly walkable if you live anywhere but the downtown area.

I co-oped at IBM in south San Jose as well. My roommates also co-oped at IBM and either rode bikes like I did or had a car. We would ride our bikes to the light rail which were a little more frequent than once an hour. We also rode our bikes to the CalTrain station.

It's definitely not walkable. It's marginally bikeable. Biking was problematic because of the lack of bike lanes and the poor lighting. Light rail and CalTrain were quite accommodating to bikes.

Completely agree. I’d add proximity to nature: Yosemite, Tahoe, Marin, Santa Cruz, etc. If you enjoy the outdoors (biking, surfing, skiing, hiking, etc.) and want to be in a US city, I’ve yet to find anywhere better.

Sure, lots of people are leaving SF but I’d bet that covid is a good thing for the city longterm. Some tech people will return and others will take the place of those that don’t. Why? Because some companies and jobs will still need to be in SF and for all the reasons people came before tech (food, art, etc.).

SF was so over its carrying capacity and skewed toward tech that a reduction in population, a chance for local government to catch up, slightly lower rent, and hopefully a diversifying population might be exactly what the city needs.

I grew up in the Bay and work in tech and personally, a SF that’s a better balance between the city of my childhood and the tech city it has become sounds ideal.

The vast majority of the bay area is typical sprawling American suburbs that absolutely requires a car.

The cities of San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley are about the only walkable places where it's feasible at all to not have a car, and even then significant parts of those cities are not walkable.

At some point the basic maintenance of law and order (or conversely the refusal to do so) takes precedence over walkability or the local art and culture scene. As for tolerance, West Coast cities are rapidly developing a social and political milieu that is openly hostile towards the tech industry to a much greater degree than Austin or Miami (to name two examples from the article) are hostile to LGBT people.

Are you really saying that it's harder to be a techie than LGBT in San Francisco?

I can't speak to San Francisco, but in Seattle at least, I never saw any flyers or graffiti telling LGBT people they were unwelcome and should leave town, nor did I ever encounter political discourse that LGBT people were somehow ruining the city, or scapegoating the LGBT community for local issues. So in my personal experience as an LGBT software engineer, I wouldn't be surprised if San Francisco was the same way.

I bike by "Go Home Tech Bro" stickers on stop signs pretty frequently in Seattle

Me too, and in 2014 someone tried to burn down Neighbors with hundreds of people inside, and before the pandemic gay couples reported being harassed and assaulted for walking down the street in Capitol Hill, and I heard more than one guy entering different bars (again, in Capitol Hill) cautiously check that this bar didn't have GAY PEOPLE, right? So I think the idea that tech people are less welcome than gay people is a horrendously uninformed one.

When I lived in SF it was socially acceptable to openly degrade tech workers. Nancy Pelosi's daughter went on TV and called SF tech workers "vermin" and "invaders" and described the presence of tech works as an "infestation". Open hostility and dehumanization is condoned. In no way did I feel oppressed, but it did come off as tone deaf the way people on one breath say stuff like that and in the next complain about how tech workers weren't invested in the community.

Yeah it's so tough being a tech worker. I feel almost as oppressed as the billionaires.

Who said anything about oppression? I just don't think anyone wants to live and work in a place where they are unwelcome and unwanted.

The post you're replying to literally says "in no way did I feel oppressed"

Victimization narratives are intoxicating. A lack of diversity in experiences will lead some down narrow paths.

In principle I agree with you--this is one of the biggest pathologies of our time.

Chicago and NYC do car-free better than the Bay Area, where not owning a car is really only viable in SF and a few small surrounding communities.

SF has a phenomenal climate though in comparison. The public transportation is lacking but I mind walking or bike a lot less in SF winters as opposed to NYC winters.

I biked to work nearly every day in NYC. The weather really isn't that bad.

And in NYC if ever I had some other obligation after work instead of my usual commute that was bikeable to. In California nearly every time an errand popped up I couldn't bike that day.

"Really isn't that bad" is your experience. The physical reality is that average January lows in NYC are 20 degrees lower than in SF.

> The physical reality is that average January lows in NYC are 20 degrees lower than in SF.

The physical reality is that 20 degrees lower isn't that bad. Humans have thrived in colder climates for thousands of years. Being a human being in a modern day NYC/Chicago winter is a cakewalk, unless you are among the small subset of people who treat anything below 60F like its a death sentence.

Are you arguing that a majority of people prefer winter weather in NYC to winter weather in SF?

The initial claim up-thread was "SF has a phenomenal climate though in comparison."

Agreed. It's definitely doable in the winter but is objectively less "easy" (have to pull out/put on weather gear) and more dangerous (lower visibility when it's snowing or raining, and fewer cyclists are out in general so cars don't expect you as much).

I didn't bike when it was raining or snowing but was still able to bike many more days than in California because after work errands didn't wreck my whole plan.

Sure, but SF is temperate year-round. Winter weather cycling's definitely doable but I immensely prefer cycling in SF year round, where I don't have to plan ahead or remember any warm gear. And I find not being able to bike for errands surprising, unless you lived outside of SF proper? I exclusively ran errands walking/biking/by bus for several years.

And Boston and DC. I wouldn't live in SF without a car unless I was a biking enthusiast.

Also I find that many people who proudly refuse to own a car in SF just end up ubering everywhere.

To be clear I (the original poster in this thread) have lived without a car in the bay area for almost a decade, and I don't Uber anywhere.

NYC is definitely more walkable--and just as expensive. Boston is about as walkable, I think (I haven't spent much time there)--and also pretty expensive!

>Boston is about as walkable

Boston is definitely walkable. My wife and I shared a car when living there, and I'd literally go weeks without actually getting in the car (she worked in a suburb, so she needed it for daily driving). Everything was generally within 1/2 mile, including school for the kiddo, sports fields, parks, grocery, hardware, etc. Transit was also convenient and plentiful.

Idk. Pre-covid, I probably used Uber/Lyft two days a month.

Some people do "Uber Everywhere", but I mostly biked/baywheels/muni.

It’s also one of the only cities where cops don’t do anything about property crime and homeless people are free to harass you and break into your building and cars without any real repercussions. My neighbor worked for SFPD and we still had to get a restraining order against a homeless person to get them out of our buildings garage. It’s also one of the only cities where kids will have to see drug use like heroin being injected openly on public transportation.

Geographically, San Francisco is amazing. But I’ve never been to any other city that is as expensive as Switzerland and run like a sleazy third world country. I finally moved out after a bullet went through my bathroom wall in Glen Park. Somethings are more important than the geography.

> Nobody really brings up that the bay area is one of few places in the US where you can live without a car.

Is this true? I've only visited the bay for a total of 15 days but only SF and parts of Oakland seemed walkable.

I lived in 4 different apartments in SF in 4 different neighborhoods, each for 1 year. (Haight/Ashbury, SoMa, Potrero, and Castro).

Where I lived in Potrero and SoMa was absolutely not walkable. Potrero was particularly bad because any amount of walking meant climbing a very, very long and steep hill - as in by the time you make it up, you're sweating like crazy.

Castro and Haight/Ashbury were walkable, but nowhere as walkable as a city like NYC.

The middle ground for me was a motorcycle. Easy to park anywhere. Cheap. Great gas mileage, etc.

I had roommates working for Cisco in SoMa who took the bus to work. That was a constant topic of frustration for him. He ended up getting a motorcycle too because of the commute.

There are suburban "downtowns"/shopping districts near many BART and Caltrain stops where it's quite possible to commute and do most everyday errands on foot/bike/transit. Possibly even easier than a lot of the southwestern half of SF proper. (Having no access to a car at all - through friends or a willingness to use Lyft/Uber - does make some things harder). The older and higher-density suburbs tend to be better for this: for instance downtown San Mateo, Redwood City, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Berkeley, Pleasanton. You pay for the privilege though, and I'm not sure that it's _that_ unique nationally?

The walkable parts of those cities is vanishingly small, on the order of a few square blocks. The tiny walkable segment is also super-expensive.

Berkeley's walkable area is actually pretty extensive. The others are less so.

Berkeley's walkable area encompasses all of Telegraph Avenue down to Ashby (Berkeley Bowl) (South), all of downtown (West), the perimeter of the UC Berkeley campus and the campus itself, and probably half way down University avenue (further West), the North Berkeley area to the north of downtown Berkeley (Chez Panisse, etc...) (North). If you like walking, you can walk from campus all the way to the Bay. If you like hiking, you can hike up part of the way to the LBL. San Pablo Ave is also walkable but wasn't as ritzy.

The inaccessible directions are NE and E. W was considered ghetto but has gentrified. The only parts harder to walk are up in the hills (pretty much impossible: narrow, windy, steep, no sidewalks) (E) and the hilly parts of North Berkeley (NE).

The problem with Berkeley is that you can’t get to other areas quickly. BART and the Bay Bridge sucked pre pandemic.

I spent almost 2 decades biking in SF. It's the best way to get around.

That statement is true. The Bay Area is a place you can live without a car (namely by living in SF or parts of Oakland or Berkeley, or in many downtowns near a BART or Caltrain station).

Everyone brings that up. All the time. As one of the (maybe not elite) tech people who has left the Bay Area, I can tell you that we're well known braggarts. The "SF attitude" actually makes it harder for us to integrate into new communities.

Edit: also, SF isn't _that_ walkable; have you spent time in NYC? SF was a huge letdown to me once I had lived there for a couple of years.

When you can have an entire South Park episode predicated on the notion of smugness in San Francisco, you can be assured the rest of the country is aware of, and partially buys into, that characterization.

https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Smug_Alert!

Now, it’s not bragging if it’s true. The problem is...well, it’s a big, wide, wonderful country and world with lots of great places and ways of life to be discovered. Keep an open mind, and try to keep a closed mouth. Reminds me of the buttons that proclaimed “I don’t care how you do it in NYC”.

I live without a car in SF, partly because I used to do the same in European cities :

- it is amazing to be able to walk / use public transport to go everywhere you need to

- I just don't like driving in cities. It is just a chore monopolizing my attention.

Still this is way harder to pull of here than it is e.g. in Paris. No subway system serving all the city here.

I am using an eskate to pick up the slack. If the market street project was already completed and we did the same for some other key streets, it would be 100% viable but in the city's current state :

- many roads are in a pitiful state. I haven't hurt myself seriously yet but I saw or know of many people who did.

- car drivers are extremely dangerous

100% on acceptance, culture scene and let's add food scene as well.

how is it walkable when the majority of people need to live over 50 miles away because nothing remotely close to SF costs low enough to afford?

CA prides itself on being green and yet, the oppressive housing policies force everyone to commute vast distances resulting in even worse global warming outcomes.

It wasn't until covid came along that we finally even allowed people to start telecommute on a wide scale

> Nobody really brings up that the bay area has better LGBT and other minority protections than anywhere in the US, either. Every time someone mentions cheap midwest cities I have to pull up https://crossingenres.com/out-in-the-united-states-where-can... and see if anything's changed since I last checked.

I'm not sure how often that article gets updated, but this Wikipedia article[1] has maps that are regularly updated and is a good reference for anyone who is LGBT, or has LGBT family members, and is looking to relocate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_Stat...

>Nobody really brings up that the bay area is one of few places in the US where you can live without a car.

Not really, not compared to Boston or, particularly, New York.

The rest of that paragraph says: > beyond a select few, similarly expensive places.

Nobody's putting Boston and NYC on the list of cheap places to live, any more than SF.

That said, someone in a different part of this thread brought up Chicago, which seems plausible! Though I haven't been there enough to know if that's true! (Though when I visited, their transit definitely was very good).

I lived in Chicago for five years without a vehicle. It's very doable, the train pretty much goes everywhere.

This is why I'm moving to Vancouver, BC.

Safe, walkable, low pollution, high density of tech co's, beautiful people.

And even more expensive, when you factor in that us Canadian tech workers on the whole get paid much less, and Vancouver real estate is sky high.

Nice city though.

I disliked almost everything about SF when I lived there. Literally the only thing keeping there was my job.

It’s a great city for some. If you like it - I do hope you enjoy it and stay for as long as you wish.

I have long left and prefer other states like Texas and the South. It’s more my style.

Every big city in the northeast wins or ties on all of those points (Boston has somewhat worse food, but much better art). Of course, they’re not appreciably cheaper (except for Philly, which is an amazing bargain, for now).

Hmm... the Bay Area in my experience is one of the less walkable parts of the United States I’ve visited.

When I was younger the only other place in the country besides NYC I thought I could see myself living in was SF, for all of these same points, but especially having a walkable landscape plus access to nature. I landed in Brooklyn, but always felt affinity for SF and traveled out there a lot from about 2008 onward. I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but at one point I realized SF had turned into a place I actually wasn't excited to get to go to anymore.

If sf can transform back to a place where the people that are living there actually are in love with their city and not just there for a work I'd be very happy. It's a beautiful city.

>Nobody really brings up that the bay area is one of few places in the US where you can live without a car

I'm not sure what bay area are you talking about. The SF bay area is absolutely unmanageable without a car, unlike Portland or Seattle.

That's an interesting observation, though I think you've missed the effect of scale. Keep in mind, a one block town would be 100% accessible by a public transportation system consisting of a horse drawn carriage on permanent loop.

More of Portland is accessible by public transportation than the SF Bay Area, but then again, in absolute terms, there's notably less Portland to be accessed. I'd say that what you can access on public transportation in the SF Bay Area vastly exceeds what you can access in Portland, mainly because the SF Bay Area is far, far, bigger. There's also a lot more that you can't access in the SF Bay Area (and if you work in tech, you may be forced to access it).

One way to illustrate this would be to overlay a public transportation map on top of population density map based on census tracks. You'll see that there are far more high density census areas in SF/Oakland serviced by light rail, subway, bus systems, and so forth than in Portland, and that the areas connected offer vastly more in the realm of commerce, entertainment, arts, sports. The same will be true of Seattle was well.

One thing that has changed is federal employment protections. That's huge, opens up a lot of the country to us. Federal housing protections could be possible as well from the precedent set.

Car-free living is possible in San Francisco and Berkeley. If you do it anywhere else you will suffer.

I live in NYC and feel the same but a lot of people just don't. They don't want culture or liberalism. In fact, I've seen a marked rise in conservatism and racism in the industry.

s/SF/NYC/g

Not true, your seeing what you want to see.

Some people don't care about those things, but do care about how big their house is, how many cars fit in the garage, and how much they (and their kids) look like the people (and schools) around them. To be fair when I was living "rural", I loved being only 45min from a 24hr Walmart, and I've lived as a minority, which doesn't feel great so I get going back from whence you came.

But I'm still going to say, what you didn't... good riddance. If you came just for the money and the ambiance a generation of intellectuals and artists created before you came, and you aren't willing to contribute to it? Leave, I'll be as happy to see you go as I was in 2001. If the pandemic (and lack of cool bars for a year) is all it takes, maybe people who give a damn will be able to move back in. Maybe that's not what created the wealth, but it sure did make it a nice place to hang anyway.

My personal guess is that a lot of those "creatives" that are moving to Hawaii/Sacramento/etc for 6 months (or a year) will be back, and if not, I hope they enjoy the place they choose to make home.

Yes, though it would be painful in the short term I think a "correction" in bay-area cost of living would be a good thing in the long term because more than one type of person would be able to afford to live there.

> I loved being only 45min from a 24hr Walmart

Perhaps I'm misreading you, but having to drive 45mins to get to a shop seems like a massive inconvenience!

Yes, I was living rural (trying to write my dissertation without distractions) and 45min was wonderfully close! My mail was most of a mile away, and the closest "convenience store" was ~5 miles. I never thought I would say that I loved being "near" a 24hr walmart (it was also where the farmers market was held), but after 6 months you learn how important that is. I will say that the ability to buy RAM, HD, Monitor, etc along with groceries at 3am (with a 30day return warranty) was also pretty amazing.

Try getting more RAM in SiliValley or SF at 3am today!