> SF isn’t undesirable, it’s just full.

Potato potahto

Well no. There’s a difference between people not wanting to be somewhere and existing people not wanting to make room for more people.

I can’t vote so not much I can do about it myself, but I’m def not leaving any time soon.

> and existing people not wanting to make room for more people

And in the process making it undesirable for other people already living there.

> A 0.15% drop in population

Are you talking about California? Because SF's population dropped by a lot. SF's population hit 834,046 in July 2022. This is down 6.5% from 881k in 2019

The data I found said 0.15% population drop in SF metro area

https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23130/san-francisco/popul...

If people aren't commuting anymore but working remotely instead, that's a pretty bad sign for the city of SF itself.

The city changes. It’s had boom/bust before (from gold rush through WWII) and when I moved here in the 80s it had an utterly dead downtown, some financial industry, a good arts scene, and was a bedroom community for Silicon Valley.

I miss its grungy period and hope it returns. It’s a little too clean and fancy for me at the moment.

But that isn't the City of San Francisco. San Francisco has a population of ~815,000 people, while the link posted has a population of 3.3 million people.

This page shows the population of San Francisco declined 6.72% from 2020 to 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco

Almost all those who moved moved to Silicon Valley or other parts of the Bay Area. Net emigration from the Bay Area itself was, as the GP comment noted, a fraction of a percent and most of those people moved elsewhere in California (mostly nearby Sacramento area or the Sierras).

You can't use the population of SF to compare how "dead" the city feels.

Something like >300k people commuted into the city every day. That's increasing the population by like 50%.

Would be curious if anyone can find reliable data on this.

Mind you the people who live in SF are also not commuting into downtown. That contributes to it feeling dead during the pandemic.

But that doesn’t mean the city died. People are still here, you just see them less. Especially if like me you’re one of those folks continuing to work from home and seeing the same few people all the time.

I mean if I judged from my personal experience I’d say there’s 500 people in the city. I even see all the same homeless folk on my runs and can tell who hangs around which block or street corner.

Totally agree with all of that, was just saying you can't use the population numbers to track how many people are in the city on a day-to-day basis.

Move to Sydney for a while and you’ll quickly see that SF is simply ‘tolerable’ due to availability of specific types of jobs

Been living in Sydney for a year, and everyone who spends time here thinks "wow the food is just as good, prices are kind of cheaper, and the city is much cleaner"

Of course, it might be different if we were actual citizens and owned property here etc. etc. but as long-term visitors, Sydney is hands down nicer than SF.

And Sydney is a dump compared to Melbourne :)

Sydney-sider here - Sydney lacks a real art scene, and a culture with its own identity. Outside of down-town, it is awefully same samey with the proliferation of cheap rental housing.

Going out further countryside - things get real nice.

Though - we are pretty lucky all that being said :)

I always thought Newtown kinda fits that bill.

newtown really used to be super cool. Like everything Sydney though - its much much more gentrified - and has just turned into restaurants and bars for yuppies. 10-15 years ago - the whole inner=west was rife with awesome gigs, international electronic acts, lots of pubs were doubling as places to host electronic - but NIMBYism really got the better of Sydney.

Hard to get a coffee at night in the city even :(

I was in inner-west Sydney in 2016 for a couple weeks and it certainly didn't feel too gentrified and awful to me – there were still plenty of "counterculture" posters and murals and buskers and whatnot. Electronica isn't generally my thing but I stumbled upon some venue on King St and caught a metal show – so that was nice. And, of course, the Lazybones Lounge.

Outside of 7-11, Starbucks, and Peets (even then COVID's put a hamper on this) It's nearly impossible to get a coffee past mid-afternoon here in the Bay Area.

I used to live in Sydney. It's been a while, but I don't remember it being overall better, just better for different things.

Yeah, I've been here 20 years, and I see a lot of people getting the vapors over The Shocking and Precipitous Decline of Our Once-Great City, but I'm not seeing it. As you say, it's fine.

To me the chatter seems like another round of the far-right panic over "San Francisco values", which has been recurring since the 1990s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_values

Full is a weird description of a low density village. "We got 10 people, and that's 9 too many people!"

Especially considering how much tent space is still available off sidewalks and the like

Huh? San Francisco is the second densest city in the US after New York.