The demographics always reminded me of China where you did not see as many girls because of the one child policy. In SF children of both sexes (10% of population) are just missing:
Persons under 18 (2010 Census)
US 23.7% [2]
SF 13.5% [3]
Expensive: check. Bad schools: check. Disfunctional government: check. Drugs on streets: check. Lots of crazies: check.
The thing I hate is that people wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire.
Going to move out to the countryside I think...
As for the nutter on BART, I got urinated on whilst on the tube in London .... twice. And no I was not on fire :)
The thing that shocked me most about SF was the shear number of mentally ill homeless people on the street. London has homeless people, but they're generally coherent enough to carry on a conversation. In SF it seemed that almost 100% of the homeless were "bat shit crazy" - I pondered at the time if the NHS's mental health care was the difference, and thanked good fortune to have lived my life within countries with social care.
Guy was conscious but confused when the medics arrived.
Nobody urinated on him or stole his wallet. Anecdotal evidence that suggests were you really on fire people would do more than get out the marshmallows.
Same with an old woman I saw faceplant on the pavement. I was on a bus that was moving. People just stepped over her.
The worst thing: a guy got pushed in front of a friend's tube train (he was a tube driver). Immediately after he got out of the cab, some platform peon started shouting at him saying "how fucking long is this going to take?". The guy was pretty much screaming his head off on the track under the train dying painfully and slowly.
Good for that heart attack guy, but he must have been lucky. It isn't the norm - and the police I've spoken to over the years confirmed it.
For example, London has around 500 people sleeping rough each night. San Francisco has almost ten times as many, between 3-5,000 (mainly because a winter's night in SF is rather more survivable than a London one).
More subjectively, I think public transport in London far surpasses SF, both in terms of safety and quality (...Friday nights excepted, but I think that's par the course of any large city).
[1]: London figures from here (http://www.thamesreach.org.uk/news-and-views/homelessness-fa...), SF figures from here (http://www.sfgate.com/homeless/)
To see more about this, there's a site called greatschools.net. You can list the schools by API score (adjusted by expectations based on demographics as well). What you'll see is that SF has an unusual number of schools scoring 8, 9, and 10 out of 10. Below that, there are plenty of decent performing schools. And then, there are some 1's and 2's. Pretty grim.
If you list schools in the suburbs, you'll find a similar situation. The big difference is that in the suburbs, you can convert a very high mortgage payment or rent into priority access for a top school. If you can't afford that, you're stuck in middling or poor schools.
SF uses a lottery, where parents list their choices and then get an assignment. If you only list highly in demand schools, you do risk getting a default assignment to a very low performing school across town (you can still get on wait lists). These people often do leave.
Prop H would have recommended giving priority access to district residents. It failed by a whisker. Probably the most interesting thing it revealed is that voters in good school districts favor priority access for district residents, whereas residents in poor school districts don't. Yeah, huge surprise there.
I feel some ambivalence about this, because I do see advantages to neighborhood schools. However, there was an article in reason magazine making a very surprising libertarian case for SF's school lottery...
http://reason.com/archives/2006/04/01/the-agony-of-american-...
Article is a little old, but I'd say schools have improved since it was written.
- Higher rents for everyone else, less affordability overall
- Reduced new constructions (even higher rents, fewer working class jobs)
- Increased vacancy (9.7% vacant [1])
- Reduced maintenance
- Lock-in (you move you lose)
- Endless litigation and political disputes
- Side effects (condos, TICs, Ellis Act, affordable housing)
[1] http://factfinder2.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/11_5YR/D...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_control_in_the_United_Sta...
[3] http://www.sfweekly.com/2000-08-09/news/the-case-for-ending-...
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/us/san-francisco-rent-cont...
But yeah, if we have a second kid it's gonna be tight. THAT IS WHY IM ON HACKER NEWZ 2 MAKE MILLION$$$.
Anecdotally I see a lot more young families popping up in my neighborhood (Nopa / lower haight) over the past few years. Though i'm not sure if everyone can stay if the market stays this way when they need more space.
I also don't like how some San Franciscans like to put down other areas. You can have pride in your city without insulting other people and places. As someone who grew up in a poorer area, it left a very bad taste in my mouth. Most SF people are nice, but it's those other few people who ruin it for me.
It is indeed sad and shallow.
Also, some people - a minority, but "anecdotally significant" - seem to be a bit smug: like living in San Francisco makes them better somehow.
That said... I don't regret the time I spent there, and it's a city I heartily recommend to Europeans visiting the US, as it'll be a lot more familiar to them than something like Los Angeles, and it has a ton of stuff to do and see. And California in general has probably the most variety of any one US state in terms of geography, so if you get bored of the city, you can go the mountains, or the "lost coast" up north, or Death Valley, or pretty much whatever suits your fancy.
Regarding old people, retired people are actually the fastest growing demographic in the city.
This, 1000x this.
Repeating a grammatical error 1000 times does not make it "more better".
If you look at actual statistics, they do seem to back up my impression: income in SF is not your typical bell curvish distribution you'd see in many other places. There are a lot of people making a lot of money, more at still quite a bit of money, and a small peak for those making very little money, and fewer in between:
http://www.city-data.com/income/income-San-Francisco-Califor...
Look at:
Distribution of median family income in 2009 (number of people)
Distribution of median household income in 2009 (number of people)
Douché.
If you look at actual statistics, they do seem to back up my impression ....
You're either confused about my comment or making a completely non sequitur argument for the heck of it. The claim I agreed with was that there are actually a lot of (largely minority) kids and people with average jobs in SF.
That is true and can be shown so by inspection, at that.
There are plenty of kids and families who live in my neighborhood (I'm on the cusp of Union Square and the Tenderloin). If you take a ride on the T towards Bayview in the middle of the afternoon, you'll also see plenty of kids.
Are the public schools in San Francisco just empty, waiting for families to move in and send their kids there? Of course not. As for people with "average jobs," who do you think is serving you that latté, helping you at Macy's, or cleaning your office? They don't just ship all of those people in from Oakland.
That San Francisco has no children or working class is a preposterous idea, mostly advanced by those who fail to step outside of the high-rent parts of the city.
The outer Sunset and Richmond have lots of families and older folks.
I've dropped this link many times before, but it's still relevant here: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face... . There's not really a "weird bubble" so much as basic economics at work: SF is a desirable place to live in many respects, but it's virtually impossible to build new housing there for reasons discussed at the link. In the face of exploding demand and constant supply, prices rise.
Regular people move to the sunbelt, where development is easy and real estate prices more reasonable, and the people who have the money and/or need to be in SF stay/move there.
Why is that ? Because San Francisco is a very neighborhood-focused city - where kids stay in kid friendly neighborhoods, and where younger hipsters or developers live in more fun neighborhoods with typically less babies.
Persons under 18 (2010 Census)
US 23.7% [2]
SF 13.5% [3]
Meanwhile, some districts in SF might have quite a high percentage of children compared to the average for areas of equal density. Not sure of this, but it would be interesting to see.
The weird thing is that the west part of the city is effectively a suburb of the east part (but "suburb" is a dirty word in SF). Yes, I am oversimplifying here-- so sue me. I guess one nice thing is that the commuters can walk to work rather than driving.
However, we know why the sewer system isn't functioning well - low flow toilets. Yes, the lack of water to move effluent down the system causes it to get stuck and then start drying and it creates a pretty horrible smell.
The homeless situation is out of hand due to the unfortunate confluence of well meaning people and a lack of framework to deal with the chronically homeless.
Noe Valley is pretty nice and it's hard to say if it's more expensive than say Mountain View in the south.
I've heard this many times :)
His point about SF lacking children is very very accurate. SF basically forces people with families out because its so expensive and the school situation is bad (your kids don't get to go to the neighborhood school). One of these days SF will wise up and at least fix the school problem, but until then the peninsula will get families and SF will get DINKs.