> I moved here very specifically to set down roots and raise my family in the SFBA.
To a raise a family, you moved to a city with more dogs than children[1] and more drug addicts than high school students? [2] Or are you planning on moving to Marin County (close, very expensive, very nice), one of the southern suburbs (close, expensive, not nice), or Dublin/Pleasanton (far, less expensive, nice) once the kids are born?
Seriously asking. (About me: I prefer dogs; If I have a kid I prefer my kid hang out with dogs; my extended family is spread out in the SFBA from Daly City to Dublin; I grew up there; I left; I miss the weather).
> Where San Francisco is a proper city, plagued by the many problems you mention, the actual Valley is basically suburb city, with a majority of spotless single family homes and tiny (but mostly spotless as well) city centers.
That's true, I completed a few internships in Cupertino and Sunnyvale, and they are different. They had too little going on for me, though, which is why I moved up to SF. And I also felt less out of place up in SF.
> I could picture living there for a few years at most, but not forever.
> yet still chose to live in SF enduring hellish commutes. I never could quite understand why.
I grew up in the South Bay. I can answer that question.
The South Bay is eye bleedingly BORING by design. It's an absolutely terrible place for a teenager or young adult. Most of the fun stuff in the city is illegal in the south bay.
> Seeing the homelessness issues in SF and LA makes me wonder if they tipped the balance of those cities being uninhabitable by such a large percentage of their inhabitants that the are going to need to majorly restructured to make it back to a stable equilibrium.
This. I moved out of SF last October after being constantly harassed by homeless at my apartment building. I moved to the Peninsula, but now looking at moving out of the Bay Area entirely now that I can WFH permanently. Why live here? Cost of living is outrageously high, dangerous homeless all over, and now with COVID you can’t even really do anything... You’re better off in the suburbs with a backyard. Rental markets are already super tight in all the other cities that Bay Area residents normally move to.
> You’re comparing SF, a major city, to Lafayette, a suburb. That is objectively a ridiculous comparison. You will see similar disparities in most comparisons of that nature.
Why? OP's numbers are per capita.
My family and I moved from SF to Lafayette precisely for these reasons: we were subject to assaults and intimidation from strangers in the street in SF (police refused to follow up), our car and garage were broken into once a year on average (police did not report back for any of the 7 police reports we filed), the total losses exceeded $5000. Others have it worse; our doctor had her house burned down by a mentally ill arsonist.
In addition, we were not looking forward to raising our kids in the SF public school system and we don't have enough money to pay for private school, so we moved out. In Lafayette, I can let my kids walk to school without worrying about them getting mugged. (By the way, aside from the neighborhood, you may experience public safety very differently depending on your height, weight, sex, and race. The stats won't tell you any of that, nor the amount of under-reporting going on due to the loss of public trust in the police/DA to do their job.)
We know many other families who followed similar trajectories.
> Great you move to Santa Clara but your kid needs to go to San Francisco since there is a good catholic school there - then what?
That's no different from living in any other metropolitan area. If you refuse to send your child to the local public school, then you're going to have to deal with the difficulty of transportation.
> Or your wife works in San Francisco?
Then it's no different from before you were married, when you were traveling from SF down to the Valley, except in reverse.
> Why didn’t you just move to a different part of SF?
> I wanted to live in a dense, central area and not in a single family house that’s 4 miles from downtown. Also, my neighborhood was perfectly nice when I moved in, and then got bad. What’s to prevent that from happening to other places in the city as well?
> SF is pretty much the poster child for a terrible place to live
That depends on what you value.
* SF's transit, while indeed bad, is still superior to all but a handful of other US cities.
* Similarly, SF is top tier for walkability and bikeability.
* SF has more cultural and ethnic diversity than most cities, especially since it's the principal city of a metro with a ton of immigration.
* SF has a LOT of interesting stuff that goes on (partially as a result of the previous point). Concerts and walks and other cultural events.
* Also as a result of the diversity, SF's food scene is really excellent.
* I'm not personally much of a fan, but a lot of people actually like SF's weather.
* SF is very left wing, and a lot of people in tech like that. Not everyone, but a lot of people.
The things you listed as problems largely are real problems of course, but there's a reason so many techies still choose to live in SF even if they work in Mountain View, and that's something your theory here doesn't explain: why not live in the closer, somewhat cheaper, and less crime/homeless-filled South Bay?
Your list of problems just reveals your own preferences: you prefer the advantages of the suburbs to the advantages of the city. Nothing wrong with that, but not everyone shares your preferences.
> I mostly get the impression people leave because they don't want to deal with the school lottery system.
In my experience that may be true for the small number of people who leave the city for Marin, Contra Costa or San Mateo counties, but members of the creative communities that gave the city the reputation it had before the tech booms typically don't have children. I can think of countless coworkers with children, but I only know two couples who decided to have children after moving to San Francisco.
> Given the proximity to San Francisco, the real estate prices have skyrocketed. Almost all my blue collar friends have had to move. It is sad that we have become a neighborhood for tourists and wealthy tech owner second homes. But, the character of the town remains, which is a nice silver lining.
You see why it’s become that, and why your blue collar friends have had to move though, right? It’s not just that it’s close to San Francisco; it’s that being close to San Francisco means lots of people want to live there, and there aren’t enough places near San Francisco for them to live.
The idea that any town should effectively push its existing residents out in pursuit of “preserving the character of the area” just seems wrong to me. Are the aesthetics more important than the people who live there?
> In San Francisco the have-it-alls are now as busy purging the middle class as they are the remaining working class communities of color.
Uh huh.
I'm no fan of San Francisco and was quite happy to leave a number of years ago, but it seems to me the problem is one of housing supply, rather than some kind of vast conspiracy to rid the city of working class non-white people.
Who votes this kind of bullshit up, anyway?
Edit: there are real problems with poverty that are serious and very worthy of our attention, but this whole bizarre attempt to blame everything on people who happen to be making some money in that area just seems like so much horse shit to me.
> They like to have yards. They like spacious homes. They like to see the sky and the mountain vistas and the water.
People flock to the Bay Area to have a yard and a spacious home? The lack of those things is the reason I left!
Maybe the very wealthy have yards and large houses in the Bay Area, but most everybody else is living in Manhattan-sized apartments without the benefits of living in a high density area like Manhattan (more walkability, public transit, etc).
> The mission was originally german-irish, and then became latino. Now a lot of young technology professionals live there, cause, you know, cities evolve.
This is absolutely correct. My family has lived in the SF area since the 1930s. My grandfather saw it evolve through many stages: working class German-Irish Catholic city, military city during WWII with a huge influx of soldiers from all over the country, center of counterculture in the 1960s, influx of gay culture, dot-com boom, second tech boom...
All of those changes happened in one person's lifetime. Before then, there were other huge changes -- the gold rush, the influx of Chinese immigrants as well as the German and Irish working class that comprised much of the population in the early 20th century, the great earthquake and fire.
Every time the city changed, the people who were already there were pretty unhappy about it.
It's all personal choice. I lived there for a long time, and if it wasn't so expensive, I'd move back in a heartbeat. I wouldn't care about SF specific laws, it's the cost of living in ANY city. Personally, I would rejoice if all cigarettes were illegal -- that would make me want to move to SF even more, to take such a wonderful stance against cigarettes.
All cities have laws that other places don't have. Why you for some reason only confine it to SF is strange.
I just adore SF.
Even all these things about homeless - that is true where the homeless are, but last time I went there a year or two ago, there were no homeless, or exceedingly rare - I went to Glen Park, Noe Valley, Inner and Outer Sunset, Excelsior, Forest Hill, Parnassus Heights, Cole Valley, Marina, Pacific Heights...so many places in SF - no, or rare, homeless.
It's the same exact thing in Los Angeles. If you go to where the homeless congregate, there they are. But I could drive around Los Angeles for days and not see a homeless person.
But people like to catastrophize. ALL San Francisco is horrible, ALL Los Angeles is horrible. No, sorry.
> To each their own, but I think it's important for people to get out of their headspace and see things from a more general perspective as well.
What makes you think those of us who enjoy living in the area haven't made the conscious choice? There are good reasons I chose to live in the urban parts of the SFBA, just like I presume there are good reasons several of my friends are happily running a household in Seattle, Austin, Chicago, Brooklyn, Columbus, or pretty much any other part of the US.
To a raise a family, you moved to a city with more dogs than children[1] and more drug addicts than high school students? [2] Or are you planning on moving to Marin County (close, very expensive, very nice), one of the southern suburbs (close, expensive, not nice), or Dublin/Pleasanton (far, less expensive, nice) once the kids are born?
Seriously asking. (About me: I prefer dogs; If I have a kid I prefer my kid hang out with dogs; my extended family is spread out in the SFBA from Daly City to Dublin; I grew up there; I left; I miss the weather).
[1] https://www.kqed.org/news/11669269/are-there-really-more-dog... [2] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/San-F...
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