- Some of the best high schools in the country. Many teachers have advanced degrees in their fields. A direct connection to Stanford and Berkeley. Courses beyond AP Calculus available for children to take.

- You can raise your children in the church. You do not seem to understand what a luxury it is to have a vast choice of local churches, where many people you meet are doctors, engineers, lawyers, and other influential professionals. The Bay Area is composed of lots of tightly knit communities where people can exchange experiences, favors, and insights with others they can trust and relate to. Maybe you weren't able to break into one, so you couldn't see the benefits?

- You overstate the pressure on local kids. Aside from a couple of tragic incidents at Palo Alto High several years ago, children in the area have lots of opportunities to hang out in bubble tea shops and cafes, visit friends, participate in sports, and basically do whatever they want to. The unique luxury of living in the Bay Area is that if you kid is over at a friend's house, you can rely on the mom to say, "Sure, you can play Zelda, but first let's do an hour of homework!" This unique and amazing culture of high achievement is what drives parents to the area at any cost.

Also, are you implying that there is anything wrong with living a lifestyle without kids? Why would I want to raise a child in a world that will be undergoing tumultuous climate change over the next 100 years.

> Even if it was like that daily, how do you know the Asian kids weren't still playing and enjoying time with friends?

I didn't go and measure daily -- I avoided the place because I didn't want to hang around a bunch of high schoolers -- but it's a sight, and a vibe, that would simply never happen, ever, where I grew up.

It's not like every kid in the school district was there, with nobody left to play on the sports teams.

Eh. The Bay Area isn't where you're from. Actually, relatively few people in the Bay Area use the term "good schools" at all because they tend to have few children and the idea of school quality isn't on their radar.

> wealthy, exclusive suburbs

Honestly if you wanted to say Bay Area residents were coding racism into how they talk about where they live, you could point to the San Francisco fetish where people AVOID suburbs like Oakland and the East Bay, though honestly that's _actually_ because of all the public-transit-accessible hipster coffee spots in the one and the violent crime and strip-mall Starbucks and sprawling freeways with hours-long commutes to work from the other.

> I look at communities like Detroit and I understand why the youth there resort to crime, but what the hell is the matter with the Bay Area? Arguably the wealthiest metropolitan area in the United States. A place with too many jobs and not enough people to fill them.

Side note - it sounds like the author is specifically talking about SF proper, not south bay / peninsula.

I suspect it's because the author is a 20something who doesn't go anywhere the BART won't take him.

The author is annoyed that people like him (according to him, the smart people, the good people, the people on whom the entire society and economy depends!) are treated with such disrespect. But how does this author treat the people around him?

He writes about the Bay Area like he's observing it from an alien spacecraft, as if he's entirely separate, outside of time and space. He evaluates the various objective factors of the Bay Area solely in terms of their benefit to him, and finds it wanting. And the author, with an unlimited ability to simply uproot himself, darkly insinuates that he, and all the other good, smart people like him, are going to do it, and soon.

But why should anyone care? By the author's own admission, he and his fellow good, smart people aren't meaningfully a part of the culture or the social fabric of the place. The author clearly has contempt for the people around him ("If you can afford Pacific Heights rents and rideshare everywhere you can pretend you don't live here!"). He clearly has no intention of contributing to the place. He clearly sees it as a pool of resources for extraction and nothing else.

It's clear that the author sees it this way because if this wasn't the case, he would be involved in some effort, any effort at all, to fix some of the problems that he's describing. Yes, California and the Bay Area have their problems. And our problems and our fortunes are the result of generations-long processes. Whatever comes next will be the outcome of people digging in, working to fix the problems, putting their shoulders to the wheel, and not just bailing out because moving somewhere else would maximize certain values in their personal spreadsheets.

A few people that I consider friends were doing that work before the current round of good times. They're people who've been in San Francisco back when it was considered frightening and dangerous, and the set of problems the city had were completely different than the current ones. They stuck it out. They made the city a much better place. As a result, we now have a new set of problems to fix. The cycle repeats itself.

Right now, we don't need any more people who are just looking to extract resources for themselves. We need people who are willing to engage, to become part of the social fabric of this place, and to figure out what the future looks like. So I want to enthusiastically encourage this author, everyone else who's written a functionally identical article in the last few years, and everyone on Hacker News who constantly complains about how much they hate San Francisco, to get out.

If you're among that group, and you don't leave, you're actually cheating yourself. There's likely some place in the world with which you could find the same profound, transcendent connection that I and many others have with San Francisco.

It's a tragic waste of a life to live in a place you hate, and that you have neither the commitment nor the desire to make any better. It doesn't benefit you, and it doesn't benefit the people around you whose home you hate so much. Everyone would be so much better off if you would simply show yourself the door, and find a place you can call home, for better or worse.

> Heading north from Fremont is basically sadness. Hayward, Oakland, San Leandro, Richmond, Vallejo. They’re all poverty stricken and broken.

If you're driving along the freeway looking out the window, I could see how you might think this. Surprise - people that have any amount of money don't want to live within hearing distance of a freeway. Most of the spaces slightly further away are fine. I have friends in the Oakland Hills along 13; perfectly respectable area. Those friends have parents out near Richmond - lots of typical older middle class housing from the 50s.

> The only green zones I see out in that area are maybe in Dublin, Pleasanton, Moraga, etc., but I honestly don’t know much about those areas because I seldom get out there.

I do get out there, and most of Alameda county away from the edge of the bay is comfortably upper-middle class (Dublin/Pleasanton/Fremont/Livermore; Hayward/Castro Valley/San Leandro feel more middle class with upper-middle surroundings + urban gentrification starting to take hold). I have friends out in Stockton; they have a comfortably middle-class house, as do their parents (though on the whole I've seen less of Stockton than I have of the Bay).

I could go on (grandparents in Orinda, an uncle in Fremont, friends scattered through SF, SJ, etc.) but my main point is that most of the Bay is suburbs on suburbs, most of them are at least middle class, and our ridiculous zoning/prop 13/NIMBY problems trap people wherever they are and discourage new construction, which contributes to the crappy old look of a lot of places.

I wouldn't call them either of those things; they're very nice suburbs on the Peninsula (west side) and less nice suburbs in East Bay. The northeastern ones (Danville, Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond) are too far to commute to South Bay from. And none of them are interesting.

There's also public transit up and down the Peninsula but it's very unreliable because the governments here refuse to invest in anything, or build anything, in the hopes it'll make everyone leave again.

> But is this really a liberal vs. conservative issue?

I wish I could provide you something more than this, but in my anecdotal experience as a minority in many ways, yes. I don't have the statistical evidence to agree or disagree though.

> I've heard Berkeley has similar NIMBYism, and that's a very liberal area, right?

Berkeley has less of it (again, in my anecdotal experience as a minority) than most other parts of the Bay. Most of Berkeley's NIMBYism seems to be confined to parts around North Berkeley.

> Is Sunset really that conservative?

From my time in the neighborhood, yes. It was older and more racially segregated than other parts of SF for sure. The neighborhood tended to be split into Chinese (mostly Cantonese) and white sections, and even when neighbors were of different races, most people stuck to a clique. Residents were also much older (older than my parents). Again though, this is just my anecdotal experience.