In my opinion the high cost of living kills everything else on that list. I'd much rather have a comfortable living, travel the world and be optimistic that i will have no problems buying a nice house for me and my spouse/family if i need to/should i want to. I don't really see this possible based on what i hear from a couple of friends living and working there. Both consumed by their tech jobs, some cool things to do every once in a while when they're not slaving away for a startup. I guess people have different priorities. All this stuff is great until you're in mid 50s and you realize your less-than-comfortable living is leaving you with a less-than-comfortable retirement.
The same goes w/ NYC. I have been here for a while now and have met so many young girls following Sex in the City dream, which invariably turned out badly.
Agreed. I just moved here from Tucson, and there's virtually no way I'd be here if not for the fact that I'm living with a medical resident in an apartment subsidized by her hospital.
Given a choice among SF, NYC, and Seattle, and I'd choose Seattle: It has much of what makes the first two desirable, but at 60% of the cost.
BTW, to the extent that you want to make cities like SF and NYC more affordable, favor the removal of building height limitations and setbacks. The real problem in such cities is with supply, as Matt Yglesias writes in The Rent is Too Damn High and Ryan Avent writes in The Gated City. SF and NYC aren't expensive because of some natural law; they're expensive because of man-made laws, which can be changed. Don't yield to torpor!
Everyone forgets Chicago. In the US, it's the most important financial center outside of Manhattan and is the third place city in number of Michelin starred restaurants (fewer than SF; Seattle has none). Boeing moved their corporate HQ there from Seattle because of its financial prominence. It has a world class university in U. Chicago and excellent bus/rail transit across the metro area. But the Chicago area is seriously undervalued as "flyover country" for most people from the coasts.
What's Chicago known for these days? When I think of Seattle, I think of music (grunge was big, and today there's still a lot of it), Amazon, Microsoft, tech stuff, and arts. When I think of SF I think of free-spirits, the 60s, and startups. When I think of New York I think of movies, finance, artists (especially writers), publishing, and fashion.
When I think of Chicago, I think of. . . corruption? Commodities markets?
I'm not saying this to be snarky or a coastal asshole or whatever. I'm saying it because I genuinely don't have much of an impression of Chicago from the popular culture, or from books, or from sites like HN.
As a place to live, in my opinion the biggest thing that Chicago has over other cities I've spent significant time in is green space. The city's motto is Urbs in Horto, and it shows. Virtually the entire lake shore is one big park, outside of downtown most the area along the river is also park land, there are forest preserves within city limits, and other significantly-sized parks and playgrounds are scattered all across the city. I suspect that it be quite hard to find a spot in the city that isn't within walking distance of at least one public baseball diamond or soccer field. Even non-park areas are greener, on account of more (and bigger) trees lining the residential streets.
Architecture would be another nice feature; the city has definitely benefited from being the home of many of the USA's most influential architects.
In summer the city's absolutely rotten with street festivals, which is also pretty fantastic.
So no, nothing that would be particularly notable to a non-resident. But you can't spend an afternoon outside reading a book under a social media startup or an up-and-coming fashion designer.
Lived in the Midwest for well over a decade. Drove 48 hours straight to GTFO of there with extreme prejudice at the earliest opportunity. There's a few top tier universities, some big transnationals like Monsanto, Boeing, Nestle - you know what great if that's your thing. Personally I didn't ever think "big money" was the best reason for living in the midwest while I was there for so long, but I digress.
My caustic opinion is if you're not a farmer or self-sufficient type who is thrilled with the opportunity to live outside of a big city, then try for a city on the coast, like San Francisco. Big midwestern cities just aren't "all that" relative to their coastal counterparts. In the midwest you get:
- Higher crime rates and corruption
- Miserable, MISERABLE prolonged winters
- Salted roads --> depresses the value of any enthusiast (Porsche/BMW/Ferrari) type cars you might have on resale
- Rampant backwards conservatism
- Uncomfortably hot and humid summers
- Tornados and severe weather
- A severe lack of places to go and things to see
After living there for so long, I have a really tough time understanding why you would want to stay there if the opportunity to leave arrived, unless you're involved with a major university or are a farmer / homesteader type person living in the country. Bottom line, if you could magically swap San Francisco with Chicago, social network and assets included at no cost for a day I bet 100% of my money a bunch of Chicagoans would reconsider their whereabouts, and most SFers would be PISSED.
Also. And this is important: weed is legal or effectively legal for most of the west coast. This may not be a big deal to you but it's just amazingly energizing to live in an area with sane people who are not brainwashed as opposed to backwards conservatives so prevalent in the midwest. People are healthier and more active here, and I feel many are a bit more open minded. You can call it a negative that the startup scene is unavoidable, but really, isn't fluorishing innovation what you'd expect to see in any super happening big city? If you don't want to see innovation, maybe city life isn't for you, maybe dairy farming is for you.
I can't imagine any city in the US being greener than Seattle. It is called the emerald city for a reason! Of course, it helps that most of the trees in Seattle are conifers that don't lose their needles in the winter.
Winters are absolutely brutal in the midwest, I would take rain over having to wear a heavy jacket.
Some of the best American architects built many buildings, apartments, and skyscrapers in Chicago. The Chicago skyline is a wondrous thing. It can't be compared.
For me, SF and NYC have a huge advantage over Chicago and that is mild winters. New York gets cold, but not that cold and you can wait inside for the subway.
I spent two years in Minneapolis insisting I could take it, but the simple fact is that long, bitterly cold winters mean you end up inactive, indoors, cooped up at home more often than not. At least I did. It felt like wasted time, and Chicago is only marginally better.
It would take more than affordable rent and good restaurants to lure me back to a place with so many sub-20F days.
I lived in Chicago for 6 years; being cooped up inside meant more time sipping hot beverages in front of my computer, which may be called sedentary but certainly not 'lost time' for a programmer.
I've been contemplating moving to Seattle. After experiencing both SF (for a short while) and Seattle, i think Seattle offers similar quality of living for far less. So i really hope it's as terrible as you describe it :)
I've lived in Bellevue, WA, then Worcester, MA, then Seattle, WA, then Tucson, AZ, then New York, NY, and I've never had a problem with sun or its lack. Different people react differently, however, and I still a) went running most days, and b) really like the cultural / lifestyle aspects of living in cities.
I prefer the Seattle experience of relatively temperate weather, year-round, to the Tucson experience of insane heat for about five months of the year. Obviously nowhere else in the U.S. is going to rival the weather experience of the CA coast.
> Obviously nowhere else in the U.S. is going to rival the weather experience of the CA coast.
Did you not read the article? :-) Seriously, summers in the city (of San Francisco) can be miserable, at least insofar as your definition of summer includes wearing fewer clothes and dining outdoors. In general the coast of California north of say, Seal Beach, is not an enjoyable place to be after sunset, anywhere. Even in LA it's usually about 60 at the beach in July at night. I've never understood the massive gap between marketing and reality when it comes to the weather in coastal California, despite having spent half my life here.
Medellín, Colombia is the place I have been that comes closest to achieving what California peddles.
July is the start of summer and it takes another month for the cold ocean currents from the north to warm up, keeping Santa Monica cool. An hour inland and it could be 110f. LA has maybe 300 sunny days a year, while Medellin is nowhere near the beach... like 1000km away.
> the Tucson experience of insane heat for about five months of the year.
I've got to object to this. Yeah, June and July (and to a lesser extent August) are pretty intense, but I'd hardly characterize the rest of the summer heat as "insane".
> I still a) went running most days,
I suppose this could be an issue. Especially during the summer rainy season (usually July-early September) it's still pretty hot and the humidity means it doesn't much cool off at night, which makes strenuous outdoor activity harder even if you do it at the coolest part of the day.
I came from the Southeast, and I haven't exactly. I get crabby, but the beauty of seeing Rainier and all the ecotourism and density makes up for everything. Plus, before I moved I didn't get much of a chance to enjoy the beaches and outdoor areas because I was too busy being stuck in traffic and sprawl.
I still miss bay area weather. Aside from lack of sun, I just really don't like constant rain. I wouldn't say that it has been difficult to adjust, it's just far less pleasant in that regard.
NYC is a big place and its not all the same. One could, for example, live in Brooklyn, pay a more reasonable rent and be surrounded by interesting people all with access to great food and bars. I suppose you could stretch that a bit further to Queens as well.
Manhattan itself is quickly changing into a business district. You go there to work, grab dinner or hit the theater, then leave.
This is by far the best way to live comfortably in NYC. People forget how diverse the city is. Everyone thinks that you just have to be in Manhattan. Yes if you are working for a startup in NYC it will be located in Manhattan (Etsy is an exception), but there's no real good reason to live there. It is a fantastic place to work and dine, that is for certain, but in terms of living it is overcrowded, overpriced, and quite noisy.
In Brooklyn or Queens you can have plenty of room for much cheaper than Manhattan/SF/Seattle. There are one bedrooms in Astoria that start around $1200 and with a roommate you can easily be paying less than a grand each for a BIG place in a great part of the City. Almost all of the creative and intellectual activity in NYC comes from Brooklyn/Queens, whether its the rise of new and interesting publications (N+1, for example), art houses being opened, exhibitions being held, wild house shows or rooftoop parties and so on and so forth. It has a great vibe that I have yet to get from any other city.
I remember being on a rooftop in Greenpoint with some friends, having a nighttime barbecue, and they had a marvelous view of Manhattan. I mentioned that it would be nice to live there and my friend just laughed, saying "The city looks so beautiful now. Why would you want to ruin it by living there?"
What parts of Brooklyn? Isn't it hard to get to work in midtown if you live in Brooklyn? The "nice" parts of Brooklyn always seem just as expensive as Manhattan when I check.
The nice part about Midtown is that it's connected to everything - every subway line except the G and the L go through it, so if you live anywhere along a subway line (again, not the G or L), you can get to Midtown.
What you say is true though, the "nice" parts of Brooklyn are as expensive as, if not more expensive than Manhattan. Manhattan's cost of living, relative to NYC in general, is plateauing, while Brooklyn is shooting upwards. Rent on the Upper East Side is downright affordable now, and even not-super-cool neighborhoods like Chelsea have stabilized.
Compare with Park Slope, where the price ceiling is nowhere to be found, or Williamsburg which is definitely more expensive than all but the most desirable areas of Manhattan. Dumbo too.
But, good news is, there are lots of gentrifying-but-not-quite-done-yet neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Bushwick and Prospect Heights come to mind, though I'm sure there are others I'm not remembering.
This always reminds me how much neighborhoods can change. I still remember my friends in Bushwick who wouldn't let me ride the subway home (I lived in Flatbush). This was after her dad's bodega had been held up for the third time in a month.
To think of that neighborhood as going upscale is almost unimaginable.
The parts of Brooklyn that are closer to the waterfront have become quite expensive, I agree. They are not on par with Manhattan when you compare the actual size of the space, but they are getting closer. They should still be high on the list of living places, because Brooklyn has more of a community feel to it than Manhattan does. Rather than going further back into BK, I would suggest looking into Queens, esp Astoria. This will also offer you easy access to Midtown. Same with Long Island City.
To the list I should add Jersey City. It's rapidly changing and has multiple train (PATH) stops that quickly get you in to the city (well, not now with Sandy repairs, but normally). It remains far more affordable than Manhattan. The fact that the NYTimes in the past month has wandered in to JC twice to review restaurants is a sign of the changes taking place. And along it's waterfront it has some pretty stunning views.
NYC is different because you can live an urban lifestyle without living in Manhattan at significantly lower cost. You can do this by living in Brookyln or Queens or even Jersey. When the urban thing gets old, there are plenty of detached single family neighborhoods in the city, early 20th century inner suburbs, or you can flee to the suburbs.
I've only been to California a couple of times to visit, but it seemed to me that everything is "newer" than your typical east coast city, and there's an immediate transition from urban environment to 1960+ suburbia.
I'm fast approaching 50 and I moved here last year. I wouldn't consider living anywhere else. Even though I owned a condo in Florida and was paying about 1/4 as much on my mortgage as I now do for rent, it was completely dead there. I'd rather live where there's actually something to do.
Be sure you're counting both sides of that. If you can get work in a lucrative field, higher cost of living is offset by higher income, and you actually get ahead on aggregate since some expenses are the same nationwide.
I still don't get why folks don't consider living in places just outside of SF that are much more affordable. Places such as South San Francisco, Daly City, Brisbane, Oakland, etc. The proximity to the city is very close (5-10 mins).
Driving might seem like a plausible option, but that's generally worse. Oakland City Center to Embarcadero is 25 minutes by car, not counting parking. Daly City to the Mission is 20 minutes. And that's not counting parking, which is never easy in SF.
People do live in those places. But it's definitely living in another city.
May I ask where you are getting the driving numbers?
I live/work in soma and as long as I avoid commute traffic, Daly City really is only ~10 minutes away. A coworker lives in Brisbane and his commute averages 11 minutes. I frequently visit parts of Oakland far further from City Center (say Mills College area), and it is just under 20 minutes.
If you lack a car, well, the numbers look terrible as well in San Francisco. This is most obvious when you note that you can bike from most A to most B faster than Muni can take you. As another example, downtown Oakland is closer to Embarcadero or even Union Square by BART than Inner Sunset is by Muni Metro.
All times were from Google Maps and BART schedules. Google Maps currently lists Daly City to Moscone as 14 minutes nominal, 17 minutes with traffic.
The "as long as I don't drive when most people want to drive" thing is nice if that works for you, but it's definitely not the common case. Most people have to commute when most people have to commute.
Have you ever lived in a city where you can easily walk or take public transportation?
If you're into drinking, even socially, it means no designated driver. No hunting for parking (can take > 10 mins in SF), especially in the areas where all the food and bars are.
Most neighborhoods in SF (and I'm guessing NYC) there's usually some shopping district with a street full of stores and restaurants, non-national chain, within walking distance.
Growing up in Orange County that is something I had never experienced and at least until I have a spouse and kids I don't really want to go back to.
Where I live I'm within a 3 minute walk to a Whole Foods, 15 or so restaurants. A convenience store. 3 cleaners. A twice a week farmers market. Several banks. A drug store. 6 bars. 5 coffeeshops. 2 bookstores. 2 bike stores. And I'm only a 10 minute walk from the mission or a 5 minute walk to the muni (to go downtown).
Compare to the O.C. where pretty much had to drive everywhere. Daly City is a similar place.
It depends what your definition of SF is. If you are talking relative to the incredibly expensive north-eastern part of San Francisco, I agree. But Daly City, etc. aren't that much cheaper than the Sunset/Richmond/Excelsior, especially when you consider that a car will become much more necessary.
That said, SF is more of a place to live if you don't have children (and if you have children, you better be rich). Those with kids tend to live in the suburbs.
Beautiful and actually, in some cases, substantially cheaper... depending on how north we're talking about. I'd prefer it to Oakland -- but I'm ok with suburbs.
The curse of the north bay is the lack of trains. BART runs to the east bay, but not the north.
The ferry is basically worthless if you don't actually live in San Rafael. It's a nice ride, but very slow, and not cheap.
Personally, I quite like the bus system: if you don't mind taking the bus, Golden Gate Transit is great. The commute from somewhere like Novato is still long (1hr) but you can use the time to sleep or listen to audio books. Be sure to check the schedules of the express routes you care about: they end kind of early (~6, 7pm) and the non-express routes that run longer take easily twice as long.
Driving is a different story. There are three things to consider: 1) leave early, like 5ish, especially if you're north of marin 2) if you work in the financial district, the time to drive from the edge of SF to parking is substantial and 3) you can park in the financial district itself, but this will cost you around $25/day.
I suppose there's a fourth thing to consider re: driving which is that your drive home is almost guaranteed to be painful if you have to go beyond San Rafael and are not car pooling.
Just curious, in your opinion, what should be the net worth target for people making regular tech income in their 30's, 40's and 50's if they want to eek out comfortable living in retirement, inflation-adjusted?
You can conservatively spend 3% of a lump sum each year and the earnings will keep up with inflation. So if you had $1m in savings, you could spend $30k/year in today's dollars forever (and still have $1m at the end).
If you want to spend down the principal, the calculation becomes more complex and you need to use software rather than a rule of thumb.
Sorry but I've become a bit of a personal finance nerd recently. :) Here is the story on withdrawal rates:
The 4% number comes from a study that discovered that a portfolio with a constant 4% rate would survive any period in US stock market history -- even the Great Depression. But past performance doesn't guarantee the future performance. Try to do this with European markets and there are periods where a nest egg won't survive a 0% withdrawal rate. But yeah 4% is the guess people use when planning retirement.
Thats fine, but in real life you have to be flexible as you approach retirement and keep an eye on the math. The first 10 years of retirement are the critical ones. After that you hopefully built up a buffer and don't have to worry due to the nature of compound interest.
I described 3% as conservative. Over most long periods 4% and even 5% would be fine, but you only have one life and you don't want to fall into an unfortunate period.
Try http://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement for a fairly straightforward, income-independent answer to that question. Tell it your annual income and expenses, and it'll tell you when you can retire. Adjust the numbers and your retirement date changes. (The defaults for "return on investment" and "withdrawal rate" work pretty well.)
Whenever I see one of these retirement calculators I don't understand how people save enough to actually retire. Are most people really socking away 25%+ of their gross income every year?? I certainly enjoy motorcycles and exotic travel far too much for that to ever become a reality (not to mention pay rent in the Bay Area and try to maintain an organic/local-sourced diet which costs about double a typical grocery store).
Now you know why everyone out here wants to do startups: it's the only way to ever retire!
Yes, a bunch of people are really socking away 25%+ of their gross income. I've consistently saved about 80% of my take-home pay since graduating from college. I have one friend who just paid off her $130K in law school loans, 4 years after graduation. I have another friend who managed to save $20K over 2-3 years on a grad student stipend (i.e. he was getting paid about $28K/year and saving 40% of it).
It helps if you don't enjoy motorcycles and exotic travel. I do something social about 5 days a week, but that "something social" is usually something like going over to a friend's house to play Starcraft or XBox, or hiking in a state park, or going rock climbing, or worst-case, dinner & a movie. You don't need all that much money for any of these.
You don't blow your money on expensive vacations and new cars. Don't pay retail.
My wife and I are in our mid 30's, put away about 15% of our income and have defined benefit pensions that we contribute 7% into.
It's totally doable. Last year we spent two weeks in Hilton Head and paid about $80/night, we drove from New York to save about 80% vs. flights/car rental. We live in the city we work in and I commute via bus.
It's also totally worth it. We're living we'll now, and will be able to retire in our late 50's with a paid off house. I will not be the guy in his mid 60s trying to hang on to his job.
Winning the startup lottery would be awesome but probably requires some amount of luck. If you save (for example) 80% of your savings you can retire after 5 years and never have to work again. Its not for everyone but you might be surprised at how little suffering is required. There is a community of "early retirement extremists". Try MrMoneyMustache or the Networthify blog if you are interested:
Travel is cheapest when you live abroad rather than taking short trips and staying in hotels. I'm from Minnesota and I've lived and worked in Beijing, Singapore, and London.
Disclaimer: Networthify is my side project and my savings rate is not 80% but its a lot higher than 25%.
Seems to me the most difficult is saving 5x between 30-40, especially at that age when a lot of folks get married, have kids and purchase property. How do you save up to 5x - which for a household income of $100,000/yr is half a million dollar; do you really get a lot of tax breaks on mortgages, kids and filing jointly?
Also, at the current rate of US inflation; by the time I retire which is in about 40 years, $30K/year purchasing power will become $110K/year. Social security will not exist when I retire and a net worth of 1 million dollar, drawing down on principal will last me less than 10 years.
For folks in your mid to early 40's, how are you guys planning for your retirement?
All of the classic planning advice is based on about a century of economic history, most of that time period having little resemblance to today and things are only getting weirder, faster. Inflation is increasing (and increasingly under-reported), investment returns just--to put it bluntly--suck, social safety nets are falling apart, and we're expected to work for much longer in a world where age and experience don't count for much anymore.
In short I don't think retirement is something you can "plan" for if it's more than 20 years out or so. It's more like disaster preparation. Save as much as possible, live as far below your means as you can handle, keep your skills valuable. Keep your money diversified and expect your returns to just about keep up with the real and honest cost of living increases until the world economy feels like taking a dramatic shift for the better. We're still "unwinding" from all the previous crises so I don't foresee that happening anytime soon.
This statement about inflation contradicts a variety of recent economic studies suggesting that the CPI understates inflation by a percentage point or so (thus inflating the cost of inflation-linked things like Social Security). Any particular source for your sentiment that it's "increasingly under-reported"? http://goo.gl/wbnUu
> Inflation is increasing (and increasingly under-reported), investment returns just--to put it bluntly--suck.
This is nearly a self contradictory statement. That is, if inflation were getting out of control, we would see high interest rates accompanying that change.
I'm not saying your advice it bad (savings are a good idea), although maybe a little extreme sounding (too much doomsday feel for my taste). I do, however, wish people would stop it with the "inflation is scary" rhetoric.
The issue is USD is losing its status as the reserve currency and declining exchange rate with BRIC countries are making consumer goods more expensive. Chinese RMB used to be 8:1 in the late 90's, now it's 6:1 and declining.
Also due to several rounds of quantitative easing, the Fed injected a lot of money into the money supply. However, banks are not lending as much money to stimulate the economy which doesn't trickle down to ordinary folks; part of the reason being big banks such as BoA and Citi needed to bolster their capital reserve against their illiquid toxic assets from the real estate speculation bubble. As a result, QE1/2/3 caused real inflation to money supply while the stock market and personal savings account returns have remained anemic.
I remember I was excited when I got a six-figure job, then I realized that 80K in 1998 amounted to 110K in 2011 and realized that inflation was real.
Inflation is what happens to prices, by definition. "Inflation to the money supply" is nonsense, like if you said int x = "foo" or talked about installing new RAM to store your photo album.
Also, the notion that banks can cause inflation by not spending reserves is baffling.
Not at all. There are several different definitions for inflation, each of which is equally valid depending on the context. Consumer price inflation is one type. Other types include producer prices or money supply (including debt marked to market).
This is wrong. CPI is not "inflation" except by common mis-usage. Inflation is defined to be an expansion in the money supply. You can have inflation and falling prices at the same time.
Do you have links to evidence that inflation is increasing, and over what time period? I thought medium term inflation estimates were still under 2%, which is historically rather low.
Lesson I will take is:
1) Save like mad.
2) If buy a house, buy with 10%-20% down-payment and financed with aggressive mortgage payback timeline.
3) Climb the ladder and take the money.
It make no sense for most people to pay off their house aggressively. Refinance periodically if you want to lower your payments, but blowing a lump sum on your mortgage principal over a compressed time period is almost always more expensive in opportunity costs.
Quick question: I put $100k in your pocket right now. Would your life be more improved if your mortgage principal was reduced by $100k, or if you went and did something else with it? I think most people could find something better to do -- start a company perhaps? Invest in a rental property? Start a kids college fund?
And again, if you did want to put that into your mortgage: refi.
If you completely ignore risk then what you say is true (especially with interest rates so ridiculously low). However, if we're talking about improving lives, I personally find value in eliminating debt (including the mortgage) as quickly as possible because such obligations represent risk. I could apply all these extra mortgage payments to other things (rental property, stock market, etc.), but then I stand a varying (but non-zero) chance of losing money on those things and still being stuck with a mortgage. I'd rather wait a few years and take those risks with my own money instead of money borrowed from the bank, and I think that economic woes of late suggest we'd be better off if a few more people thought this way.
I actually think of it the opposite way: if you put money into paying down debt, you know exactly what the return on that capital will be. It's the interest rate on the debt (in pre-tax dollars for mortgages, after-tax for almost every other form of debt). Money is fungible; any money that's not locked up in debt-service is freed up for other purposes, like investing in other assets.
I tend to advise people I know to pay down debt first these days, because they're usually paying around 6-7% interest, and where else can you get a 6-7% risk free investment? T-bills are at about 3%, inflation-adjusted T-bills are often less, CDs are under half a percent, and savings accounts are basically nothing. You can potentially get more than that in the stock market, but that comes with additional risk, so for a lot of more conservative folks it doesn't make sense to carry a debt and simultaneously invest in the market.
6-7% would be pretty high for a mortgage these days. I was quoted a little over 3% a month ago, and my credit is not the greatest.
For student loans, I agree with you, and I'm putting all my extra money into them while saving the bare minimum for a bit of security if something bad happens.
>I was quoted a little over 3% a month ago, and my credit is not the greatest.
You have to consider things like origination fees and points, though. Everybody thinks they're going to stay in their new house for decades, but the average is something like four years.
If you have a fixed-rate mortgage with a monthly payment at a comfortable level, then the mortgage should represent a very low source of risk. Having 12~18 months of payments in the bank saved up for a rainy 1.5 years is a great plan to mitigate that.
The idea of personal comfort is interesting, I think people should attempt to quantify the value of being mentally released of debt burden -- maybe for some there is very high value in it. For me personally, I have always been comfortable with the idea of strategic debt as a way to advance certain goals.
I think what your approach neglects is the fact that being conservative is risky as well. In the last five years, of course, it would be hard to make that case. But unless you die soon, there will definitely be times where you will be left behind -- relative to your economic peers -- if you don't finance your activities externally.
Based on the 10x at 50 multiplier, I'm guessing that's for retirement savings/investments alone, not a net worth target. (It makes a big difference if you're planning on making any other big expenditures -- down payment on a house, helping the kids with college, etc.)
That's nice, but honestly I'd be surprised if many were able to do that at all without a lot of generational wealth backing it up.
Assuming you went to college and got out in 4 years thats only 8 years to put back 1x salary. Given that a lot of those first few years is invested into "setting up shop" getting things like furniture, a reliable vehicle, maybe buying a house, getting married, sometimes having kids, I don't think thats in the cards for many people.
The idea is that if you meet the guidelines with your existing salary, you can expect a lifestyle similar to the one you are already used to. If getting a lower-salary job lowers your lifestyle expectations, it could work. :P
I think you have it backwards. If your salary is 50k, they suggest trying to save up 50k by the age of 30, 250k by the age of 40, and 500k by the age of 50.
Keep in mind this isn't direct savings. Stock and other investments count.
I believe this means you should have $50,000 in the bank or investments at 30 if you have a $50,000 salary by then, $250,000 at 40, $500,000 at 50 (if income doesn't change)
I'm living in Toronto, Canada, and the SF crack-head thing is always a shock.
If I'm in SF, it's for conferences and it's always strange that literally one block away from our expensive hotel, there are zombies shambling about -- and this is totally normal!
For those who know Toronto: it's like you're in Yorkdale, you walk one block and you're in the worst part of Parkdale.
The other odd thing is that I seem to pay about the same in taxes, given the author's figures.
Calling people crack-heads and shambling zombies is pejorative. You don't casually use words like fag, dyke, tranny, bitch, ho, nigger, Indian (for native / aboriginal), and kyke, right?
If you want a name, say "drug-addicted homeless person". We're talking about the most badly abused people in our society and you and the author are simply abusing them more with these words. Surprise, they aren't there to say anything back, not that they care at this point. Although I hope at least you'd get a couple fuck you's if you tried it in person.
1/3 of homeless people in the US have a serious mental illness like schizophrenia. Do you think that if they aren't able to distinguish between reality and fantasy and are constantly being told to take pills by a health professional that they will miraculously decide not to take other drugs on the advice of a drug dealer?
If I called you a zombie for just blindly going along with the crackhead term that the author used, you would be offended, right? Are the thank-god-for-the-lowest-caste-so-that-I-can-not-belong-to-it opiates treating you well?
Do you think that anybody living on the street addicted to drugs is feeling happy and fulfilled about it? I mean, it just doesn't go down like this: "I've decided that despite the fact that drugs are bad for you, I'm going to totally allow them to fuck up and control my life and be homeless." It's more like: "I'm in a lot of pain, and hey for a couple hours if I do this I feel better. Fuck my life is getting bad now and nothing I do is working, I need some more of those things that make me feel good."
Fuck you and your expensive hotel.
edit: I was mean here, so I apologize. It probably didn't do any good, I think I just felt like getting angry at someone.
As someone who lives around and deals with these people every day, let's call a spade a spade and not cover it up. Have you seen a zombie movie lately? These people basically ARE zombies - they hobble around, mutter to themselves, smell like shit, randomly attack people, and will infect you with disease if you touch them.
Whether they scream at/spit on/push around my sister or female employees because they are on crack, mentally ill, or just in a bad mood, I could care less. They need to be removed from the area because they are a real and present threat to public safety.
I would happily donate money to move them all to a camp outside the city where they can scream at trees and smoke tea leaves all day but for whatever reason the powers that be seem content to leave them where they are, which directly places the rest of us in harm's way.
The powers that be leave them alone because if they don't, they are met with complete civil unrest in SF. Any attempt to even address the homeless issue is met with outrage and organized protest. This goes along with the outcry against gentrification and the lament of the city losing its "character."
Make no mistake, some of the people here actually want to live in a post-apocalyptic zombie film. :)
So true. When I realized SF actually wanted these people living on the streets (despite empty talk to the contrary), I gave up petitioning the city to clean up my neighborhood and moved to a different neighborhood. No longer do I have to play hopscotch every morning along my commute. Or fear for the safety of my wife.
For the record, I don't think the situation is a good one by any means. I just don't think the people who are least empowered to do anything about it should be referred to pejoratively, and a big part of that is because it isn't going to help the situation. For that matter I don't think anyone should be referred to pejoratively on the basis of class membership, rich or poor.
It just seems to me that replacing the pejorative terms with neutral language makes the whole post more compassionate. And then the question you end up asking is, "This is bad, what should we do about it?" - because obviously zombies outside your four star hotel is a sign of badness - as opposed to, "Fucking crackheads, how do they work?"
I think that people even have to live on the street at all in the richest nation in the world is a travesty. It's almost like they're there to motivate people to work harder.
"Doublespeak is language that deliberately disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g., "downsizing" for layoffs, "servicing the target" for bombing [1]), making the truth less unpleasant, without denying its nature. It may also be deployed as intentional ambiguity, or reversal of meaning (for example, naming a state of war "peace"). In such cases, doublespeak disguises the nature of the truth, producing a communication bypass.[2][3]
However, euphemism is not the same as doublespeak. It will not be considered as doublespeak if it is used appropriately and without the intention to deceive. For example, using "passed away" to suggest somebody is dead is an appropriate use of euphemism."
I would argue the euphemism often has the intention not to deceive but to strong arm the listener to perceive things along the lines the speaker intends. This becomes mildly coercive and when done for a social engineering purpose qualifies as Doublespeak imo.
So are you saying that "drug-addicted homeless person" is doublespeak whereas "shambling crackhead zombie" is neutral language? Because I think those are the phrases we are talking about, and I think the first is much more neutral.
I am confused as to how my attempt to assert the use of neutral language is coercive or being used for social engineering or how it is strong arming anyone here. I certainly don't want to be doing these things, so if I am I would appreciate being told how I am.
I would say that "economically disadvantaged sporadically sheltered substance abuser" is a lot more... Orwellian.
That's not a good solution because you're doing something to someone who is effectively powerless, and they have no recourse.
It's a recipe for large-scale, institutionalized abuse. All I have to do is label you crazy etc., and then I can do whatever I want with you, while no one has to see it.
Any case where we argue that we should compel someone to do something for social order needs to be handled with the utmost in transparency and restraint. I.e. not putting them in camps.
> If you want a name, say "drug-addicted homeless person".
Fair enough.
> If I called you a zombie for just blindly going along with the crackhead term that the author used, you would be offended, right?
Nope, I really wouldn't. But, that's probably because I'm a privileged Half-Blackfrican-Canadian with a 150 IQ.
If you said I didn't act black enough, or said I was a bad programmer, then I'd be insulted.
> Are the thank-god-for-the-lowest-caste-so-that-I-can-not-belong-to-it opiates treating you well?
You're assuming far too much. I apologize for hitting what is obviously a hot-button issue for you. Re-read my comment as a criticism of US social policy.
Yeah, I jumped to conclusions. Thanks for taking the high road. I don't know why I get so upset about the plight of homeless people. I think I also hate the zombie meme. And, I used to call people crackheads too, so maybe I'm just annoyed with myself for that.
When I was in Toronto, I found Jane & Finch to be a bit of a shock because suddenly there were all these pejorative pejoratives pejorativing.
This comment does not belong on HN. It's angry, self-righteous, and unproductive. Comparing people who defecate, urinate, shoot-up, stink, and leave needles on your front porch to other minorities is really offensive. Especially when these people have all the resources in the world to get out of their situation. Often they have better apartments than the people they are begging money from.
Just as you petitioned SF to get rid of the homeless people from your precious neighborhood, you can downvote my post, flag it, and petition PG to ban my account if you don't want me to post comments like this. If it fails, just as your real life petition failed, you can always find another web forum.
What's becoming clear is that I don't belong on HN. There's just no real sense of belonging that I have. Despite understanding all of the technical stuff, I just don't seem to fit in with you guys, and I don't really share a lot of your views, including PG's. It's almost like I come here just to differentiate myself from what I am not, and to show off technical knowledge once in a while.
If it's not okay, why does my comment have more upvotes than downvotes?
For me, this isn't a forum where degrading a whole class of society is okay. Except, from what you guys are saying, maybe it is okay because it's a visible and personally annoying class? That is where the anger comes from.
What's ironic about all this is that if you read his later comments, the original guy I responded to apparently shares my opinions more than yours.
Finally, did you get so hung up on the F-bomb that you missed my edit to the original post?
I was annoyed by georgeorwell's self-righteous tone as well. Pejorative or not, the homelessness in San Francisco is a substantial social and economic problem that does require something different than what we have right now, and whitewashing the language certainly isn't going to help matters.
That said, you're also completely out to lunch.
> "Especially when these people have all the resources in the world to get out of their situation.
They can? Have you been homeless, or worked with the homeless? What do you think is a sufficient upside to convince someone to be hated by everyone around them, be addicted to all kinds of dangerous chemicals, shit on the streets, and sleep in their own filth?
Do you also realize that the majority of the homeless population suffers from severe mental illnesses - severe enough to make them effectively non-functioning? Do you know the proportion of the homeless population who are veterans suffering from PTSD?
So you have a group of people who are, predominantly, suffering from a wide variety of mental illnesses that prevent them from functioning in life, and they have "all the resources in the world" to get out of it. Right. That's like chaining someone up, giving them a nail file, and asserting that they have all the tools to get out of it.
Hell, even if we institutionalized most of these people the bulk of them won't ever "get out of it". There are two distinct classes of the homeless - the situationally homeless, and the chronically homeless. Most liberal-minded people like to believe that all homeless are capable of being returned to "normal", where in fact a large portion of them will never escape their mental illnesses enough to be functional members of mainstream society, even with the best of help.
> "Often they have better apartments than the people they are begging money from."
Citation needed on this. There are, of course, some people out there scamming a quick buck by taking advantage of the homelessness situation. Did you watch that one NBC expose on that one woman in Queens, NY, and extrapolate this to all homeless?
For what it's worth, I am annoyed by my own self-righteous tone. I didn't respond with maturity. I've admitted as much elsewhere if you read the thread. Thank you for clarifying many of the issues here.
I don't agree that challenging negative language and asserting neutral language is "whitewashing". I believe that it helps matters relative to the negative language. If you wouldn't use language to somebody's face, it's still abusive to use it behind their back, because it doesn't encourage kindness towards them. Would you call a homeless person with a crack addiction that you knew by name a crackhead to his face? If I take a moment to imagine going outside and doing this, it makes me want to cry. Whitewashing is what I associate with taking something bad and making it look good by changing the language. I don't want to do that.
But then there's even the more generic argument for not talking badly about people behind their backs: if person A says something mean to person B about person C behind their back, it actually hurts A because person B will start operating on the basis that when their back is turned, person A will talk about them in a similarly bad way to persons D, E, and F.
By the way, this page says 1/3 of the homeless population has severe mental illness (not just schizophrenia):
I don't think that page includes simple alcoholism and drug addiction, which are legitimately disabling physical and mental illnesses on their own. After that, I'm not sure there are any homeless that are unaccounted for. None of them are there because they are "lazy bums".
> They can? Have you been homeless, or worked with the homeless? What do you think is a sufficient upside to convince someone to be hated by everyone around them, be addicted to all kinds of dangerous chemicals, shit on the streets, and sleep in their own filth?
Heroin. Crack. Severe mental illness. I didn't say even all the resources in the world could help them, just that they were available. Except for the one resource we refuse to offer--involuntary institutionalization. But we don't and we won't. Maybe because of old movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Maybe because we think they are exercising their civil rights by sleeping in their own filth and shouting at passerby.
> Citation needed on this.
I lived in a building downtown where many of these panhandlers lived. During the day they would hang out on the sidewalk and beg for money. In the evening they would go back to their $3000/mo market-rate apartment and do drugs and prostitution.
> Except for the one resource we refuse to offer--involuntary institutionalization. But we don't and we won't.
There is a revolving door between mental institutions, prisons, and the street. Talk to some schizophrenic people if you doubt me.
Nevertheless, I do believe mandatory but free drug rehab and work placement programs could help people, since I believe drug addiction is a mental and physical illness. Then addicts might be able to work for a living instead of beg for a living.
> In the evening they would go back to their $3000/mo market-rate apartment and do drugs and prostitution.
I suspect a pimp might be involved in paying for a $3K apartment if the people in it are "doing drugs and prostitution".
It makes me angry when privileged people don't demonstrate compassion. I have trouble demonstrating compassion for them. You're right, I don't have fun at parties full of such people, and I've been to a few.
But you're also right that I need to lighten up. Attacking people out of the blue like I just did is not good for one's health, and it has little positive effect on the world. I have pretty poor social skills.
Compassion generally means feeling another person's pain.
I don't think that you can use negative, objectifying language and feel another person's pain at the same time.
For example, consider:
(1) "Just outside of my expensive hotel, there were all these drug-addicted homeless people that couldn't even walk properly. Life must be pretty difficult for them."
vs.
(2) "Just outside of my expensive hotel, there were all these crackhead zombies shambling around. Life must be pretty difficult for them."
The second sentence in the second form is so improbable that I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.
(3) I find it strange that there is such poverty next to such wealth and that people consider it acceptable. I feel as though I've woken up in a zombie movie, but everyone else is just carrying on with their day, like no big deal.
Right, so the question was designed to expose me as a hypocrite, i.e. character assassination. In doing so, you make me look like a two-faced ass who cannot make sound arguments.
Except, even if we assume that one must not be a hypocrite to advocate a given position - I am accepting your fallacy here as truth - you are also changing the position. I did not argue that one should help homeless people. Rather, I argued for not using degrading terms to describe them. I have not been a hypocrite in that respect, and I have admitted to using degrading terms to describe them in the past.
Now, "a strong association in your mind" is a manipulative way of saying, "if and only if". So, if and only if I am a hypocrite, then my rhetoric is empty. Since you have exposed me as a hypocrite, or attempted to, my rhetoric must also be empty.
If you claim, no, it's only in the other direction, then since my rhetoric is empty, I must be a hypocrite, so then you decided to expose that side of it to see if you were right.
So now it falls back to the question of whether or not my argument is empty. Without an explanation as to what you mean by "empty rhetoric" - because the term is sufficiently vague on its own as to only constitute more character assassination - you may as well say, "Your argument is bad."
Your argument is bad too. I believe I have explained why.
This is anecdotal, so I guess you can take it with a grain of salt.
But as someone from Vancouver who has visited SF quite a bit, SF always seemed to have more homelessness (it does have a warmer climate than Van) and more parts that smelled really bad. I might be desensitised to it already, though. Also, throughout my time living in Vancouver, I've never witnessed a robbery/theft/crime, whereas visiting SF last month I witnessed a random theft from a homeless at a Walgreens and they were really abusive towards him.
What I'm saying is, it still feels like a different country with a different culture, instead of it only being a west coast thing.
I lived downtown in Vancouver for 5 years - I think I had my car broken into about 200 times, no exaggeration. It got so bad I just left the damn thing open.
Everything in the US is basically X 10, so you have to allow for that in the similarities.
It's half warmth, half social services/laws. You see way more homeless people in Seattle and San Francisco then you'll see in Houston or Jacksonville. The social services and laws for homeless people are way more generous on the west coast.
I visited Chicago and SF recently, and (at least down town) you're talking several orders of magnitude.
Being in SF was really sad for me - sitting in a niceish cafe/restaurant and looking out the window to see a homeless person sifting through a bin. It's not at all what I'm used to.
Chicago, on the other hand, is a beautiful city. I was only in the Loop/Greektown area, but it was super clean, full of really friendly people, and lovely art installations and park areas. It was a pity that I could only stomach the food for a few days.
I live in Chicago and see them every single day. They are usually on buses and trains or at the stops and stations. I also see them digging through the trash in the alley behind my building.
Absolutely agree as I guy from Toronto living in SF. San Francisco has a very large number of drug related homelessness. The weather is a contributing factor but additionally, the programs that cater to the homeless are all in major areas for some reason (especially around Moscone).
Unlike West Queen West (Ossington & Dundas hood), SF has not tried to pretty up their shelters etc.
But what you say shouldn't be generalized to Canada; Gastown, which is probably the heart of Vancouver's tech scene, is spitting distance from the poorest postal code in Canada. Homeless people migrate to places like Vancouver and San Fran for their temperate winters and progressive attitudes.
Must be a west coast thing. One of the first things I noticed when I visited Vancouver for the first time was how many crackheads were just sitting about, and how friendly they were when asking for directions.
I considered moving to SF but chose Austin instead. I refuse to live in a state with such a dysfunctional government and ridiculously high taxes. Some of the same reasons I left NY.
You can do tech anywhere. You do not need to live in the bay area. If you really like the city pick a place (like Austin) with inexpensive direct flights and go a few times a month. You'll still save money.
You CAN do tech anywhere, just as you CAN be a banker outside of NYC or an actor outside of LA. Doesn't mean it's the most efficient or effective way.
I have lots of respect for people who choose to live in other parts of the world but to suggest that there's not much difference between living in SF or Austin for someone interested in starting or working for a successful technology firm is inaccurate.
I don't count freelance development as "doing tech" as it's equivalent to being a "day-trader" vs banker or "youtube star" vs actor.
^This. I've lived in both SF and Austin. Austin is a bad ass city. In terms of quality of life, as a young and single male, it is a complete and total no brainer that Austin is better than SF. Better nightlife, more attractive women, cheaper cost of living, less bums, more sunlight, better weather (if you prefer hot to cold), better urban/outdoor balance...
BUT, in terms of the startup scene, SF is in another league. Austin has some successful startups, but they seem to be largely enterprise focused. It's going to be a long time before you see a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Yelp, Dropbox etc. founded here. If you're doing a startup, particularly in the consumer space, SF is the place to be.
Austin has some successful startups, but they seem to be largely enterprise focused.
And? Is that supposed to be bad or something? I don't know about you, but I find consumer webapp startups to be dead boring. Who cares about building yet another way for people to share pictures of cats doing stupid shit, or whatever? At least with enterprise software, you're doing something that's actually improving someone's productivity, helping other businesses grow and prosper, etc.
Disclaimer: I am the founder of a (non-SF based) enterprise focused startup. So, yeah, I'm a little bit biased. :-)
Heh... "90 degree summers" is mild. More like 105. Summer is brutal, though I actually haven't found it all that humid. That said, we were throwing pool parties in November while my friends in SF were walking around in coats.
Sept-Nov is nice in SF, but otherwise it was too cold and windy for me. I lived in soma, though -- if I were to do it again, I think I'd live in the Haight, mission, pac heights or the marina and I'd probably have a different experience. The variance between neighborhoods in terms of climate and culture seems to be greater in SF than I've found in Austin.
Are the women really more attractive in Austin? One of the things mentioned in the article is that in SF, people are in shape. How are things in Austin?
I've lived for several years in Silicon Valley and Austin, and would have to agree that Austin has more attractive young women. The University of Texas probably has a lot do with it. It also helps that that Austin has 10-11 months of warm weather (January is our winter), so you're seeing more skin here, to put it bluntly. :)
Austin has more in shape and attractive people by FAR. I moved to SF a couple years ago and moved back... SF was like clowntown when it came to fitness... Austin is orders of magnitude better when it comes to the fitness scene.
I also heard Austin is like a Californian oasis in TX (when it comes to politics/race/etc.)
There is also visiting a different country if you want to find a spouse. The foreigner mystique (esp. if you are pale and Caucasian) is still somewhat alive... based on the vlogs/blogs I've read about: South Korea, Japan, China, etc. Foreigners who blog/vlog eventually talk about foreign guys who date outside of their league because of the foreigner mystique. "Why are so many beautiful women have ugly white boyfriends?"
The paleness comes in handy because of some dumb stereotype: People who are pale work in offices, not in fields, and are wealthier.
Oh, there's no doubt that there's a sizable portion of East Asian women who have a Caucasian fetish. While this is good for dating and hooking up (even the most clueless and ugly white guy will get so much action in Tokyo, Shanghai, or Seoul), I disagree that it's a good basis for a marriage, particularly a cross-cultural one.
However, I'm not sure what this has to do with SF vs Austin, other than for the sizable Asian population in SF (in which regard Austin isn't "a Californian oasis in TX"). In that regard though, SF is a good place to be, as the Caucasian fetish is in full effect among Asian American women as well: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/29/us/20110130mix...
I've lived in a Austin (5 years), NYC (6 years), and recently moved to SF. In my experience, Austin has many more attractive people, in general, than SF. NYC has more than both of them, but also 10 times the population, so there's that...
There is nothing more equalizing than your ability to sell software to random strangers over the internet. It truly can be done from anywhere and potentially in a more efficient way than in SF.
Selling software over the internet to strangers is only a very small part of what "doing tech" is. Like I said, you could "act" in a local volunteer theater in Nebraska but to say you can "be an actor" anywhere is inaccurate.
If you want to grow beyond a 1-5 person shop, if you want to build incredible software that is used by hundreds of thousands or millions of people, you need a critical mass of great engineers, designers, marketers, etc working together.
Sure virtual teams are possible but just ask Jason Evanish (OP) about how Kissmetrics went in the reverse direction - from virtual to in-person and how that's transformed their business for the better.
That's incredibly short sighted. There are too many examples of large tech companies not in the valley or SF for that to be true. They might not be household names but that doesn't mean they aren't killing it.
What's funny Jason is that we met through a mutual friend in 2011 on one of my trips to SF. RideJoy had just launched and you were looking for talent. I was interested in your startup but wasn't interested in a job.
> I don't count freelance development as "doing tech" as it's equivalent to being a "day-trader" vs banker or "youtube star" vs actor.
For every big name actor there are 1000 serving food to make ends meet. For every investment banker managing billions there are 1000 working in cubicles analyzing obscure sectors and securities. Are you implying that their work is more desirable and/or more real than a successful day trader or YouTube star?
I get what you're trying to say and I completely disagree. I think my clients, many of which are startups who happily hire freelancers, would too. I really dislike this condescending attitude some startup founders and investors have. If you're a freelancer, run a "lifestyle business", or bootstrap with a real business model and and target long term growth you're looked down upon. It's bullshit.
"I refuse to live in a state with such a dysfunctional government"...so you picked Texas..hahahah
You can absolutely do tech anywhere. But it is a very different experience. I had the exact same rationale before moving to the bay area. It was a tough decision to make, even loving the city, was it really worth it. Here, you're surrounded by tech. It is literally everywhere. When you have conversations with people, you no longer have to change your stories, your talking points, your vocab, people actually understand what you're talking about here. Sitting in a coffee shop, or on the bus, almost all you hear is tech conversations. If it's a passion, if it's what you love, it's worth every single penny to be in the heart of it. I've never been more motivated in my life.
Have you been to Austin? Or Dallas? (I'd personally stay away from Houston and San Antonio). It sounds like you're passing judgement without really experiencing the area.
Texas is a fairly reasonable state when it comes to most of their laws. There has been some controversy around the human-origin that will be taught in schools, but this issue isn't isolated to just Texas. And beyond that, if you really dislike the public schools, you can always go for private or charter schools, or even homeschooling.
Texas government tends to stay out of the way of their people for the most part (at least compared to NY or CA). No state income tax, though, property taxes are fairly high in the cities and suburbs. Gun laws are very lax. It's overall a pretty good state.
>It sounds like you're passing judgement without really experiencing the area.
It sounds like you did the same to California. The parts of the government being reacted to are probably the laws about when you can kill people (e.g. if they rob your neighbor), express lane to the death penalty, etc., etc.
Yeah, the state with the surplus. The weather in Texas isn't anything to write home about, but in every way that matters it's a more competently run state.
They probably have a surplus because they underfund health care system, among other things... (I remember being surprised at the full-time firefighting budget cuts not long before the huge fires two years ago)
"A boom in revenues from sales taxes as well as taxes from oil and natural gas production have given Texas a budget surplus that the state comptroller has estimated at $8.8 billion."
Of course this will start a new debate about how it's only a surplus because of previous budget cuts, but that's for another time and place. Still others will crunch the numbers differently and say there was actually a deficit. Politics is fun.
In broad strokes states have essentially two functions - education and social services. Of course when you make substantive cuts that's where they're going. There's no "right" amount of social services - as a state you pay for what's reasonable at the time given budgetary constraints.
It's no coincidence the Economy in Texas has recovered while the economy in California hasn't. This is particularly galling given the number of tech companies in Northern California with highly compensated employees.
In any event, California didn't slip into a budgetary black hole by coincidence. State employees are grossly overcompensated, and much of that compensation takes the form of generous retirement benefits. The state will be raising taxes and using budgetary gimmicks for decades because the real problem is unfunded pension liabilities, not delivery of current services.
There's a big difference between an actual surplus and a "surplus" based on accounting gimmicks. You can only pretend California is in surplus by pretending to believe the state retirement systems really will return 8% on average.
Please explain which gimmicks you think are currently active. Your knowledge of California budgets seems to be a few years dated. We've reformed a lot about the budget process in the last few years. Up to and including how many votes are needed.
There's a lot wrong in California, but a lot of people are barking up the trees from years ago instead of the ones that are real problems today.
As a non-Texan, I'd be interested if could you share some of the dysfunctions of their government? I haven't heard many people claim that before, so I'm curious as to what I'm missing.
So imagine an already very low service state having to cut budgets even more. Am sure that will work out well for the kids long-term. The State is tossing welfare/health/service issues down to the counties now, so expect your property taxes to skyrocket in the next decade. Some counties will be rich, and most will be poor.
Not happy to with keeping MLK or Jefferson out of K-12 history textbooks, the governor and his lackies are going after those pointy-head elitists at UT.
Expect the next short-fall to be ~$30B. You're going to pay one way or another.
Let's face it: American governmental bodies are dysfunctional at almost every level. Most people live in California, Texas, Florida, and New York. All are poorly managed. And then there's the federal government sitting on top.
The key to thriving in the US is to have a high net worth so you can feel independent of this dysfunctional government. And then ignore all the stressful noise in the crisis-obsessed news cycle.
You should educate yourself to avoid further embarrassment.
From wikipedia:
"Fascism was founded during World War I by Italian national syndicalists who combined left-wing and right-wing political views.[11][12] Fascists have commonly opposed having a firm association with any section of the left-right spectrum, considering it inadequate to describe their beliefs,[13][14] though fascism's goal to promote the rule of people deemed innately superior while seeking to purge society of people deemed innately inferior is identified as a prominent far-right theme.[15] Fascism opposes multiple ideologies, such as communism, conservatism, liberalism, and social democracy.[16]"
More or less, fascism is the supremacy of the nation/state & creation of a civil religion around it. It merges the idea of the nation, the government, and links proper behavior to operating accord with the principles set forth by the leaders. At least that's what I got out of Mussolini's writings on the matter.
It's the people in service of the State, as opposed as the State being the People(communism).
No government pleases everyone and no government is perfect. However, from someone who has been a citizen of both Austin, San Francisco, and other cities, Texas/Austin, despite some shortcomings, is to me clearly the less dysfunctional government. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has been citizens of both cities and honestly thinks otherwise.
I'm not saying Austin is better than San Francisco or anything super subjective like that, but only the mildly subjective assertion that the government is less dysfunctional in Austin, compared to SF.
As a former Austinite, I can say that it's very easy to forget that you're in Texas when living in Austin. This creates the good feeling of being an oasis and the bad feeling of being a bubble.
But now you're living in TX? Despite Austin being an enclave of politically progressive views, you're still surrounded by well armed pickup truck driving rednecks on their way to the Dairy Queen in 110" heat?
Paying the SF "tax" is worth every penny in my opinion.
Yes, people here are (on average) conservative and well-armed, and the most common vehicle is a Ford F150, but I wouldn't describe anyone here as a redneck. They're happy, polite, friendly, community-minded people.
I'm not entirely sure I could say the same thing about San Francisco, where I didn't like living at all. But that's fine, isn't it? Different cultures for different types of people.
I hate that everyone calls the weather here amazing. Being cold all but maybe 30-40 days a year is not incredible weather, especially factoring in fog.
I grew up in the South West. I don't miss hundred-plus degree summers, burning my hands on steering wheels and the backs of my legs on car seats. I don't miss the asphalt being tacky because of the heat, or the sandy, sticky, salt-encrusted feeling after spending a day running errands, alternating between air conditioned interiors and sun-baked exteriors.
I certainly understand why other people might not enjoy the perpetual cold, damp, and fog of San Francsico. But every time I need to add another blanket at night, or put on a jacket during the day, or close the window against a chilly July evening, I give a happy, contented, slightly chilly sigh.
I guess that's personal preference. Growing up in Indiana, we hit 100+ in the height of summer (and humid as hell) and subzero in the winter... While I don't _enjoy_ those extremes, it does really lend to a sense of time passing and makes the really nice days throughout spring and fall that much more enjoyable. I miss waking up on Xmas to a foot of snow, despite not enjoying snow, and having to huddle around a fire to warm up after being outside. I hate the cold, but I dig how it brings people together. As for the heat, you'll never appreciate a cold beer or lemonade (or both) like you will after mowing your lawn in 90+ degree weather. And those first few days of spring where it's light sweater weather in the morning and then 80 the rest of the day after having just braved a winter of snow and freezing temps? That's my favorite time of year.
You make a good point about the seasons. I took the passage of the seasons for granted while growing up. It was just "how the world works." A few years after moving out here I realized that my body didn't know what time of year it was. That was a disconcerting feeling, although I doubt if I could explain why.
I feel it as disconcerting as well and I think it's because it makes everything seem mundane and gives no distinction on a (may be the wrong word here) biological level that time is actually passing.
In California, if you want a change in the weather, you drive to it. I grew up in Maine where there were two seasons, winter and August. Oldtimers claimed there was a third, mud season. I dont miss it at all.
ehh. isn't that right next to Palo Alto? I'm reading this thread from all across the pond, and when people from towns at biking distance from one another start discussing where the weather is better, I start feeling a bit weird.
So the Bay Area is incredibly mountainous for such a densely populated place. There are numerous 1000 meter peaks ringing the bay, and even more only-slightly-lower peaks and ridges that are right in some of the towns in question. When you combine this with the ocean and a huge estuary that drains most of the water in California out through a small channel, you get very dynamic, very localized weather patterns. There are lots of places in the bay area where moving a few blocks produces significant changes in climate.
There's an narrow altitude band in the Berkeley and Oakland hills where a nearly constant temperature inversion creates a literal "banana belt" (you can actually grow bananas). 100ft lower or higher, you get frosts and can't.
There are places in Woodside with two adjacent houses, one of which is in dense fog nearly every afternoon and the other never is, because there's only a small channel in the ridge that allows the fog to spill in, and it drains nearly straight downhill.
If you get lucky in January, you can hike Black Mountain in Los Altos and go from 75 degrees at the base to a couple inches of snow at the top.
Anyone who's lived in San Francisco can tell you all about the numerous bizarre little micro-climates from neighborhood to neighborhood. They can be exceedingly different, and it's not unusual for the temperature to drop 15 degrees as you cross the city from east to west.
So yes, Redwood City is two towns over from Palo Alto, but two towns can mean vast differences in an area where the weather changes drastically when you go around the block.
stephencanon is absolutely right about the microclimates in the Bay area. I used to live in Polk Gulch and work in the Mission. Sometimes, when I'd go to work at mid-day (which eliminates the possibility of time causing the change), there would be a 10-15 degree change in temperature from home to work, with complete changes in wind and fog as well. That was a 2 mile distance in a 7 mile wide city. Pretty crazy.
I worked in Cupertino for 5 years; just two towns south of Palo Alto it is frequently 90+ in the summer (and as you go through San Jose it gets even hotter). At home in Menlo Park and Palo Alto it was consistently ~10 degrees colder.
I'll confirm San Jose being way too hot. I lived there during our YC summer and it was 90-100 every day. Palo Alto and Menlo Park are incredibly comfortable 10+ months out of the year, and maybe a light jacket the rest of the time.
I have spent a winter in NY. And about 24 of them in Indiana. The thing with those places is that I expect it to be frigid in the winter. San Francisco is always lauded for it's "amazing" weather, which to most people -- especially tourists who generally come with nothing but shorts + tshirts and end up buying hundreds of dollars of giants/niners/i <3 sf gear to stay warm -- is in the 70-80 range. Even when it is "nice" and in that sweet spot, it's only from about 11am-3pm and then it gets cold and/or foggy and/or crazy windy (depending which parts of the city you're in, of course).
I don't think it's a fair comparison, though. San Francisco weather is exceptionally cold given its geographical location. It shares the same latitude as Mediterranean countries like Spain, Greece and Turkey but is much colder than them year around. This is why SF residents tend to be bitter. :)
I will give it to you that those special days where it remains 75 throughout the entirety of the day are pretty awesome. However, in 18 months here, I can count those on two hands, and the days where it was comfortable in shorts/tshirt until 8-10 at night number at probably 2.
It was, but still, evenings are almost never warm (i.e. above 70) except for a few days in July/August. That makes it easier to sleep, but I do miss warm summer evenings outside.
One of the biggest shocks to me when moving to the Bay Area is the difference in social norms and acceptable behavior. I grew up in Texas and went to college on the east coast. For the first few months after moving out here I was in awe by some of the things people would do and thought were acceptable. In fact I'm still in shock by many of these things but used to them by now. From some of the things I've seen managers do in regards to relationships with their employees and behavior at office parties to an entire section at AT&T park cheering when an opposing pitcher gets hurt and pulled.
Furthermore I also found it much harder to communicate appropriately as social cues seem a bit different. I have at many times found myself in a conversation (or lack there of) filled with awkward silence.
I found that people from the west coast, esp. LA and SF are more happy-go-lucky types - meaning that if you were to meet a girl at a party or a new bro, the person of interest might be very enthusiastic or affectionate - "leading on" that there's specific chemistry between you or that person; when in fact that person is just very spontaneous, in the sense of being open and fun in any social situation. This is a bit different from the Northeast Coast frigid weather which causes most people to be irritated and singular-minded on roads/public transports, but causes people to find "cuddle-buddies" during the winter; once you make a friend, that friend becomes a best friend.
I used to be upset about this. But now I'm more understanding that for some people, they don't necessarily value their individual friendships as they value their own belonging/membership in a clique (SF vegan-foodie who works in SOMA startup who rides single-fixed gear) and also the necessity of forging temporary social/professional alliances in an transient yuppie community where most people moved to for professional advancement (marketing guys from frattier backgrounds fraternizing with engineers with more diverse backgrounds to advance everyone's careers).
>The most crushing aspect I saved for last though. Taxes here are significantly higher than I’ve experienced anywhere. This means you’re squeezed both on your take home pay and your expenses.
...and some weirdness means they don't spend that money on roads, so the road surfaces are lousy. Maybe I've been spoiled by our great road surfaces in UK.
Here in Oregon we have less than half the taxes of California, and yet we have well-maintained roads (to the point of joking that the state flower is a traffic cone), and well-maintained everything else. And the state doesn't gripe about not having enough money nearly as often (and when they do it doesn't make the national news). The state even (by law) gives back any excess tax revenue they collect each year, though the state legislature puts a measure on every major ballot to try to prevent that (and it thankfully always fails).
I genuinely wonder what California has done so differently to end up doing so badly when they have twice as much tax revenue per person.
California is too large a state to be well-governed. Because of its size, it requires a big budget to campaign. As a result, the public sector unions dominate state politics. Democrats have had the majority in both houses of the state congress for 40 of the last 42 years - that gives you an idea of how dynamic our politics are.
In good economic times the legislature hikes union benefits and in bad times taxes are hiked to pay for benefits which are no longer affordable. We just passed prop 30 to increase our income taxes to the highest in the nation and most of the money behind the proposition was from unions. The $4 billion in revenue from prop 30 earmarked for schools will barely cover the state's shortfall in its teacher pension fund. Not a dime will go towards actually making the schools better.
California has the trifecta of suck - high taxes, bad services, and big deficits. That's what a state looks like when the government exists to serve its unions and not the people.
Others have pointed out the proposition system. Propositions do tend to be somewhat spastic - voters seldom balk at spending money on boondoggles like the high speed train that is supposed to be finished any decade now. But I don't think it is a huge problem. The proposition is one of the only outlets for non-liberal policies in the state, so I think it gets more hate and blame than it deserves.
> California is too large a state to be well-governed. Because of its size, it requires a big budget to campaign. As a result, the public sector unions dominate state politics. Democrats have had the majority in both houses of the state congress for 40 of the last 42 years - that gives you an idea of how dynamic our politics are.
This isn't really true. California's cities have some serious issues around allowing growth and development, and the state as a whole has a major problem because of Prop 13. See here: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/05/should-w... for more, although there are many other issues.
These problems aren't inherent with size; they're self-created.
Californians pay more in federal taxes than the state receives in federal spending. This is also true of Oregon, but in California it's true to a much higher degree. So the state is essentially subsidizing the rest of the country and doesn't have enough left over for itself.
That sounds like the results of progressive taxation and federal welfare. California income is higher than the national average. Mississippi's is lower. So some federal tax dollars from California end up in Mississippi's medicaid fund.
But you can't blame all of California's suck on that. It is not exactly a low-tax state!
It's not true that those tax dollars are going to Mississippi's general fund. Rather, they are going to things like Medicaid and food stamps. Presumably the federal transfers equalize access to food and medicine across states, so they both start from the same place when they start levying state taxes to provide state services.
that just sounds like an accounting trick. if Mississipi had higher revenue it could accomodate for more social services without the help of California.
i'm not very familiar with this stuff, but i believe states like California have better social safety nets than states like Mississipi. so different states don't even actually start from the same place
Different states have different levels of economic development. Since all states share a common currency, it isn't possible for states like Mississippi to devalue their currency in order to be competitive with California. Large fiscal transfers between states are necessary to keep things balanced out.
This would only be the determining factor if you believe that California on its own would not vote for the federal government providing support for the lowest income people.
The evidence seems to indicate that is not the case.
They wouldn't as much as they are forced to now, especially if they were an independent country (which is the only fair comparison).
There's also efficiencies of density that you just don't get in Mississippi, but that also pays off as a redistribution within states from cities to the suburbs and countryside.
A few reasons. Less populous states have proportionally more representation, since representatives are proportional to state population but every state gets two senators. Rural states are earlier in the presidential primary season (Iowa is the first), so they wind up getting more. And the less populous states tend to be poorer in general, so they have less to give and greater welfare need.
Much has been written about the dysfunction of California's government. I would summarize it as we have a direct participation system, in the form of propositions, that has limited what the government can do. Specifically, the voters have limited the amount of property taxes that can be raised, required a super majority of the legislature to raise any other taxes, and then gone ahead and proscribed what the legislature has to spend money on, either directly on things like education or indirectly on things like prisons when we pass laws like 3 strikes. Even when we raise additional taxes, as we just did with Prop 30, we specifically earmarked that money for education. All this leads to terrible roads.
Oregon has done exactly the same thing, though, and it hasn't caused the same problems. We have a balanced budget requirement, an annual cap on property tax increases, a requirement that the legislature can't pass taxes itself but has to put them as ballot measures, and a requirement that no new tax can pass at a special election (non-May non-November) without a 50% turnout (in response to too many ballot-stuffing special elections where all the special-interest groups remind their members to vote).
So, I remain curious about the root cause difference here.
I can't speak to Oregon, but in California the voters also specify the things the government has to spend on. We have legislature must spend on. For instance we require that some 60% of the budget go to education. The legislature only have control over something like 20%. Additionally, while this is probably only a small problem now, we will have pension / retiree health care issues.
Oregon is similar in that voters can specify things for the state to spend money on. However, I think the root of it is that California is a lot (more than 10x) bigger than Oregon. Any independent group that wants some money earmarked gets a much larger payoff in California than in Oregon. On the opposite side of the same coin, an overzealous reform group gets more bang for their buck getting a bill passed in California, too. Oregon has had its share of bad bills too, but as far as I understand it we just have far fewer than California.
I'm in New Zealand and interested in potentially moving to Portland one day. I'm aware that the city has a great reputation for arts and food (which is the appeal for me and my family) and personally prefer living in smaller cities. The regular folk music events, street markets and greenery all seem very appealing! Are there many job opportunities for software developers there however?
> Are there many job opportunities for software developers there however?
As a software developer there, I can unequivocally say "yes". That applies whether you prefer big companies, startups, or something inbetween.
And the rest of the reputation you mentioned is entirely deserved and accurate. (Also, if you prefer smaller cities, the surrounding area can easily accomodate, and the Portland area has a great light rail and public transit system to get you to and from downtown Portland.)
Feel free to contact me privately if you'd like to chat more about the area.
Sydney is 10 times larger than Portland. Having lived in lots of different cities, large and small, I think 300-500k is the sweet spot for me. Any larger and I feel like you start suffering from quality of life issues - pollution, traffic, overcrowding, traveling distances, crime etc.
"...and some weirdness means they don't spend that money on roads"
Of course they don't! They spend it on public-sector employee pensions, and boondoggle public-transit projects like that high-speed rail link between Bakersfield and Fresno. :P
LA has some of the worst road surfaces I've seen anywhere, even on the freeways. On the flip side, though, I suspect the US has more than 5x the roads despite only having 5x our population.
It's also a really big deal when you shut down a freeway, even if it is for maintenance that'll improve it. Not many cities make national news with road closures like LA has done with the 405. The cost of this maintenance goes way beyond time & materials.
I love how much denser the suburban parts of LA are compared to other places (though I do wish it had more of a super-dense urban core), but it does take a toll infrastructure-wise. LA has a pretty extensive network of freeways, and they're still all packed. It's crazy. And impressive, in a way (I have a love-hate relationship with the 405 in particular).
On the other hand, the city I'm from originally is finally getting to widening one of the core freeways in an area that's seen a ton of growth over the past twenty years, and it sounds like just as much a pain for the people living there as the 405 construction has been in LA. There's just a far lower total of affected people since the city is so much less populated. :)
I am right near the 101 myself, so I hear you on the love/hate thing. I figure, at least it isn't the 710.
Even the medium sized midwestern city I am from has problems with road widening. I think it's basically a scourge wherever it goes on. There are some freeways in LA that almost seem impossible to shut down under any non-catastrophic circumstances, such as the 5 downtown (or anything downtown, probably) so it'll be interesting to see how they approach that over time.
The problem we see down in Sydney is that they spend a lot of time and money on the widening of the freeways, but nothing on the infrastructure as soon as you get OFF the freeway. So the traffic still piles back up with huge traffic congestion through all the towns that are connected.
Major highways in metro areas are regularly resurfaced and repaired. It doesn't take a long-term shutdown of the road. They just shut down one or two lanes late at night, repave or repair a section of the road, and then do the same for the other lanes a different night.
It's fun driving around in the hills, which represent a massive slice of property taxes, and often be on street surfaces that are far worse than anything you'll find in the most rural sections of Georgia.
NY is a funny animal when it comes to roads. Upstate, the thruway, state highways, and interstates are pretty good. The State and Feds fund this.
County roads often suck because the counties are broke for a variety of reasons. City streets are awful because the state doesn't provide any aid -- although "towns" (some of which are bigger than cities) do.
The other thing is related to NY being ahead of the curve on highway construction. Many of the "expressways" and "parkways" in the NYC metro area are ineligible for federal highway funds because they connect toll bridges, but don't receive any toll money.
Massachusetts has a road system designed by masochists who didn't drive. No amount of money could fix it.
Maybe inside NYC or Boston city limits, but not in rural NY or MA and certainly not on the freeways. PA, on the other hand... you don't drive through PA in the summer without hitting at least one section of freeway that's become a parking lot because of road construction.
I'd say Minnesota and the midwest states take it for worst roads, especially in the city areas. The freeze/thaw and snowplows decimate our roads every winter.
No chance! MN and WI are so proactive about road maintenance that we get pretty good roads despite the extra hassles caused by cold weather. I've spent a bit of time in Los Angeles and Hawaii, and those roads are easily in worse condition than the roads of Minnesota and Wisconsin.
I will confirm this. Just had to replace part of my exhaust a few weeks ago because I bottomed out hitting a pot hole at night I couldn't see until too late.
In the northeastern US, they have to fix the roads every spring from damage caused by plows and frost heaving. In SF and other mild cities, there's now much seasonal component to road maintenance so roads tend to go much long between repaves.
What freeways in the northeastern US have average daily traffic volumes above 300k? Do those have alternative routes or see significant traffic volumes overnight? It's tough in Southern California because of a lack of north/south transit corridors.
Though it's surprising that even a temperate US city would have dodgy road surfaces. In the north and northeast, it's at least understandable with our winters and the multiple freeze/thaw cycles we usually see before spring.
You do know that we have a lot of cobbled streets here in Edinburgh? ;-)
On a serious note - I think the ongoing billion pound Great Tram Fiasco resulted in a lot of streets being left half-repaired for a long time as they were once part of the ever-shrinking tram route. Either that or the council is saving money on road repairs to help pay for it.
Or it might be part of the ongoing attempt to discourage driving in the city - which I don't mind as I pretty much walk everywhere!
"Meanwhile, here, no matter what you’re doing, those you meet will almost always be in finance or startups."
Well, except for the taxi drivers, the restaurant workers, the police, the teachers, the students, the grocers, the bike messengers, the lawyers, the house cleaners, the fire fighters, the ...
I know it's just one anecdote, but a Subway employee in SOMA once asked me if I knew anyone that would hire him as a DBA. The feeling in SF is that the tech world is inescapable, which some people seem to like.
I moved to SF two years ago. Since then I've had a discussion with the cashier at Taco Bell about the differences in the way browsers render on different mobile OS's. Had a discussion with a banker that learned Ruby to help with some of his reporting...
That's a bit pedantic. It's pretty clear that the point the author is trying to make is that relative to other cities, a ton of people work in finance or startups so you will encounter a lot more of them. Not that every single person in the city falls into those two categories.
This whole article is written very clearly with a very specific audience in mind. "You will be come an early adopter!" Well, maybe. I guess if you work in tech and know people who work in tech, yes. But as you noted, there are plenty of people who don't.
I think the implication from the original was that you don't really meet the other people, in that sure, you encounter them, but they somehow don't matter or are less interesting.
I don't think the poster meant that, so I wanted to call it out to encourage us techies to see that we are part of a larger culture and context.
We depend on a hell of a lot of people, and a lot of infrastructure that's not just for us, but keeps the entire city going.
This seems more of a "West Coast vs. East Coast" article than it is a "San Fran" article.
For the most part, the author is highlighting the differences that anybody living on the East Coast will experience in moving to one of the western coastal cities, save perhaps LA, which as everyone already knows is its own little planet.
Most of these "hints" hold true for San Diego, San Fran, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver. They are all in the same vibe the way Philly, New York, Boston, and Toronto are "the same vibe".
I'm sorry, I just don't think these points are true for the other cities you mention. As a Seattle inhabitant, the descriptions of San Francisco-specific weather, rent, cost of living, costumes, events, transients, canine-friendliness, fog, commuting, and other things just do not apply here. Of the first few things mentioned, only the strong neighborhood identity is something we share.
Actually, a lot of it is pretty similar, especially if coming from the east coast.
* Weather - replace fog with overcast/drizzle.
* Rent & Cost of living - Seattle is not cheap by any means, and rent and house prices are really steep until you get quite far from the city.
* Canine-friendliness - Definitely a west coast thing, there are tons of dogs in Seattle, dog parks, and companies that allow dogs at work.
* Commuting and public transit - Commuting is bad here, I-5 and its interchanges with I-90 and WA-520 are pathetic. On top of that, native Seattleites are terrible drivers - driving below the speed limit in the left lanes, blindly changing lanes, and don't know how to use a 4-way stop. Then there is the layout of Seattle, with bad east-west travel and the ongoing road construction.
Coming from not the west coast, San Fran, Portland, and Seattle do have some similarities - and aptly described as 'west coast' feel.
I've lived in both Seattle and SF - the situations are quite different.
SF weather is nothing like Seattle weather. Sure, they lean towards the chilly side, but Seattle doesn't have the curious microclimates that SF has, which is actually a substantial deal in daily life.
Ditto rent and cost of living. Seattle isn't cheap cheap, but the cost of living as a proportion of the average software engineer's salary is night and day. Seattle is downright cheap compared to SF - I went from paying $2200 for a brand spanking new 2BR (doorman, gym, elevators, the works) to $2200 for a tiny studio built in the 20s. It's really night and day. Even as a well-paid engineer (say, $120K+) you constantly feel at least a little bit poor, whereas in Seattle a software engineer (say, $90K+) feels like they're swimming in a pool made of pure money. I've been in both situations personally.
If you live in the Seattle suburbs you're going to have a bad time, but it's not bad living within walking distance of most workplaces, the rent is lower than SF and the city isn't allergic to development, and salaries are almost as high, so you're considerably ahead overall.
The similarity, in my experience, is more visible when held in relation to the East Coast. For west coast cities, you're probably right, but I'd bet most people would consider Seattle closer to SF than to NYC or Boston. Someone from the east coast would never call NYC and Boston similar, but they're closer to each other than they are to SF or Seattle.
Having lived in and around both, I would say NYC and Boston are fairly similar. Boston's whole psyche is based around staunchly insisting on not being inferior to New York.
Came in to say that much of it's true about Portland. The weather's better. Rent and the cost of living is cheaper, but finding a place close-in to downtown is still highly competitive (ie - you have to be ready to put down a deposit as soon as you find a place you like; there is no real opportunity to look at other places and come back). PBR is losing some of its cachet - you just as often see Hamm's or Old German as PBR anymore. I'm pretty sure anyone who has ever live near a city can agree that the 'burbs are always further out than a real-estate agent says they are.
...and unlike Oakland, all the shit people say about Gresham is true.
(ie - you have to be ready to put down a deposit as soon as you find a place you like; there is no real opportunity to look at other places and come back).
Things are different in less 'happening' cities, smaller towns or out in the burbs. You can actually spend a few days looking at units and have time to think about which you want. You can come back a 3-4 days later without worrying too much about your first choice being leased. If it is, you can probably get your 2nd.
"The City" refers to the core of whatever urban area you're in. It's meaningless outside of your local frame of reference. The only place in the US that has a halfway legitimate claim universal ownership of that name is NYC and that's tenuous at best.
If you read more carefully, I said people from the Bay Area call SF "The City". I didn't say it was the universal name for SF, just for the people in the area.
The only people who seem to get annoyed with the term "San Fran" and Frisco are either transplants or hipsters(which are usually transplants to begin with). Some of the old schoolers and hip hop community still use the term Frisco.
Only _some_ people from the city proper frown upon "San Fran", frisco, etc. Most people don't care and more over people that I know from elsewhere in the Bay area do some times call it San Fran or Frisco, if only to annoy people who get annoyed by the monikers.
I couldn't care less what people call it. When I lived in towns closer to San Jose, 'San Jose' was the reference 'city'.
Hah, I thought exactly the same. Even out here in Sacramento people call it "The City" (fair enough, Sacramento is just a big-ass, boring suburban sprawl)
Coming as an Australian, where our brand of English is inherently lazy and involves skipping syllables wherever possible, the idea that you would frown upon a simple shortening of the name is ridiculous. Frisco does sound pretty lame though, I can understand that one.
Definitely true with regards to sports and costumes, but otherwise I'm not so sure this holds any more. Everything around D.C. is much further away than you think, for example, and more than half the people I meet work in the tech sector somewhere. I have friends in Boston and it's much the same there - live in the 'burbs and you won't leave your neighborhood much except to go to work, as the city is very spread out. The East Coast is changing, especially D.C., which is a totally different city than it was even 10 years ago, and has a burgeoning startup scene that is not solely dependent on the government teat. There are a lot more young people here, doing interesting things, than there used to be. I would wager than in another decade the differences between East and West Coast will be even fewer, if things keep on the same general trajectory.
As someone who lives in Boston, I would like to point out the falsehood of this. Boston is not spread out. By area it is tiny. From where I live I can walk through five major neighborhoods in half an hour, some of which are among the most densely populated neighborhoods in the country. Boston has much more in common with SF than it does DC.
No. There's something to be said about West Coast vs East Coast vibes, but the article accurately describes SF and it mostly doesn't apply to the smaller cities like Portland, Seattle and especially Vancouver.
I have very close friends in Vancouver, and over the last 20 years, I've been to there often, throughout all parts of the season. I'm fairly familiar with it. If I could retire in Vancouver I would because it's a nice, quiet, slow-paced town. Even at the height of work hours, there is very little traffic downtown.
It doesn't have the same flair that a city like SF has. SF has major events throughout the year. It has a culture of weirdness, wackiness, lots of technology, lots of greed. It has very vastly different neighborhoods with vastly different cultures. Haight is completely different from
Noe which is different from Castro which is different from the Marina. It's not like West End vs East End in Vancouver.
There is a culture of risk taking. People always coming up with stupid or crazy startups, trying to push it on the local businesses. There are lots of great restaurants as well. There is zero night life in Vancouver, and a few very good restaurants (but a lot of great sushi restaurants, much better than SF). Downtown is practically dead by 8pm, which is nice. Granville Street which should be like Market Street, is instead almost like a dead street, Robson has a lot of tourists, but no real culture except coffee shops.
So go back through the article, and you'll see most of the stuff on startup life doesn't apply at all. There is no craziness or wackiness, no real tech scene, not on the scale of SF or Seattle, no sense of early adoption (not very many people has iPhones in Canada because of the draconian cell phone contracts), the idea that neighborhoods are far away doesn't exist in Vancouver because the traffic isn't nearly as bad as it is here, not even 1/10 as much fog as SF, etc.
Your impressions of Vancouver are dated by about 5 years. A lot has changed over the last few years with the Olympics, Canada Line, BC Place renovation, Convention Centre, Shangri-La being built, etc.
> There is zero night life in Vancouver, and a few very good restaurants (but a lot of great sushi restaurants, much better than SF).
The problem with Vancouverites is that they just like to complain about the bad nightlife even though it is actually fairly vibrant. I have lived in Vancouver for about 15 years now and most of that time I've lived downtown. I can go into almost any bar and hug the bartender. There is a good live music night almost every night of the week. (Guilt & Co, Railway, Commodore, Media Club, Orpheum)
> Downtown is practically dead by 8pm, which is nice. Granville Street which should be like Market Street, is instead almost like a dead street, Robson has a lot of tourists, but no real culture except coffee shops.
Granville and Robson are the tourist trap and drunk college kids strip. Gastown is usually packed on Friday and Saturday nights with drunk 19 year olds. Most of the locals hang out in Gastown, Yaletown, or South Main depending on your scene preference.
The sushi in Gastown is garbage, but Yaletown probably has better sushi than the rest of Canada and the US combined (Ki Isu, Honjin, Bistro Sakana, Minami, Blue Water, Hapa Izakaya).
You are essentially saying SF is bigger than Vancouver, which it is. Of course there is more of everything in SF.
Have you ever lived on the East Coast though? The differences between the actually "culture" is dramatic. It seems though that most of the people objecting to my comment only have experience on the west coast, and therefore see the differences in the cities instead of how - in reality - how similar they are, at least when compared to the eastern half of the continent.
BTW, here in Vancouver everyone I know has an iPhone, including me.
Nope - San Francisco is not much bigger. San Francisco has 800K people. Vancouver has 600K.
(It is true that there are much more people in Bay Area versus the greater Vancouver area.)
I've lived in both cities. Vancouver is basically the San Francisco of Canada. But it lacks the defiantly weird spirit of San Francisco. The insane wealth that's pumped through the city from nearby tech zillionaires does play a role, because it gives 20-year-olds really high incomes, even though they spend a lot of it on rent. But in NYC or Toronto people would be spending that money on status possessions, not constructing snail-cars that shoot fire.
And everyone having an iPhone? That was 2007 in the Bay Area.
Vancouver does have virtues of its own. The OP talks about SF's culture of fitness, but I did not notice that so much -- it's nothing compared to Vancouver. People in Vancouver have excellent work-life balance. They put in a decent effort at work, more or less 9-5, but do two different sports in their spare time. People in Vancouver look like they're 25 when they're 35. People in SF stay mentally young for longer, but the job stress tends to wear down on them. When I moved from Vancouver to SF I noticed how tired everybody looked.
(It is true that there are much more people in Bay Area versus the greater Vancouver area.)
Yeah, it's bigger. People don't stay within local municipal boundaries. Don't be ridiculous. Nobody in their right mind would argue that Vancouver and SF are the same size.
I've lived in both cities.
Great, but have you lived out east? Because that is what I'm comparing. I recognize there are differences between each city. Of course there are. What I'm saying is that there is a definite "vibe" that is shared by each of the cities on the coast, (even Portland and San Deigo have it) that is simply different from the average each coast city.
I have absolutely no interest in moving to San Francisco, and I only happened to glance at this article because it was so highly voted on Hacker News.
Boy am I glad I did. I still don't care about living in San Francisco, but I am in awe of your amazing blog-writing skills. This is not a book or newspaper article: it falls solidly within the typical boundaries of a blog article, talking about own experiences and opinions on a matter of interest to him and his neighbors. But so WELL written! The amount of detail, the little touches like pictures that reflect, illustrate, and even extend each point being made... I could only aspire to someday be able to write like this. I've bookmarked it under "examples of great journalism" as an exemplar of the "blog post" writing style.
Thank you for writing this and spending the time (it must have taken a good deal of time) to make the presentation so polished.
I'm sure they were there, but I managed not to be distracted by them, perhaps because the breadth and depth of the content caused me to skim somewhat (read quickly).
Here's one that I don't see discussed much:
The tech meetup culture isn't that great.
In other cities with moderately sized tech communities (Seattle, Portland, Austin...) the user group communities are a strong social force - it's how people collaborate, and how they share skill and technology news.
In SF, people are too busy working late at their well-funded post-startup jobs to go hang out and talk about code as a craft. So everything is siloed by company, and you get the Google Way and the Apple Way and whatever from the various places that people worked together, and knowledge only moves as quickly as people can get poached from one company and brought into another.
Also meetups here suck because most of the people in the tech scene aren't really that fun to be around. I've been to a few launches and it was nothing but the following: 1) people inflating their egos talking about worthless metrics, how many exits they've been a part of, and how what they're doing now is changing the world (guess what, it's not), 2) people just looking to be a part of the "it" crowd of SV, 3) people looking to find some engineer dumb enough to be their tech guy and execute the idea they have for a paltry equity stake.
I've definitely noticed that. It's strange going from talking to a bunch of Java meetup people who are well versed in the history of the language and know how Spring and dependency injection took Java by storm and a ton of other things like that - to talking to Googlers who often don't even know what it is, don't know the benefits, and fight to keep it out of projects.
There used to be very regular meetups - like SFBeta, SVASE meetups, etc. These were actually lively before YC got huge - I believe that this is in part YCs fault in that people are really focued on getting into YC, as opposed to the meetup networking that people went after.
It would be great if YC threw a monthly meetup at 111 Minna.
I used to live in San Francisco for about 4 years (1998 to 2002) and for a few months over those 4 years I lived south and north of the city. I say this very literally, that I rather be homeless in San Francisco than live anywhere around it. Its an amazing city that has given me a lot (and taken a lot in a fair trade). The most amazing aspect of this city, in my opinion, is that its where all the American 'rejects' end up in. In those years the start up scene was different than today and not everybody around you was in a start up. But most of those who were not native and not in a start up were those that didn't quite fit in in their home state and though they'd find acceptance in San Francisco. Most of them did. Its probably one of the most tolerant city in the States where most people there have a passport and are well travelled. Yes its expensive, but you do get what you pay for. The same applies to any big city like London, New York, Tel Aviv etc.
Although I'm no longer a local, here are a few culinary pro tips: if you are a sushi lover, you must visit Ebisu in the Sunset (http://www.ebisusushi.com). If you fancy a good pint of Guinness, Oreily's pub in North Beach is a must (and they make a beef and Guinness soup that is just insane).
Oh US and your complaining about taxes. "You leave with ONLY 65% of your income after paying taxes". In Denmark you pay 60% in taxes, so you leave with 40% of your income in your pocket. And petrol is now more than $10/US gallon.
On the plus side, you get considerably more for it (I don't regret moving from California to Denmark myself). For example, healthcare is included in that price, whereas in the US you have to pay for it separately. If you subtract what you'd have to pay in the U.S. for healthcare premiums + copay, your takehome pay goes down considerably, especially if you're older than ~40, a freelancer / small businessperson who isn't part of a corporate group plan, or have a family. And the public transportation infrastructure is also much better in Denmark, at least in Copenhagen; it's much easier to get by in Copenhagen without owning a car than it is in the Bay Area. Also, university is free, so nobody has student loans (another thing that reduces many Americans' real takehome paychecks). Actually, better than free: university students are paid a small stipend to cover their living expenses.
I'm less annoyed by the level of taxation in California than the fact that, despite paying it, the money doesn't suffice to buy you health care, higher education, or good transit. If those were different I'd be happy to pay 50% more! (Also, you don't really pay an effective 60% tax in Denmark unless you make quite a lot of money. I make a decent professional salary and paid <40% overall.)
The problem isn't so much that the taxes are high, it's that the money is wasted. I think that if Americans saw a (domestic) example of high taxes being used in a productive manner, they would be much more open to the idea of a Scandinavian style cradle-to-grave system.
But as long as the states with high taxation are poster children for governmental dysfunction, there will be a palpable opposition to taxation. And that's why people who live in states like Texas (where there is no income tax, personal or business) enjoy having a small government so much.
Damn, that sucks. Are there any other big states that have more favorable tax laws?
The problem with Texas is that the growing Hispanic population is going to lead to it turning into another California in the next 10 to 15 years. It'll turn blue and the taxes will skyrocket.
Depends strongly on the area, with probably more focus than in the U.S. on whether the company will produce either scientific or cultural innovation in addition to profits, because many of the funds come from nonprofits or state initiatives. There is a lot of seed funding for companies that can show they'll produce a scientific impact, through either state-funded "research commercialization" grants (where a company will propose to turn academic research into a product), or through quasi-charitable private initiatives like http://www.novo.dk/composite-364.htm
There is also a ton of arts funding, much larger than in the U.S. on a per-capita basis, to the extent that it bleeds over into funding tech companies too. For example, Playdead (makers of Limbo) got their initial ~$150k in funding from the Danish Film Institute, and I know two founders with seed funding from the Nordic Game Program.
The western European model seems great if you want a life safely doing what has always been done.
And the American model seems great if you're part of the small percentage who are not merely differently but excellently different. Further problem: if everyone's special, no-one is.
You wouldn't understand the complaint unless you move here (I moved from a "high tax" country to SF).
The taxes are still high (any claims that the US is low tax are inherently just BS spouted by people who don't understand taxes) but you get nothing in return. That's the problem.
OP, did you honestly not know how expensive it was, as well as a few of these other points in the article? I would be shocked if that's the case. Most of the items in the post are pretty well-known things about the San Fran area. More or less, the title is a bit of link bait, and I doubt most of you don't already know these things about San Fran (or the bay area, for that matter).
It has been getting more expensive quickly, so no, most people don't know how expensive it is. In particular, the rental situation is now back to 1999 levels of crazy.
As to many of the rest, they were exactly the things that I was surprised by when I moved here, and they are things I hear about from noobs all the time.
When I moved here I took a 6 month lease, since that was the cheapest option - my apartment building has a weird rent pricing structure. When it was up to renewal, they raised my rent $500 from $2400 to $2900 (for an 11 month lease, which was the cheapest option). I'll probably be moving when this lease is up.
How much of that is just that when you move to a place, these sorts of differences are conversation starters?
When I decided to move I was painfully aware of the cost of living and housing issues. They factored heavily into my decision and I made sure the numbers added up. When I got here, did I still complain about it to anyone who'd ask, and some who didn't? You bet.
Also, though by the time I got to SF I had been out west for a while already, let's not forget that for many of us east coasters, complaining is a big part of the culture. :-)
No way, last time I went to SF it was $20 for two burritos. Compare to $10 at Roberto's in Mission Beach, and they don't put sour cream in the carne asada...
Nick's Crispy Tacos around Nob Hill. The prices seemed in line with the rest of SF though. IIRC, they charged extra for guac, and added cheese -- on a carne asada burrito! Which should never have anything but meat, guac and pico de gallo.
A carne asada burrito can have anything on it. If america has proved anything its that we can take anything in your culture, completely change it, and still call it by your name.
With that logic, no one should write anything. Living here for a year, I was happy to read this piece. Everyone knows the cost of living is sky high. But unless you have to pay it, research it, live it, it's higher than most people expect. I knew i'd be paying up the ass, but when i saw the 2k+ for my studio, it was still an eye opener. Things like the divisidero being the fog line is actually pretty important. Muni having to step down, and china town being a bottle neck, may be picked up quickly, but it's still nice to know if you're moving here. Majority of article is accurate, and half of it were not known to me before moving here.
As someone interested in languages and dialects, these types of things interest me immensely.
In Vancouver, Canada, we call it "San Fran", as well. I don't know anybody there that would even recognise it if it was called "Frisco" much less "The Bay (Area)", unless more context was given.
Only rappers say "Frisco" any more, probably because it's easy to rhyme. The most common abbreviation I hear is simply "SF" for San Francisco itself. "East Bay" for Oakland, Alameda, Berkeley. etc. "The Peninsula" or "The Valley" for anywhere south of SF and "Bay Area" for the whole thing.
I also hear "The City" for San Francisco often enough to find myself using it on occasion (Something I vowed I'd never do after bristling at my friends using the appellation for NYC when I lived in the Northeast).
I think everyone who lives near a major city calls that city "The City" in everyday conversation. I live near NYC, and I do it in reference to Manhattan. (Less so the other parts of NYC, such as Queens and the Bronx.)
Other commenters have pointed out that almost every major metro area gets called "the city" by its suburbanites, and that matches my observations of at least Seattle, DC, and Nashville. I've lived outside Seattle for 5.5 years and routinely hear it called "the city" by both locals and transplants.
In Santa Cruz we typically called it "SF", or else the full "San Francisco". Didn't hear anybody use "San Fran" or "Frisco", and "The City" was too nonspecific.
No. I've been living here for 15 years and the rent increase in the last 1.5 years has shocked everyone. I thought it the worst was during the dotcom bubble and my rent went from 1900 to 2300/month for a 2ba/2ba, but I've seen some rents go up $1000/month in the last year, and 2br/2ba in SOMA is $4k/month.
Rent control only applies to buildings that were built before a certain year (is it 1989, I think?). For newer buildings, they can raise your rent as much as they want.
When I first moved to the Bay Area, I got a 40% pay increase, but I calculated at least a 50% increase in cost of living (coming from Salt Lake City), and that was moving to the East Bay.
Some days I'm sad I moved away (Denver), other days I'm happy to own a home for a lower payment than my rent in the Bay Area.
The nice thing about having both pay and cost of living go up: when everything gets more expensive, it becomes that much more effective to live frugally, and you still get a net increase. For the example you gave, if you get a 40% pay increase and your cost of living goes up by 50%, that's still a net win as long as your previous cost of living started out as less than 80% of your income.
I got a 75% increase, and I was making a decent (high 5 figures) wage for where I came from. My wife, who is sorta non-tech (she's a project manager) eeked out a 20% increase.
For me, expenses are definitely up. And things like rent are a far bigger percentage of my pay than they once were. As a whole, my savings is a lower percentage but still a much higher dollar amount.
Edit:
It took me some time to realize what kind of negotiating position i was in. If you're a software engineer, unless you die to work in a seed-round startup, you can get paid. I find that people think the median is lower than it actually is. I'd put it around 120-140k.
I was better off in the I received several large raises while I was there. It was actually my first job out of college so it was a bit of a jumping off point for me. I was better off in that sense than had I stayed where I was.
Hearing about how expensive it is to live out here is much different than getting here and confronting the reality of it. I had heard (and seen) how expensive rent was, but I was blown away when I got here to have the rent + parking + taxes + food costs all compounded. There's a lot of things you don't take into account into you're actually in it. In addition, in the year and a half I've been here, rents have increased significantly and continue to be on the rise.
I've been out here a year and a half- when I moved, I knew things would be pricier, but not this bad. Going straight from college in upstate NY (where I paid $300/mo for my share of a huge suburban house with some friends) to here (where I paid $1500/mo for half of a smallish Soma 2-bedroom), I definitely experienced a bit of sticker-shock.
Sounds like Rochester pricing. I miss it sometimes --$1000 for a 3 bedroom with a garage and a backyard, in a nice neighborhood near Highland Park, a nice bike commute to RIT or downtown. Too bad about the job situation up there, though it's getting better.
Small world. I am in the Bay Area for a stint currently, but have a house in Rochester a block away from Highland Park. I'm seriously considering basing a company in Rochester since the cost of living is so reasonable and the quality of life is high. I'm not convinced it makes sense to be in the Bay Area unless you're trying for VC funding or have some other connection to the area. Rochester has the Public Market, Wegmans, Eastman School concerts, The Little, Geva shows, bike and hiking trails, four distinct seasons, a well-educated community, a handful of great restaurants, and the list goes on. It's a metropolitan region at low cost, and just a cheap flight or (long) drive away from New York or Boston. Perfect for bootstrapping. I wish more people would stay.
Rent control. A lot of people are living/stuck in apartments and paying much, much less in rent. The high rent only applies to new people moving in, and I'd suspect that less new non-tech people are moving in these days.
1. You live somewhere defective. Now, "defective" is relative and can simply mean "inconvenient" (looong commutes) or it can be an area that's kinda uncool, ugly, subject to crime, constantly overcast, devoid of the interesting stores, subject to drive-by mariachi music attacks, etc.
2. Roommates. You live with someone else.
3. You were grandfathered in, either by owning property or by having a lease which (as a result of city law) essentially grants you immunity to rising rents. Lucky you.
The same way they do in every large city - they sacrifice. They get roommates and do more with less. They live in places that are shunned by others because of industry or crime. At least, that's what I see here in NYC. It shocked me how someone could sell fruit and still live here. But they do it.
I was amused by point "SF is a super fit city." As someone who lives in Boulder, CO and frequently visits SF, I feel like SF has a lot of out of shape people compared to Boulder. Guess it's all relative.
haha totally is. I moved to SF from Pittsburgh, a home of cold winters, hot summers, and greasy foods. I felt like I didn't see an obese person for the first 6 months of living here, but it was all relative to what I was used to seeing on a regular basis.
Welcome to the West Coast. I went from Seattle to DC and they sure do love their sports out East. Even the nicest restaurant in town has a wall of TVs displaying football. Every restaurant is a sports bar.
Regarding the weather, most people don't realise that SF is cold. Sunny, but cold. It's not LA. Bring a sweater.
I moved from Seattle to SF and one big difference I noticed is that people are waaay friendlier here in SF than they were in Seattle. It's so much easier to get to know new people here. I think part of the reason for that is that almost nobody in SF is actually from SF. Everybody you meet grew up somewhere else, so people seem much more open to getting to know new folks. This is particularly true as a guy trying to meet girls. "Seattle Freeze" is a real thing.
As a San Francisco native, I can say that this is the single best post of its kind that I have ever read. I wouldn't change a thing, except to add the pro tip that you should never, under any circumstances, call it "San Fran".
Palo Alto and Mountain View are farther away than you think
The 3 things you need to know about MUNI (Google Maps is never right about what time the bus will come; Half of the buses require you to step down into the steps to get the back door to open; Chinatown is a bottleneck on any route going through it)
There are tons of amazing views
Startup Central is in SoMa
SF is a super fit city
If you’re a foodie, welcome to heaven
The 3 hour time zone difference is a big deal
Watching sports matters a lot less
Everything is taken to the extreme
You’ll turn into an early adopter even if you weren’t one before
It is, but so are salaries, even in non tech fields. I have a friend in town from Atlanta and I was explaining the benefit of this to her last night: a lot of big-purchase items have retail prices set at a national level, so things like bicycles, television, musical instruments, etc., feel a lot less expensive here than they do in other places.
I commuted to Mountain View from San Francisco on Caltrain. It is doable, but it gets old pretty quick.
Also those sports fans that the OP say don't exist much? They all take Caltrain to go to the ballpark at peak commute hours during the season. Also, they allow alcohol on Caltrain. Imagine a packed train full of orange and black with lots of alcohol.
With the coming electrification of Caltrain in preparation for high speed rail though, hopefully they'll be faster and more frequent service.
Depends a lot on when you go and where you're coming from.
From my house in the Mission, right now Palo Alto is 30-minute drive that traffic has bumped up to 61 minutes. The next train takes 25 minutes on BART to get to Millbrae plus another 34 minutes on Caltrain with a 19-minute wait in between. That's on a limited; a local train would take even longer. Mountain View is another 10-15 minutes away.
Having lived here for quite a while, I think the author has it right: those places feel pretty far.
Caltrain isn't bad headed south in the morning, although getting to Caltrain can be a real PITA, however. Coming north in rush hour, things get uglier.
I commuted from the Mission to Cupertino (MV station) for three years on Caltrain. Wouldn't recommend it.
It's around 38minutes if you catch the 'bullet' train. I think the regular train is a little over an hour, although this doesn't include the time to actually get to the train station.
Yeah - it always takes longer to get to and from the station too. Sometimes it's hard to justify whether it is worth it! Personally I use ZipCar when I need to head down there now (which to be honest is rarely).
Yeah, I'm in palo alto now - but kind of want to move to SF. The crazy rent/finding a place and commute issue serve as a pretty strong resisting force though.
Meanwhile, NFL Sundays will never be the same as 10am kickoffs is something I don’t think I’ll ever get used to.
Born and raised in Seattle. Some of my fondest memories growing up were rolling out of bed at 9:45 and sitting down to watch some football in my underwear with a bowl of cereal in my lap. (In college, sweatpants replaced underwear and screwdrivers replaced the cereal.) Now I live in D.C. and it's weird that there's nothing on until the afternoon and you can stay up until midnight watching football.
Try being a (American) football fan in Europe. Some games start at 2am, watching the Super Bowl usually involves me taking the next day off work as the game usually ends around 4am.
I lived for several years in Japan, too. The games start at 3 a.m. there and go until the early afternoon--but on Monday. So there was a lot of furtive checking scores online around the office and extended lunch breaks when word got out that a game was close late.
On the plus side, the Super Bowl is on Monday morning so the day becomes a de facto federal holiday for American expats.
All of my friends who have lived on both the east and west coast absolutely prefer west coast football times. I find it difficult to stay up until midnight or 1 AM watching Sunday or Monday night football and make it to work the next day. I feel sorry for those who attend the games. On Sunday mornings, there is no time to kill before the games start, and the local teams usually kick off at 1 PM.
SF is surprisingly hostile to late night music for a city of its size. The DNA Lounge blog is a good window into what it's like to own a club in SF. Here's a classic post where jwz compares SF to Austin after attending SXSW for the first time:
http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2009/03/16.html
This is by far my biggest gripe with SF .Sometimes I want to carouse until 4am and follow that up Korean food. Unfortunately, that's impossible San Frisco.
Where in San Francisco? It's my understanding that rent continues to go up in basically every part of the city, and it's even incredibly expensive outside the city.
No. The rent on new leases is going up, due to low supply and high demand, but also extremely low turnover. So people generally look for rooms, not full apartments.
In this way, housing is regulated in SF through social factors on the low end (i.e. whether your personality and your interests bring something positive to a household), and price on the high end.
I pay $680 a month for my room in the heart of the Mission, mainly because I'm an open-minded guy, and my roommates needed someone tolerant, willing to abide by certain rules (in my case, no meat in the house) and conscientious about shared space, which is more rare than you'd think.
If you're single and you feel the need to rent your own apartment, I just can't relate to you. I don't get it. I feel like living down the peninsula is a better option for people who feel like they need that much personal space.
I lived on roughly the same salary the first year I lived in SF. I was 24 at the time, and it was fine because I was working non-stop and didn't have much of a life, but I wouldn't want to do it again for long periods of time.
I'm 24 and don't work most of the time, hence the lower salary, and I still manage to go out a lot and enjoy the city.
There's just so much free or cheap entertainment here, you don't need a car, and it's usually sunny enough that if you get bored, just walking around is a pretty viable option. Living here doesn't have to be expensive, people just make it that way.
> Pro Tip: Oakland gets a bad rap, but there’s tons of great concerts and other events there worth checking out.
Or, you know, the multitude of world-class restaurants and great bars such as: Chez Panisse, Gather, Boot & Shoe, Cafe Van Kleef, Claremont, Heart & Dagger, etc.
Yes. SF is not a very family-friendly city: the cost of living is high, transportation can be difficult, the schools are not great, and there are many homeless people and "crazies".
Apparently, San Francisco has the lowest percentage (13%) of children of any major city in the country.
It gets cold at night not because of fog, but because of lack of humidity. Same reason the desert is like that. Same reason the surface of the moon is 107°C during the day and -153°C at night.
Most of the bay area is chaparral. The Central Valley is generally ten to twenty degrees hotter than the coastal areas during the summer. The hot air literally sucks the cold wet marine air inland right across SF during most summer days.
That is why the best SF weather is early spring and late fall when the temperature difference between the Central Valley and the SF Bay Area is minimal, and their is much less fog.
When the summer sun goes down, the fog evaporates in the dry air and the temperature drops.
Not my area of expertise, but from my understanding fog is a "local" phenomena, not large enough to dramatically effect temperatures the way that atmospheric pressure / humidity can.
I lived in San Jose and Palo Alto from 2002-2005. Moved to NYC and have been there since. Two things I would add:
-SF (vs say NYC,Boston,Chicago) is a one industry town and is therefore a boom and bust town. When I moved there right after the bubble burst the guy who sold me my car was a former dev. Many of you only know the good times, and it won't be like this forever. That's not to say its a great place and I don't miss it.
- The cost of housing on the peninsula and to some extent the east bay is almost as bad as SF. When you are reqdy to have a family, at least in NYC you can live in a nice house in Westchester or NJ. Or a really nice modern condo for half the price of NY. You can't get a nice place with a good school district by going further away from SF, it's like prices get even worse the further south you go until you are way past San Jose.
I haven't been here for very long, but I can't say it's a "common sight" to see flip phones at coffee shops. :)
On a more serious note, I have to agree with the bit about being a "pro-dog" city. I am constantly amazed at the number of dogs on the Muni, dogs in parks, dogs tied up outside of stores/restaurants, etc.
I've lived in both places. Back in college I also lived with someone who was allergic. That changes my reaction a bit, I think. It makes the people who bring their dogs on transit, to the bar or to the supermarket look like jerks.
Having kids has also changed my perspective on this. I've been taking my kids to a sports field near a playground for the past few years, and so far, the incidence of off leash dogs has been 100%, even though there is a dedicated off leash space right next door. Most of the dogs have been very friendly, but occasionally you do get an unknown very large and powerful off leash dog bounding up to a 3 foot tall kid. This is all next to a well posted sign about leash laws, though I have never seen any enforcement.
I've heard this is frustrating for other dog owners as well. There are a lot of people whose dogs need to be socialized better and they try to keep them on leash, and it's pretty much impossible to go to an open space without off leash dogs.
I'm still 100% in favor of creating a lot of excellent off leash areas, and most dog owners are considerate. But it does frustrate me that enforcement is so lax that there is pretty much nowhere in SF that isn't used as an off leash area.
BTW, if you're moving to SF, "dog wars" are definitely something you'll get used to. Lots of emotion in SF around this one.
I was getting ready to roll up my sleeves and begin critiquing on how it was wrong (how could a kid who has been here 9 months know anything blah blah blah), but this is actually a very excellent article. He pretty much hits it right on the head, and I've lived in this area for 15 years now.
SF is nice. I spent time living in different areas along the peninsula, but definitely enjoyed living more toward the south, like in Mountain View or Sunnyvale. Easy access to SF or SJ. Lower rent. Easier access to good hiking at Rancho San Antonio, easy drive to Santa Cruz.
If you are more interested in the economical aspect, or you're an entrepreneur who wants to move to SF, this is how me and my co-founders lived with 1.1k/month in San Francisco, including the rent.
Rents are more expensive now, but you can still find workarounds. At the time I remember we didn't have lots of comforts (if any!) but we were happy with it. We landed in SF from Italy, and had to survive somehow while living the dream.
I don't suggest doing this for a long period of time though, except if you're happy and really don't care. Personally, I didn't.
I live in the Tenderloin, and it's not that bad. Sure there are a lot of homeless people and drug addicts in the area . As a 24 y/o white male, I have not felt threatened by any of the "sketchy" people here. In fact, most here are very polite saying "excuse me", "be careful with leaving your phone out", and "do you need help with that?". San Francisco is just a friendly place in general. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_cities_by_crime_r...
Basically the tenderloin is the ugly model. Yeah it's the worst model but still a model. And since the price is half of anywhere else in the city, it's worth it.
It had a similar feel to Palo Alto for me. At least in the area I live now. In fact, the biking/walking seems to be slightly better. It feels like the beginnings of a tech and startup community are forming and I am kind of hoping I can be a big contributor to that. The city is investing massively in the area to promote tech and startups.
And the biggest factor for me was cost of living. I own for (far) less than 1 bedroom rent in Palo Alto or San Francisco (with my 20% down payment of course): 2000 sq/ft 3 story condo on the river for less than a grand a month. I pretty much went months without using my car too, walking and biking only.
I saw PBR in wholefoods the other day here in Portland, OR. I was kind of shocked. I always considered PBR to be on par with Milwaukee's Best... In other words, nasty cheap beer that people only drink to get drunk.
I thought most of the article was pretty spot on, except for the PBR being the drink of SF.
PBR is all over hipster bars in the Mission, but there are plenty of places where you can't get it (most bars in the rest of the city). The true drink of SF in my opinion is Fernet, which is heavily consumed by long time San Franciscans. Fernet has a long history in the Bay Area (SF is even listed in the Wikipedia page on Fernet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernet), and surprisingly it is stocked in almost every bar. I've personally had it in everywhere from the Kabuki movie theatre to bars in North Beach to the Mission.
the "distance from mountain view" was spot on. when i moved here to work for google, i was debating between living in the city and commuting, or living in mountain view and going up to the city to do stuff. thankfully, i'd spent nine months living in mountain view a few years ago, and knew that, realistically "going up to the city" would never happen (i don't drive); if i wanted to be in san francisco after work i pretty much had to live there.
so far, while the commute is a bit painful (45 minutes going to work, 70-90 coming back), i have no regrets about deciding to live in sf.
Tenderloin is the shittiest places I've ever seen.
Local poor people stick on tourists and try to rip you off.
Go one street below of Market, you'll see junkies injecting heroin to their arms.
There is no street that can be called as "the heart of the downtown".
Cafes get close on 6 or 7pm.
The ocean is fucked up by some industrial shit. and the people think "it's ok".
The transportation is fucked up.
Streets are big and straight. Nothing smells historical or romantic.
Rents are crazy. I saw an apartment in a shitty neighboorhood for 1450$ per month and I even don't leave a dog in that kind of small and unhealthy place with no sunlight!
Hope I'm not repeating something already mentioned in this large discussion, but here's another thing to add to that list:
Once you live in San Francisco for a few years, it will become difficult to move elsewhere. You get used to all the cons mentioned. You will start loving running in the 6pm chill, the cultural diversity and the intellectual similarity, the feeling of living in slightly in the future compared to the rest of the world...
The only critique I have: PBR is the hipster brew of choice everywhere especially here in NYC and up in Portland... BUT in SF there is a healthy dose of Tecate as well.
In fact what sets SF hipsters apart from their peers is that they drink Tecate (and modelo).
Anyway I'd call it a Tecate town. Really miss the stuff here in NYC... $2 at delirium, those were the days
I might be a little late to the party, but if you're in San Francisco or looking to move here, you should really attend a San Francisco Hacker News event. We throw movies, meetups, poker games, dinners, and soon to be hackathons.
Wonders how anyone can live without being in the tech industry... then chooses not to buy local..
You are making things a lot harder on the families of SF that have been here for a long time by not shopping local.. please think of that next time you order on amazon from your soma office.
Buy local is the biggest crock (with one exception: if you honestly and truly believe the food is better quality). It causes a net loss for society. Consumers can't purchase as many goods, and the goods being purchased are not being produced as efficiently as the 'non-locals' version. Which means your groceries cost more every week then they would have otherwise.
http://mises.org/daily/5283/The-BuyLocal-Canard
Ah, a personal attack against the organization whom hosts the article and yet complete avoidance of any consideration of the points made in the article, so refreshing. </sarcasm>
The problem is that the article isn't worth even reading because of the source.
It's like linking to the AEI or Heritage Foundation or some US Chamber of Commerce stuff. You know what you're going to get, and there's no point wasting cycles.
Regardless of the source (I didn't read it), there are some good arguments for buying non-local, non-organic being better for the environment. Efficient farms use less land to produce the same amount of food. Taxing carbon and pollution appropriately would allow lowest price to correctly indicate what is best for society, including environmental concerns.
Very thorough write-up, and, as a longtime SF resident, I concur most of it is accurate.
One thing I want to add is that even if you aren't into startups when you get here, there is a great chance that you'll get swept up into the tech industry by sheer osmosis.
Well, of course it's going to come as a big shock coming from Boston, because I don't consider Boston to be a "big city." I was born and raised in Los Angeles, I lived in San Francisco for a while, and now I live in New York City--Brooklyn, specifically. Much of what you said applies to New York, too.
I don't agree with the weather thing. I've been to Boston where it was 60 during the day and in the low 30s at night, and San Francisco will never, ever get as cold as Boston does during the winter. Hell, it doesn't even really snow in SF except for a few weird flukes in the past.
Rent, cost of living, etc. is the same in NYC, too, which is fast becoming a startup city.
I find it interesting that Boston often gets the rub of being a "small city". It certainly is when compared to New York or LA, but when looking at the metro area it's on par with San Francisco: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistica...
Not that there's anything wrong with being a small city!
I think it's because most people don't really consider the metropolitan area to have anything to do with the city itself. For New York, parts of Jersey and Connecticut count as the metropolitan area, but you'd never say New York and mean New Haven.
With that in mind, Boston is 600k or so people, which is tiny in city terms.
That has nothing to do with the actual size of Boston. That's a political artifact more than anything else, as neighborhoods around Boston didn't want to get annexed around the turn of the century. Boston's continuous urban population, which includes Cambridge, Brookline, etc. is over 4 million.
Having lived in Atlanta, Boston is a much bigger city despite Atlanta having a population of 4 million within it's proper city limits. That's why you never use city population over metro area or continuous urban population statistics to determine actual city size.
4 million? That seems like a lot. As a New Yorker formally from Boston, I tend to think of the city as the places that the subway can get you. Coming from wikipedia:
Actually, there's quite a few, if you you by what you get get to via the subway. That means Everett, Braintree, Quincy, Newton, Medford and several others.
But there's a more systematic way city size is measured: MSA and CSA. Boston's MSA ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston-Cambridge-Quincy,_MA-NH_... ) is 4.5 million, with 4 million being defined as "urban" population. These are all places served by MBTA (which claims to serve 5 million).
Now, the main issue in the way you're looking at it is that those of us from the northeast have an entirely different view of what "urban" is. There are places in the center of Atlanta that have laughable density compared to any northern city, and the Atlanta subway system serves maybe half a million people. And yet Atlanta has a metro population of 5 million with an urban population of 4 million. The threshold for urban is very low compared to what we're used to.
The truth is that the vast majority of American cities feel like they're mostly suburban sprawl. Yes, Boston is dwarfed in size by NYC, LA and Chicago, but Boston is also roughly the same size as SF, DC and Miami. And no matter what the statistics of city-limits population say, it's has more people and is more densely populated than most other cities in the country, including San Diego, Minneapolis, Charlotte, Detroit and Seattle.
As I recall, it's the 5th largest CSA, 10th largest MSA and 4th most densely populated city in the country.
Yeah, it probably has to do with what we consider urban, or feel to be urban.
The MSA for New York includes places no one would ever consider parts of NYC -- if I'm out on long island or in connecticut I'm not in the city. Just like if you're out in the Boston suburbs you're not really in Boston/Cambridge.
If it really is technically 4 million that's cool, but when I'm in Boston it doesn't feel like a city of 4 million. Just like NYC doesn't feel like a city of 19 million, even if that's what its MSA is.
Boston feels like a small place, just like SF. Nothing wrong with that, it just is what it is.
Marin headlands is one of the most beautiful places to go when you are there. For someone from the east coast, walking along those dramatic cliffs was very exciting. My wife and I imagined we were in Scotland!
All of you can always move down here to Miami (South Florida). I actually live in Fort Lauderdale across the street from the beach. I do a lot of work in Miami.
For the price you pay for a tiny apartment in NYC you can live VERY well down here. Of course, Florida is crazy.. :) Not to mention you lose your net connection when a storm flies by.
And if you in tech, spanish is a must. Since much of the tech work here is linked to South America. The one exception is medical. Though there is a fair amount of banking work down here too.
Of course you'd be living outside the bubble. That brings it's own drawbacks.
Not mentioned is one of the great San Francisco treats: THE EXPLORATORIUM. http://www.exploratorium.edu. The Exploratorium is moving in April from the old facility near the Palace of Fine Arts to a more central location on the waterfront. While it's a great place for family and kids, it's also a great place for the rest of us. And, in the new location there will be more events like the popular date night "after dark" gatherings. And if you've got spare cash, donations are always welcome.
The really big point to consider, IMO, is within SFBA -- there are huge differences among SF, Peninsula, and East Bay, and variations within each of those as well. I personally put SF below many other places in the US to live, but really like the Peninsula -- the big issues being crazy California-level politics/taxes/regulations and really high cost of living (mainly, housing and tax; fixing zoning issues would bring down housing prices, and fixing prop 13).
While I agree with you in that San Francisco is nowhere near "global city" status (I don't know what people are thinking when they say stuff like this), unfortunately this is where most of the tech world is. So you're going to get articles like this.
The funny thing is, the food here really isn't that great, the coffee is also average at best, but these are all relative to the rest of the US.
As for the high cost of living, try looking at it from a different angle. Instead of thinking about how much more you can get for your money elsewhere, ask why are all those other places worth so much less.
I'm not saying the math adds up to you needing to move to SF, NY, Boston, or other city. But this post helps explain why SF is valued so highly by the many people who choose to live in here.
Thanks for all the great info, it's very helpful for someone like me, who's gonna come to the SF area the first time in march (attending / giving a talk at GTC San Jose 2013).
One more question, is there something like a weekly pass for the Caltrain, such that I could visit SF in the evenings after conference?
(Note: You'll need to acquire and use a Clipper Card to use 8-ride tickets, see https://www.clippercard.com/ClipperWeb/index.do - or just go to a Walgreens when you get here and you can buy the card and the 8-ride ticket at the same time.)
The 8-ride ticket was recently nerfed+. The discount is smaller, and you have to use all 8 rides within 30 days now instead of 60-90-whateveritwas. So if you're going up and back at least once a week, it's a small savings, but if you miss even one ride then you've probably wiped out several 8-rides' worth of savings.
I think they're doing a paper-ticket surcharge anyway so get the Clipper card, and consider paying with Clipper-loaded cash value instead.
(+ They were planning to get rid of 8-rides entirely and making it paper-ticket or 25c-discount-for-Clipper in something that amounted to a stealth fare hike - of course they denied that was the main motive).
Does anyone have the time to do a similar writeup for the tech scene in and around LA? I'm probably going to be doing the move from Boston-LA myself in just a few months.
Perhaps you should write that after you make the move. :) And even then it would be difficult.
As you likely already know, one thing sure to be on that list is "have a car". Which stems from the reason making such a list would be difficult. LA is so spread apart, what's true for someone on the westside isn't gonna ring as true for someone downtown, to south bay, to OC/irvine (if we're even counting OC/irvine).
lots of tech companies here in LA but due to the lay of the land and 30 mile commutes, they don't mingle as much.
Moved from SF to Manhattan 6 months ago, this characterization is no longer entirely accurate. Manhattan now is barely more expensive than SF, and most of SF is more expensive than most of Brooklyn.
People aren't really aware of just how fast cost of living is going up in SF. Manhattan averaged, what, 5-6% year over year, and we think that's high. Some neighborhoods in SF have experienced >100% YoY rent growth, but more typically in the 30-50% range (seriously!).
It's really insane out there, to an extent most people outside of SF don't know.
Right now in any of the "cool" neighborhoods of SF a studio would be cost comparable to one in the Upper East Side or Chelsea, though you'd probably get a bit more space for your money (not by that much though). It'll be a lot more expensive than any of the gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhoods, but probably slightly cheaper than the real gentrified bastions like Park Slope or Dumbo.
It'll be interesting to see the numbers after this boom, SF certainly is getting a lot more expensive. Latest figures though did put the order: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Honolulu, and then SF:
