> "the current external γ-ray dose rate to a human from the contaminations associated with the 'Taiga' experiment was between 9 and 70 μSv [micro-Sieverts] per week". The report also recommends periodic monitoring of the site was recommended. In comparison, typical exposure from naturally occurring background radiation is about 3mSv per year, or 57μSv per week
As someone who is in this field (work at a company that does secondary market transactions), I'm very curious as to why this explosion of growth is happening. I see two examples that aren't directly related to the articles point of money looking for high growth opportunities in a low interest rate environment
1) Increasing capital in the private market has lead to a decrease in value of this benefit of being public (raising large capital rounds)
2) Decreasing regulatory barriers for participation in the private market
I'm curious as to how other HNers who may work for these companies feel?
I think that this was a really interesting parallel to the natural world. There are two really important questions to be asking when trying to figure out if the exodus of Silicon Valley is temporary or permanent.
1. Is the damage or outside stressors that are causing the exodus permanent? (I really hope not...)
2. Was there a natural cause (repeatable, will continue) for the previous abundance, or was it just momentum and luck that kept Silicon Valley as abundant as it has been.
I'd like to highlight a phrase in the summary here that really stuck out to me. As with some other commenters, it does seem that the judge is not particularly inclined in this argument to side with Epic because it is in the mobile gaming arena, but...
> Fortnite aside, though, Judge Rogers also said she was inclined to agree with Epic's assertion that "there is an uproar in the marketplace about the lack of competition for [distribution of] iPhone apps. You read the papers, I read the papers, it's there." That said, Judge Rogers also suggested this specific case might not be the right one to make that argument, "given the amount of competition for mobile games."
While it looks like this is going to a jury trial, it does leave open a hole for a different kind of app (lets say spotify or tinder (match group)) to try and take a similar argument to court within a different market sector.
I don’t see that. Changing laws because of “uproar in the market” is normal and a good thing (laws serve people, not the other way around), so yes, things may change there.
I also don’t see a need for a judge to signal to lawmakers that laws need to change/be created to react to that uproar. The ball already is rolling there (slowly, as it should. A big benefit of government is that it provides stability)
I am living in SF now and this confirms a very clear pattern that I have seen emerging, particularly of tech workers. I would say that >50% of the people I know who were living in the city have left, or are in the process of leaving. Some examples (there are countless):
1) All three of the roommates that I had are choosing to leave either permanently or temporarily.
2) A friend who works for google who is going on a 6 month road trip in a camper van
3) A friend who is moving to Santa Cruz just to be closer to surf while we are remote
4) A friend who moved home to Australia because of how the US is handling the virus.
5) A friend who is going month to month in different cities, staying in Airbnbs, and still paying less for housing then his one bedroom in the bay area
6) A friend who moved to Austin to live with her sister
What I am seeing here is very clear also. The SIP order has removed many of the greatest parts of SF, the food, the bars, the culture, the density to be able to go anywhere and see your friends easily, and whats left are many of the problems that the city has, trash, homelessness, and exorbitant housing prices.
I've seen the same. The misconception is that people are leaving because the housing is too expensive and its not worth it anymore. Almost everybody I know that moved out had no problem affording housing (high earners / home owners / rent controlled). People are leaving because quality of life has fallen dramatically and the only thing keeping people in SF was their offices.
About half of the tech people I know have moved out. Of those about half have left permanently, the other half are on the fence depending on long term WFH ability / if the city is able to get the quality of life issues under control / plus a lot of complaints about taxes.
-In my 6 unit building in Nob Hill (5 of which are owner occupied). 3 units including myself have moved out permanently. 1x to Austin. 1x to Palm Springs. 1x to East Bay.
-5 of my 6 best friends in rent controlled units have moved out. Mostly to other cities in California. In 10 years living in SF I've never seen people willingly give up rent controlled units like this.
-Other friends that were looking to move to SF that have cancelled those plans. In particular employees at large companies that were impacted by layoffs (Uber).
> The misconception is that people are leaving because the housing is too expensive and its not worth it anymore. Almost everybody I know that moved out had no problem affording housing (high earners / home owners / rent controlled). People are leaving because quality of life has fallen dramatically and the only thing keeping people in SF was their offices.
Whether something is too expensive is not just a function of whether you can afford it. It’s a question of whether it’s worth it at the price being offered. You make make that same conflicting point.
The affluent would simply be first movers in this type of situation as many do not need to time their exits with their leases ending. The cash poor, yet high income tech workers will be the next mass exodus.
If you think SF is a shell of a city now, just wait till 6 months from now.
Only in the short to medium term... the characteristics which make SF an attractive place to live (just like NYC) are resilient and sticky.
If you consider a post-covid world 5 years from now, do you think that SF with it's museums, bars, restaurants, and proximity to nature will be an unattractive place to live?
Do you think that remote-first/remote-only companies where the majority of employees are outside of the bay area will be as competitive with startups which follow a more traditional model in silicon valley?
Both are things I wouldn't bet on. This is a blip. It could be a major blip, but it's a blip nonetheless and those who are betting in the complete other direction are likely to get burned.
Many of the bars, restaurants, and smaller cultural institutions will be gone.
The larger, well-funded museums and nature will stay of course.
But much of what is interesting about a city comes from the people who live there and shape its culture.
The San Francisco of today is very different from 10 or 20 years ago, and will be very different 10 years from now.
This is recoverable, sure, but its not guaranteed, and its absolutely a change of course for this city and others.
I live in Brooklyn and have seen 2-3 business close a week around me. At this point almost every other storefront is vacant (many of which have been since before the pandemic). My hope is that this will bring down commercial real estate prices down significantly and create an opportunity for a lot more small businesses in a year or so, most of which I assume will be restaurants and other "experience" based shops.
The outdoor dining has been a great addition and it looks like it might become permanent [1], which would be a big plus for the city.
There's also a lot more people biking now and I'm hopeful that it will help shape future legislation to make the city even more bike friendly. (I went to 4 different bike shops around me and they were all sold out).
> My hope is that this will bring down commercial real estate prices down significantly
I'm going to predict that this will not happen. More specifically, that it will be unusual in general for rents or prices anywhere to drop any more than 10%.
There's something odd going on and my best guess is that there are (a) accounting/tax practices that provide incentives for vacancy with certain nominal values and (b) real estate markets are now driven more by massive pools of capital trying to soak up opportunities than they are by demand on short-to-mid-term horizons.
But I don't know enough to say for certain and explain how, and I'm hoping that someone can tell me why/how I'm stupid.
The value of land rented is mostly based on the rent that can be charged. Loans which use the land as collateral need the value to stay high in order to roll over (refinance) the loan.
It's conceivably better for major real-estate holders to rent the land out at their preferred rate one or two months in a year, and leave it unoccupied otherwise, than accept reduced rates. The former gives a fig leaf for rental value, which props up the land value, which enables refinance. The latter admits that rental value has dropped, which would lower the land value, which would cause refinancing to fail.
That makes sense, but I'm confused how you make loan payments without tenants paying rent. Not to mention property taxes, maintenance, utilities and other overhead.
Kind of feels like the cliché "make it up in volume" when you're losing money on each transaction.
It's not sustainable indefinitely but most large landlords have significant capital reserves as well as revenue from a diverse portfolio of other properties. So they can afford to take losses on vacant properties for a few years while waiting for the market to recover.
You don't make loan payments; you make interest-only payments and are speculating on future appreciation on the value of the land, a proxy for the local economy.
It's not sustainable indefinitely, but it can go on for some time. And if the economy picks up, then all is right again.
You are speculating with other people’s money and at very high leverage. If the market keeps going up the amount of profit can be spectacular and the losses while also potentially spectacular may not be so bad if you don’t have any collateral in the first place.
Rent in SJC is down by at least 10% if not much more. I am in an apartment now that used to cost $3500/mo for only $2600/mo now. A month or so ago, I moved out of my dilapidated, old roach infested apartment I was paying $2750 for elsewhere in San Jose. Yeah lots of businesses have closed and people moved out, but the discount units are filling up and businesses are reopening.
I don’t think that this is always true. Land reform happens consistently in history when ownership gets out of wack. Also the value you assign to the land is going to change when the use changes, for example houses in currently popular tech hubs aren’t as important when people can work remotely. And the improvements to land like houses aren’t always going to necessarily hold their value. Labor is a huge influence on price, what happens when machines start building houses? Not saying you shouldn’t buy land or houses, I consider them part of my strategy but consider the downsides too.
Oh yeah, take a look at the Georgists and The One Tax where land is the only thing taxed since it’s the only finite resource. It’s not impossible that we end up in a situation where holding land just to hold your wealth isn’t going to exist anymore.
This has historically been true, but one major variable has changed: executives have been forced to see what their companies look like with remote workers. The land and housing markets look very different when a significant percentage of people aren’t paying for a shorter commute.
I think the massive pools of capital thing is somewhat true, but this investment strategy works because ultimately there's so much demand for property, which is what's driving the real estate prices.
A permanent drop in demand because more people are working from home could crash the market.
If everybody has access to the pool of fake money: you get inflation.
If only a handful of fools do, you will get economic devastation sooner or later, because you remove the feedbacks of capitalism and hand the reins to monkeys that just happen to have access to the money printer.
That's great four months a year, but what about the rest of the year? No one can eat outdoors in 20F, or bike to work in the snow and ice. SF does have the advantage of year round biking weather.
I would beg to differ. 3 season biking is easy as pie, and 4 season with just a little effort. there was only maybe a month out of the year I couldn't bike to work in Minneapolis or Chicago, all it takes is infrastructure and the right gear.
As easy as pie, all it takes to bike to work is all the tarmac and smooth roads of a car world, all the parking space of a small car world, all the maintenance of a small vehicle, and a car/bus/taxi/train system for when you can’t bike, and their infrastructure, parking and maintenance.
Do bikes have the largest amount of unmentioned externalities of any form of transport?
> all it takes to bike to work is all the tarmac and smooth roads of a car world, all the parking space of a small car world, all the maintenance of a small vehicle
You are just joking, right? You’re exaggerating by an order of magnitude, you can literally fit 10 bikes in the space of a small car, on the road and when parked. You think bike maintenance is the same effort as car maintenance? I’m baffled by this claim, and I maintain several bikes and several cars. Cars are much harder, much more expensive to maintain, and require far more resources. Bike maintenance is something most riders can do on their own, while car maintenance is something people take to a shop.
> Do bikes have the largest amount of unmentioned externalities of any form of transport?
What on earth are you referring to? Are you comparing a few sidewalks and bike lanes in select metro areas to the 3 million miles of paved roads in the US? Are you suggesting the 1-2 ounces of oil I use on my bike chain per year is somehow worse than the average 2 metric tons of gas and oil used by the average car in a year? Are you including pollution in your list of externalities? Are you including accidents and fatalities in your calculation? I’m confused, I really can’t think of a single unmentioned externality where bikes don’t compare favorably to cars by a very wide margin.
So, it seems like the answer is a really clear and obvious no, there are other forms of transport with externalities so much larger than bikes that it makes the mere suggestion seem pretty absurd. Examples include but aren’t limited to: cars, airplanes, and cargo boats.
> You are just joking, right? you can literally fit 10 bikes in the space of a small car, on the road
You are just joking, right? A Fiat 500 is 3.5 meters long and 1.6 meters wide. No way can you "literally" fit 10 bikes being ridden on the road in that space - or even 3. Parked, you might be able to fit 3 if they're staggered, but if you're going to tell me you can double-decker it, you won't also fit the stairs/ramp/elevator mechanism in that space as well.
> You think bike maintenance is the same effort as car maintenance?
You take it to a shop, drop it off, and leave it there, then get it back later? Yes, that sounds about the same effort. Except a car usually needs servicing and is still drivable, a bike is probably punctured or chain snapped and unusable, making it more hassle, and if you decide that means you have to do it yourself, more effort. Everyone remember how fun it is to take a bike wheel off and run it through the bathtub to identify the location of a puncture, yes? Never spent that much effort on taking my car to a garage.
> Bike maintenance is something most riders can do on their own, while car maintenance is something people take to a shop.
You've gone from "baffled by this claim" to "most people spend more effort on bike maintenance than car maintenance" in the space of a paragraph. No comment.
> What on earth are you referring to?
I'm referring to the things I said. If you didn't have paved roads made for cars, you would need to build them for bikes. You wouldn't need to build them for walking. Bikers never ever mention this, it's a kind of parasitism on the car infrastructure - a cost that bikers don't consider. If there were no cars, but we needed to upkeep hundreds of miles of tarmac roads, bikes would need to be taxed hugely. It's an externality in the sense that bikes need it, but aren't paying (directly) for it, and are offloading the cost onto car drivers (who currently need it more and do more damage to it).
> Are you including pollution in your list of externalities?
No I'm not including the cost of container shipping enough bikes for 500,000 people from China, or the cost of digging up the iron ore and making the steel and carbon fibre to build them, or the trash heaps where hundreds of thousands of bikes rot. Good point though, neither do bike enthusiasts.
> Are you including accidents and fatalities in your calculation?
The kind where a big heavy fast moving metal lump collides with a soft squidgy easily damaged slow-moving pedestrian? I'm not including those either, but I am against bikes being allowed anywhere pedestrians are, so let's add that in as well.
> I’m confused, I really can’t think of a single unmentioned externality where bikes don’t compare favorably to cars by a very wide margin.
Neither can I. That's a totally cherry-picked comparison because it's like saying "being stabbed compares favourably to being shot by a very wide margin". There's no unmentioned externality where walking doesn't compare favourably to bikes by a very wide margin - in a place which is designed and built for humans walking -- which all places should be because humans are more important than vehicles. Walking needs less tarmac, less machinery, less maintenance, less money, is more accessible to people of more abilities, takes less parking space, less infrastructure, causes fewer accidents, places fewer restrictions on clothing, has lower environmental cost, lower pollution, less waste, doesn't need helmets and high-visibility clothing and bike-locks, doesn't need insurance and breakdown recovery and loan-cars...
> So, it seems like the answer is a really clear and obvious no, there are other forms of transport with externalities so much larger than bikes that it makes the mere suggestion seem pretty absurd.
Cars pay for roads in terms of fuel taxes and vehicle taxes. Bikes don't pay for either. Cars often pay for car parks, bikes often use sidewalk, or car parks. Cars pay for accidents with mandatory insurance, bike riders are uninsured. That other things are worse was not my point, my point was that bikers gloss over needing roads and the cost of that, car drivers don't.
Look I don’t know what has you so triggered and angry about bikes, but your hyperbole and exaggeration is undermining your arguments, you’re making your points weaker by trying so hard to prove your point. A good example is framing fixing a bike flat to be more effort than taking your car to the mechanic. Fixing a flat takes roughly 5 minutes if you’re slow, which is less time than it takes to drive to the shop (by approx. 1 order of magnitude), and a lot less money (by approx. 2 orders of magnitude). I know it happens once in a while, but I’ve never snapped a chain in my life. On the other hand, I have had a car engine blow out, more than once.
It’s just us here; acting like a bike is soooo hard to deal with isn’t going to convince me, since I know how much effort bike maintenance takes and how much car maintenance takes. I know from experience that cars are the bigger drain on time and money by many multiples. Pretending otherwise is just ensuring I have more reasons to discount what you’re saying.
> A Fiat 500 is 3.5 meters long and 1.6 meters wide. No way can you “literally” fit 10 bikes being ridden on the road in that space - or even 3. Parked, you might be able to fit 3.
Standard bike rack spacing is 12-16 inches. Mine is 14 and fits mountain bikes side by side. I’ll give you a generous 15 inches, in which you can comfortably fit 8 bikes in 3.5 meters. 1.6 meters wide is a tad narrow, but many full size adult bikes come in at just over 1.7 meters long. You ungenerously picked one of the smallest cars ever made to attempt to prove your point, but I’m happy to concede that you were wrong by 8x rather than 10x. If you picked a Honda Fit, which is on the small side of small cars, then 10 bikes actually do fit in it’s 162 inch length.
Lanes aren’t 1.6 meters wide, they are wider, and bikes don’t need to be spaced out as much as cars. The throughput can be much higher than 10x due to slower speeds and the higher density in both directions, sideways and front to back.
It seems like you decided the outcome before you thought about this very carefully.
> No, I’m not including the cost of container shipping ...
There’s a lot of snark in your answer, but you fail to acknowledge that there’s no winning the comparison against cars, which is what I was talking about. Whatever the costs of shipping and materials, cars are 20-40x the mass of bikes.
Hey, I agree with you that walking is cheaper than bikes in all ways, and I surely advocate walking. I don’t get your rage over bikes though, they’re a huge improvement over cars, and they are not otherwise causing problems relative to walking.
> my point was that bikers gloss over needing roads and the cost of that, car drivers don't.
One tiny little nit you seem to have overlooked: walkers need and use sidewalks too, so for the one “externality” you’re considering (while selectively ignoring the larger and more important ones like pollution, oil & gas, and accidents) pavement is an externality for walking too. You could claim walkers don’t need sidewalks, but bikes don’t really need sidewalks either, plenty of bikes will ride on dirt paths comfortably.
That answers a bunch of the questions asked in this thread. Another relevant answer to why biking is useful is that it extends the range of accessible daily activities around 10x compared to walking. You can bike further than you can walk in a given period of time.
So one of those hidden externalities you like to account for @jodrellblank, of walking vs biking is that walkers require more food consumption to sustain a daily commute of a given distance compared to bikers commuting the same distance.
This is the kind of thing I'm talking about with unmentioned externalities.
Biking is the most energy-efficient form of transportation, if you ignore the fact that to get such a result you have to make bikes and make steamrollers and concrete mixers and tarmac and roads first.
> Another relevant answer to why biking is useful is that it extends the range of accessible daily activities around 10x compared to walking. You can bike further than you can walk in a given period of time.
But not 10x compared to walking + bus or walking + taxi or walking + train, and not without added inconvenience of biking; and also not if you've built your environment so plenty of daily activities people want are close enough to comfortably walk to.
> So one of those hidden externalities you like to account for @jodrellblank, of walking vs biking is that walkers require more food consumption to sustain a daily commute of a given distance compared to bikers commuting the same distance.
And walkers require paying more taxes for the infrastructure to subsidise bikers.
> You’re arguing that we should use motorized vehicles instead of bikes??
Are you going to bike 100 miles to the next city? Are you going to bike to work with a broken ankle? Are you going to bike furniture home from the furniture shop? Are you going to bike everyone's garbage to the dump? Are you going to bike building materials around?
Given that you're going to have motorized things, they should be for optional, occasional use as an assitance for walking people who then don't need a bike or a car.
Because otherwise, you're going to have motorized things, and walking people, and bikes on top, for no particular reason except a bike obsession.
> Bullshit. Nobody is paying walking taxes. You are enjoying the very same “externality”.
? Nobody is paying explicit sidewalk taxes in the same way nobody is paying explicit streetlamp taxes. People are still paying taxes for infrastructure in the environment they live in, and that covers paying for sidewalks.
> People are still paying taxes for infrastructure in the environment they live in, and that covers paying for sidewalks.
Yeah, I agree, that's right. The bikers are paying for sidewalks & roads, just like everyone else. You've nicely summed up exactly why bike infrastructure is not being somehow "subsidised" by drivers and walkers.
Despite your wish to call sidewalks your own and not share them, and despite the fact that I agree with you about separating pedestrians from cyclists, sidewalks are multi-use infrastructure that everyone pays for and everyone can use. It doesn't matter that you don't like it, the intent has always included bikes as well as pedestrians and wheelbarrows and dogs and children, among many other uses.
Thus settles the red herring non-issue of externalizing taxes to pay for pavement. It's not a real thing.
> Despite your wish to call sidewalks your own and not share them
I don't mind sharing them with things moving at walking pace. Dogs, wheelbarrows, ice cream carts, wheelchairs, maybe skateboards.
I no more want to share them with bikes doing 10-15mph than with mopeds doing 10-15mph or sprinting people.
> The bikers are paying for sidewalks & roads, just like everyone else.
Bikers are paying diesel and petrol tax and road vehicle tax? Not in the UK they're not. Pedestrians aren't either. If they're not, that isn't "just like everyone else".
Any argument which makes bikes better than cars, makes walking better than bikes; you keep ignoring that and diverting back to "bikes are better than cars". Yes bikes are better than cars. Walking is better than bikes.
> Fixing a flat takes roughly 5 minutes if you’re slow.
I googled "how long to fix a puncture" (it's a long time since I had to do that) and CyclistResource.com[1] says puncture repair glue takes 5-8 minutes to dry. My proverbial mother is not going to have her puncture fixed in the middle of a pedestrian street in 5 minutes, and when she ends frustrated and with chain oil on her tidy clothes and muddy wet hands with nowhere to wash them and I call her "slow" that will earn me a proverbial slap. Assuming she even knows what quick release is, and can find the tiny inconvenient weight-optimised tyre levers which she's sure are in her bag somewhere under all this stuff she actually cares about. It takes 5 minutes maybe true for a certain kind of bike enthusiast mechanically interested person, I doubt it's true for a majority of the population.
Going to a garage is less effort even if it takes more time. That's usually the trade off - longer, less effort. But even so that's you redirecting to cars away from walking. Nobody has to carry tyre levers and a Nike Air pump to fix even their fancy airwalk trainers, let alone their ordinary tidy going-out shoes.
I'll concede that you can pack more bikes into a parking space than I counted for, but even your estimate of approx 10 bikes per 4 meters means a city like Amsterdam of 800,000 people would need a row of bike parking 80km long just to cover a quarter of its population having a single place to park their bikes. No matter how multistorey that gets, by the time those people can park in many places (at home, work, green park, shopping, entertainment) it's a lot of city space for a benefit of a minority of people. And yes, before you say it, cars are much worse.
> It’s just us here; acting like a bike is soooo hard to deal with isn’t going to convince me, since I know how much effort bike maintenance takes and how much car maintenance takes
I also know how much effort bike maintenance takes, which is not a /lot/ but is more than I can be bothered with for the few situations they have value in. If a journey is short, walking is more convenient. If a journey is long, cars are more convenient. If there's something to carry, cars are more convenient. If there's a destination I need to go inside, walking is more convenient. If there's multiple people to go with, walking or driving are way more convenient. If there's a chance plans will change and I'll get a lift back or we'll meet up with other people, walking and cars are more convenient. Bikes only win out for people who want to ride a bike for the purpose of riding a bike (fun, exercise) or for people who have a short-car-journey distance to travel with little to carry, alone or with another biker, but don't want to use a car (for environmental, cost, or idealism reasons), or a blend of the two (a single digit mile commute they'd rather not drive).
> I don’t get your rage over bikes though, they’re a huge improvement over cars, and they are not otherwise causing problems relative to walking.
They are an improvement over cars. They aren't a huge improvement. Instead of a roof, you have to change your clothes and carry a change of clothes with you. Instead of a trunk you have to arrange your life around the limits of a bike to carry less stuff. Instead of an engine to go any distance comfortably you have to pay attention to distances and hills and how sweaty you are willing to get. Instead of freely wearing what you want, you have to wear clothes suitable for biking. Instead of having a lockable metal storage you have the inconvenience of not having that but still needing to carry bike things (helmet, lock, toolkit). Instead of being comfortbly on a sidewalk as a pedestrian or on a road in a car, you have to be annoyingly (maybe illegally) on a sidewalk or in danger on a road full of cars, or be lucky and go a diversion in the few places there happens to be a bike path.
They're a "huge" improvement over cars only if you take away all the conveniences of a car, and offload those things onto the person while pretending you aren't doing that.
> One tiny little nit you seem to have overlooked: walkers need and use sidewalks too
Walkers should get sidewalks without bikes. If I say you walk at 4mph and bike at 6mph you'll probably tell me you can average 20mph on your bike. If I say bikes don't mesh with people, and are an accident risk, you'll say bikes "use sidewalks too" and point to people sedately biking at 3mph among strolling pedestrians. If you're biking at a speed that's safe /and not annoying/ to pedestrians (i.e. not weaving between people, making them jump out of the way) then you're going slow enough that you're as well off walking. If you're going faster in a way that only a bike can, you shouldn't be on a sidewalk and need a dedicated concrete place to cycle fast.
All 800k people in imaginary Amsterdam pay taxes for sidewalks because all 800k people use them. All drivers pay fuel and road tax, all cars use roads. Bikers don't pay any special tax for roads or bike paths, which means the minority of bikers are subsidised by everyone else. It's not hyperbole, exaggeration, hatred or snark to point out this kind of thing.
> You could claim walkers don’t need sidewalks, but bikes don’t really need sidewalks either, plenty of bikes will ride on dirt paths comfortably.
Leaving a chewed up muddy plowed mess for everyone else to walk on. Walking on cobblestones is easy and comfortable, riding on them needs suspension and arms that don't mind juddering. But what I'm really claiming is that taxing 100% of the people to make sidewalks that 100% of the people use is fine. Taxing motorists for roads which their cars use is fine. Bikes get the benefit of lots of paved roadway, which they approximately need, without explicity paying in any way. If there were only sidewalks bikes would clash with people. If there weren't roadways, bikes would need them to be invented. If my mother needed a full suspension mountain bike to go to church on, she probably wouldn't. If cars vanished, bikes don't provide anything like the income for the upkeep of the roads left behind by cars if cars vanished. If instead you move to a model where bikes need hundreds of km of bike paths weaving through the city seperate from sidewalks, and then you move to a model where bikers are the people who pay for that, bikes will become a lot less desirable.
Even the limited convenience and usefulness bikes have (which is nonzero) is enhanced by leaning on a car-culture and would struggle hard to stand on its own merits.
Did something bad happen to you relating to cycling? You’re struggling so hard to paint bikes negatively, exaggerating so much about minor and insignificant problems, that I can’t help but assume a cyclist must have collided with you or there’s someone annoying in your life who really into cycling. Do you have a physical condition that prevents you from cycling? Do you lean libertarian and have a problem with taxes for things you don’t use?
I still don’t get your angle whatsoever. Every single thing you claim to want is advanced considerably, and we get closer to walking culture, every single time someone rides a bike instead of a car.
> Any argument which makes bikes better than cars, makes walking better than bikes; you keep ignoring that and diverting back to "bikes are better than cars". Yes bikes are better than cars. Walking is better than bikes
I responded to your comparison between bikes and cars. My argument is that bikes are better than cars. So we are in full agreement. I’m not arguing about walking, I said twice already I’m in favor of walking.
> Walking is better than bikes
That depends entirely on what you mean by “better”. Bikes have a larger range, shorter travel times, and are more efficient. Walking is IMO more pleasant and a slightly safer, but not as functional for traveling more than .5 miles or carrying any cargo with you, even as small as a laptop.
Personally, I think it does a disservice to both bikers and walkers, and to the causes of human designed cities and pollution reduction, to fabricate drama by pitting bikes against walkers as if they're somehow in complete opposition. Bikers and walkers are 99.9% on the same side. I love doing both walking and biking. As a biker, I see people advocating for walking spaces and even bike-free sidewalks as a good thing that helps me. As a walker, I see people asking for bike lanes downtown as a good thing that helps me. You say you don't want bikes on your sidewalk, yet complain about how bike paths are paid for... you do realize that dedicated bike paths get bikes off the sidewalk, right?
> Going to a garage is less effort even if it takes more time.
For someone who brought the concept of externality to this thread, you’re actively trying to externalize time to exaggerate your claims. Cars are more expensive, and money requires time. You can’t count only the travel time to the shop while ignoring the extra time it takes to earn the money to buy & repair your car.
> Walkers should get sidewalks without bikes.
Irrelevant to our discussion, but I happen to agree.
> [in Amsterdam] Bikers don’t pay any special tax for roads or bike paths
This isn’t true, you are making assumptions, making things up. Citizens fund Amsterdam’s bike infrastructure. Not walkers, not drivers. Citizens.
In the city I live in, bike paths are being added by referendum. They are voted on and the funds come from multiple tax sources. I’m paying for the bike infrastructure I enjoy, and the majority of my fellow citizens are asking for improved bike infrastructure.
You are harping up a storm on a complete and total non-issue. Who pays for bike paths is not a major problem anywhere. And if it was a problem, it would be a great problem to have, because it would mean people are biking instead of driving.
> Did something bad happen to you relating to cycling?
A haw haw haw an ad-hom.
> You’re struggling so hard to paint bikes negatively
I'm writing pages of stuff off the top of my head, my biggest "struggle" is how you can't see any of these things exist. I haven't mentioned bike theft (compared to, say, shoe theft), noise pollution of squeaking brakes, people I see around biking while staring at their phones, the fact that we live in a car-world which is to a rough approximation the best possible world for bikes (lots of tarmac, lots of spread out things, low costs) and even then the vast majority of people don't own or regularly use bikes, and almost any other world would make bikes less convenient and more costly, making that worse. Not to mention the way you can leave maps and notes and sunshades and medical kits in your car glove box, but you always need to carry everything away from your bike, not to mention the huge change that sets in if you happen to bike at night and need lights and batteries and reflective clothes for safety, not to mention the extra difficulty of calling someone up to ask for a lift if they have nowhere on their car to put a bike, or leaving your bike out to come back to a wet rained-on saddle, or how cold your hands get held out in front of you, or how wearing a helmet messes up your hair, or how people desire a 'dashcam' experience and have to have it affixed to their helmet.
> I still don’t get your angle whatsoever. Every single thing you claim to want is advanced considerably, and we get closer to walking culture, every single time someone rides a bike instead of a car.
No we don't.
Take the "ungenerously small car" comment and look at the Top Gear clip "Driving in Lucca" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_eLViH7_YI - the ultracompact cars are the Fiat 500, the Citroen DS3 (~4m long, 1.7m wide) and a Renault Clio also ~4m long 1.7m wide. And look how they barely fit in the streets of a city built for humans. Look as they drive around, how there's no long straight roadways for a bike to get up to speed and make strong use of the vaunted efficiency and ability to cover longer distances more quickly. And if you tried, a chance of a bike popping out of any junction at any time at 10mph would make everything awful for humans who weren't biking.
At 4:30 in the clip there are ~7 bikes visible. That's approximately everywhere you can leave a bike in that scene including in front of some windows on the left. That's 7 people can bike to that street out of a city of ~85k population + tourists. There's no room there for a "small car sized parking for 10 bikes" turned sidways because the "ungenerously small car" takes up the entire human-size space and there wouldn't be room to take the bikes out and barely room to walk past.
What you get from bikes is not "closer to walking", it's "things built around distances too far to walk with the idea that people will bike those distances". Building around walking means building things close enough that nobody needs or wants to bike. It's like saying you get closer to reading by watching a short film.
> My argument is that bikes are better than cars. So we are in full agreement
I'm saying that bikes are /bad/ and you're saying bikes are /good/. That's not full agreement. Even if we both agree that cars are bad, I say bikes are bad for the same reasons, on a smaller scale, and for their own reasons on top.
> As a walker, I see people asking for bike lanes downtown as a good thing that helps me. You say you don't want bikes on your sidewalk, yet complain about how bike paths are paid for... you do realize that dedicated bike paths get bikes off the sidewalk, right?
... you're going to terrorise walkers into paying for bike lanes for you to use, so you don't have to pay for them? You do realize that doesn't sound nice or friendly, or what someone on "the same side" would say, right?
> For someone who brought the concept of externality to this thread, you’re actively trying to externalize time to exaggerate your claims. Cars are more expensive, and money requires time. You can’t count only the travel time to the shop while ignoring the extra time it takes to earn the money to buy & repair your car.
Me: cars have costs. bikes have costs.
You all: Why can't you see that cars have higer costs?
Me: I can see that. Why can't you see bikes have costs at all?
You: I don't understand how you can ignore the costs of cars are so big?
Me: I'm agree the costs of cars are high. Look at the downsides of bikes.
You: But her car emails!
Me: Stop focusing on cars. Bike costs. Annoying. Inconvenient.
You: How can you ignore the cost of cars like this!?
Hello? I know cars have high costs! I'm not /denying that/. I'm not interested in that because /I'm not supporting everyone-has-a-car-world/. I'm supporting nobody-needs-a-bike-or-car world specifically against the alternative most-people-need-a-bike-world.
> This isn’t true, you are making assumptions, making things up. Citizens fund Amsterdam’s bike infrastructure. Not walkers, not drivers. Citizens.
If everyone payes the same tax, that's another way of saying bikers dont' pay any special tax. Which is what I said and you said is made up, then said the same thing. ???
> the majority of my fellow citizens are asking for improved bike infrastructure.
Because the majority (>50%) of them want to use it? Or because they are willing to suffer paying for it to get you off the roads and sidewalks because you're annoying both pedestrians and drivers? Cycling England says there are ~160,000 bikes crossing London every day, but Transport for London says there are 2,600,000 cars registered in London.
Cycling England says "n 2018, cycling accounted for 1.7% of all trips". That's 99.3% of citizen-trips on foot and in cars and public transport "funding" 1.7% of citizen trips.
"England: 42% of people aged 5+ own or have access to a bicycle" yet "80.9% cycle less than once per month or never".
A storm full of points you're completely glossing over in favour of ad-homs and diverting the talk about cars instead.
> Who pays for bike paths is not a major problem anywhere
Did I say it was a major problem? I said it was an example of something bike enthusiasts don't mention. In England 2% of journeys are by bike. That leaves "Citizens" paying for road and pavement usage for 98% of journeys and also paying bike path costs for some subset of 2% of journeys.
> And if it was a problem, it would be a great problem to have, because it would mean people are biking instead of driving.
That would be bad because you'd have a world built around distances too far to walk, far enough to want to drive, but unable to drive. What would get 80% of people to bike those distances in lieu of cars is most likely motorized bikes.
I wasn't attacking you with an ad-hominem, I'm sorry it seemed like that. I was honestly asking why you're so bothered about bikes. You have a lot of reasons, but I don't understand your overall thrust or point.
> and diverting the talk about cars instead.
You keep saying this over and over and over, yet I keep pointing out consistently that I'm primarily focused on bikes vs cars, and primarily responding to your comment here, which compared bikes to cars, and didn't even mention walking. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24186001 You somehow don't even see you're the one moving the goal post.
Take a step back, I don't want bikes banned, or to stop you from riding your bike on the road or pavement tomorrow. We're imagining a future where we say that internal combustion engines emit too much air pollution and CO2 and should be replaced. One choice we have is to replace them with electric cars. Electric cars still have large resource costs around the planet because they're quite big, and have costs in their use in urban environments in parking spaces and charging cables and traffic lights and etc. (NB. another unmentioned thing - all the desire for self-driving cars isn't going to build self-driving bikes anytime soon).
There is an element of social unfairness where people need frequent use of tens of thousands of dollars of car to live a first-class citizen life, and doing without makes people second-class citizens in many ways. If we step away from cars (and for the moment, motorbikes and mopeds and so on), there are not many choices left, they boil down to:
1) Keep the world the same, solely switch cars for bikes.
2) Rebuild and rezone smaller and denser, but stop at bike distances.
3) Rebuild and rezone smaller and denser, to walking distances. Walking distances have to be very dense because people walk slowly.
The first is unworkable - 2% of journeys done on bikes today is not going to boost to 90%+ journeys done on bikes just by taking the cars away. The distances in the world today are built for cars.
The second has all the costs of cars but on a smaller scale. It has all the costs of rebuilding and rezoning. It has all the social unfairness of still needing a personal transportation device. And on top of that it has all the problems of bikes that I've been listing because they're not very good compared to cars.
The third, done well, has the massive advantages that you don't need a vehicle and get more money in your pocket. The cost of having to use walking effort instead of driving is offset by the fact that you don't have to walk far. The disadvantages of not having a vehicle are traded off with the advantages of not needing a vehicle. More people get a first-class experience of life.
The first is cheap but it won't work. People need cars now because everything is so far apart and it was built far apart because everyone else has cars. The second and third are not going to happen because rebuilding is expensive and people don't want to give up their cars. But if they did happen, the second is a chance to make hundreds of millions of people's lives simpler, cheaper, easier, less hassle, and lower global resource use, not done, stopped short of that, deliberately to make people have to use bikes just for the sake of people using bikes. It's a /tragedy/.
Even if the third happened perfectly, that wouldn't stop you from riding your bike to work. What it would mean is you wouldn't have to. Most people wouldn't have to, and wouldn't. If the second happened, it would mean most people couldn't avoid riding a bike to work because work was deliberately zoned too far to walk to prop up bike use.
> yet I keep pointing out consistently that I'm primarily focused on bikes vs cars
I'm primarily focused on humans vs vehicles. Bikes and cars both go on the vehicle side. I criticised biking to work, I have kept criticising biking in every reply, that's not moving goalposts unless you think I was cricitising bikes in favour of cars - I wasn't, I was just criticising bikes. Like the parent three posts to that one is "There's also a lot more people biking now and I'm hopeful that it will help shape future legislation to make the city even more bike friendly" - why? Why hope to make legislation to make the city more bike friendly instead of hoping to make the city rezone so people can live and work close enough that they don't need vehicles? "I want to see more bikes" why do you?
Have you been in a place where lots of people ride bikes?
A small car world would be 100% -> 60% resource reduction. At reasonable scale, bikes are at least a 100% -> 10% reduction in all mentioned 'externalities' or should we say resource use, or 10x capacity for same resources, except for road size at maybe 3x, but still more than 10x on cost.
Public transit would grow (no need to fit all cyclists), but that should actually be a net benefit.
To comprehend the difference in scale, view images here [1]. Half as many cars wouldn't fit, even if they covered every cm of the image.
> A small car world would be 100% -> 60% resource reduction.
You're missing the part I replied to which was about bikes being usable 11 months of the year. If you need all the car infrastructure for 1 month, plus the bike infrastructure, that makes it overall worse, not better.
But discard that, if biking is a 60% reduction, then a walking+train world would be way more.
Your link talks of a train station building a 12,500 bike-parking garage. For comparison the busiest train station in the UK (Waterloo) has 250,000 people using it every day. Note that the pictured bike parking in Amsterdam takes up the space of two of the large multistorey hotels next to it, just to store metal, but pushes actual walking humans two hotel distances further away from their destination just to walk past unused metal storage.
Bike parking, like car parking, is a non-place in the sense of https://newworldeconomics.com//place-and-non-place/ it's not somewhere anyone wants to go, or a place where anything happens. Scale that bike parking up to 100,000 people and it would be an enormous amount of physical city-center non-place. Now count that you have to park those bikes at both ends of every journey - bike parking at the supermarket, at the clothes shops, at the pubs, at the apartment buildings - and instead of a small, dense, walkable city center, you're now measuring the total area devoted to non-place metal storage in square kilometers, and inconveniencing everyone with kilometers more walking every week just to cross the distances taken up by mega bike park bloat.
This picture is Shinjuku in Tokyo, the world's most populated city, near the world's busiest train station: https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/shi... - can you imagine that street being as pleasant with 2,000 bikes barelling down it at 2x walking speed and every one of those eateries having 5-20 bike parking outside?
And there's no chance those 12,500 bikes would fit on the trains, how many bikes fit on a passenger train, maybe 15 or so? Bike+train means most people can only bike on one side of any train journey.
> Public transit would grow (no need to fit all cyclists), but that should actually be a net benefit.
If public transit is growing, more people will be able to not-need bikes.
> To comprehend the difference in scale, view images here [1].
e.g. [1] "The typical U.S. solution is to surround the train station with acres and acres of free parking.[...] There are 157 acres of land in this photo. When you step off the train, you have immediate walking access to 157 acres of /nothing/"
and [2] "The better solution is to surround the station with all the highest-value property. All the best offices, stores and restaurants are as close to the train station as possible, so we can walk there from the station, and where there is the most pedestrian traffic. Plus, you also try to put as many apartment buildings there as you can, so you can easily walk to the station in less than ten minutes."
"if you want people to be able to live without automobiles, you have to make it easy to get from the train station to wherever you want to go on foot. This means you put all the good stuff right up against the train station — even build it into the train station itself if possible. When you step out of the train station, you want to land right in a wonderful pedestrian Traditional City environment, not a parking lot wasteland."
When you switch a "large" surround of car parking for a "large" surround of bike parking, that doesn't fix anything. I put "large" in quotes because the measure is not abstract meters, dollars, or kilos of concrete, the measure is human size and human footsteps - walking past 12,000 bikes is 90% of people walking further for no benefit, while the bike owners also walk further for a small benefit of part of a journey, and puts desirable city space to use by metal instead of humans.
To be clear, I don't want to displace public transit -> bicycles. I was talking about cars -> bicycles. Densest cities are best served on foot - the places nobody would dare convert to car transit.
As I emphasized, cars -> bikes is not 100 -> 60, but 100 -> 10. Meaning not 1.5x nor 2.5x but 10x density. A moderately priced double-decker staggered height bicycle parking comfortably fits 20+ bikes in the place of a single car.
The only places that require comparatively large bicycle parking areas are large transport hubs, and in the example, the added distance for pedestrians is less than going between platforms, if any at all.
In a typical not-overly-dense places, bike travel is technically faster than foot if you're going more than about 50m + about 120% of distance to parking (if not along the way).
> U.S. solution .. 157 acres of free parking
That is truly foolish, and would fit over a million bicycles even without racks.
> The only places that require comparatively large bicycle parking areas are large transport hubs, and in the example, the added distance for pedestrians is less than going between platforms, if any at all.
> I was talking about cars -> bicycles. Densest cities are best served on foot
Right, so if you're redesigning smaller and denser, why on earth would you build so everyone needs bikes, instead of building so everyone doesn't?
And if you're not redesigning smaller, and distances are still car-suburb distances, they're still too far for bikes for most people and most journeys. You might have to do a 20 mile round trip to get into Houston center and back, for example, that's 1.5-2hrs biking. Way outside what you could expect most people to want to do regularly compared to say a 15 minute walk.
> The only places that require comparatively large bicycle parking areas
All bicycle parking areas are comparatively large for the people who don't have bikes. "The space of a single car" is ~3 meters. You only need 30 of those to push your walking commute, trip to the shops, visit to your friends, out by +1km and +2km after a round trip. Building for the 10% of bikers compared to the 90% of non-bikers is insanity.
> That is truly foolish, and would fit over a million bicycles even without racks.
If it did, it would still be 157 acres of non-place nobody wants to go to, spend time in, and resent having to get to the other side of. The foolishness is having that much inhuman space dedicated to metal storage, not that it's dedicated to fossil fuelled vehicles instead of pedal powered vehicles.
That is, the desire for and apparent need for bicycles comes from having a city built large enough for cars, too large to walk, and then having the cars removed. Where you are miles from your destination and between you and your destination are acres of no-place, nothing nice to travel through, nothing interesting to do.
In a city built small enough to walk, bicycles are unwanted and unneeded extra hassle, and when you occasionally do have to walk a couple of extra miles it's through a vibrant, busy, maybe even beautiful, human space not concrete void.
"It should be obvious that it is better to not need a bike than to need one. [...] we should not think about bikes-instead-of-cars, but rather getting over this unhealthy fixation on My Personal Transportation Device"
"Accept a bad solution because otherwise I'll threaten your children with a worse one" might be a convincing argument, but it's not a good argument.
Designing things around bikes, and then everyone needs a bike, is a worse option than designing everything around humans (instead of some kind of vehicle).
Neither of those sentences is living in reality. Nobody's threatening children with a worse solution, we already have the worse solution, our children are already inhaling the pollution. You can choose to keep it or choose to lessen the pollution. As far as pollution goes, there's little difference between bikes and whatever alternative you're proposing (walking?). Walking doesn't pollute, bikes don't pollute, cars do pollute heavily. Bikes aren't a bad solution to pollution, they are a perfectly good solution. One of many.
> Designing things around bikes, and then everyone needs a bike, is a worse option than designing everything around humans (instead of some kind of vehicle).
I'd fully agree we should design things around humans, but where are people designing cities primarily around bikes? And what, exactly, are the problems we actually have with bikes? Not the fear-mongering made-up FUD, but real problems that exist already. Bike parking space is not an actual problem today. What is?
What does it mean - exactly - to design around humans? You could argue the problems we have are because we designed around human convenience already, and allowed our walking space to be paved and prioritized for cars.
Your arguments are vassellating between comparing to cars and then not comparing to cars. What's the goal post here? Are you demanding something perfect, or do you want to improve considerably over the crappy position we're in with cars? Is removing all vehicles entirely a realistic goal? Is redesigning all the largest cities on earth, and getting everyone to work within a mile of where they live realistic? Why are you trying so hard to lump non-motorized vehicles together with motorized vehicles? There is a large difference between having a gas-consuming engine and not having one, don't you agree?
The making of bikes, and the concrete for them to ride on, involves pollution and externalised costs. Bike tyre dust pollutes, abandoned rusting decomposing bikes pollute. Less than cars, no question. "they don't" - not true.
> And what, exactly, are the problems we actually have with bikes? Not the fear-mongering made-up FUD, but real problems that exist already.
They aren't good enough to replace cars. They aren't a good improvement over not needing to own transport. They aren't a good improvement over walking in most dimensions, and the ones they are are dimensions that would be better eliminated than papered over with bikes.
> What does it mean - exactly - to design around humans?
Design around what the human body can do (mostly) unaided. Glasses bring your eyesight back up to human norms, we don't design imformational screens so everyone needs magnifying lenses to be able to read them. Hearing aids bring your hearing back to human norms, we don't make important announcements quietly enough that everyone needs a hearing aid to be able to partake in society. Walking sticks aid balance for the disabled, we don't make waterbed rolling walkways so everyone needs an extra third point of stability to avoid falling over. If it's too far to comfortably walk every day, it's too far. If that can't be helped, mass transit. Personal transport should be a thing people don't need, but the 2% of people who ride bikes today can be the 2% who ride bikes tomorrow if they want.
> Is removing all vehicles entirely a realistic goal? Is redesigning all the largest cities on earth, and getting everyone to work within a mile of where they live realistic?
Is preventing catastrophic global climate change realistic? Is ignoring mass transit so you can strawman that everone needs to work within a mile of their home instead of everyone having work or train station within a mile of their home, reasonable?
> Why are you trying so hard to lump non-motorized vehicles together with motorized vehicles?
Because that's where they belong. The only way bikes are going to become as popular as they need to be to satisfy the pro-bike agenda is when they become motorized. They will approach "electric cars" closer and closer.
> where are people designing cities primarily around bikes?
Good question. If bikes are so great and the answer to pollution and the future, where are people designing cities primarily around bikes? Nowhere? It's old places designed around walking, and new places designed around driving, and occasional neighbourhoods redesigned around walking. Bikes are incidental in both approaches, like nobody is redesigning cities around skateboards, unicycles, Segways, hoverboards, Kangaroo boots, rollerskates, rollerblades, monowheels, pogo sticks, velocipedes, stilts, or spacewalkers. Bikes belong in the category of those things. Fine where they are, not a thing to promote for daily commuting and mass transit of world populations.
There's a reason why Finland or Canada or Alaska are sparsely populated: The weather.
Sure, those people who can be bothered with it might pick up the cycle during the winter. Those people who can't be bothered are going to pick up their stuff and leave.
I'm from one of those northern areas. Very few people leave because of the weather even if they don't like it. It's mostly because of studying and career opportunities.
North is sparsely populated because the crops were historically poor and prone to losses due to weather conditions, not because people don't like the weather.
What sort of gear do you need for conditions like that? During one cold snap, my chain literally froze on a long ride through some light rain/sleet. (No, I don't know how that happened, but it did.)
And that was in the Seattle area, where it rarely gets all that cold.
I was a Mormon missionary in Hokkaido in some of the snowiest places in the world and got around just fine using a cheap mountain bike. The only additional "equipment" needed was a lighter, to thaw out my bike lock when it would freeze shut.
I looked up Trondheim, NO weather. It's only Rhode Island cold not Minnesota cold. Plenty of people in Providence, RI bike in the Winter. Trondheim also doesn't have the range found in either RI or MN so you don't get ridiculous heat and humidity to bike in.
My midwestern city is out of bikes too, but it isn't because of a surge in demand. It's because all the bikes were made in China, and supply has slowed to a trickle.
Absolutely, I totally agree. It's going to be really sad when we're out in a year (or two or three) and all those places that we went to and remember are no longer there because of this pandemic and ensuing lockdown.
But I think about the places (bars, restaurants, clubs, galleries, small shops) I visited almost a decade ago now when I first moved to SF and a bunch of those disappeared in the good times! They were displaced by rising commercial rents or a change in their clientele because of the rapid gentrification of neighborhoods and replaced, oftentimes with more kitsch stuff but sometimes with amazing restaurants or shops, which might not survive this lockdown.
San Francisco was once destroyed by a fire and has bounced back over and over again and I don't think this time will be different. It'll be different but not in the way people are panicking about in this thread and post.
Currently in S.F, rent controlled. On the fence about leaving, but I don’t see This getting better. I’m seeing this country turn totalitarian; COVID19 running rampant, and one, of many to come,Retrovirus, which is extremely disruptive to our T-cells (immune response).
Where to? Santa Cruz, too quirky? Marin, beautiful but overdone? Santa Rosa, I like this. Now, in Silicon Valley, there’s a sense of being out there; Mountain View, Los Gatos; attractive smaller enclaves.
Inner neighborhoods like the Tenderloin, SoMa, Union Square, Nob Hill, Lower Nob Hill, the Russian Hill, etc. Will probably need a lot of infusion to keep the cartels from fighting over territory. With a deficit so big, its hard to see an easy way forward.
Naw bro, they should put all the homeless people on a bus to Texas and then get rid of all forms of taxes. Make it so you don't even need a license to open a business. It'll be the greatest city in the world! /s
A 8.5+ earthquake would be a city changing event. Entire neighborhoods with URMs would probably no longer exist afterwards (Chinatown, Tenderloin, Soma, etc).
I don't know about you, but I didn't move to the Bay Area for museums, bars, restaurants, or proximity to nature. I moved because that's where the jobs were (to paraphrase Willie Sutton). While I have grown to like it here, when my company tells us what the salary adjustments will be for moving to other parts of the country, I'm going to start seriously looking for a new home.
Granted, it may turn out that my new home will be the same as my old home, but, at least being forced to be remote is getting the wheels turning.
I have to imagine if we had software unions we would hear nothing of this "adjustment." My code is worth just as much to the company if I write it in Arizona or San Francisco.
> If you consider a post-covid world 5 years from now, do you think that SF with its museums, bars, restaurants, and proximity to nature will be an unattractive place to live?
As long as the city & county and state governments are as bad as they are, yes. San Francisco was easily the most disgusting American city I have ever been to. It somehow has managed to land in an anti-sweet spot of repressive laws aimed at the middle classes, while not enforcing any laws against the mentally ill who do things like defecate in public, urinate on the floors of even nice bars, accost one on the street and so forth.
San Francisco needs someone to do for it what Hercules did for the Augean stables.
The suburban area was much nicer, but still hellaciously expensive, way out of proportion to the quality of life. There's a reason why people are fleeing California in general, and San Francisco in particular.
There's almost no problem so severe that it is immune to hyperbole. I'm always in such a strange place responding to comments like this, because I generally agree. San Francisco govt is very restrictive toward business - it bans plastic straws and happy meals - but it seems helpless in the face of severe misbehavior from addicts and mentally ill. So severe that people might wonder if some in government are willfully enabling this behavior.
I've lived in SF my whole life, and I'm pushing 50. My parents live here, I'm raising my kids here. Every day I wonder if I made the right decision. There's still time to leave. It hurts, feeling this way, because in many ways I still really love the place where I grew up, and I feel like a lot of my life is woven in here.
I said all that to make it clear that I agree with you And yet, there's still room for disagreement about how severe it is.
I've been on long walks (something I like doing in urban areas) since COVID hit. Where I go often depends on something I need to do in an area, an errand I have to run. I walked a long distance through the outer sunset along the great highway (closed to cars right now). From Washington and Presidio out through Clement street, for a ways. I surf, too, and while the waves don't have the shape of a point or reef break (think Santa Cruz), I'd much rather spread out in the beach break and find the occasional open corner than crowd in with a bunch of surfers all competing for the take-off spot (I felt this way before COVID, let alone now).
Plenty of others (Carl Nolte wrote about a walk of his own in the Chronicle this sunday[1]), I don't need to list them all. I have glorious days here, still - there is some intrusion from urban blight even on those glorious walks, but in some cases it was a still pretty minor. I was not accosted, nor did I have to constantly dodge human feces. The city showed well, the houses and buildings were interesting looking, the views were glorious, the people around were friendly. There are comments who make it sound like every square block of SF is like escape from New York. It isn't, though it's getting worse, and I'm worried. Some of this, I think, is motivated by a desire to disparage left-wing government (I'm ok with holding progressive San Francisco accountable for what the city has become, though I do think we need to consider macro factors beyond what they can control - not to dismiss the considerable role of SF's policies, but as part of the discussion).
I've also been downtown in plenty of other US cities - most recently, Seattle and Milwaukee. In some ways, the remarkable thing about SF's downtown is that it was inhabitable recently. Many cities wrote off their version of market street long, long ago. I do agree that parts of SF are pretty disgusting, and SF does win the top prize in this regard, but I actually don't agree that it is uniquely disgusting.
Anyway, this is just a disagreement about degree, and some hyperbole is intended as a kind of satire or comic rant. Overall, I agree, we have a really serious problem in SF.
If I came from maybe Flagstaff Arizona I'd think SF has "museums, bars, restaurants, proximity to nature" but having lived in plenty of other places with more museums, bars, restaurants and proximity to nature SF was a let down.
San Francisco is a very small city, but it is a city nonetheless which puts it on the list of places in the US where you can live (and I mean truly live) without a car, even before the age of Uber/Lyft. (Unsurprisingly, the other places on that list are also cities.)
Due to tech money and location, it occupies a weird place in the various lists of world's cities. It is just tiny a small city compared to other cities in the world, and geography and politics aren't about to let that change any time soon.
>where you can live (and I mean truly live) without a car
Maybe. I do know a couple who live in SF who don't own a car but they sure use a lot of Ubers and do rentals.
More generally, and I'm probably just showing personal bias, but for me living in SF without the ability to just hop in a car and go to mountains etc. seems like it would be cutting myself off from much of what makes SF more interesting than comparably-sized cities.
I should have been more specific and said owning a car. It's more convenient to use a car in many situations and modern car rental places (Zipcar/Turo/Getaround), along with the traditional car rental companies, mean its easy to rent one for a few hours or a weekend. Depending on where in the city you live and how often to you go the mountains, the cost of car payment + parking + insurance may or may not be worth it compared to renting as needed.
It's not a personal bias when most Americans share the same bias. I've found Americans are only slightly weirder about their attachment to owning guns than owning a car, but far more Americans have this religious attachment to having a car.
That's certainly an option. Depends on your requirements and how much you use the vehicle. Renting does have some friction associated with it but, if you're only going to use a car a couple weekends a month, don't have dedicated parking, and don't need/want anything special, it may well make more sense to rent.
I agree. I live in SF and hate driving in the city. 95% of my in-city transportation is walking and biking.
But my quality of life went way up once I bit the bullet and got a car. Skiing, surfing, and hiking all became way easier. I was already occasionally renting cars to do those things, but the friction of picking up/returning the cars and the marginal cost of each trip were big drags. Now I don't think twice about a 1-2 week long backpacking trip, where previously I would have been dissuaded by that expensive rental car sitting unused in the parking lot.
#1 suggestion: Washington, DC. Museums (the Smithsonian museums), bars, restaurants (one of the Michelin cities), proximity to nature (there's a national park that cuts through the middle of the city, there's the National Arboretum, and you're about an hour drive from numerous state parks in Virginia and Maryland)
I will 100% grant that the weather in the Bay Area is generally better than all three of those places - but if you don't highly rank outdoor activities, does that matter as much?
> a national park that cuts through the middle of the city
Come now, you aren't suggesting that the National Mall counts as "proximity to nature" ;-)
I've spent some time in all three cities and live in one; none of them really offer the same ease of access to nature as does San Francisco, if you count nature as necessarily including some level of remoteness from the built-up environment.
By that criteria Denver/Boulder, Seattle, Portland, etc. are way superior. Any kind of nature activity (hiking, backpacking, skiing, paragliding, cycling) is better and closer, except surfing perhaps.
With density that I until recently used to consider as an unquestionable positive becoming at least temporarily moot with covid (and frankly becoming permanently soured by the out of control protests - I realized I prefer my density Singapore style, with CCTVs and harsh sentencing), I can see why people would move out. I'd probably be out of Seattle, at the very least to the burbs nearby with the same access to everything and few of the downsides, if it was just me making the decision. Same applies to SF (I've lived in SF and Mountain View before, I'd say it's even more acute in SF, quality of life is just terrible even for someone who loves dense cities - might was well move to peninsula or east bay for better access to nature in essentially the same place).
LOL they're referring to Rock Creek Park, not the National Mall. RCP is probably the single best "urban" park system outside of Forest Park in Portland. I can walk out my door and be in nature in just a few minutes... you can walk or run all day and never leave the forest, yet still be in the middle of the city.
There's plenty of walkable greenspace in the DC area, but unless you live near a Metro stop or work remote, you will need a car and you will probably hate the traffic.
Likely only by virtue of it sitting on Federal land (the District of Columbia). That is, if by the National Park designation you mean to imply a level of grandeur and majesty that the likes of Zion or Glacier National Parks bring.
To be fair, I've never been to Rock Creek Park, but photos of it make it look like any number of state- and municipal-level parks near me. :-)
I mean National Park in exactly the same way that everybody means National Park: Rock Creek Park was the third National Park, made so by an Act of Congress, just like any other big-N National big-P Park.
If you're willing to travel as much as it takes you to get to Big Sur from San Francisco, you can easily visit Shenandoah or the Blue Ridge, both bona-fide up-to-snuff pre-approved Real™ Beautiful™ National Parks from DC. There's also the Chesapeake, tons of magnificent beaches and state parks in the surrounding area---many beautiful sites on the east coast had already been state parks far before the notion of a national park was invented. That doesn't make them less beautiful or grandiose, however.
That's fair! I do acknowledge conceit in my comment, but you can attribute that to my jealously (as an eastern seaboarder) of the landscapes of the American West.
Access to nature from SF does require that you actually take advantage of it. There are probably a lot of young tech folk (among others) in SF who don't own a car and tend to mostly do urban stuff. In practice, if you need to rent transportation or depend on friends every time you want to go more than a few miles, you're probably not going to do it.
And at that point, you lose a lot of what makes SF appealing versus other cities.
As for weather, some people do value not having snow or typical summer heat/humidity (or both). But SF isn't the only place with a nice climate (and, for many, SF is gray and foggy relative to even other nearby California options).
For the purposes of the weather, I say that SF isn't in California. For better or worse. (During this current heatwave, I think better. Today's high is forecast to be 76/24.)
What are other options for similar mild weather? LA/San Diego gets too hot, Atlanta gets humid as well, Boston and NYC get too hot and humid in the summer, and are snowy in winter (though I don't mind that so much). Seattle's got too much rain.
I don't really disagree. Although a fair number of people are fine with the Southwest deserts, especially high desert.
But coastal California (which, as you say, is mostly somewhat different from SF specifically) is the only real Mediterranean climate in the US.
This particularly unpleasant spell of weather we had until a couple of days ago notwithstanding, New England generally isn't bad in the summer especially once you get out of the cities. You're rarely going to be too uncomfortable on the Maine coast in the summer even without AC. But, yes, it's cold and snowy in the winter.
Living in San Diego now and by the coast I don’t think it gets too hot (if you can the ocean, it’s likely not too hot). There is usually ocean breeze and most of the year it’s warm, not hot.
I do remember driving up the highway from Mountain View or San Jose many times and seeing this "cap" above SF. Literally going from short sleeves to jacket.
There are bars and restaurants and museums in hundreds of cities around the country. What makes the ones in SF so special? Or is it rather a tech gravity hole that was enabled by combination of chance and attractive climate?
SF has does high-end, expensive, Michelin star restaurants well. But affordable and mid-range restaurants, bars, and museums in SF are at best on par with what you'll find in other cities.
It's where the most tech jobs are, it's where the VC money is, and if you're in your early twenties and straight out of college, it beats living in a bedroom community on the peninsula.
The Bay Area has the highest concentration of Michelin stars in the country. The bars have great cocktails, decor and vibe. The SFMoma & DeYoung are first class museums as good as any city outside New York in the US.
The SFMoma & DeYoung are not first class museums. They have modern art. New York may beat San Francisco, but it is not particularly good.
The winning city, without any doubt, is Washington, D.C.
Also beating San Francisco:
Houston, TX
Huntsville, AL
Pearlington, MS
Kennedy Space Center, FL
Dayton, OH
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Chantilly, VA
Ashland, NE
Unless you actually go to the same museum again and again, your own city doesn't matter. To see different things, you have to travel to different cities. The best city is thus one with lots of cheap direct flights to the cities with museums. That would likely be Denver, Dallas, Chicago, or Atlanta.
I'd also include Los Angeles (Getty and LACMA), Chicago (Art Institute), and Boston (MFA, beating SF by default because it doesn't even really compete in this category).
Getty and LACMA are not good. Los Angeles does however have good museums: the Battleship USS Iowa Museum, Fort MacArthur Museum, Mission San Fernando Rey de España, La Brea Tar Pits, and the California Science Center.
Chicago's Art Institute is not good. Chicago does however have a couple good museums: Museum of Science and Industry, Field Museum of Natural History,
Boston's MFA is not good. Boston does however have Fort Warren and the USS Constitution.
> The SFMoma & DeYoung are not first class museums. They have modern art.
These two statements aren't even related, and while the first is subjective, the second is misleading in regards DeYoung, which is not focussed on modern art.
They really are related. Modern art museums are something you endure to complete assignments for unpleasant humanities courses that are required for your degree. Most of the content is disgusting or boring.
I'd much prefer to see a Saturn V, mummy, XB-70, stegosaurus fossil, Space Shuttle, enigma machine, US constitution, SR-71, or moon rock.
The best museum in San Francisco is probably the cable car museum.
The DeYoung is mostly special exhibits, right? I've been to a couple that were pretty good but, in general, SF is pretty weak in terms of museums. (And I admit I just don't personally care for much of what's in SFMoma.) Though that's generally true of the West Coast with a few notable exceptions like the Getty.
I guess the permanent collection at the DeYoung didn't make much of an impression the last time I was there for a special exhibit. Never been to the Legion of Honor.
A great museum is likely to have events, speakers, special exhibits, and other new features that keep it fresh for residents. The Smithsonian system is very attractive in that regard; I can't vouch for the others.
I see you put Chantilly, VA on your list. The main museum of Chantilly is Udvar-Hazy, also part of the Smithsonian. Like the Smithsonian, it's free, though there's a parking fee (and it's in the middle of nowhere, so you do need a car.) It has many of the large aircraft that don't fit in the downtown Air and Space Museum, including a Space Shuttle, a Concorde, and an SR-71. Highly recommended.
I'll give you the Michelin star restaurants, but cheap or mid-range restaurants are disappointing (understandable given the astronomical cost to open and maintain a restaurant here), the bars and nightlife are similar to what you'll find in other cities, and museums in DC, Chicago, and LA blow SF out of the water.
So if it's a 10 or 20 year "major" blip does that make it longer than "temporary"?
Locals tend to go to museums once or never, lots of places have good bars and restaurants and the idea of SF having a proximity to real nature is a joke. I guess time will tell if you, I or someone else is ultimately correct, but the pull of SF was the jobs above all else; if that's gone then I'd argue there are much better places to live for the amenities. NYC is in a similar boat - you move there for the people and what they bring when packing too many people in too small a physical space. This doesn't seem what most are looking for now or in the near/mid term.
Do you live in the Bay Area? Your take doesn’t match my experience at all...
* Most of my friends are members of one museum (or have season tickets to SHN/SFJazz/etc)
* Most of my friends go hiking in Marin or Big Basin or whenever at least once a month, and spend a weekend somewhere like Big Sur or Yosemite a couple times a year. Bay Area nature is unparalleled.
SF may be in a tough place for a while, but don’t underestimate why it’s special.
Finally a truthful comment. Everybody goes there to make money, that's it. There's nothing wrong with that, so why do people still try to pretend that isn't the reason when out of view of their employers?
> and spend a weekend somewhere like Big Sur or Yosemite a couple times a year. Bay Area nature is unparalleled.
If you've gotta drive 4 hours to get there, it isn't 'Bay Area nature'... There are very few places in this vast and beautiful country that aren't 3-4 hours away from jaw-dropping scenery - in fact I doubt you could find a single one.
Dallas, Texas fits (or nearly fits) this description. Unless I've missed some area of Jaw-Dropping scenery that's more than a single attraction, it's 10+ hours to the natural beauty found in Arkansas or Colorado, and 4+ hours to get to the closest thing to it in Texas.
On the other hand, Dallas is the hub of 2 airlines so well connected. With the rent money you save you could afford to take multiple mini vacations a year!
I have to assume that there's a place in Kansas/Nebraska somewhere in the Great Plains that you have to drive 4 hours to see anything other than fields.
Chrissy field beach was amazing on Friday, whole family got sunburned and didn’t want to leave. Ocean beach is massive and awesome, great for bonfires. Both those are 10 min drives for us. Or head to one of multiple nudist beach just south of Pacifica or north Baker beach near the GG. I totally relate to SF being associated with beaches and ive been here 15 years now. We used to have to drive in over 1hr of LA traffic to go to the beach, don’t miss that.
Sure there are plenty of beaches, but most of the time they're cold and windy. On a typical day I wouldn't want to lie around in a bathing suit or swim.
Friday's weather was an exception and I'm glad you were able to enjoy it!
> Do you think that remote-first/remote-only companies where the majority of employees are outside of the bay area will be as competitive with startups which follow a more traditional model in silicon valley?
Absolutely. Lower overhead, greater access to talent, and assertions that the Silicon Valley model is somehow better than a remote-first model are frequently worthy of a big ol' [citation needed].
I'll be honest, I've never cared about museums and having moved around the state I find the bar/restaurant scene pretty lacking compared to southern California. There's a good view to be had that I think will gurantee a certain minimum value in the city but I can get better culture and better food elsewhere.
Detroit is actually pretty great, we have some pretty awesome museums (the DIA has a really impressive collection), affordable orchestra, ballet, and opera, great parks (belle isle is magical), the food scene isn’t SF or NYC but it’s accessible and experimental, there are tons of pop ups, food trucks and the like. Besides that, It’s extremely affordable outside of a handful of neighborhoods. Obviously there are problems, but it’s actually a really easy and fun place to live
A vacated city doesn't wait around for your blip to pass, it fills up with all sorts of nastiness, making it even more unpleasant for anyone to return.
> People are leaving because quality of life has fallen dramatically and the only thing keeping people in SF was their offices.
Do you think those quality of life issues are temporary or permanent? I mean, many of the things that make SF great are temporarily closed down (its geography and architecture are notable exceptions). That said, I think SF also has more negatives than many other cities (aggressive homeless population, tons of property crime, very high taxes but with services that are comparable, or worse, to other cities). Will be interesting to see what happens in 6-12 months.
I think there's a sizeable group of people who found the quality of life poor prior to any shut downs or changes. SF is also not nearly as attractive to those starting a family compared to new grads and young single professionals. Combining these factors I see a significant permanent change if people can keep their high paying jobs and escape the physical proximity.
> SF is also not nearly as attractive to those starting a family compared to new grads and young single professionals.
But that's been true for a long, long time about most major cities. Wasn't a big plot point in the ending of Friends in the 90s that Monica and Chandler were starting a family thus they were moving out to the suburbs? I don't see any big permanent change here except for perhaps people willing to relocate to somewhere way more out there than just the 'burbs.
The misconception is that people are leaving because the housing is too expensive and its not worth it anymore... People are leaving because quality of life has fallen dramatically
Aren't these two sides of the same coin?
Very few people base their housing choices on cost alone. Other livability factors play a huge role. That's why real estate developers put amenities in their apartment buildings, and fight over location: Because people are willing to pay more in rent if the livability is higher than a cheaper alternative.
I think you're right and we may be saying the same thing. Certainly most people consider cost vs quality of life. In SF this is particularly true for the younger people that are leaving. They just move back in with their parents, stop paying rent, and maybe will come back if/when things reopen.
My point was about the other group that is leaving: more established professionals / homeowners / parents. For that group, saving on housing in the short terms isn't actually a major factor. Many are likely moving to other expensive places. The main thing keeping them in SF was their offices, professional network, or their children. In other words they were in SF despite the declining quality of life. With those constraints gone, they are leavings en mass as well.
Then again, a large contribution to pre-Covid/BC-era "declining quality of life" was due to the city bursting at the seams (the city's population grew far in excess of the number of new housing units being built), and the troubles that came with that.
Living in any place where everything is shut down is a pretty bad deal, but that's the situation we're in now. Sure, you get a lot more room to yourself at lower prices if you move out of the bay area or out into the woods, but it seems pretty short-sighted to uproot your life for something that will be temporary (even if "temporary" means another year).
But I guess some people are only here because they have to be for their job, and haven't cared to put down roots. I won't mourn their disappearance, frankly. Lower cost of living for those of us who actually want to be here would be delightful.
I’d rather live somewhere where petty theft, homelessness, public drug use, and dirtiness are less of an issue and where COL is much lower if they’re both equally as boring.
And good for you! I admittedly don’t have many roots. Most people I know who are leaving are those who were renting and didn’t have kids. I’ve seen rents dropping so I’m sure you can benefit from the exodus as well (if you’re renting). They still haven’t dropped enough for staying to be worth it to me though
HI! I'm the correspondent for AFP a global news agency, and I'm looking for to speak with people leaving San Francisco because of pandemic/remote work. Did you already moved? Do you know other person in the process? Can I talk to you?
- Homeless issues. Mentally ill people pissing and defecating on the sidewalks in every significant public space.
- Vehicle vandalism is extremely common and unchecked by police.
- Extremely high income taxes with no perceivable difference in government-provided services.
- Property tax law that advantages long-term owners over young people trying to buy at today's inflated prices.
COVID added some new ones:
- Extremely high pre-COVID rents meant many adults were living in roommate situations that seem a lot less acceptable when your health is tied to the willingness of everyone in your unit to behave responsibly.
- Bars and restaurants that made the city attractive for many are now closed
- Public transit in crisis and may no longer meet your needs
> Vehicle vandalism is extremely common and unchecked by police.
I believe the problem is more nuanced. I spoke with a retired police officer, and he said, "we can only give them a citation, and they [the vandals] know that, that they're gonna be out the same day."
In other words, the law is the problem, not the police.
"We can only give them a citation"? I think a big part of the issue is that the police almost never even do that much. They do zero. If you try to call this stuff in, they laugh at you.
I've called 3 times for 3 different broken windows on my car (a 2010 jeep - nothing special) and they literally just send you to an online form that automatically generates a generic police report. Insurance fraud here also has to be off the charts.
Because it would be a complete waste of time. The people have voted to decriminalize vehicle break-ins. Making the police to go through the motions when nothing's going to happen to the perpetrator would just be a waste of your own tax money.
Exactly. You can see loads of videos online of 5, 10 people, entering a regular Whole Foods or 7-Eleven and simply looting the place and leaving without pay. This kind of thing doesn't even happen in 3rd world countries like where I live, its's baffling to see what a huge american metropolis is allowing to happen in the name of political correctness.
This is actually really interesting. I don't think this is a problem with policing or political correctness. This is something I always think of when looting is mentioned: Most people reading this could walk into any grocery store (or Target, or auto parts store) and just purchase whatever they wanted without even thinking about the cost. For all practical purposes, in a software engineer's budget, expenses like that are a rounding error. My point is that the problems and solutions are usually a lot more complicated than they seem. The various social forces at work in SF are kinda crazy when you think about them.
It's not a matter of "affording" food/products or not. It's a political decision, to not prosecute people for crimes against property. And it's an extremely dangerous decision. The rule of law, and the freedom that societies that enforce it have, are inextricably linked. A government that does not protect the property of it's citizens has no right to exist. It's basically telling the ordinary citizen "you're on your own". What this type of goverment creates, either by stupidity or malice, is an anarchy fueled law of the jungle.
It works if you have a captive population and the people have no other choice. As this thread demonstrates, people are getting fed up and just leaving. If the city doesn't turn things around it will setup a downward spiral that's very hard to get out of. I think that's a real risk for a post-covid comeback, if it gets bad enough after all the people making the city great have left then it just won't come back.
Unfortunately many of the people who've left San Francisco have moved to Austin and are enacting exactly the same policies. It's already created a dramatic shift in the city, and I can easily see Austin strongly resembling San Francisco from a quality of life / lawfulness perspective in just 5-10 years.
Im a third generation Texan and welcome all the Californians and their politics.
Even in Austin, Texas is a backwards, overtly racist, pro-big business anti-small business state that hates “freedom” unless it has to do with guns or corporate protections.
By the way, we have so many homeless because other republican heavy cities ship them here. Google ‘Haruka Weiser’ for a pretty normal example of a cop from a small town picking up a mentally unstable transient and dropping them off in downtown Austin a couple of blocks near the university.
I think there are pros and cons to each policy position, but let's not kid ourselves, San Francisco is not the city to model yourself after. A lesson that unfortunately all the people fleeing SFO didn't learn when they landed in Austin.
I am glad to see that Austin has become more progressive in some ways, but being completely ineffectual in how we care for members of our community while enabling the worse consequences of untreated mental illness and homelessness isn't something to be happy about. The key factor here is "untreated". There are some cities in the US that are actually working in a positive direction to help the homeless communities in their area to improve their lives, rather than just giving them a free pass out of doors.
Homelessness is a major problem all across America, and it's also a very complex problem. There are no easy fixes, but there are some obvious things which make the conditions and problem worse. It'd be great if there were easy fixes, but the reality is that it's very difficult to help people unless they want to be helped, and there's very real human rights considerations to forcing people into mental health or addiction treatments. Our country tried that at one point too, and it also didn't end well.
"Our country tried that at one point too, and it also didn't end well."
In fact the mental health insttutions system of the 70's and earlier was very successful from what I've read about. It was the victim of a mass campaign of what we today would call "fake news" from activists. The result is the crisis you have today, where people that NEED help, even if they are incapable of understanding and consenting to it, can't get it and are left to fend for themselves on the streets.
Unfortunately, the horror stories about state mental hospitals in the US were true. Patients had no ability to leave of their own accord, even if they were reasonably of sound mind. Once committed, you were completely at the whim of the doctor(s). In many cases people had unnecessary and permanently damaging procedures done to them such as electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) or a frontal lobotomy. There are serious philosophical concerns around consent and patient rights when it comes to permanent involuntary commitment.
Absolutely. But it really feels like kicking the can down the road to try to deal with severe inequality just by decriminalizing theft. There has to be a better long-term solution.
People brazenly come into my Starbucks all the time and openly announce they are shoplifting, because they know that the police won't show up to take a report for at least an hour.
Once we do have the report, even if they do get caught, nothing happens. Many months of reports and multiple trips to the courthouse and we can MAYBE get a stay away order. Usually before that point, the store management has shuffled around enough that the person handling the legal legwork has moved on.
This economical view on Justice - ignore petty stuff because it is too expensive for the system to deal with it - destroys the goodwill on people and on State.
Public transit is a huge problem. Even if, say, my coworkers were willing to ride public transit, I'm not sure I'd be willing to be in the same room as them.
And to add to the roommate problem, I think a lot of people in sf led lives predicated on not spending that much time in their tiny housing. All of a sudden with everyone all home all the time... oof. You really need a separate office for each person so you're not spending 95% of your life in your bedroom. That's pretty unaffordable for most of the city.
My company bit the bullet and allowed permanent remote. Fifteen percent of our employees have already left sf. I suspect this will accelerate as leases expire.
Also, the stunning incompetence of sf government has led to property prices that are just stunning. A coworker bought a nice condo -- obviously elsewhere -- for less money than he was paying to have two roommates in sf. Getting out from under the ridiculous cost of living here leads to such a stark change in quality of life elsewhere.
The property prices are due to "stunning incompetence of SF government"? I'm not buying that. Public officials are not in charge of—nor do they have any real control over—property values. Your co-worker who bought property elsewhere wasn't able to do so because the mayor of that town was incredibly competent. That had absolutely nothing to do with it.
The board of supervisors routinely rejects housing projects, or puts them up for an absurd review process that involve things like banning buildings if they cast a sliver of shadow on a park (which would on the other hand be tremendously welcome these days). Several supervisors are landlords who are personally invested in keeping the supply low so that prices keep rising.
By contrast, Seattle has been building to keep up with demand and has been able to manage prices much more effectively. We could have had a Tokyo of the West. Instead, we're left with an emptying shell of a self-agrandizing suburb.
And who do you think effectively controls the BoS and planning commission? Voters. Landowning voters. Because by and large, they want to maintain the status quo.
(Full disclosure: I also own property in SF, but am in faor of all sorts of new housing, even that which will lower my home's value.)
Yes, especially in local elections, where participation is often ridiculously low, the electorate skews heavily toward long time, older residents, and more on the homeowner than the renter front. So the incentives are clear against new developments.
Edit: Thanks for supporting housing even against your financial interests. I’m on the same boat (across the bay). In my case I just want to live somewhere walkable without breaking the bank.
There is enough new housing here that apt buildings went down in monthly cost last summer. People keep moving here so house prices have been stubbornly resilient.
According to this, Seattle rents doubled from 2010 to 2016 and have been fairly flat since then. SF seems to follow basically the same curve: up 1.5x from 2010 to 2016 then flat-ish.
Maybe I was too much on the dropping side but the article says prices had been booming like you said for a decade and 10k units were filled and then prices stabilized.
The SF Board of Supervisors has a lot of control over the supply and has used it to make it very hard to build anything. High prices are a direct result of low supply.
I'm not sure I'd call it incompetence though, they are very motivated to keep existing landowners happy. Higher prices and fewer neighbors to deal with is an easy way to do that.
It's not incompetence, though thats what the BoS would like you believe of them. It's corruption, plain and simple, and it'll cost you a $50,000 bribe to start getting the permits. The latest expose is against Mohammed Nuru but look back across the decades and realize it's a recurring theme.
Example: Hillary Ronin is the supervisor for the mission. An area that was historically lower income minorities, now being displaced, in part due to a lack of housing units. She has fought for years to stop the construction of buildings that would add both affordable units and market rate units.
"Ronen fought to prevent the construction of a 75-unit building on the site of a laundromat. She argued that an environmental review of the building did not consider the impact of a shadow on a nearby schoolyard, even though an environmental review conducted by officials at the San Francisco Planning Department showed that the new construction, including its shadow, would not have an adverse impact on children at the schoolyard.]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Ronen
SF city “leadership” had failed the city miserably. What we’ve witnessed is that the city was actually really, really hard to destroy with A LOT going on for it. The pandemic just accelerated the demise - no other city even in CA has exodus quite like SF. This is all very sad as SF was such a beautiful city.
Why would anyone vote for the incumbents in SF’s next elections is beyond me.
If you are talking about the board of supervisors, I agree. They are to blame for many of the city’s problems, mostly because their most politically active constituents and donors are angry homeowners who block everything.
The current mayor London Breed has been doing good work, her handling of the covid-19 crisis in particular has been excellent. The problem is that most supervisors hate her and block her every step of the way.
Extremely high pre-COVID rents meant many adults were living in roommate situations that seem a lot less acceptable when your health is tied to the willingness of everyone in your unit to behave responsibly.
Unless you're practically retired, this is not a real issue given the COVID mortality profile. The sort of people who have flatmates tend to be younger, so the idea that COVID means nobody can or should have flatmates anymore isn't backed by any sort of medical reality.
But there does seem to be an issue here with the type of people who live in SF not seeming to perceive the risks around COVID correctly. Why is Google keeping their offices closed until 2021? All you have to do is look at the stats or the history of epidemics to realise that this doesn't make sense, especially for a workforce as famously young as Google's.
If you could establish an impregnable firewall between young healthy people and vulnerable people, and you ignore the rare deaths of healthy young people and side-effects of infection, the infection rate among young healthy people would be less important.
But establishing an impregnable firewall is impossible, and long as the boundary between groups is porous, a higher infection rate among the young and healthy will increase the infection rate among the vulnerable, and hence the death rate.
SF has an extreme homelessness problem, there are places where you can walk two blocks from posh shops to tent lined streets and open air drug markets. Working at a previous gig had me looking at the ground carefully to avoid stepping on needles, feces, and humans, all of which were nearly daily obstacles.
Because of the mild weather and culture, SF is somewhat of a destination for the homeless which is less of an issue, but it wasn’t clear that the city was doing nearly enough to address the filth and human tragedy plaguing the streets.
It is also so expensive that bars and restaurants (before covid) had a hard time hiring because working at an SF restaurant meant either living in squalor packed in somewhere or living extremely far away and commuting. Thus everything opened late and closed early. The food scene was overrated, most of the artists left for the east bay or LA, and the charming things about the city seemed like they were only still there because of fantasy or stubborn inertia.
Other cities have room and willingness to build or the courage to restrict business growth if not willing to expand residential growth. People and businesses are much more willing to leave other cities, and that supply/demand elasticity makes problems fix themselves, but other cities don’t have the romanticism/reality disconnect in nearly the same way.
That you have an affluent area on one block and a poor area on the next is not new at all. it was like that back in the 80s. And it's probably a good thing, in terms of making it easy to climb the ladder. If you live in a wasteland of poor people you'll never be able to sell any services at all, or make any money, or climb the ladder.
I agree, but it seems like "poor area" means something different in SF. Most cities don't have any areas where the sidewalks are littered with needles and human feces.
What are these quality of life issues, and how have other cities avoided them?
They haven't. But other cities have handled some quality of life issues differently, or better, or in some cases worse.
It's all cyclical. New York was a great place to be in the 60's, largely due to quality of life. New York in the 70's was a hellhole, largely due to quality of life. These things ebb and flow in every city. It's just SFO's turn to be on the fuzzy end of the lollipop. It'll come back.
Uhh, maybe US cities haven’t, but here in Tokyo I never smell feces, step on needles, nor are there hordes of homeless people in every major part of the neighborhood, in a city that has affordable housing, a truly phenomenal public transit network, streets that pretty much never have potholes, and endless cultural and culinary amenities, in a place with GDP per capita far lower than SF. And it similarly was the case for pretty much every city I’ve been to in East Asia, so it’s not even just a Tokyo thing.
I was active in SF housing politics when I lived there for 8 years, and my conclusion is that SF and most other US cities incompetent local governments (SF’s especially) are stuck in a mindset where they still repeatedly declare that they’re “great!” despite their blatantly subpar infrastructure and the rampant, systematic trampling of their own citizens human rights. Perhaps it is great for the elderly voters who never leave their homes in the burbs and see the “undesirables”.
They make excuses about how US culture makes tried and true solutions in other cities impossible to implement (So... are they saying US culture is just inferior?), and that things will get better just around the corner (when it costs 10x more and takes 10x longer to make any updates to the built infrastructure in US cities than anywhere else, and SF itself has built virtually nothing in the last 40 years).
Maybe it will, but I decided for myself that I’m not willing to wait around for it, and chose one of the countless
cities in the world that in fact does do better.
I don't think you are reading the parent poster. Tokyo was probably rubble in 1945 then it re-invented itself into a world-class city.
Hong Kong was (probably still is for now) a world class city for the rich and the free and now is on path to become a hell-hole for both.
Cities swing through a pendulum of up and down. SF might be going to ruins but it'll be back. It might have to reach rock-bottom first before re-inventing itself though.
That said, the city does not have visible homeless or crime problems of most large US cities, partly because you can legally get a coffin for $300/month.
Hong Kong has an imperfect but subsistence-level dole system (CSSA), coffin house style bad but cheap housing (notably absent in SF), less of a drug problem, and a more functional system for taking care of the mentally ill.
You kidding me? Physical infrastructure is absolutely central to the issue. Demand to live in SF skyrocketed but the city responded by resisting any expansion of its housing stock. To claim that doesn’t have an impact on the affordability in the city, which in turn affects whether or not people can afford to live in a home there, is madness.
> Tokyo could be the rare example of a once expensive city that successfully managed the difficult political process of removing planning restrictions in order to achieve affordable housing.
They didn't achieve affordable housing as a result of a clean slate. In fact housing in Tokyo was insanely expensive during the 80s. It wasn't until zoning restrictions were changed in the 90s that prices came back down. It's about the laws, not about having to contend with old buildings.
How did you make the move? Are you Japanese or Asian? I would love to move to Tokyo or similar but feel I would be discriminated against for being a dark skinned Indian male.
I’m half southeast Asian, which is different enough people can tell if they get close, but close enough that I can blend in in a crowd. It depends where in Japan you’re moving to as well - but being in Tokyo it’s definitely global and people are generally used to foreigners. Your mileage may vary being more visibly “different”, as well as you motivation to learn Japanese/local customs (I’m pretty conversational, which took a lot of work), and your sensitivity to being treated differently - though for me I mostly don’t take it personally.
Thanks for the response. I think I wouldn't be too sensitive regarding being treated different but I would feel more sensitive to how my wife and kids experience it. It's the same issue keeping me away from places in the US like Idaho and Montana.
Oh, I didn't answer the how - I had been to Japan a lot, so I already had friends here. When I made the move permanent, I had cofounded a company with a few friends, piloted doing remote work from here a couple times before actually moving to convince the team that it can work. Once we were all onboard with it, I crashed at my friend's apartment while going apartment hunting with my Japanese then-girlfriend (now-wife). When I first arrived permanently I was on a tourist visa waiver, but then switched to a student visa studying Japanese (since I was planning to anyway). It was 6 months of full time school + full time job which was exhausting, but after we got married then I switched to a spouse visa and life calmed down since.
I don't know what your profession or situation is, but if you can line up a job you can pretty easily get a work visa (it's much less binding than US work visas). Japanese corporations are known to have pretty brutal work culture so that's something you ought to be aware of when searching, if you seriously pursue it. Hope it's interesting food for thought :)
You should probably consider if your own fears are biased. There seems to be a tendency to assume that racism is more prevalent than reality in many areas of the country, fueled by the internet and the media. I live in a suburban, Midwestern area that is absolutely more diverse and welcoming than those on the coasts seem to think. Of the 6 households nearest to mine, 3 are white. The other 3 are Indian (first generation immigrant), Chinese (second generation), and Eastern European (first generation). I work at a smaller startup now, but at my previous job, my team was white-minority. Most people on my team were East or South Asian, including my boss.
I have no doubt there are racists here, especially in the rural areas. But I also have no doubt that the same holds true for places like California and Washington. You may be keeping yourself from experiencing areas of the country that you may love and would love you back.
I appreciate your comment. I grew up in the Bay Area in the late 70s and 80s and even then there was plenty of diversity. But I was definitely treated differently/bullied due to my background. I don't think this will happen to my kids in the Bay nowadays (or at least not to that extent). But I guess I am a bit biased in thinking other parts of the country are not so progressive.
I'll keep your perspective in mind and temper my assumptions. Thanks!
I hope US cities wake up, become humble, and actually try to fix the deep hole of social issues they’ve dug themselves into. Best I can say is be active and vocal in your local government, since that’s where these messed up policies come from and you have a lot more power to impact your city than you do the federal government.
What about the fact that, nation-wide, many Americans don't have access to good jobs? Especially people without college degrees, but not even limited to that. This is an economy-wide problem. The federal government could probably do something to better address that than a city government.
How about that we generally fail at mental health care, or health care in general? The former is clearly applicable to many homeless folks who are visibly suffering. The latter is a huge cost for many people, drives many personal bankruptcies, etc.
I do believe city governments play an enormous role in these issues; the most obvious is the ridiculous and convoluted process for housing approvals in SF that has made it impossible for the city to come even close to providing adequate housing supply for the people that wish to live there, driving housing costs through the roof; coupled with the incessant stonewalling of any housing and transportation construction by municipalities across the Bay. Plus the fact that people dedicated to perpetuating this atrocious system keep getting elected to the the SF Board of Supervisors, no thanks to young people who would benefit from competition failing to show up to the elections.
But I also place a lot of blame on state policies too - CA Prop 13 is a cancer on the whole state, incentivizing land owners to fight tooth and nail to prevent progress. I'm glad that Scott Wiener got elected, though, as he's been making solid progress at the state level to rectify these issues.
The roots of these problems are not broadly federal in my opinion and, while they certainly can help, there's a lot of work to do at the city and state level that are achievable with a small number of dedicated people - if only they cared.
Neither would I just blame the sorry state of US cities on inadequate mental health care - while healthcare broadly certainly should be better, I'm in Japan where mental health awareness is relatively speaking in the stone age compared to SF, and that hasn't resulted in the level of human tragedy you experience viscerally by existing for 5 minutes in any of the US's major metropolises. Part of the reason for that is I can get my own apartment without roommates 15 minutes from the center of Tokyo for $600/mo, largely because the local government here actually does things to make it livable (and it's not just here, it's practically everywhere besides US cities).
And that won’t go very far if they started to offer free mental health care and housing because they will start to get people shipped in from everywhere else.
I'm on team "build more housing", but providing housing (as in, the city pays for housing for the poor who can't afford to pay for their own housing) directly costs the city money, if the city is paying rent to the landlord; costs the city money if the city buys the building/pays for construction; and indirectly costs the city money in lost property tax for units that the city designates as BMR units.
Allowing construction will alleviate pressure on the system as a whole, but, perhaps due to a failure of my imagination, I'm not seeing ways in which it won't cost something. I think it's worth it, mind you, I'm just not seeing how to make it $0.
Yeah, I guess "providing" was a poor choice of words.
In 2020 SF, even the upper middle class struggle to pay for housing. If you, as a first step, allow the housing stock to double, twice as many people can afford to live in the city, and life in SF becomes much more accessible.
Sure, there will always be people out of luck needing some assistance. But it should dwindle down to a smaller core when there are places to live.
Personally, I don't believe in government run housing. It's better to help people with rent money etc. But of course, none of this will ever happen in SF, so my opinions don't matter.
With unemployment rising and poor benefits, civil unrest, and shitty containment policies; I’m thinking about riding the rest of this out back in Canada so we don’t get robbed/assaulted.
"While the border closure has had significant economic and personal repercussions for the millions of people that live along it or have loved ones on the other side, the vast majority of Canadians want it to stay shut."
>>When entering Newfoundland and Labrador, visitors will be required to produce two pieces of government issued identification to verify that they are a permanent resident in one of the Atlantic Provinces. One piece of identification must include a home address.
The Right of Return is an international law that allows citizens to return to their country of citizenship, and while some may have doubts about the willingness of the USA to follow the Geneva Convention, I'm pretty sure Canada still adheres to it.
Not as much as it was. De Blasio has been an unmitigated disaster, and NYC is rapidly approaching 90s-level (if not 70s-level) squalor. Only time will tell if the voters will throw him out and elect someone who can effectively manage the city government, or double down on failure.
At a guess: everything is shut down because of the pandemic.
That's true in other cities too. But if you can't take advantage of the facilities a city has to offer, why pay $4,000/month rent to live there during the pandemic when you could pay less than half of that somewhere else?
>Almost everybody I know that moved out had no problem affording housing (high earners / home owners / rent controlled).
How are we supposed to reconcile this is all the insanely wealthy people saying they will move out of California because of a wealth tax they can easily afford without even noticing it?
>-In my 6 unit building in Nob Hill (5 of which are owner occupied). 3 units including myself have moved out permanently. 1x to Austin. 1x to Palm Springs. 1x to East Bay.
Did they sell those units or are the owners just holding them empty? I think there is a lot of that going on. For those that bought a long time ago, there might be a comfortable equity cushion that can let them hold units like these empty for years.
I am going to go out on a limb and guess - are you in your early to mid twenties? Just guessing based on some of your examples. I'm not at all trying to dismiss the perspective of young people, but I think these behaviors are very strongly correlated with age and/or life stage.
I'm a bit older than that in my thirties, and I haven't really observed this effect yet among my peer group. A lot of people are leaving temporarily, one person moved to Marin (but that's where their family is and I think they may have done that anyway), another friend was already planning a cross-country move and just did it a little earlier due to covid. On the other hand, looking at a lot of my younger friends and coworkers over the past few years, it feels like maybe a third to half of them always ended up leaving the city after a few years, and this was before covid.
I saw someone tweet this about NY, and it's my best guess about the present situation too - that it's likely most of the people leaving permanently due to the pandemic were going to leave the city in the next 3-5 years anyway. People have been moving to New York and then leaving after a few years for decades if not centuries (and writing nostalgic essays about doing so so often it has become a whole genre). And now that SF is such a hub for tech opportunities, in the same way that NY has always been for many different industries, I think this is just as true here as well.
In my early 30s here. All my friends have left, and now we are doing so, too. You are right, IMO. Most of those friends are in tech and plan to move back eventually, but are hoping to score better deals on rent then. For now they live in the mountains and can do some fun solo activities for the next year.
For us, we have wanted to leave for several years, but the ability to WFH for my wife actually makes it possible now. More space, owning vs renting, and more local friends elsewhere all are big drivers.
It turns out that most of my friends from SF have all left for the same general area, so it became a pretty easy decision for us. Additionally, We are moving to a place where many of our college friends also live, so we are hoping that some of those friendships also rekindle.
> How are you able to make more local friends in a less dense location?
Not the GP, but the social changes that happen with population density may make starting friendships more difficult (e.g. people adapting by being more standoffish than welcoming due to the sheer number of people they have to interact with in a dense environment).
Alternate experience: I just moved into SF a week ago from elsewhere in the Bay.
I was able to get a large, modern, luxury 1BR in a decent location for under $3K + almost a 1 month concession and no deposit.
Being a single, young(ish) guy, it still makes sense to be in a city. I have more space than I need now, and I can afford the rent. Maybe things aren’t that nice right now, but I’m hoping they’ll get back to semi-normality in a few months. Plus, I’m still banking on there being more opportunity to level up in my career much more here.
Oh no... I barely tolerate driving through civic center, nevermind walking there. I avoid waking or biking through the filth in the civic center at all costs. I'm not being facetious, I wish you a good time with no ill events, that's definitely a good deal on the rent.
That's not really true. I've lived in the Inner Sunset for 2 years, and I've actually noticed an increase in the local homeless population over that time. Obviously not concentrated/encamped in the way they are in the neighborhoods you mention, but still, they're much more present than in equivalent quiet residential neighborhoods I've lived in in NYC or Chicago.
It varies. There were multiple encampments in the Richmond. 24th and Anza, 20th and Geary, and 16th and Geary for example. The city cleaned them up recently and posted signs about no lodging, but they were there for months before.
Don’t listen to everyone being so negative. I lived in Civic Center for several years. Fine place because it’s so central and easy to get anywhere. Probably not a good place to raise a family but otherwise fine. You got a great deal on rent.
You're probably at Argenta, Fox Plaza, NEMA or 100 Van Ness. It's a fine place very central to most cool spots. Keep your wits about you and it shouldn't be a problem. I find 4th to 8th St to be the worst of it.
And for reference, a Hayes Valley 1bd would still be right above $3k. Or right below with concessions.
Luxury studios are going to $2400 already though.
Expecting further drops.
Yes, there are many people in Central Valley who can now afford to live out their dream of being in "the city".
A change of scenery is a change of scenery. I've met suddenly unencumbered East Coasters that roadtripped across during Phase 1 Shelter in Place, and they are content with the new environment.
I don't see these as demand drivers, as the replacements are not the economic powerhouses that were here: subsidized college kids and tech workers. So its nice if the city gets a diverse culture again, but in the topic of rent and housing prices, I wouldn't expect a rebound so optimistically.
Luxury studios were about that much 10 years ago. I don’t expect drops to be much further. The exodus is already decelerating according to Zestimates I’ve been following closely. I expect prices to drop further for a little bit longer then start to creep back up. Anyone who wants to live in the best weather in the continental USA should lock in their price now.
I also think $2400 is a floor here, but I also think the spread between unit types will get much closer. Instead of a 1bd being $2900, maybe it will be $2490. I've seen this curve compress in a lot of different combinations over the last 3 months.
But the other factor, which I think everyone is still neglecting, is that the exodus was only voluntarily exits. Evictions and foreclosures aren't happening and there is a massive backlog when they do. So with only the current date, November - January is when the fireworks start.
Best weather in continental USA? You mean in Orange County? I lived in Irvine for 6 years and it was essentially an average of 72 all year and mostly sunny days and barely any rain at all. Versus SF which gets way more cloudy and rainy days and isn't as warm.
So that would be, cold and foggy to cold and foggy? San Francisco weather is not usually touted as "good" by most common measures. I'll grant you that it is consistent, but most people appreciate seeing the sun now and then.
For comparison I own a 2br apartment in Melbourne, Australia. It takes about 15 minutes to walk from here to the heart of the city. My mortgage repayments (including interest) are about $700usd/month.
> My mortgage repayments (including interest) are about $700usd/month.
Melbourne is not cheap, there must be more to this story. The average house price in Melbourne is $855,428. A $600k unit, 20% deposit, 25y mortgage, cheap 2% rate is $1.4k or USD 1k. + strata fees
Yeah, this person lives in a shoebox in the outer suburbs. We pay double that for a 1920s apartment (so very spacious, but cheap) in a suburb walking distance from the CBD, right next to a tram line.
No I don’t. I’m not in the sticks - it’s a ~20 minute walk to southern cross station from here. I’m not saying how much I paid but it was noticeably less than $600k. My apartment is small for a 2br (It would be uncomfortable with a family) but I live alone and it’s great. It’s bigger than any studio apartment you’d find in SF for $3k/month.
The numbers work out because I had a decent deposit when I bought - which I should have mentioned above since it certainly brings the repayments down. And (I think) let my mortgage broker negotiate for better rates.
Right, I think the parent was quoting an absurdly low rate to point out that even with unrealistically ideal financing, the monthly payment would still be higher than the grandparent's claim.
I'm calling BS on this. I lived in Melbourne for the past 5 years (left 8 month ago) and never saw any 2br apartment that would be that cheap with a standard P+I loan with 10% down.
I guess it's possible if you took out an interest-only loan for only a fraction of the purchase price, but then you've painted a highly misleading picture.
I live in SF and no excrement on the sidewalk where I live.
Problem with SF is some neighborhoods are being neglected. There’s no penalty for lawless vagrancy, not even a “shoo shoo”. I’ve seen portapotties set up next to tent camps. I guess that’s better than street shitting but it’s a major disappointment to see tent cities encouraged.
You're assuming that salaries are not also impacted by the immense amount of wealth being generated by the Silicon Valley economy, though. And you're also assuming that housing prices will radically change, which I don't think is guaranteed even in the medium-term.
That's not what this article and others are saying. That is, people are leaving and housing is falling. Also, much of the appeal comes from bars, restaurants, boutiques, and such. Those too are falling off the map.
You can rent-to-own a 6br house on a 6k+ sqft lot with a detached garage in NJ with a ~1hr commute to Manhattan for $3,500/month in NJ. $3k/month on an apartment gets you a luxury huge 2 to 3 bedroom with in unit w/d and bowling/swimming in the basement or something in Hoboken with a <25min commute to Manhattan.
Thinking 36k/year (more then the total comp of many workers in America) is cheap housing is a Bay-area distortion.
who wants that long of a commute? It's all relative and the salaries here more than make up for it. I'm sure someone in the texas exurb would think you're nuts for paying that much in hoboken.
As someone who grew up in NJ about an hour south of Manhattan, that sounds like a living situation that would make me very unhappy as an adult (don't get me wrong; I had a great childhood). But I have some dear friends who lived in San Jose for several years and then ended up moving back to rural South Jersey, so, clearly, to each their own.
Even the 25min commute from Hoboken would make me sad. I want to be able to walk or take local transit to where I want to hang out.
> Thinking 36k/year is cheap housing is a Bay-area distortion.
Ive lived in San Jose and I can assure you that besides jobs, San Jose kind of sucks as a place to live. It's mostly just strip malls and good weather, imho. Campbell was a little nicer and had some cute shops.
Mostly proximity to extended family, and in general just indifference toward many of the trade offs between city and rural living. Those trade offs matter a lot to me, but not to them.
I live in the area and I think this is a bit exaggerated. I dont think the commute is 1hr door to door either. It's almost 1hr d2d from Harrison and I know you arent talking about Jersey City / Newark / Harrison / Bayonne
Manhattan renter here. NYC's slowly coming back alive. Hoping the commercial rents on storefronts go down a bit and we see some more novel shops open and some of the chain banks and fast food joints disappear.
Also, you can... pretty much, walk around town with a "to go" beer now which is really nice. It reminds me of Europe and taking a nice long walk, and then grabbing a bevvy is a nice change of pace from sitting at a bar in the before times.
A lot of stuff is still really empty, bike traffic is booming, the subways are surprisingly enjoyable to ride on due to the decreased numbers, and the beach is fantastic.
I don't have too many worries about the recovery here. Especially since the populace seems pretty good about masks. Hoping my rent drops a bit though!
Other things that I hope remain post COVID are some of the streets being closed off to traffic with lots of tables in the roads.
At the community board meetings they're already discussing whether or not they'll take a lot of the office space around me and end up converting it to residential. I think it's a bit premature for that but the city seems ready to adapt and thrive.
If you want to safely live in a city, now more than ever. The nation watched in horror as the pandemic hit NYC, hard, early on, so while other parts of the country still can't get their act together and wear a mask, NYC's experienced the shock and horror first hand and is likely to open back up sooner, even without a vaccine, simply due to more people believing in the guidelines. Conversely with only 69 deaths in San Francisco county attributed to COVID-19, SF's simply tired of being inside.
> I was able to get a large, modern, luxury 1BR in a decent location for under $3K + almost a 1 month concession and no deposit.
After being in my 1br in the Tendernob for 10 years ($1675/mo), I upgraded to a larger (similar layout) apt for just over $2K in Nob Hill. I received two-months concession for a 15-month lease.
I'm long past wanting to blow $200+ a night on bars and restaurants every day and because I love being in SF, I'm really happy.
> won't the price skyrocket when things go back to normal?
California adopted statewide rent control as of 1 January 2020. [0] If not already under rent control, rental units older than 15 years are now under rent control.
who cares? live your dream for 1 or 2 years and move on, or cross your fingers that new opportunities present itself in the denser environment that let you keep up with the rent. If you don't make new friends that you want to be roommates with for lower individual rent, then you end up moving on anyway.
Almost all apartments in SF are rent controlled. The landlord can only raise the rent by some tiny nominal percentage mandated by the rent board every year.
This isn't really true... it only applies to units that were built before a certain year (1979). If you are in any kind of modern unit / luxury unit as noted by GP, then this won't hold.
However, most landlords in non-managed buildings are fairly reasonable about only raising rent 2-5% a year. Your mileage may vary.
Then great news, SF has built almost nothing since 1979, so you’re more likely than not to be covered!
Maybe I was being a cheapskate for keeping my rent under $2k per month when I lived there, but I never lived in an apartment that wasn’t rent controlled.
Last stat is read is 30% of units in SF aren’t under rent control. Don’t forget that condos (single unit) aren’t rent controlled even if older than 1979.
For better or worse, landlords have figured out they can renovate the unit (at considerable expense) in order to need get a new certificate of occupancy, which has the upside of considering it to be a 'new' unit for rent-control reasons.
I think rent control laws recently changed, in the last two years; in SF units older than 2005 now fall under standard rent control rules of ~2% per year or CPI increase, whichever is less. Values of properties built in 2005 recently dropped as a result. A couple years ago, rent controlled units were much older.
Rent is extremely low in SF compared to what it a year ago. 9-25% off. Yeah, wide range.
Luxury buildings are the primary ones offering more 1-2 month concessions, which really means rent has dropped another 18% than what is listed.
And this is without evictions on tenants, or foreclosures on homeowners. Both of which can't really get started until November or January due to local regulations and now backlog. This is with purely voluntary departures.
For comparison: When I was apartment shopping in late February and early march in northern Virginia (limited to walking distance to the office and nice restaurants) One place I looked at was a luxury 1BR at $2k + 1 month concession, I went with a cheaper "studio" in the same building though (the 1BR had carpet and the studio had hardwood floor and wasn't much smaller.)
I manage a team of 10 people in San Francisco and confirm a similar pattern. 8 of them have moved out of their SF apartments either to move somewhere else more spacious or in with their parents outside of the Bay Area.
Other people I know at my company have renegotiated rents. Most but not all are open to the idea of moving back depending on how things play out over the next 6-12 months.
I think their is still a big career advantage to being in the Bay Area due to the big tech companies having offices here and face time being important for career advancement.
I would expect somewhat of a swing back away from
remote work when we get a vaccine. That being said, I think the wild card is city/state taxes in the aftermath of all this.
> I would expect somewhat of a swing back away from remote work when we get a vaccine.
I think a lot of people will move back to where offices are located, but I'm wondering if we'll see an increase in people who fly in for a few days every few weeks for meetings then jet back home to a cheaper part of the country. Relationships are hugely important -- and deep relationships are almost always only built in-person -- but we're overselling how much facetime you get in a full week vs. a very impactful 2-3 day trip with time for lunch/drinks etc.
Yeah I could totally see that. It’s a conversation me and my wife have been having a lot lately. I’m thinking about moving out of SF myself. Probably Oregon or Washington but we haven’t made any decisions yet. We want to see how the world looks after the elections in November.
These newly remote companies have no idea how difficult it is to be fully distributed. The company I work for have been doing it for years and we’re still dealing with growing pains. You lose a lot when all you do is Zoom with coworkers.
I'm not sure why you're getting downvotes. That's basically what I do during normal times. I actually live near a big office but I mostly meet with people elsewhere.
3) A friend who is moving to Santa Cruz just to be closer to surf while we are remote
Yeah? I've lived in SF and Santa Cruz. The quality of surf in Santa Cruz is vastly better, but the crowds are intense and at times pretty angry. I found it was less about localism, more about the anger of a large number of often very talented surfers competing for a scarce resource. I got longer, better rides in SC than I typically did in SF (by a 20-1 margin), but I'd have to maneuver for an hour to get priority for a few rides. They were glorious waves, though. Up here in SF, I tend to spread out on the beach break and find an uncrowded corner. Every thing has to line up just right to get a long, open, peeling wave out of a sand bar at OB or nearby beaches - whereas SC beaches (steamer lane, the point) generate this stuff pretty routinely.
But that's why it gets so edgy in SC. Everyone's in there, you finally get into position, it's your moment, you get maybe two of these every hour, and... someone paddles through the peak. Someone drops in. Even worse, that a someone is you, and you'll get barked at, at best (and while maybe the guy's being a dick about it, you really did fuck up). It's just too edgy, just boils over too much for my tastes. I know people say "well, don't do those things", but you'd be surprised how difficult that is. How do you know if you're deepest on a wave that breaks both directions? Did you drop in, or did someone snake? If you sit too far out, you'll miss the wave, and if you make it, there will be a sea of people you have to dodge. If you sit too far in, you may be staring down the barrel of a dozen surfers all taking off on the peak - and they'll either run you over, buzz you, or kick out of the wave and be really pissed that you ruined the ride that they spent the last 30 minutes getting ready for. Or, if someone does that to you, you kick out (better that than run the guy over), and now you're now caught inside and pissing off the next guy.
I surf regularly, and I'd much rather be in SF or Pacifica than in Santa Cruz. It's a trade off, though. If you want consistently high quality waves, SC does have more to offer.
Unrelated but it cracked me up... I do a bunch of outdoor stuff but really couldn't get into surfing (and downhill skiing) because you have to wait/jostle with people/paddle forever/wait some more until you finally get 1 minute of enjoyment (or more like 10 seconds when you are starting out with surfing). I thought it was the beginner problem because the places where I can be are so few, and I suck at catching waves... so if I only practiced it would all be long rides with minimal downtime. I figured I'd never get around to actually do it, and it turns out I didn't make a mistake :)
The worst you have to deal with in climbing is getting up super early so you could be the first on some popular route :)
I suspect part of the problem (for surfing) is the absence of a clear line-up. It's not the wait that bugs me, it's the constant maneuvering (and physical dangers of collisions in the water with boards). If I could join a clear defined lineup, wait my turn, paddle into a wave that I knew was mine to take, get a nice long ride, and re-join the lineup, I'd be fine with it. That there is such a thing as a line up at breaks with very well defined take-off zones, but even that breaks down pretty quickly in a crowd. A small number of surfers can make it happen, but good breaks in an accessible place (certainly everywhere in Santa Cruz) will exceed this crowd size 98% of the time.
I'm not a climber at all, but I've done a little bit of climbing on an indoor wall, and a crowded day means you need to wait longer, which is a hassle, but I get the feeling there's a much clearer sense of how to wait for your turn, with less interference when it is your turn. No idea if this is the case for outdoor climbing, though, or at more advanced sites. I'd still prefer a less crowded day with shorter lines of course - but crowds on a surf break don't just make it take longer to get the experience of a ride, they can pretty well ruin it. That's a big part of why I only surf uncrowded beach break.
On multi-pitch outdoor routes, if you get on first you usually stay first until the end unless there's a much faster party and a bypass pitch they can use, or you let them climb thru or use the same anchor (if they are faster they are not going to be in your way anyway, so why not). So for good beginner climbs you just have to get there super early and it's yours.
Crowds can be a problem at good beginner-friendly single-pitch crags, but yeah lining up for a popular route is pretty straightforward if annoying.
with skiing at least, that problem goes away almost entirely once you can confidently get down blacks & double blacks. even short of that, congestion is only ever really a problem at the base of the mountain, everywhere else it is rare to even be within vision of ten people at any given time.
I am making that move, definitely surf motivated. But the sc crowds made me hesitate. im hoping the weekdays at weird hours will be better then weekend afternoons when i was there along with everyone else. i think living there gives you access to the other beaches no one talks about, up 1 and stuff. i also like to think i can out surf most people after 17 years lol. all through high school and college i never surfed weekends or holidays, i got my fill before work surfing the week. expecting to go back to that
in the end for me ob is to hit or miss and the season is really only fall. 8ft+ ob when the solid winter swell come in gets crazy. spring and summer just blown wind. pacifica has weird locals and crap waves. hmb barely breaks and traffic sucks. fall surf at ocean beach is about as good as it gets though, ill miss that for sure. post covid ill get my perfect wave fill in hawaii, indo, central america i guess, ive saved so much money the last few months
Once upon a time SF was expensive, but affordable enough for a bunch of non-tech folks right out of college to room together. Most of tech was down South so you had to want to be in the city. If the city reverts to a quirky countercultural moderately overpriced spot, minus some of the tech workers, it’s not the end of the world. And the rest of the US will benefit from more dispersed tech brainpower.
Similar observation, on my tiny stretch of street I've seen 7 moving trucks since SIP started, far more than I've ever seen. I get it, If you just moved or been here 1-2yr I'd leave too, the costs would make no sense.
I'm right on the fence. I've been at my current place ~6 years, prices have just started to get to about what I'm paying (rent controlled). I'm hoping it drops some more so I can negotiate a reduction.
...with permanent WFH I too want to leave, head to Europe (I'm a citizen). With travel restrictions in place, and my employer saying they'd adjust my pay to reflect local cost of living I'm not sure what would be best.
> and my employer saying they'd adjust my pay to reflect local cost of living I'm not sure what would be best.
This "local cost of living" and "regional market" argument is a farce. Remote workers are competing in a global market by definition. They might as well be honest and say, "we think we can get away with paying you less."
Yeah I get that, the further east you go the worse it is, and my experience working with Indian coworkers sounds like a nightmare for them.
I'm from Portugal so I was thinking of being there, 8am here is 4pm there, and 5pm here is 1am there. I kind of like the idea of having my morning to myself, and working in the evening. With lock down that's been my work schedule now. I do exercise, chores, and cooking in the morning, and actual work in the evening (the occasional meeting tends to occurs as I bake/boil/chop something).
And what does SF have for people who don't care about the "bars and culture?" Not much.
I spend a half the year in my Sunnyvale, CA home. I never go to SF to see shows, concerts, etc. Several times a year, when I'm in the U.S., I'll put together a trip to NY, LA, etc, to see several events over a long weekend. And/or go to Tanglewood, Monterey Jazz, Cabrillo music festivals.
People who visit me are shocked to learn that I live 40 miles from SF and never go there. (Especially because I'm a gay man.)
SF really needs to build more housing, and get the homelessness and crime problem under control. Pre-pandemic, SF had 2.5x the violent crime rate of NYC. (That may be different now that crime has spiked in NY.)
If you are into the outdoors and being an active person it is pretty amazing to live here. The cycling here is quite possibly the best in the world and can be accessed without a car within minutes.
About half of the young-ish employees at my company left SF (temporarily) to move back in with family. The company has also offered to make people permanently remote, but very few (less than 10 out of many hundreds) have taken up that offer so far.
IMO it is too early to judge the permanent impact of this to the city.
Accurate experience, I have some similar examples as well.
I am still considering if I should be like your friend #4 and go back to eastern Canada to wait out this disastrous response in the US. If only winter wasn't coming, I would have probably already left but my lease is only ending at the end of September.
FWIW, it seems similar in the Seattle area. Lots of people moving out of the big cities. I assume it's a combination of being able to work from home and people no longer being able to afford their incredibly expensive in-city homes due to furloughs and layoffs.
Mortgage interest rates at all-all-all time lows. It's a little ridiculous to say that given that mortgages are, say, a 50 year old product. All time not very long.
But debt and interest have been with us for thousands of years and it is likely that there has never been such low cost liquidity for durable assets (houses) as there is now.
When you think about why THAT is, it should make you worried to buy that house.
There's only one way for interest rates to go from here, and home prices vary inversely with those rates. For middle class folks still working, I'd say save your money and wait for the next housing collapse. Sure, interest rates may be higher but you'll have cash. Or I could be wrong...
I'd pull my emergency fund and short term savings accounts and put it in a safe in my home. The rest of my fiances would be either virtually unaffected or would benefit from negative interest rates.
Physical dollars are an important medium of global liquidity. Taking them out of circulation is not in anyone's interest. In fact, taking them out of circulation would be extremely bad. Hard to communicate how bad this would be. Pretty much a crossing the streams/total protonic reversal outcome.
Could bad outcomes be prevented? Stunts like what was done with Indian currency, or a move to all-digital currency? I don't see it.
Since hoarding of the polymer bills seems like a likely outcome of negative rates hitting consumers, and this would be bad, and in the absence of other preventative measures, I highly doubt we'll see negative rates at the consumer level.
Possibly but there’s still a long way down to go. I can’t fathom negative rates but I wouldn’t be shocked to see rates get below 2% and maybe stay like that a long time.
When the economy was roaring a couple years ago the Fed was starting to bump rates up it shook the markets bad. Started ratcheting down since.
If they can somehow get inflation higher then I could see rates moving up a bit. But it just hasn’t happened. So much of the rest of the world has lower rates (much lower) as well.
Unless you need a place to live now, especially during WFH craziness related to COVID...
Also, Trump or even his successor might juice the economy quantitative easing, meaning that cash you are saving in the bank becomes worth less anyways. This isn’t an easy decision to make.
To be blunt- the other side of the deal is REALLY INTERESTED in having a party committed to 30 years of payments on a valuation that, they realize, almost certainly has to drop.
Mortgage interest could be 0.5% and lenders would...probably still make the deal.
The property itself is collateral for the loan. If the value of the property tanks, and then the owner is also unable to pay their mortgage due to not having a job, then in many cases the bank ends up holding the bag. This happened quite a bit during the Great Recession.
Also, given the way that the Fed has been pushing interest rates to near zero, and with the chance that they could go negative (which I find pretty unlikely, but everything seems so wild right now so who knows) there is a chance that inflation could come into play and keep property values high.
The mechanics you describe are not so much factors any more. Lenders don't keep properties on their books, too much risk and plenty of opportunity to sell and diversify. In that model, flows matter, not values.
And inflation- in my read inflation is due to a scarcity of money- it is an output of money scarcity, not an input- and what we have now is an abundance. So it is exceptionally unlikely.
But at a macro level, values are still extremely important. If there is perception of deflation, flow drops. And there are more govt structures set up to maintain values. I just have less confidence in their ultimate efficacy, and more confidence that politics will change and immigration policies will change and building policies will change.
I'll admit I'm not an expert in this area, but it seems like whoever is buying these loans should be doing some due diligence on the property associated to these mortgages, right? It then follows that the lenders should have to do some due diligence up front so that they don't get stuck with something they can't later resell.
The vast majority of loans- basically every loan under $500,000 in most areas of the country, $750,000 in high cost areas, are bought by government-backed entities- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They do the purchases at scale- hundreds of thousands of loans a month. See for instance the introduction to
What happens next is a very complex balancing act where some of the loans- mostly lower performing- are kept on Fannie's and Freddie's books, while others- mostly higher performing- are packaged into securities.
And again, what matters are the flows, not the values. The actual value of a property can be seen from auction/foreclosure sales, which are inevitably at a fraction of the prior sale price.
But Fannie/Freddie and holders of larger mortgages that are not performing manage the flow into foreclosure very carefully, in order to maintain prices and confidence.
This is a very, very complex machine. Maintaining values on one side and liquidity on the other is the purpose of this machine. I make no claims to deeply understanding it. I see the value of flows, of getting more commitments from people to feed their income into this machine, and see that reflected in the change in rates, and in the change in valuations. In terms of buying in- what is one buying into?
The other side of this argument is- what actually happens if someone is not able to make their payments? There seems also to be accumulating evidence that there is far more forgiveness for failing to pay a mortgage- even before COVID.
That all smells to me like a value bubble that pops when the end game for COVID is clear, with collateral damage for those who have commitments to flows for the long term but who may need to make changes in the short term.
Lenders make money on origination (closing a loan) not servicing (interest). So there is a strong motivation to originate more loans and sell them quickly. In a bad enough environment the pressure will be to make as much money before the shit hits the fan.
They’ve really been doing well selling refinancing for quite awhile now too. The interest rate is nearly immaterial to the closing costs, Selling points, PMI, etc.
What's becoming increasingly clear is that the submarkets of urban condos, urban SFH, suburban condos, and suburban SFH are dissociating and exhibiting their own dynamics.
The fact that people are now working from home in very large numbers can make multi tenancy buildings noisy since people are SIP but making the sort of noise they'd make at the office, endless socializing on Zoom, phone etc. This claustrophobia is not likely to change soon as corporate balance sheets are lightened by the removal of commercial rents, HVAC, cleaning etc costs and WFH becomes the defacto norm.
Ergo more living space and noise exclusion is suddenly at a premium even if just suburbia.
Seattle, I don't think as much, or even at all. Home and rent prices at least in Seattle seem stable or even increasing (for buying homes). Not clear why, maybe we're just behind the curve, or maybe it's because Seattle doesn't suffer from as serious of quality of life issues as SF area does.
I have been watching this and wondering the same thing. I think Seattle Washington's lack of city and state income tax is a huge plus and provides insulation. Contrast that with SF California of I think 1.50% + 7.25 - 12.3% taxes.
I wonder if a lot of Californians are coming to WA because of this
My friend lives in a nice apartment in Berkely and she decided to move to a different apartment in the building (to get a balcony and no neighbors above). The rent will be 25% cheaper than her current rent for essentially the same unit.
> What I am seeing here is very clear also. The SIP order has removed many of the greatest parts of SF, the food, the bars, the culture, the density to be able to go anywhere and see your friends easily, and whats left are many of the problems that the city has, trash, homelessness, and exorbitant housing prices.
For an introvert who hates these sorts of things, and wants to own a house, I'm hoping companies stay this way and people become more open to remote work.
I feel no benifit from living in NYC or SF but I need to be close to these places for work. I hope that if things continue o can buy a house in and just work from home. Never needing to worry about commuting again.
My family and I are in group 5. We had a neat, but very small, apartment in SF. It was great when I was going to the office daily and my kids were in school or at the parks / Cal Academy / etc. With all of us at home and me trying to work... not so much.
It was sad leaving, but my productivity is massively up. Right now we’re enjoying seeing other parts of the west coast, while playing the waiting game. I want to know how much of a pay cut I’d face if I moved permanently (company hasn’t said yet), and I’m also nervous about the winter coming up and how different regions will handle what I’m afraid will be an inevitable super-surge.
I have a school-aged child. I have an offer from another startup in a different city and am likely to take it. We love our school here - it's one of the better ones in the SFUSD system - but with everything being remote, as well as the district kneecapping just about anything our parents and support orgs want to fund to help kids, its becoming a wash in terms of quality.
Plus, with everything starting remotely, the fact that school starts tomorrow doesn't really matter. Even for a school with a strong sense of community, in which us as parents are deeply involved, it still feels fairly impersonal. My own child is pretty indifferent as to where they go to school at this point.
That said, sticking it out isn't the wrong call either. This is a great city, it's just that with everything related to COVID, its becoming less worth it.
we have a kid, and are moving, for what it's worth.
If you are in the bay just because of work, and you have a kid, that means your kid is not seeing family very much due to travel restrictions and the overall covid situation.
So rather than it being a blocker, it's really an extra incentive to move.
Oddly enough a traditional risk of moving with kids is the "lost year" due to the disruption of changing school districts. But this year is going to be lost anyway, and a 100% certainty is no longer a risk. And if school is going to be online anyway, then they could stay plugged into the old district until they get fully plugged into the new one.
Good question. The two considerations I would say here are
1) Rent vs own - everyone i know in the own category is staying for now, and actually exhibiting the opposite tendencies and digging in for the long haul
2) School is now officially going full remote. This was a unknown for many families and now we will see what they choose to do.
The only thing keeping me in the Bay Area right now is my mortgage. I envy you renters who can just leave at the end of your leases! With work from home and school from home, there is no reason to physically stay in the Bay Area. We might as well move to an RV in the Nevada desert. $200/acre and I get as much benefit (nothing) from zero income tax there as I do in CA at 10%.
people with kids either did not move to SF or left earlier. I have several friends (with kids) who moved out of SF before pandemic due to crime/safety concerns. Mostly in 2018/2019
>2) A friend who works for google who is going on a 6 month road trip in a camper van
similar on Peninsula - a neighbor couple, renters, he is at google, went back to their country for 6 month. Upon coming back they're planning to buy a house here.
HI! I'm the correspondent for AFP a global news agency, and I'm looking for to speak with people leaving San Francisco because of pandemic/remote work. Can i talk to you?
> 2) A friend who works for google who is going on a 6 month road trip in a camper van
I tried it for 6 months. It was easy because I had a sister who lived in NYC for a time and essentially I could wash up there and not have to pay outrageous campground prices for temporary stays to seek a shower when needed. I stayed on the street there for 6 weeks mostly around Flatbush area and in Brooklyn elsewhere but also on the street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This was the most fun part of the trip. It was really a trip (I wasnt on drugs by the way). I saw a rocker getting into a cab with a woman hanging on him and he had to like push her away "no baby - it's over" right in front of me as he got into the cab. She was hot. It was a deeply personal thing that I shouldn't be reporting on but synchronicity somehow drew me to that event. I was there seeing it go down and I wished I could haved helped her. I couldn't buy her food because I lived in a van, and that story would have to come out in the first 5 minutes or I'd be a sleezebag who didn't explain to women what his deal was yet the deal wasn't completely unworkable. She could have had her own place and have been interested in me intellectually for long enough for it to be fun, and maybe a relationship could have blossumed out of that. Instead I got back in my van and lived a normal life as a vandweller who was afraid to hit on her. She deserved something.
These kinds of antedotes came up throughout the van ride out west (to San Francisco) too and basically I had fun but was stuck too often in situations where I needed to fess up to being a van dweller around attractive women in a way that I couldn't cover myself for doing well back then due to societal norms not having van dwelling being real back then. In today's world it might be OK. I'd talk about tiny houses first and how Twitter helped make them become popular and how a van is almost the same thing underneigth. It's just better looking to be honest (once you have the inside paneled). You need a rising platform (in the back) up on stilts like made of wood with storage space underneath giving you just the right about of headroom with a futon installed above it. A real carpender helped me and it was easy relative to fancy stuff that people do with RVS. You need to really have a second battery with an alternator cut-off solenoid in it so that the second battery charges off of the first and automatically ensures it cannot drain the first if you forget about it. This enables you to run 4 or 5 fans in the back that are mounted above if you can and basically that's it. Enjoy your rig.
Civic places I hung out:
- Portland Oregon
- Downtown Oakland
- SF proper (Haight parking is possible)
- Colorado (hotel stay needed - it was too cold sometimes)
- Las Vegas (hotel stay needed - the other temperature extreme)
- Chicago
- and many other places along the way
i have an honest question here. i haven't lived in sf -just visited. i have however been to most states and about 40 countries for comparison.
food - most of what i saw was not good food. hipsterish overpriced food made by chefs trying to show off by putting a twist on dishes -not to be good, just to be different or weird. tiny portions, not tasting above average, on a huge plate. all presentation, not actual taste.
culture: there is no culture. culture was when i lived in versailles. sf is all snooty people with no content, trying to show off. culture is down to earth, with class.
bars -there are very few attractive girls at bars, or at offices, or even on the street, compared to just about anywhere in the world. and if that's not why you go to bars, i have to ask -you'd enjoy going to bars with mostly men? because that's cool too -once in a rare while.
density is poor in sf. in good cities, you can walk where you want in a few minutes. sf is uber heaven. i've lived in cities with amicable density - without a car, and maybe grabbing a cab once a month. sf ain't it.
the weather's not bad, a little windy. and the ocean is close by. housing prices are being kept artificially high by sf itself -not letting people build housing.
so i can't see anything about sf that'd make people want to live there other than higher salaries. and the first chance they have to earn that salary elsewhere or remote, they jump on it.
so i think that's what's happening now. nothing to do with covid directly -just people who would never live there in the 1st place if it wasn't for the job, leaving as soon as the job lets them.
i think all this analysis of what people are doing and why weirdly avoids the very simple explanation -everyone's just doing what work lets them do. it's entirely dictated by employers.
as someone who's lived in SF for years this is all very true.
Food is expensive and a lot of it's designed to be instagrammed. There are definitely some great spots but not that many and really not that diverse (lacks middle eastern, greek, british, American bbq, spanish)
Nightlife is horrible, bars pretty much close at 1am, hardly any live music, gender imbalance, and not much density so it often just feels "dead" in a lot of places
the weather is ok. there's usually a few hours per day where it's pristine but quickly gets too cold/windy. And it's too uncomfortable to eat outside for dinner.
Public transit is unpleasant and slow, so most people who can afford it resort to 100% rideshare. And having your own car here is also a pretty bad experience (though some people would say this is a feature not a bug)
Petty crime is high. My friends regularly have to deal with car break-ins. (yes the same person would have multiple break ins in a single year, and no they don't keep anything in their car)
It's hard for me to speak to the culture, most of my network is in tech, and most people I know intend to leave at some point. Living in a city that people don't plan on living in for very long does not create a very good community or culture.
I live here because this is where my job is and where my friends are, but I want to leave pretty badly. I just don't really have anywhere else to go, if not my home country
> Nightlife is horrible, bars pretty much close at 1am, hardly any live music, gender imbalance, and not much density so it often just feels "dead" in a lot of places
As a southern Californian, I can attest to this. It's pathetic that our bars have last call at 2am (effectively many close at 1:30a).
There's been push after push to get last-call to 4am like it is in NY but they never go anywhere in the state legislature.
Bars are loud. People smoking outside of bars late at night tend to be very loud and sometimes get in fights. If you're trying to go to sleep, it's annoying to have a crowd of drunk young men screaming at each other outside your window.
Politicians don't want to go against MADD, and business owners might not want to expand payroll to staff those hours where people are far more likely to get either violent or violently ill.
Because the best way to reduce drunk driving risk is to force everyone out of bars at more or less the same time. Back in my teens and twenties I found myself intervening, with varied levels of success, to prevent drunken trips to the store because "beer-o'clock" was nigh and it was the last chance to obtain more alcohol.
It's always seemed crazy to create a sudden spike in the number of impaired drivers.
What I'd like to see is a comparison of statistics from areas with early last call laws and other jurisdictions with later last call or no restrictions. It would be great to move past what feels good and use some actual data to make a our policies.
In the UK they pushed for pubs to close much earlier. The effect was that people would start drinking earlier and more (at home), and binging because stuff closes earlier. TL;DR it backfired.
I'm not sure what you're comparing it to, SF is known to have a world-class food scene. There are multiple examples all of the things you listed(except maybe british but who wants that?), as well as things that you don't find in may other cities: burmese, cambodian, laotian, peruvian.
Exactly. It is known to have a scene. It is a great place for people who like to go to restaurants. For people who like good food, not so much. I remember going to a tea tasting in SF's chinatown while at a conference there. My friend (a local) asked if we had such good tea in Vancouver. The shop owner who was serving us interrupted: "They do. My brother has a shop there. He sent me this tea."
Really not sure what your point is here. Name cities in North America that have 10+ legitimate Burmese restaurants. If you want to try good Burmese food, it really helps to have local Burmese restaurants. The last time I was at a Burmese restaurant in San Francisco, the waitress told me a lot of the staff was in Burma for the month finding new flavors and ideas for recipes. In most cities there is no chance that the wait staff at your local ethnic restaurant is actively going back to Burma every year to get new recipes and ingredients.
Since you mentioned Vancouver, I searched for Burmese food on Yelp. Only 7 restaurants total come back total.
2 are "Burmese / Thai / Malaysian" Asian fusion places Three of 3 are a generic Asian chain called Noodlebox that has one item called "Burmese naan"
1 is a Thai restaurant with one "Burmese curry" dish
1 is a Vietnamese restaurant that mentions its near one of the Burmese / Thai / Malaysian fusion restaurants
So Yelp has 7 total Burmese restaurants in Vancouver, not one of them is actually Burmese, and almost all of them don't even have Burmese dishes (where is the tea leaf salad? Burmese naan doesn't count)
So you can act like San Francisco is just known for having a food scene, but when you don't even have access to many of the same world cuisines in other cities it is hard for me to take you seriously when you say its not a place for people who like "good food."
You know the majority of American produce is grown in California? Do the vegetables get better when they're shipped for a few days to the east coast?
SF does have some very nice restaurants, but the vast majority are nothing special and quite over-priced for what you get IMO. And the very nice restaurants are so expensive they're not the thing you go to more than once a month unless you're very wealthy.
British people? I'd kill for a local place that regularly served Sunday roast with a Yorkshire pudding. There was one in my city for a while but sadly it was at the edge and they didn't sell enough to keep it up, as such roasts need to be prepared a long way in advance, so you had to pre-order.
Always love to grab myself one when I'm in the UK though.
Discovered the other day a restaurant that sells afternoon cream teas - perfect!
I would very much like an English style pub that serves full English in the mornings. In the UK the price point is also very attractive; a meal that lasts you for most of the day for often less than 5 pounds.
heh. food scene. i don't want a 'food scene.' i just want good food. i don't care if it's on 3 plates with sauce designs, i don't care if it looks like a beef-flower, or if it photographs well for my 'stream.'
btw the british school of cuisine is one of the most famous in the world. not scene-wise though, but good food is for eating, not instagram.
sf is definitely not known for tasty food. it's known for showing off food. good for bored tourists. not good to live there. and no, sf doesn't habe good greek food or middle-eastern food. i've been to greece and the middle east quite a bit, and they have better food at has stations.
sf is all show and hype. that's not what locals want.
It's mostly orthogonal to the trendy food scene, and if you follow the latter hoping to find the former you’ll likely be disappointed, but SF is known for excellent examples of both a wide variety of authentic ethnic cuisines and a wide variety of excellent unique creative/fusion offerings apart from the trendy scene.
the south is known for great bbq. chicago is the meat capitol, with deep dish and greektown. maryland for crab and maine for lobster, nyc has authentic jew-food that rivals what i ate in israel and jordan.
what is the food sf is known for? because if i literally ask anyone i know, the answer will be 'fusion.' or 'pizza' with ranch and lettuce in it.
you're known for california rolls. the big mac of sushi.
known doesn't mean known just to you.
you may have some good restaurants here and there that people can uber to. the rest is fusion of hipster and lsd microdoses.
in a city i want to live in, i walk outside and pick from 5 good places. you take an uber across town to those. people are leaving now that work doesn't require them there. to a cities with better food.
Yes, lots of places in California, especially Northern California, are inspired by,or share inspiration with, SF.
Can't think of any place I've known so many people (and not just of any one national background) who live well outside the immediate area go to regularly specifically because of the quality of some particular cuisine (often, people of non-US origin going for their own national cuisine) that is there, though.
And SF has a large populace of vegans like me, who have a choice of dozens of innovative restaurants with mind boggling vegan food, from Michelin quality and expensive to cheap and homely and everything in between, that I literally can’t find in any other city. It’s cool if you don’t like this kind of food but you did ask what kind of fare SF is known for, so it’s not clear what your point is.
I'm not exactly disagreeing, but just thought you might be interested - the last time I was in Warsaw, Poland, there was quite a variety of vegan places.
Guessing based on a huge pile of assumptions, from relatively few observations, I think it's more health motivated than animal welfare given the apparent demographics of the patrons, but I could very easily be wrong.
Where the hell did you get this "ranch and lettuce on a pizza" thing that you keep spouting off. THAT is definitely not what SF is known for. I've been here a decade and I'm not even sure if that's a real thing or if you just made that up, but it's definitely not indicative of anything except for your lack of qualifications to talk about San Francisco or food.
> Where the hell did you get this "ranch and lettuce on a pizza" thing that you keep spouting off.
Well, ranch perhaps not in the same context, but arugula on pizza is definitely a thing that fits SF quite well, and the unk pledges let seem to refer to arugula as (expensive, hipster-favored) “lettuce”, despite the fact that it's not at all lettuce.
> mais j'ai une question. si tu ne parle rien le francais, why do you use french words where there is an english one already
Oh come on, French / German / English use loan words from each other all the time for various reasons. Often in German the English word just sounds better. Also you have no idea if the OP speaks French or not you just made the assumption, the rest of your comment and all your comments in this thread just read like shitposts.
Everyone also has Chicago-style deep dish pizza and Southern barbecue. You asked what food SF is known for, and the Mission burrito is probably its most famous export, with the Bay Area having the most restaurants competing to make the best one.
>Nightlife is horrible, bars pretty much close at 1am
Serious question. Are there many night clubs and any day clubs? I was last out so late/early quite a few years ago but in most (possibly all?) Australian cities there are night clubs that were open through the night until 6am. I can recall one place in Melbourne that opened at, I think, midnight and didn't kick people out until 10am.
There were also a few day clubs in Sydney and Melbourne, which are like a night club but not opening until night clubs are just closing.
Personally, I've not been to San Francisco. I'm just staggered that given the cities fame the night life is so constrained.
> culture: there is no culture. culture was when i lived in versailles. sf is all snooty people with no content, trying to show off. culture is down to earth, with class.
So I'm in the South Bay and only visit SF once in a blue moon now that I've got a family, but when I was younger & single there were quirky events that I've never seen in any other city. Things like Bring Your Own Big Wheel, Bay to Breakers, a random pillow fight with thousands of attendees (I guess San Jose has this as well, but it only drew a few dozen), scavenger hunts that covered multiple city blocks, poetry readings in the unpermitted basement of an antique shop, a game fair where indie game developers tested out their street games on the public, Carnivale, the Folsom Street Fair, etc. Maybe it's gotten too expensive since and this all moved out, but at the time it was worth making the trek up from the South Bay just for the events that you couldn't get anywhere else.
If you think San Francisco has poor quality food, you clearly haven’t spent much time there (as you admit) or you don’t have very discerning taste. California grows the majority of the country’s produce and most everyone else is getting the same ingredients a few days later. Farm to table is the standard instead of something that starts at $25/plate like in most US cities
The city could be more dense in some areas but it’s far more walkable than almost any US city outside of NY. Maybe go to the Mission next time and show me how LA, Miami, etc. are more walkable after
I don't know about Miami but LA is known for its sprawl. Imo using possibly the worst possible example of a thing to compare it to only makes the other persons point for them.
It's like pointing at little people as an example to show that 5'6" is heaps tall.
Most cities are known for sprawl here. It’s not my fault.
Sure I could compare to Portland but it’s small and honestly not that different from SF in terms of the kind of farm to table food and wine that’s served
What are the numerous cities I am missing that have better food and are more walkable than SF and not counting NY? I honesty haven’t found them
> If you think San Francisco has poor quality food, you clearly haven’t spent much time there (as you admit) or you don’t have very discerning taste.
Or just are following shallow, presentation-focussed hipster-targetting marketing and being surprised that it leads you to presentation-focussed hipster-targetted food offerings.
or, follow me on this. i just walk out onto the street, type "restaurant" into google, and pick something with 4 star and up reviews. no marketing or presentations involved - just what people around there reviewed as good. and the food is average. this isn't bad, but average food with some gems you have to know about and take an uber to, is not a reason to live in a city - and it was presented as such in the comment to which i replied.
If you're seriously suggesting that a Google search for "restaurant" is going to get you a marketing-free, accurate picture of the world around you, I'm not sure what to do with that.
> or, follow me on this. i just walk out onto the street, type "restaurant" into google, and pick something with 4 star and up reviews. no marketing or presentations involved
Heh.
Reliance on numerical ratings in online reviews isn't particularly different than reliance on marketing with a specific demographic targeting and, yeah, surprisingly enough it does tend to lead you to the more instagram-ready establishments.
right.. when someone eats at a place and gives it a number of stars rating how good it was, it tells you the same about how good it is as instagram marketing. here's the point - you go to sf, get a place around you with good reviews, and the food is overpriced, overpresented, and average in taste.
The OP literally stated a reason to live in SF is the food. That's simply false. It's not poor quality, but it's no reason to live there. It's not better than in an average city.
> right.. when someone eats at a place and gives it a number of stars rating how good it was, it tells you the same about how good it is as instagram marketing.
There are distinct demographic trends in online reviews activity that are broadly similar to those involved in instagramming meals, which makes the biases in using aggregate ratings similar to those in favoring Instagram or marketing targeting the same demographic, yes.
(You can get better information from online reviews, but it takes more than blindly following aggregate ratings.)
i did not say poor quality food. i said very average food, overpresented artistically and overpriced. farm to table isn't good for meat -aged meat is better. aged about a month. sushi -yes. except very little sushi from what i saw in sf. a lot of weird rolls, which is not sushi to me. good sushi was in tokyo, where i have lived for several months.
fresh produce is shipped overnight anywhere nowadays. being near a farm no longer gets you fresher produce. and keep in mind, produce is grown in many, many places. heck, in chicago we got farmer's markets every few blocks.
miami is one little street that's walkable, and a run down city of trash. i never said it was better. la was the example i gave of a city that is not walkable, like sf is not walkable. so density is not sf's pro, which the comment i replied to claimed.
as far as discerning taste, i've lived in moscow, versailles, catalonia, and tokyo. i've had good food. sf wasn't it. it was regular food, presented in weird ways, just to be different. putting avocado on something or drinking sake cold doesn't make it good -it just makes it different.
San Francisco has functional public transit which escapes almost every American city and the cool neighborhoods are in fact quite dense, like the Mission. This is why people view it as one of the most walkable cities in America even though it may not be a compact area built around a train station like much of Europe, for example. I would like that, but that’s not how any of America is.
You went to a few sushi roll places and now you want to demean the quality compared to Tokyo? Give me a break. I’ve spent months in both and you’re not painting a very fair picture. Tokyo is the sushi capital of the world. No one would dispute that the Japanese have the widest variety of amazing sushi. But San Francisco is way up there and if anything the problem is there are too many unaffordable omakase menus with the best fish from Tsukiji market in Tokyo or from Monterey Bay. There are places that sell California rolls to tourists like everywhere, but San Francisco has so much actual Japanese food and so much omakase that I find it absurd that you characterize it that way. There is no way Chicago can go toe to toe on Japanese restaurants and you know it.
As for drinking sake cold, if you spent much time in Japan you’d know they typically serve crappy sake warm to disguise the impurities of not having polished the rice enough before making it. A good Junmai Ginjo will be served cold. You are welcome to have sake however you want, but don’t blame San Francisco for knowing how to drink sake properly. In fact, San Francisco has the only sake store in America (True Sake) because there are so many Japanese people and it’s so popular.
Actually, sake can be enjoyed cold, warm, or hot. Having the sake serve at a warm temperature doesn’t mean there is anything inherently wrong with the sake itself.
The purpose of changing the temperature, as you pointed out, is to change the flavor notes. Having a particular sake cold may bring out fruitier notes while warming it up gives it an extra layer of vanilla. This is just an example. All sake have different notes and it can be really subjective on what notes are being registered. The ability to change the flavor drastically just by temperature is what makes sake interesting. This legit use isn’t just limited to subpar sake, but to the entire quality spectrum sake as well. So it really depends on many factors like the intended temperature consumption by the brewery or the establishment you are consuming the sake at (they want particular notes to come up so it goes well with the pairing of a dish, for example), or the most important: consumers palate.
Playing with the temperature is akin to whisky drinking: neat vs on the rocks vs water dropper. Each preparation changes the flavor and aren’t necessary bad.
You are correct that warming up bad quality sake can mask the undesirable attributes.
"At the risk of overgeneralizing, many sake experts say that ginjo and daiginjo sakes are usually best not warmed (since being served chilled enhances their flavors and aromas), while many junmai and honjozo sakes do well either way (since warming these types of sakes tends to draw out their complex flavors and smooth them out a bit)."
Partially but it affirms my point that you disagreed with. My point from the beginning was that “nice” sake that was polished more and costs a lot (a Junmai Ginjo or Junmai Daiginjo for example) will be served cold. Many of the more alcoholic sake styles and cheaper sakes will be served hot or cold. The heat can help hide impurities but it can also play down (or change) the heavier alcohol flavors.
So yes I agree certain styles will be served warm and might have different and interesting taste profiles depending on temperature like your whisky example. But ultimately, warming the sake will tend to hide the subtle flavors that the sake maker did all the extra rice polishing to achieve, so it wouldn’t be recommended for a nice Junmai Daiginjo. The poster I replied to tried to falsely claim that hot sake would better pull out these subtle flavors, which I cannot find any reference for and does not agree with my experience drinking and reading about sake.
i did not go to mission, so my comment about density may not be correct. which is why i asked. that's one neighborhood though.
as far as sake.. i don't drink anymore, for a while now, but you're wrong. serving it warm brings out the taste, and makes any cheap nastiness worse. serving it cold is what hides it. having a store that only sells sake does not make it 'the store for sake.' there are many stores stateside that have a good sake selection. they also sell japanese beer and plum wine. and in the style of true sf culture, you just said japan has crappy sake, which is why they serve it warm, while sf is doing the traditional japanese wine correctly. this -people like you on every corner, is why i didn't like sf. it's the culture -or lack thereof.
Honestly, I can’t take anything you said seriously if during your 3 weeks here you didn’t step foot into one of the most unique/distinctive neighborhoods in the city and then proceed to berate the availability of tasty food. I read all of your comments here and was trying to decide whether you were uniquely knowledgeable or full of shit and this right here tells the whole story. I have also been all around the world and SF has a wide collection of high quality cuisines from all around the world — not just Japanese food in Tokyo and Russian food in Moscow.
Actually no one in this thread agreed with you on that. And if you'd bothered to visit the Mission or Divisadero or the other main centers of walking life then you wouldn't think people just go from restaurant to restaurant in Ubers
"At the risk of overgeneralizing, many sake experts say that ginjo and daiginjo sakes are usually best not warmed (since being served chilled enhances their flavors and aromas)"
It is bizarre you go on these rants about how people on Hacker News aren't cultured like you after all your time in foreign cities, but you didn't visit the main neighborhoods, chose a few bad restaurants on Yelp, and clearly don't know how the locals prefer to drink their sake even after bragging about all your experience. Since you don't even drink, maybe you should listen to the people who do and who have toured the sake factories.
Way to be totally obnoxious and ruin the normally polite discourse here. You're posting on a brand new account and already getting flagged for abusive posting. You're not even trying to have a productive conversation. Go argue with people on Reddit.
> sushi -yes. except very little sushi from what i saw in sf. a lot of weird rolls, which is not sushi to me. good sushi was in tokyo, where i have lived for several months.
Ok, you lost me there. I've lived in SF for 10 years and there's sushi all over the place. Actual, real sashimi, nigiri, whatever you want. A la carte, set meals, omakase, whatever. Some of it is pretty high end, and you'll pay more in SF for an equivalent meal in Tokyo.
Beyond that, it's a little weird to bring up Tokyo as an example... the sushi in Tokyo is better than the sushi in pretty much any place in the US, perhaps in pretty much any place outside Japan. Not really a fair comparison.
Regardless, I kinda just think that you were visiting the wrong places when you visited SF. I agree that there's an annoying amount of of mediocre food that seems to exist more to look nice than to taste amazing, but that's true of many cities. (But these places tend not to last that long.) There's lots of fantastic food in SF, and frankly it's not even that hard to find, so I'm baffled by your bad experience.
> "farm to table isn't good for meat -aged meat is better."
"farm to table" does not mean the meat is not aged. It just means the restaurant buys directly from the farm. No good restaurant would ever serve you an un-aged steak.
If you're going to call out people for "bullshit" when they post facts you could easily Google, then you could at least apologize after you were shown to be both wrong and rude.
Well you called bullshit and the number is 56.7% per the article the other user helpfully linked. This is why "California cuisine" has been farm to table for so long and why it is more affordable to eat fresh, tasty, in-season produce there.
Is this a shitpost? I honestly can't tell. You start off by saying you've only ever visited SF and then go on to make a load of generalisations as if you know SF like the back of your hand.
Also this:
> there are very few attractive girls at bars, or at offices, or even on the street, compared to just about anywhere in the world. and if that's not why you go to bars, i have to ask -you'd enjoy going to bars with mostly men? because that's cool too -once in a rare while
Is so awful that the only explanation is that the whole thing is a shitpost.
People go out to have sex. Either you haven't noticed somehow (maybe you aren't old enough?) or you're deluding yourself that it's about something else. We're a sexual species. You exist because your parents met and had sex. It's just the way it is.
And it turns out San Francisco has -- well, at least pre-pandemic -- bars that make really good drinks. Smuggler's Cove is hands down one of the best tiki bars in the world. Rickhouse is a great (if crowded) new-deal whiskey bar, right around the corner from another great (if crowded) new-deal tiki bar, Pagan Idol. Tadich Grill is like stepping back in time. Trick Dog is wildly inventive and kind of nuts. Bourbon & Branch is a dynamite speakeasy. Buena Vista has legendary Irish Coffees. Cliff House is kind of a tourist trap, but their Ramos Gin Fizz is on point and you can sip it while looking out plate glass windows overlooking the Pacific. And speaking of gin, there's Whitechapel, which is like someone opened a goddamn steampunk bar in an abandoned London subway station. Tequila? There's Tommy's, a dive Mexican restaurant whose tiny dingy bar happens to be run by a guy designated as a "tequila ambassador" by the Mexican government.
I'm sorry San Francisco bars didn't live up to your standards as pickup joints. But maybe when you come back here sometime you could, you know, get a drink. Cheers.
Hanging out with a group of guys with everyone drinking a ramos gin fizz while overlooking the Pacfic doesn't seem what the average guy would seek in a bar.
What does on point mean? Is this a drink you order everywhere and the quality at this place is comparable to others you've tried?
Is Gin a popular choice for a young person in sf?
"Ramos Gin Fizz is on point and you can sip it while looking out plate glass windows overlooking the Pacific."
Oh please. I'm gay, and this comment is ridiculous. You mean gay men enjoy being in bars where there are other people who they are sexually attracted to and who could be sexually attracted to them. Which is exactly the parent commenter's point. It's obvious the parent commenter is speaking about things from his own perspective, which doesn't make it some sort of "heteronormative" crime, it just means he's straight.
The comment he was replying to was clearly from the perspective of a straight man, as that previous comment was pushing back against the idea that a prime purpose of bars is to find sexually compatible mates.
It's OK if other people are having a conversation that isn't directly about you. Even better to reach out and see how it could apply to you if you think being in a bar with very few people you could be potentially attracted to would be less fun.
_Obviously_ he was writing from the perspective of a straight man.
I was pointing out that it was unfortunately that he structured his argument and tone in such a way that it was the reason he goes to bars, it was _the reason_.
It's not a big deal, but it's not helpful and worth thinking about.
> It's OK if other people are having a conversation that isn't directly about you.
(FWIW this does apply to me, I just think this stuff matters).
Um, I go to bars to hang out with my friends while someone else makes tasty cocktails I'm too lazy to make for myself. News flash: most people who go to bars aren't there just to look at or hit on women. Yes, there are some who do, but that's not what bars are for.
> food - most of what i saw was not good food. hipsterish overpriced food made by chefs trying to show off by putting a twist on dishes -not to be good, just to be different or weird. tiny portions, not tasting above average, on a huge plate. all presentation, not actual taste.
You probably selected places to eat by either marketing presentation or talking to novelty-seeking hipsters, and so found presentation-heavy novelty-focussed hipster food.
San Francisco has plenty of good food—and it's usually much cheaper than the food of the type you describe. Of course, if you live in a hipster bubble and don't communicate outside of it, and don't actively explore, you might have trouble finding the real gems.
> culture: there is no culture. culture was when i lived in versailles. sf is all snooty people with no content, trying to show off. culture is down to earth, with class.
There's plenty of culture in SF, but this also sounds like you spent your time in the same kind of hipster bubble your food impression reflects.
As someone who actually lived in Versailles, this made me laugh outloud. It’s a boring upper-class suburb which happens to have a big castle in it. Culturally it’s at the same level as the Hamptons, just with older buildings and more royalists.
Coming from the east coast US, I didn't find the people snooty. They seemed friendlier than where I am from, I made way more friends here than I did back home. Back home you would get arrested for drinking beer in public, in sf you can have a beer in one hand, a joint in the other while playing kickball in golden gate park.
I liked the food a lot. I got giant, tasty, burritos in the mission for like $8. Of course you have to go to a side street, not something right on mission.
Didn't really go to bars so not sure about that.
To me the city is absolutely beautiful. Seeing the city from twin peaks, walking to the beach through golden gate park, or cycling across the golden gate bridge are all incredible experiences.
I've lived in San Francisco for a couple of years now, and I'll tell you why I have no current plans to leave: the startup ecosystem.
When I moved to San Francisco, my goal was (and still is) to move into entrepreneurship. Some people working in tech might move away, but the startup community, venture community, and general notion of SF being a "startup capital" seems like it's going to be more or less unaffected by the pandemic.
so, you are agreeing with me that the only reason people are in sf is because of work. the implied question was: he gave a bunch of reasons which from my total of 3 weeks there, were not true. it may have instead been my experience which was not normal though. it was up to op to counter what i said.
> bars -there are very few attractive girls at bars, or at offices, or even on the street, compared to just about anywhere in the world. and if that's not why you go to bars, i have to ask -you'd enjoy going to bars with mostly men? because that's cool too -once in a rare while.
I don't think everyone goes to pubs or bars for the same reasons as you might.
the reason they go is to socialize. both men and women prefer to socialize in an environment that's not mostly men. bars were listed as a reason people live in sf. i say it's not, because a sausage fest that closes at 1am is not something people find as a reason to live in a city. the people who do are the people who sit at their weird guy-table in a normal bar full of girls, afraid to walk up and say hello.
I actually agree that SF has essentially no culture and a poor food culture compared to many other major american cities. The only things truly exceptional about the city are the weather, housing prices, and being the most city-like city in greater Silicon Valley. And with that third point being moot, it's no surprise people aren't staying if they don't have to. I'm also leaving in two weeks.
The only reason a lot of people live in SF is solely that it's a really good place for a career in the technology industry or to do a startup. That's why I was there.
Your friends are how representative of SF people?
1. Going on a road trip right now is a very bad idea
2. Most normal people don't have the ability (I guess if you're a high performer in tech?) to move to another high income English speaking country.
3. Moving to Santa Cruz is a joke if you're worried about cost of living.
4. Same with Austin.
>Your friends are how representative of SF people?
OP didn't say that. They said that their anecdotal experience matches the argument in the article. Somehow you decided not only to argue with OP on this point, but also to argue about the way OP's roommates and friends decided to handle remote work (from taking a road-trip to moving back home to Australia). What's your reasoning for that?
I can imagine the argument is that unless you're periodically getting tested to you have a likelihood of spreading if asymptomatic over a broader geographic area while traveling.
That said, I personally think now is a great time to get out into nature and travel more locally pending the regulations in your area(s).
My van had a back-end that was size approprate to fit a YETI brand cooler (Tundra 45) between the raised platform in the back of the van and the seat backs so I could get in and out of it easily while having it to write on or use my laptop computer on (it doubled as a desk when I felt like sitting indian style on the floor of my van). This was essential and I could rely on fresh fruit all the time kept in the back of my van along with well various other fresh produce.
All of those things reduce risk, they do not remove it. And given that you can be asymptomatic for two weeks there’s a very real danger of spreading the virus. And there isn’t really a good reason to be doing it right now other than “I want to” so it’s not difficult to see it as a selfish act.
(the friend travelling from city to city and staying in Airbnbs sounds considerably worse to me, though)
Probably not that bad since, with the advent of masks and social distancing, supposedly ~95% of cases are NOT from community spread. Most of the spread is from dense living situations and meeting with friends and family without masks when you shouldn't.
It’s no more selfish than those going to pickup takeout food from different restaurants multiple times a week. If you’re going to chide a van camper, chide every single person you see outside not having all of their groceries and supplies delivered to their doorstep.
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"Other activities that can resume under the new order include residential moves and the use of certain shared outdoor recreational facilities that were previously ordered closed, like skate parks, but not others that involve shared equipment or physical contact." -- I believe this means they will open up parks that were previously closed and allow people to visit again.
I really had fun reading this and thinking deeply about the blurry Ill defined line between things that are alive (an individual) and things that are not.
To take this experiment to a conclusion which the author has “left to the reader” as all good texts do, let’s think about a virus.
A virus has information, in the form of dna or rna (I believe this is what a coronavirus uses), that it injects into a cell to then cause the cell to create more virus. The goal of this is to pass “information” to successive versions of the virus which are then programmed to do the same thing. Since they are trying to keep the same information, then they are in fact attempting to reduce entropy across time therefore they are as the author defines, an “individual”.
Would love for someone to test that logic train that I just rode
The blog entry is quite good, but it seems to suggest that the breakthrough consists in analyzing living organisms through the lenses of information theory. This is not a mistake in itself, but a shallow perspective nonetheless: information theory is, supposedly, a mathematical representation of the ways our brains make sense of the world around. The blog entry accidentally gives leeway to readers think that there is some intrinsic quality to living beings that transforms dull matter into information propagation channels.
As expected, the article does a better job in setting aside this line of reasoning[1]. What you are really measuring is how information is persisted over time, and over the "background noise" of environment. They specifically talk about viruses at a point, and the usual odd distinction of them being not quite living creatures. When they are found sitting outside their hosts, it is very hard to point out if they actually carry information over time.
If I could edit the parent comment, I would replace “our brains” by “an observer”, which is common physics parlance.
As far as I know, all uses of information-theorical approaches outside of its original scope also involve a scenario where an observer is originally unable to formulate a model that allow them to draw conclusions from alleged discrepancies. This paper is just one more example of that.
This somehow reminded me of the following quote by Bertrand Russell. “Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.”
Maybe I misunderstood you here but I don’t think information theory and in particular entropy has anything to do with “our brain”. It’s simply a statement of the number of micro states in a system. There is no requirement for reading them out or having a brain look at it. This value exists without observer. In that sense there is indeed an intrinsic quality to living beings that leads them to have a reduced number of micro states. They spend energy to keep it that way over time.
I know this is a pretty bold claim, but it is hard to overlook the idea that information theory as proposed by Claude Shannon works as a model of information as related to human cognition, and that it does not imply that information is a fundamental property of the physical universe.
There are several interviews in which he mentioned that the understanding of how the human brain works was one of his main inquiries. His work on AI and the Theseus. And the seminal paper on information theory contains a section in which a fidelity evaluation function is defined with relation to the human ear and brain.
Shannon wasn’t the first to think about entropy. It’s a general concept that is hugely important in thermodynamics and statistical physics. Information theory itself becomes increasingly more important in fundamental physics, see the firewall problem of black holes. It’s even harder to overlook these ideas and claim the human brain and our ears are somehow relevant to the definition of information and entropy.
Indeed, he was not the first at all. The concept of thermodynamic entropy predates, with a huge margin, its information theoretical counterpart.
You make it look like I am saying there is a mystical property of the human brain that backs the validity of information theory, an assertion that has no resemblance at all which what I am attempting to express, and sits in the same category the ones I am trying to debate against do.
What I am trying to say is that there is no meaning in a teleological interpretation of information theory. Things like “the purpose of living organisms is to propagate information” contradict information theory because there is no such a concept as absolute information, you always define it on mutual terms.
> there is no such a concept as absolute information, you always define it on mutual terms.
This is true of classical information theory, but not (as I understand it) algorithmic information theory. I think the jury is still out on whether it makes philosophical sense to generalize over universal machines like AIT does, and the practical applications compared to classical information theory seem minimal, from a layman's view it seems like it's been mathematically very fruitful.
My understanding is that, in order to recognize information, you should at least compare it to the outputs of a source of entropy.
It is a common mistake to conflate information and entropy. A bad analogy to mechanics is that the outputs of an entropy source are the frame of reference, the signal is a body and information might be whatever property you wish to analyze, such as velocity or acceleration.
> in order to recognize information, you should at least compare it to the outputs of a source of entropy.
Again, this is correct for classical information theory which requires some frame of reference for "likelihood". But AIT claims a "global frame" over the minimal representation in all universal machines, the particular choice of machine being at worst constant overhead.
You can argue, I think somewhat plausibly, that this frame is still an (inter)subjective frame rather than an objective, absolute one. But if we assume C-T (and we virtually always do), that argument is pretty weak - any other definable frame becomes formally "worse" in that it becomes "merely" a specific case of the universal one.
I am delving into speculation here, since I am not familiar with AIT and I don’t know any other definition of algorithmic information besides mutual information as defined by Kolmogorov which, remember, relies on Kolmogorov complexity but is a separate concept.
My point is that if I ask you, “given a bit sequence A, is it an optimal program?”, your answer would probably be: “I cannot even say if this represents a computable function and, also, is it an optimal program compared to what?”. You must establish a frame of reference such as the Kolmogorov complexity of a given program.
> “given a bit sequence A, is it an optimal program?”
> Kolmogorov complexity of a given program.
You seem fundamentally confused about the objects of study of information theory. They're not programs, they're e.g. strings of symbols. We measure by the information content of those strings based on likelihood / programs. Information theory asks "given some bit sequence A, how much information is in it?" not "is it an optimal program?" - instead we measure the information in it by constructing or otherwise proving facts about programs that generate or predict it. We talk about Kolmogorov complexity of strings (/ signals / states / whatever) as measured by programs, not Kolmogorov complexity of programs themselves.
Obviously programs are also themselves representable strings of symbols, and this is why we find the usual suspects of self-reference paradoxes in IT. But that doesn't mean the measure does not exist, or that it's not possible to find in lots of interesting, easily-computable cases. It's a bit like handing me a ruler and asking me how long it is - sure, if I don't trust any ruler I'll have a hard time measuring it. But I don't have to trust that specific ruler to do so, and the fact it's a device used for measuring itself is completely incidental to my measuring of it.
> You seem fundamentally confused about the objects of study of information theory.
It is hard to argue against your slightly condescending remark if my comment is not accurate, which is still up to debate. I am sure I could not observe all due formalities even if I tried. But please understand that my comment was written taking into consideration your previous comment, by which I mean:
- You mentioned that the overall approach in Algorithmic Information Theory is to assume Church-Turing thesis as valid. My understanding is that having a standard representation of data is one among the various accidental benefits of that---raw data could pretty well be represented by a Turing machine itself, as well as any other program representation that could generate it as long as it is a computable function. Notice that, in this scenario, talking about the Kolmogorov complexity of a program is valid, as strings of raw data are also represented as programs.
- The "is it an optimal program?" question was a rhetorical device which apparently did not work well, even due to the fact that I did not define what "optimal" meant in this context---I thought it was given. But I can't understand how you came to the conclusion that I was defining the subject of study of Algorithmic Information Theory there.
So if I’m understanding this correctly you have a relativistic understanding of information in which the zero state is observer dependent? Just for my understanding, consider for example the spin of an electron. It can be in one of two states, up or down. In which scenario am I unclear about the absolute information content of knowing the spin state?
It is really hard for me to reply to that comment.
I would say, first, that I need a definition for absolute information, as I have been insisting that information is defined on mutual terms. If we move past that, though, information about the spin state is unclear before measurement.
viruses have no agency so they don't attempt to reduce entropy across time. viruses are a reduction of entropy across time, just by being an organized structure (of rna and protein strands folded together) requiring energy to create and maintain. information is encoded in that structure--both in the sequence and in the shape--and that's transmitted through time.
I think it is a mistake to say that agency is a property of a system, rather than a lens through which we can analyze a system. It truly is useful to describe a thermostat and heater as trying to keep a room within a certain temperature range, even though there is nothing actually striving there.
Much like anything under evolutionary pressure, the viruses that propagate are the ones that do manage (in their normal environment) to keep entropy across time from exploding. Are they "alive"? Meh. In combination with their environment, they act like it though.
Not OP, but this is something I spend a lot of time with. I have a pet framework called Zodeaism which means "Living Ideas". In my theory, the real "life forms" are ideas which possess the capabilities of information storage, adaptation, self-repair, and transmission. My own consciousness is mediated by thousands of such ideas, some competing and some working in harmony.
One such idea -- Do Good Onto Others As Others Do Unto You -- is an example of an extremely powerful and resilient idea which lives and operates in the brains of billions of individuals. It is powerful enough to ward off weaker ideas and has lived a long time without much modification to its original essence.
With that out of the way... I felt it was necessary to reduce agency to ability to use internal energy in order to put oneself in a higher energy state in the external world. This can be observed externally. I am standing next to a rock. I can jump up, spending some of my energy, and fighting against the potential energy well of gravity. I've increased my external energy state at the expense of some of my internal energy. Thus, a living being needs a way to store and use energy. You can observe this externally and conclude that I am alive, while the rock is either dead or inactive.
I consider such an act of "living" motion which can take another path than that of least resistance to be a "kin". In other words, any motion which is the result of a physical calculation (Zodeaism is compatible with determinism) and leads to an increase in external energy state. A kin is any such motion, large or small.
So now the problem becomes, what is the smallest kin we've observed in nature? Single-celled bacteria can expend energy in order to move through their environment against forces like friction and gravity, but a virus "rides the waves" if you will, never expending energy for things like respiration or locomotion. Any energy which is spent internally is potential energy like chemical or gravitational, released through a physical process without need for computation. I am unaware of anything smaller than a single-celled organism which produces such kins, but that doesn't mean they aren't out there. Even ethereal life forms such as ideas can produce these kins within the bodies of countless individuals across the planet, so physically local computational circuitry isn't a hard requirement.
So, according to this framework viruses aren't alive, however we can make the case that some machines are, except the experience is incomparable because of the advanced circuitry we contain which mediates our experience through things like emotion.
Yes to all three, when I was exposed to Friston's work I found many parallels in my own research and I would like to reach out to him when I've reached a more complete formalization of my ideas.
What do you think of his free energy principle and related concepts?
i haven't thought about it enough to even speculate, but one criteria would be the ability to make decisions, however simple.
viruses are entirely passive in their action. they're exquisitely complex structures (for what they are) existing entirely by chance that happen to have the property of self-replicating in the presence of the right cellular machinery. they don't decide to do anything, they just are, and therefore don't have agency.
Unfortunately, by your definition, computer programs are closer to being an individual than viruses. I am assuming that is not intended, so probably the idea needs more refinement.
I also think this is a weakness of the original article: a lot of things we probably shouldn't consider individual life forms would probably fit the definition (nations, for example).
yes, as @selestify also noted, that seems contradictory on the surface but actually isn't. the virus itself is a reduction of entropy while it's net existential entropy contribution is positive.
where you draw the system boundary matters for defining entropy changes, but long-term we're all bound to increase entropy, otherwise life (and our semi-living cousins) would be violating the laws of thermodynamics writ large.
When you simply include the raw materials the virus is made from before and after it forms you have a net loss of entropy. So, it’s not clear what you mean by boundaries in that case.
I don't know if the goal of the virus is to reduce entropy. Viruses mutate just like some clever computer viruses. Allowing them to trick immune systems and anti viruses and render antivirals useless. Bacterias are doing that too.
I think we can equate too much entropy with danger since cancer cells also mean mutations.
While zoom has faced many privacy concerns in the last few weeks, it is incredible how reliable the service has been given the massive spike in demand.
Most services would have buckled (examples abound like robinhoods recent outage) and part of their stack would have not been able to handle the load.
On top of that they are in new customer segments that I bet they didn’t see as their user base. I know more than a few elementary school teachers who are now hosting zoom classes with 15+ 5 year olds on a call.
> I know more than a few elementary school teachers who are now hosting zoom classes with 15+ 5 year olds on a call.
Given the ease of setup of Zoom which defaulted to a machine-guessable URL which displayed email and other information about participants, this is one reason Zoom is rightly being scrutinized and criticized for poor security.
"Instead, the city’s Dept. of Education is transitioning schools to Microsoft Teams, which the spokesperson said has the “same capabilities with appropriate security measures in place.”"
I would be really interested in a tech writeup on how they managed infrastructure. They run a lot of very bandwidth and presumably CPU intensive servers that they quickly had to scale out massively. There are some older articles that they use Equinix for infrastructure (probably colocation?) but adding that much capacity in a short amount of time is really impressive.
> "the current external γ-ray dose rate to a human from the contaminations associated with the 'Taiga' experiment was between 9 and 70 μSv [micro-Sieverts] per week". The report also recommends periodic monitoring of the site was recommended. In comparison, typical exposure from naturally occurring background radiation is about 3mSv per year, or 57μSv per week