Sometimes I wonder if there’s a funded campaign against the Bay Area online. Where do you live, and where did you come from? I just moved to SF and yes it has homeless people, traffic and is extremely expensive, but these are things that every other big city I’ve lived in has. The costs and homelessness are worse than Seattle or NYC but not to the point that it’s a reduction in my quality of life. To say you have “no good opinions” is so extreme. The area is beautiful, has a rich history, amazing culture, food and art, and if you work in technology has the best availability of jobs in the world.
I had a company fly me out to interview at a startup in SF a few weeks ago. My hotel was a 20 minute walk from my interview. I almost walked. I'm glad I did not. Just about every block between my hotel and my destination was densely packed with homeless and tents. I watched a drug deal in broad daylight at a red light while just spacing out staring out the uber window, and found I accidentally made eye contact, and prayed the light would change over faster, as meanwhile a mentally ill man is literally roaming the streets screaming about the end of the world (not exaggerating).
The start up had about 20 people (maybe 2 of whom were over 30) in what was clearly an apartment at some point in the past, except the "bathroom" was what looked like a makeshift closet to me: a sliding glass shower door with a room divider behind it. For ~20 people. As the interview wraps up, one of the leads decides we should go for a walk so he can break the bad news about the job. We walked around the block about 5 or 6 times, every time passing the homeless man asleep on the sidewalk about 15 feet from their office door. No one there seemed to understand my astonishment/shock/horror about the state of that city.
The uber driver on my ride back to the airport who was native to the area sure understood though. That dude just drives around all day feeling out whether or not someone's going to report him if he speaks honestly about it. That conversation was by far the best part of the trip.
Flew back to ny and interviewed in nyc a few days later, and all I can really say is at no point in NYC did I feel physically unsafe like I did in SF. They're not even comparable in my book. I'm still unsettled by just how bad SF was, and I'm absolutely astonished that I don't hear people talk about this more.
Few agree with you, San Francisco is in a dire state. I work here and I walk past passed out people with needles in their arms, human feces littering the sidewalk, women with their toddlers on the street asking for money. BART stations smell like garbage. There is a homeless, mental health and drug crisis happening all at once condensed into a small geographical region. San Francisco still has some charm, but it's hard to appreciate these days.
It’s not just a matter of disagreement— take a look on here, Reddit and Twitter and you’ll find a swarm of people making it seem like the Bay Area is a dystopian hellhole. I was legitimately concerned about my move before I got here.
I agree that there's lots of people online who make exaggerated negative claims about San Francisco, and my best guess as to why is that it's part of the coastal/inland, liberal/conservative cultural divide/war. It's easier to put others down than to fix your own mess, and frankly, California's economy and social services are the envy of almost every other state.
San Francisco is a very liberal city and conservative publications like the WSJ love to vocally shit all over the city because of its many problems, but that doesn't mean it doesn't actually have those problems. It does. San Francisco is a shitty place to live for anyone but the wealthy. I've worked in the city for 9 years now (I live in the East Bay) and if you stay here long enough like I have you'll discover that the young single people that come to work here don't stay long, they do tours for about 3 to 5 years and then cycle out to someplace they can actually raise a family.
You simply haven’t lived here long enough. It’s crazy that you would dismiss a crisis that has been documented and growing for years as an online misinformation campaign because your few months here don’t align with what you’ve read.
I'm not dismissing the crisis- it's a separate conversation that can be had for SF, LA and Seattle. My call out is for this confusing picture painted online that the Bay Area is a crime ridden wasteland that should be avoided at all costs, which simply isn't the case.
Some of these complaints didn’t really pick up in earnest until after 2015, even though the underlying issues have not meaningfully changed in severity since then. In fact, rents in SF are lower today than at their peak in 2015. Homelessness is up, though the city has gotten slightly better at provisioning shelter and is slowly writing conservatorship legislation.
Of course someone will bring up the infamous up-and-to-the-right poop maps, but that seems primarily to be a case of response bias as 311 rolled out an app with increasing adoption.
It's not a funded campaign against California or anything (although I suppose our current president's campaign rhetoric comes close to meeting that definition), but I agree that the constant California bashing is annoying. My guess is that it's simply a result of the fact that more people here have experiences with California than anywhere else, and people like to complain about where they live. So you see a lot of negative California rhetoric, because lots of people here can relate to it. Whereas if I complain about the intolerance, ugliness, weather, etc. of College Station, Texas (all reasons why I moved away and have no interest in moving back to that state) few know what I'm talking about.
I'm no California booster or anything, mind you. Some people like it here (I'm one of them), and some don't. That's fine. We certainly have our problems that we need to work on, and we have also done a lot of things right. (For example, SF tore down the Embarcadero Freeway permanently when it was damaged in the earthquake. Brilliant move. Wouldn't fly politically for a second in Dallas.)
