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San Francisco

antirez.com

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Re: San Francisco

#261

Post by Zhenya »

IAmScumbagSteve wrote: post #255
upquark wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say 1.4k is a reasonable rent in DC, not in my experience at least. Not even if you move out to the nearby suburbs.

I currently live in the DC suburb of Fairfax. My rent is $675. I'm renting a room in a 4 bedroom 3.5 bathroom house. I had a friend that came down from New York to visit. He joked that my kitchen was the size of his apartment.

I don't get arguments like this. You live in DC. He lives in one of the greatest cities on the face of the earth.

So what. Market has spoken. His rent is X and your rent is X-market discount for living in DC.

Re: San Francisco

#262

Post by baddox »

acchow wrote: post #238
baddox wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in the Midwest, where we had all the seasons and often fairly bad summers (old people die if their air conditioners fail) and winters (can't leave the driveway without 4WD). Still, in San Francisco, I am personally uncomfortable due to weather far more often than I ever was in the Midwest. This is due primarily to the lack of air conditioning in housing (I have bay windows constantly open and a fan directly…

It sounds like you could significantly improve your standard of living by buying an air conditioner...

Most apartments and shared houses I've seen and both the ones I've lived in had no easy way to install an air conditioner.

Re: San Francisco

#263

Post by thufry »

ryanSrich wrote: post #80

Eh. They can keep it. • Average engineering salary in sf: 116K / year [1] • Average rent for a one bedroom: $2,700 / month [2] After taxes you're coming in around 72k / year - 32k / year for rent You'll have roughly 40k to play with. That may sound like a lot but factor in food, health care, travel, energy, internet, phone, and numerous miscellaneous expenses and you'll be hard pressed to save anything over 10k a yea…

I'd gladly give up that $11K three times over to live in San Francisco instead of DC. And, looks like other people would too, hence the ridiculous rents here.

Re: San Francisco

#264

Post by larrykubin »

mclenithan wrote: post #164
larrykubin wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who lives in Portland, I would love to have SF's weather.

Yo Larry! Come down to LA, Santa Monica area. Code with ocean views! Although, I do miss the amount of live music in Portland.

Hah, hey Patrick! Long time no see. Sounds like things are going well over there. I'll let you know next time I'm headed that way.

Re: San Francisco

#265

Post by geebee »

lakethun wrote: post #256
egometry wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These two posts are not incompatible. That 13.5% of kids needs to live somewhere. I'd bet that a heatmap would show "kid locuses" in some neighborhoods and "kid voids" in others.

They are not incompatible only if by "tons" you mean "half as many". I would expect some areas of San Francisco to have more kids than others but overall the number is very low.

SF is a small region in a larger urban area. My guess is that you could easily single out dense, urban sub-regions in LA or Chicago that are as childless as SF. SF used to have more kids, but I'd guess that this used to be true of the dense, urban sections of other cities. The difference is, a kid who moves from urban chicago to suburban chicago is still counted in Chicago's stats.

Meanwhile, some districts in SF might have quite a high percentage of children compared to the average for areas of equal density. Not sure of this, but it would be interesting to see.

Re: San Francisco

#266

Post by baddox »

philsnow wrote: post #251
baddox wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in SF, summer is often colder than winter. A common misconception, even among residents, easily debunked by paying attention or doing a quick Google search: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#Climate http://weatherspark.com/#!dashboard;q=san%20francisco

SF itself has even more fine-grained microclimates than the peninsula (which only has a few). I didn't (immediately) find out how the wikipedia climate numbers were assembled nor what weather station(s) weatherspark gets data from, but if it's a single weather station, the data gathered is nigh-useless. weatherspark looks very nice btw, I'm going to go look if they have an android app.... seems there isn't one. oh we…

Is there any neighborhood that experiences higher average temperatures in the winter? I've spent most of my time in South Beach, FiDi, and Outer Sunset, and while I never kept records, it always seemed to me like each of those had a higher average temperatures in the (late) summer.

Re: San Francisco

#267

Post by geebee »

antirez wrote: post #18
spikels wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a great place for raising a family: expensive, bad schools, disfunctional government, drugs on streets, and lots of crazies[1]. Pretty much everyone I have ever know who had kids in SF moved away within a few years. The demographics always reminded me of China where you did not see as many girls because of the one child policy. In SF children of both sexes (10% of population) are just missing: Persons under 18 (2…

The census citation is pretty incredible indeed... About schools, that's something you could never tell just looking at the city that seems very civilized, and this usually correlates with quality of schools. I hope there will be efforts to fix that in the future.

I'm very late to this discussion, but SFUSD schools really aren't terrible, they're just very uneven. SF has an unusually high number of extremely highly rated schools, a large number of middling ones, and a notable number of failing schools.

To see more about this, there's a site called greatschools.net. You can list the schools by API score (adjusted by expectations based on demographics as well). What you'll see is that SF has an unusual number of schools scoring 8, 9, and 10 out of 10. Below that, there are plenty of decent performing schools. And then, there are some 1's and 2's. Pretty grim.

If you list schools in the suburbs, you'll find a similar situation. The big difference is that in the suburbs, you can convert a very high mortgage payment or rent into priority access for a top school. If you can't afford that, you're stuck in middling or poor schools.

SF uses a lottery, where parents list their choices and then get an assignment. If you only list highly in demand schools, you do risk getting a default assignment to a very low performing school across town (you can still get on wait lists). These people often do leave.

Prop H would have recommended giving priority access to district residents. It failed by a whisker. Probably the most interesting thing it revealed is that voters in good school districts favor priority access for district residents, whereas residents in poor school districts don't. Yeah, huge surprise there.

I feel some ambivalence about this, because I do see advantages to neighborhood schools. However, there was an article in reason magazine making a very surprising libertarian case for SF's school lottery...

http://reason.com/archives/2006/04/01/the-agony-of-american-...

Article is a little old, but I'd say schools have improved since it was written.

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