I've been wrestling with the idea of moving. If I do, I know it will be extremely difficult to convince myself to ever move back. I haven't found this city a desirable place to live for several years now, I'm priced out of the peninsula, and life's too short to spend hours commuting every day from the East Bay.
Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall
731–740 of 1001 posts
Re: Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall
#732Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
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 di…
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.
Re: Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall
#733Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
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…
strange how a whole bunch of people on this thread agree with me - both visitors and sf residents.
this ladies and gentlemen is what you get when you have a kid, he gets picked on for doing stupid things i school, and you tell him it's not his problem -it's just those people have issues.
sf has some good food. you have to know what it is, and take an uber across town there. the claim was, you'd live in sf for its food. if you step out of your house and walk to surrounding restaurants, the food is very average, overly presented, and priced by artistic presentation - not taste.
when in tokyo, i can walk to a random place and get great sushi. in moscow, the russian food at any cheap hole in the wall is good (and greasy) - you don't need cafe pushkin. in sf, if you don't know where you're going and do some research, the food is average. which isn't bad. but average food is certainly no reason to live in a sausage factory and pay 2mil for a studio.
Re: Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall
#734Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Cycling year around in New York should be relatively easy. There is winter cycling culture in much harsher climates https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/feb/12/ice-cycles-no...
I visited Oulu in late November to early December a few years ago. Yes, they cycle.
Re: Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall
#735Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 bu…
> 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.
Re: Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall
#736Have others noticed this kind of "revolt against cities" attitude lately too? I do wonder if people consider the huge advantages city living can provide? I'm reading constantly that current dream is buying a plot of land in the middle no where, signing up for StarLink and growing watermelons while trying to work a full time engineering job. The thing is though, this is all just a temporary thing, even if this pandemi…
> this is all just a temporary thing, even if this pandemic meanders on for another 3-5 years. The last American urban exodus started in the 1950s and wasn't fully reversed until the early 2000s. Many cities never recovered in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest. Even the most expensive cities, like San Francisco, LA, and New York, had neighborhoods that were run down and dilapidated, ignored for decades, until very recentl…
> Cities are incredibly expensive to maintain
The whole thesis of the strongtowns.org website, with lots of data and references to back it up, is that medium dense city centers and town centers are the only parts of a city/town that are revenue positive. Commercial strip mall areas and suburbs do not generate enough sales tax and property tax revenue (and often require tax breaks) to pay for the infrastructure: miles of roads and streets, sewers, utilities, etc. Density, when you have lots of people and economic activity in a smaller area, can pay for its infrastructure, even if it might be more expensive than a country road.
Otherwise, I do agree, it is cyclical, cities were over-hyped for a while, with the tech boom in many east and west coast cities, but now remote work might reverse that. However, as Europe has shown, with a few precautions and some sacrifice such as concerts and night-clubs, a lot of city activities can go on, and with less rent pressure, we might be headed toward a good balance.
Re: Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall
#737Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's silly that they even close. What's the point? Can someone enlighten me on why bars and stuff close at 1am? Thanks!
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.
Re: Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall
#738I honestly don't mind this at all.
SF was a desirable place to live before all the techies (such as myself) crowded in, and it will continue to be after many leave. I'm sticking around; I love this city for reasons that can't be destroyed by a virus, despite all its problems.
And it's not like other cities are doing great; at least in the US, all cities are being damaged by covid-19 to varying degrees. Why would I move to NYC or Chicago or Boston or Seattle or wherever else? They all have similar covid-related problems, and they're unfamiliar places where I'd have no or a minimal support network. I'm not a suburb/rural guy (grew up that way, not going back), so I don't feel the pull to move out of a city entirely.
SF still has the same underlying problems it had before covid-19, and some of them have worsened in recent months. It's going to be a difficult few years getting out of this and figuring out what the next chapter will be, but this is home for me. For the people who are leaving (who are only here because they have to be for their job), that's fine; I'd rather be left with people who actually care about this place enough to stick with it.
Re: Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall
#739Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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…
People who couldn't afford to live there but always wanted to will move in.
This won't make San Francisco a shell, it could even make it a nicer place to be.
Re: Remote work is reshaping San Francisco, as tech workers flee and rents fall
#740Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 n…
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.
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
Starting at 7:41 in this video an interview with the same supervisor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw8MACDZ3RI&t=547s
The tax breaks that she is referring to were roughly $10mm/year. https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report-state/twitter...
The city's budget increased by nearly $6bn during the time the tax breaks were active (largely fueled by the growth from tech boom).