There is a famous paper about the location of company headquarters: they get as close as possible to the residence of company CEOs. If we don't consider the CEO's influence, I'm actually curious if the location of company headquarters has to do with the average age of the employees in the Bay Area. As the employees start to have families, they most likely move to the south bay for better or for worse, and I have a hard time imagine that they'd enjoy commuting via BART or Caltrain for more than an hour every day. And this is probably just me or my circles, a city's hustle and bustle becomes a distraction or at least increasing irrelevant as I age. I increasingly enjoy ample parking space, tranquil suburbs, being able to step out and start jogging in woods or huge parks, and certainly not having to deal with the craziness on SF streets. If more people are like me who prefers living outside of the city proper, then I'd imagine a company will have access to more talent by moving its headquarters to the south of SF.
It’s been a while since we had sf offices, but back when we did sf had a pretty aggressive additional payroll tax and gross receipts taxes.
I’d imagine this is likely a factor in the decision.
I know for a while they were waiving some of these taxes for companies who set up offices in certain parts of the city. E.g. zendesk got a big tax break for its market street location near the tenderloin.
As for commutes, I’d be pretty curious to know how many folks who work at Twitter actually show up to their offices every day, especially in eng roles. Even with a return to office mandate I can’t imagine this not becoming more hybrid over time (of course I’ve never worked for musk or his managers — but I’d assume that if folks are high output he would not care how often they were in the office).
Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get to an office in South Park.
I’d be curious to know:
- how folks who work at X think about this move?
- how much remote work will be allowed?
- tax savings.
- lease savings.
I’d bet getting rid of sf tax nexus was a key piece of the reason.
during one visit to those Zendesk offices an urgent slack message (verily) was sent out advising everyone to get away from the windows, as there was shooting outside.
About 10 minutes later also via Slack the CEO announced not to worry it was simply one drug dealer shooting another drug dealer in the back. Everyone could return to their desks.
I never understood why the company would put its employees in danger until the parent comment.
My first week working in a finance firm in midtown Manhattan there was a significant shooting. These things happen everywhere (edit: in the US) unfortunately. I'm not convinced that a more suburban location that forces people to drive would actually be any safer.
If by "everywhere" you mean "major megapolises with crime problems", then yes, everywhere. Otherwise, no, not everywhere, and yes, in a suburban location a chance of a shooting happening under your very office window is extremely low. Living/working in a megapolis has its advantages, but let's not paint over its downsides also. Criminals want the same advantages too.
Cities tend to have a lower per-capita crime rate, it's just dense and visible.
This is just suburban paranoia. Crime happens.
I think it's reasonable to measure crime in terms of crimes per area, rather than crimes per capita, especially when comparing suburban to urban.
I don't see how that's reasonable. What I'm interested in is how likely crime is to happen to me, personally, not how likely any given crime will happen in some radius to me.
You really don't see how that's reasonable?
People want to feel safe. Having high crime nearby makes people feel unsafe, even if it's just drug dealers and gangs beefing with each other that likely don't care about you.
By that logic, it would be reasonable for the government to outlaw the reporting of crime, as people would "feel" safer.
That's the worst possible interpretation of what that comment said.
- If there's a shooting 100ft from me, I don't care if it gets reported or not. I'm worried about getting in the crossfire.
- On the other hand, if there's a shooting 10 miles from me, I'm safe.
So it's perfectly logical to want to live in the second situation and avoid the first. Per-capita statistics mask the effects of the first and make the second look worse.
The best thing to do is to use per-capita stats when judging your likelihood of being a victim, and per-area stats when judging your likelihood of being near a crime.
Most people want to minimize both, and you shitting on them for it is bizarre.
Minimizing both is fine. But not minimizing the one that actually measures how likely you are to be a victim of a crime is … weird.
Regardless, the whole premise that started this argument is wrong. There is higher crime per capita in large cities.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...
I don't think you're reading those numbers correctly. The highest crime per capita is in Alberque, New Mexico, the 32nd largest city in the US, and that list is literally the crime rates of the 100 most populated cities, not the 100 cities in the US with the most crime.
Because as the Zendesk example that started this pointed out, an entire building (probably multiple!) of people were affected by this incident. There was 1 victim. It's going to seem insignificant on a per capita basis. There's thousands of people impacted by it, and possible dozens in the immediate vicinity who could be suffering from ongoing trauma having witnessed it.
There's no need to outlaw reporting crime. You simply don't do anything with reports and the problem solves itself. Shootings tend to still get reported, but there's little point to reporting less serious crime once it's established that no action is taken. To that end, crime statistics are pretty hard to use in a meaningful way.
Ridiculous take. And not only because people obviously wouldn’t feel safer if reporting crimes was illegal.
It is reasonable. Many totalitarian governments hide crime statistics. Many badly run police forces discourage reporting certain types of crime, like theft or robbery, to not mess up their stats. Of course, at some crime level, the difference between the official picture and the reality becomes impossible to hide, but the pretense usually lasts much longer even if it's obvious how hollow it is. But yes, it is very rational for the government whose interests are detached from the interests of the citizens, to manipulate the data, and they frequently do.
Crime per area makes it more likely you are an accidental victim of a crime. You know, if the drug dealer missed.
Also, much of crime is not just random. So there is some logic in placing more value into not witnessing crime (especially one where someone is shot) while theoretically in a vacuum having a higher chance of being a target of a crime.
Accidental victims are already included in the "per capita". If a drug dealer accidentally shoots someone, that is a crime and goes into the crime statistics.
So statistically, by definition, crime per capita is all that matters. If there is lower crime per capita in a dense city, that's already accounting for accidents like stray bullets too.
If you don't want to be a victim of crime, then you want to live where crime is lowest per-capita. Period.
Not where it is lowest per square mile.
"There's only 1 crime per square mile!"
"...but there's only 1 person per square mile too."
I feel like this whole "per capita doesn't matter!" parade is a recent invention of some specific corner of the internet that feels frustrated the data keeps disagreeing with what they think reality is.
The correct claim is not that per capita does not matter but that it alone does not provide you with adequate picture. Imagine a street where 100 people live, and there's a shoot-out there every day. Now imagine a mayor made an order, and another 100 people are forced to move and live on the same street now, and there's still a shoot-out there every day. Can you honestly say the quality of life on that street improved 2x, even though you still have the daily shootings as before, but it's now twice as crowded? I think something is missing in this picture if you make such a conclusion. Of course, per capita numbers show some part of the picture, but you need to see the other parts too.
What you could say, assuming the number of shooting victims per day remained constant, was that people on that street were now 50% less-likely to be killed in a shooting. If you moved enough people onto that street, again assuming a no change in the number of victims, the likely-hood of any individual being shot could be forced into a statistically insignificant number.
The reverse of your hypothetical is basically how high-crime areas come into being. If you have an area where 1 person every day is killed, and half the people leave, you would absolutely say the quality of life in that area declined. Everyone is twice as likely to die.
While per capita is an imperfect number, it's a crazy-good proxy for the thing we worry about – "how likely is crime in this area to affect me?"
What doesn't go into statistics is
1) the negative externalities of being near crime. Suppose you live in a densely populated enough area that you can expect a person to be murdered within 1km of you every year. There's another area, with an identical crime rate but a much more sparsely populated population such that you'd expect a person to be murdered within 10km of you every year. Most people would much prefer the latter.
2) How people adjust their behavior (to avoid the externalities and risk of being an accidental victim). There are places in SF I simply won't step foot in or even drive through after 10pm or so. That's a cost being absorbed by people; if they didn't do so, there would be more additional accidental murders.
Crime per area makes it more likely you are an accidental victim of a crime
Strange take. The opposite is true. Crime per area has nothing to say about how likely you are to be the victim of a crime, while crime per capita literally does say how likely you are to be a victim of a crime.
No, it's not just suburban paranoia. Travel to Tokyo or Singapore and then to S.F.
We recently spent a month in Tokyo. It is ridiculously safe and law-abiding. I'm surprised they have any crime at all. In our entire time there, I saw one (1) individual piece of small rubbish on the street.
Tokyo is not safe. People who are arrested for suspicion of crimes are held for weeks by the police and threatened and beaten and tortured until they confess, even if they are innocent. The police then release them for 24 hours and rearrest them on a different charge so the two month holding timer resets.
People there have been held for months in solitary confinement (torture past a few days, per the UN) awaiting trial only to be found innocent and released.
As a foreigner, good luck if a Japanese person calls the police on you and accuses you of something. You’re looking at 40+ days of beatings and torture as the police will of course believe natives over tourists.
well that just shows that to japanese people, even kangaroo courts are better than crime
Spent a week walking around SF and saw no crime. It felt extremely safe.
Big tech made SF unaffordable and then loves to complain about the poverty left in it's wake. I don't care if tech workers feel uncomfortable in SF.
SF was rapidly gentrified to the point of mass homelessness, now they want to legislate a way to remove the homeless people that were made impoverished. I will never care/empathize with a hackernews poster complaining about crime in the Bay Area. You moved there, you demanded luxury, you demanded space for the luxury, you pushed the existing population out.
According to who? Do you have a source?
Top violent crime rate per capita US cities [1]:
1. St. Louis 2. Detroit 3. Baltimore 4. Memphis 5. Kansas City
If we include all crime and not just violent crime, it’s still all large cities at the top. Not sure where you’re getting your info.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...
That list is of the 100 most populous cities in US, so by definition it does not include mid/small cities, towns, and villages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Per capita, smaller cities are outstanding in their crime.
Even Baltimore is down in 51st place.
This list is incomplete to boot. Large cities often called "war zone" by culture war fighters are largely safer than being in a small town.
St. Louis is sketchy AF but it's hardly a large city, relative to actual large cities.
You're right of course, but it's sort of meaningless. I live in Germany where there isn't nearly as much gun crime, but Musk isn't about to move Twitter to Germany.
Don't your police regularly jail people for non-violent speech? I don't see Musk moving to Germany.
They jail people for antisemitic and nazi speech, if for you this is "non-violent", I have a history lesson on 1939-1945 to show you.
I saw a video of a German activist being hauled off by the police for giving a seminar about censorship the other day. Your country controls speech through force. Like I said, it's highly unlikely Musk would move anything to your country.
it's highly unlikely Musk would move anything to your country
And yet Musk proves you wrong: https://www.tesla.com/giga-berlin
Tesla does not operate a social media platform.
You certainly did not see an activist hauled off by the police for giving a seminar about censorship the other day.
So ... can you link that outrageous video, that we can judge whether it really was the way you said it was?
If by non-violent speech you mean roman salutes or nazi quotes, yes.
It is more or less enough to in public say why you don't support Likud nowadays to be arrested in Germany.
You really need to normalize crime rates by population (including commuters) and avoid focusing on anecdotes
Why would an individual living and working around some area care about the crime per population?
I would personally care way more about the crime density like per mile or something because that is what would actually be affecting me. Like how many crimes would happen in close proximity to me that could put me in potential danger.
I couldn't care less about the crime per population.
This doesnt make sense. You care about "per population" because you are 1 out of the population. You don't care about per square mile because you are not measured in square miles, you are measured in people (1).
Why should crime proximity to my location be completely ignored?
If the crime is higher per person, but the crimes are several miles away then why would that be a problem for me?
Compared to lower crimes per person, but the crimes are happening on my street.
If the crimes are happening closer to me I'm more likely to be affected by it in some way.
No, my point was that you would also want to factor in injury rates from commuting, which tend to dwarf crime rates.
Just another anecdote but I concur with you--10 years of commuting experience in the Bay Area tells me that the most likely bodily harm I will experience is behind the wheel on the freeway, not from homeless / mentally-ill people wandering the streets. I have been involved in two car accidents on 580 (not at fault) but zero bodily harm on BART.
I have lived 39 years here in New Zealand and have never witnessed or been near a shooting. I'm not saying shootings have never happened in New Zealand, but the idea that these things "happen everywhere" is asinine.
San Francisco has nearly 8 times higher population density than Auckland.
Add to that other factors like the size of the CA economy (wealth attracts crime), a lax criminal system, attractive social services (compared to the rest of the US), etc etc. It's an apples to oranges comparison.
We both know it’s none of those things, it’s access to guns
Non-gun crime is a bigger concern in SF than gun-related violence.
I've lived in the Bay Area for 60 years, and never witnessed or been near a shooting. They do happen more often here, but violence is far lower than you would think from the media and online anecdotes.
It's just a very American-centric sentiment, because here in the states, that's true.
Not "everywhere", as an European that grew up in a big city (Paris) that's unthinkable.
That's a really surprising example. Paris has nearly identical crime level to San Francisco.
From personal experience, I did not feel particularly safe in Paris when visiting (compared to e.g. Berlin).
Moreover, Paris has several neighborhoods and suburbs that are very unsafe and most people avoid going there. One could say Tenderloin in SF has a similar reputation, but it's very small and easy to avoid.
I think OP was referring to shootings. In France, as in most of Europe, it's not trivial to get access to guns. So the risk of getting shot in Paris is small, but of course you still might get stabbed.
This is not typical in the US. I have never heard or seen a gun shot fired while someone committed a crime.
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Because in reality, as in statistically, SF is actually not that dangerous.
People say this about any vaguely blue city, which is almost all of them. But they forget Urban areas are very dense. You're actually more likely, per capita, to die to gun violence in rural America. It's just very hard to see that because the coverage isn't there and the actual amount of deaths is lower.
Per capita is such a stupid way to measure shooting danger. What really matters is average proximity to shootings (which does measure danger, since proximity to the bullet could lead to you getting killed, or the shooter aiming in another close direction). Obviously, this is higher in dense areas, hence the higher perceived danger.
Case in point, if you have a rural area of 1000 people and there are 10 shootings (1% shooting rate), the likelihood that any of the 980 people not involved was near any of those shooting is very low.
On the other hand, a 4 block stretch of a city with a 1000 people with ten shootings, you can bet that all 1000 heard / saw / were affected by the shootings.
Cities need to be safer than other places in order to feel safe. And until people get this obvious fact, cities will always have this reputation.
Right, but I'm saying there's a disconnect between perception and reality. The reputation cities have is based on their perception and not necessarily reality.
You can only make some place so safe in a country like the US. It's trivial to obtain a firearm, so naturally gun violence will always be a problem for us.
To be fair, cities do also generally have MUCH more public services available. They have shelters, food banks, and free mental health facilities out the wazoo as compared to rural areas. But there's only so much you can do.
You can only make some place so safe in a country like the US. It's trivial to obtain a firearm, so naturally gun violence will always be a problem for us.
Absent a few violent neighborhoods, the American homicide rate is on par with places without guns at all. Nevertheless, homicide rate is pretty inversely correlated with amount of quality of life policing. Giuliani made New York city incredibly safe, one of the safest cities in the world, despite the preponderance of guns. Policing works. Consistent prosecution works. Continued imprisonment for those who are clearly dangerous works. The net economic benefit (not to even mention the environmental ones) is more effective than any welfare program
This is debatable. From what I've seen, increase of tough-on-crime policies and police presence does not make anything safer.
Also no, the rate of gun violence in the US is much higher than any developed country (and even a few undeveloped ones). Again, unavoidable and obvious.
I also think it's a bit hilarious when this talk of increased policies and tough-on-crime policies doesn't include... making it harder to obtain a firearm. Requiring ID checks, requiring registration, only allowing certified shops to sell. Apparently those policies are too tough and too much of a burden for law enforcement, somehow.
What really matters is average proximity to shootings
Social proximity. Less than 10% of homicides are from strangers [1]
[1]https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Again, when judging danger in a situation, you as a random by stander are unlikely to be the target. However, again, a targeted shooting in a spread out locale is less dangerous than one that happens a few feet from you for the simple reason that the bullet can miss
Again, when judging danger in a situation, you as a random by stander are unlikely to be the target
Yes, shootings are terrible, but they happen everywhere because of our absurd gun laws. SF is not a standout, and is in fact rather safe despite your feelings.
Here's more stats for perspective:
- There were 53 homicides in SF in 2023, and per the FBI source, ~10% of homicides are random. So ~5.3 random killings.
- There were 26 traffic fatalities in SF in 2023 [1], all of which are random (They'd be a homicide otherwise).
You're 5x more likely to die from a motor vehicle than be randomly murdered in SF.
[1] https://www.visionzerosf.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Visi...
I think you must live in a city. Literally everyone in your 1000 people rural area would be affected by 10 shootings.
No area in the United states has crime rates as high as in my hypothetical, but many rural areas of the South have homicide rates on par with a city.
Fascinating how suicides are creatively included in "gun violence."
There is a gun, and it's violent. And keep in mind suicide isn't always clear-cut.
What about a 13 year old boy who grabs the gun from the safe? This could have been prevented, and it's also suicide. This is a rather common scenario, too.
Here's what Black's Law Dictionary has to say:
*violence.* Unjust or unwarranted exercise of force, usually with accompaniment of vehemence, outrage, or fury. People v. McIlvain, 55 Cal.App.2d 322, 130 P.2d 131, 134. Physical force unlawfully exercised; abuse of force; that force which is employed against common right, against the laws, and against public liberty. Anderson-Berney Bldg. Co. v. Lowry, Tex.Civ.App., 143 S.W.2d 401, 403. The exertion of any physical force so as to injure, damage or abuse. See e.g. Assault.
Violence in labor disputes is not limited to physical contact or injury, but may include picketing conducted with misleading signs, false statements, publicity, and veiled threats by words and acts. Esco Operating Corporation v. Kaplan, 144 Misc. 646, 258 N.Y.S. 303.
[Black's Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition, p. 1570]
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There's a stark difference between randomly being killed by someone else (i.e.: during a stick-up robbery in the Tenderloin) and consciously choosing to end one's own life: intentional blurring of these lines is often an exercise in bad faith.
These conversations are typically held under the frame that "gun violence" is a valid reason to abridge a Constitutionally-enumerated right.
Suicide, accidental mishandling, etc. are "user error" - not remotely-valid reasons to amend the Constitution or to chip away at rights using legislation. (Confusingly, vehemently anti-gun folks often hold the most pro-euthanasia/doctor-assisted-suicide positions.)
"Likely to die" is a loaded phrase: why is one person of sound mind more "likely" to commit suicide in a rural area? (Is it that boring?)
Confusingly, vehemently anti-gun folks often hold the most pro-euthanasia/doctor-assisted-suicide positions
Right, because I can just pop down to my doctor-safe in my basement, and I've got all I need to have a doctor-assisted-suicide, within minutes of the idea popping into my head./s
Banning coal oil stoves in Britain had a strong effect on their suicide rate, so its really not that much of a reach to think that if fewer people had access to another method of instant-gratification suicide, fewer people would kill themselves.
To be clear here, I am pro-gun-ownership, explicitly for self-defense. I oppose e.g. "assault weapon" bans. But if you're lumping opposition to spur-of-the-moment suicides in with opposition to suicide as an option for the terminally ill after much contemplation and confirmation, I'd say you're not really arguing the point in good faith either.
To address your final point, spur-of-the-moment suicides are frequently the result of long-simmering depression, punctuated by an acute event, without meaningful help. One of the common bits of advice if you think someone is suicidal is to not leave them alone (not just to prevent them from doing something rash, but also because companionship can itself help stave off suicidal ideation in the first place). In light of that, it seems sort of self-evident that people who are physically alone more often would commit suicide more often.
consciously choosing
This is remarkably hard to prove and also ignore that many people can play a role in suicide.
If you, say, bully someone every day and they take their life sure they made a decision, but you influenced it and you're partially responsible. People don't take their life for no reason. If you look at the reasons, it's incredibly complex and actually not mutually exclusive to gun violence. Meaning, their reasons may include there's a gun present.
Like how suicide by opiates is included in "overdoses"?
To be clear on this - people pout about these suicides being considered a firearm death. They are.
They may not be "gun violence" against another, but they're still a firearm death.
Just as someone (and I've seen it several times, as a paramedic) who takes a lethal amount of opiates to commit suicide rather than for recreational use is still considered an overdose death.
It's not "recreational drug abuse", but it's still an overdose death.
Agree or object to both, or none. Guns don't just get a special pass such that shooting yourself with a pistol is somehow not a death by firearm.
"Pout?"
Nobody said these weren't "firearm deaths" - they're not "gun violence" regardless of how badly you want them to be for this strawman to work.
The problem comes when folks lump all of these deaths together and then attempt to legislate based on these inflated numbers: it's intellectually dishonest.
Someone choosing to kill themselves cannot impact my Constitutionally-enumerated rights.
Show me where suicide by firearm is described as "gun violence" rather than "death by firearm".
I totally agree with you. Suicide by firearm is not gun violence.
What I see is people seeing statistics that say counting suicide in firearm deaths is inappropriate. This is why the CDC has to call it out separately, to avoid the furore. (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-...).
The big challenge with my comment, I admit, is that it very quickly gets into a debate about suicide rather that the right to bear arms or decide what you put into your own body. It is a good comparison, I believe, because both are effective at enabling suicide, but have legitimate - and illegitimate - uses.
You're actually more likely, per capita, to die to gun violence in rural America.
Isn’t the vast majority of gun violence suicide? Because if that’s the case than your statement is disingenuous, you’re not less safe in rural America if you’re worried about being shot on the way to the office.
If it is taken into consideration that a vast majority of gun deaths are suicides, that doesn't mean "the vast majority of gun deaths outside of <insert blue city>". Statistically the same proportion of gun deaths are suicides both in cities and out of cities.
Note: “not that dangerous” means you will be confined in extremely stressful dangerous situations routinely. situations that, statistically, you and the frantic crowd will leave physically unscathed
Maybe we should add mental health to these statistics
I have a feeling you're including suicide in "gun violence" here which doesn't really make sense (suicide isn't violence regardless of your feelings about guns generally). I would also expect suicide by gun to be disproportionately higher in rural areas but I can't exactly articulate why I think that.
Most non-suicide gun violence is gang related and you're going to have a tough time convincing anyone there's more gang activity in rural Nebraska than there is in inner city Chicago.
Danger stress is an AOE (area of effect). A single shooting in a city mentally harms/affects 100x more people than in the burbs.
That's averaging the crime over the whole city into one statistic. The point here is not simply that the office is in SF, it's where it is in SF that matters.
Eh, but if the incentives are set to roll & experience the dangerous subset dice, does your commentarys subject and the commentaries audience really overlap.
SF certainly has its challenges. But in my 9 years of working in the financial district I never saw something like this.
Obviously others will have different experiences than me.
Point is, you can find crime and bad things in any city. San Francisco has work to do, but isn't the hell-hole people or the news make it out to be.
Thats odd because SF _has_ been the hell-hole people and the media have described it as in my own experiences.
It would seem to me that Chicago, NYC, LA do have "bad parts" but they're distinctly separate from the "good parts". San Francisco's bad parts and good parts have evidently merged.
I do not understand why people who live in SF have to effectively gaslight themselves into believing that the breakdown of certain basic tenants of society is part of the culture of their city.
I honestly think people like ahuth honestly don't see these sorts of things. I've found that a substantial portion of people who live in my lovely city of Portland for example, simply are not very good at observation, and will happily walk by incredibly dangerous situations and never notice. I've had to point out to my very progressive in-laws for example, needles in parks, drug deals in broad daylight, guns, etc, that they honestly just do not see. This complete lack of awareness is very common among a certain subset of residents, especially in cities, and probably explains why they vote the way they do.
I'm not sure how to go about teaching situational awareness, but I imagine voting patterns would change if people were aware at all.
Perhaps these situations just aren't as dangerous as you think? I can understand not wanting to see drug deals happening out in the open, but it's less of a threat to your personal safety than crossing a busy street.
Given the fact that I live happily in Portland, I think it's safe to say I don't find these situations necessarily dangerous. However, I'm aware they exist, which many of my neighbors are not.
Again, I do think voting patterns would change if people were simply aware of their surroundings.
Portlander here since the late 90s. Downtown for much of it. I think most people are very aware, but just aren't really too concerned about it. Well, about drugs anyway. A certain degree of "live and let live" and just general anarchism is embedded into the DNA of the city. Everything going on in Portland today are the same things that have been going on in the city for decades, it's just become much more visceral and in your face over time as the American landscape has changed. Drugs are harder now. Resources are more constrained. Everything is more competitive. It's just not nearly as easy to get by. Guns are a different story, however. I think everyone of all stripes are pretty collectively worried about that. I don't know what the answer to all these problems are, but I think it comes from US society as a whole becoming more introspective about how we ended up here to begin with.
I do not understand why people who live in SF have to effectively gaslight themselves into believing that the breakdown of certain basic tenants of society is part of the culture of their city.
That phenomenon isn't isolated to San Francisco, nor even to the US. The same mindset is also widespread in "progressive" Canadian cities like Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa, for example.
From what I can tell, one of the main pillars of the "progressive" ideology that's prevalent in such cities is that certain specific groups of people are declared to be "victims" or "disadvantaged", and these people are put on a pedestal and held in high esteem for some reason, no matter how awful they behave in public.
I suspect that most "progressives" inherently know that these sanctified people aren't the "victims" they're ideologically portrayed as being. Even if the "progressives" don't openly admit it, they themselves don't like dodging human feces on the sidewalk, nor the stench of urine emanating from building walls, nor used needles left in parks, nor addicts overdosing in bus shelters, nor smelly unwashed hobos sleeping on public transit, nor aggressive panhandlers demanding money from passersby, nor crucial retail stores closing due to rampant shoplifting, and so forth.
Yet, these "progressives" seem unwilling to admit that this main pillar of their ideology is fundamentally wrong. Perhaps they know that if they admit this, even to themselves, then the rest of their belief system will inevitably come crashing down because it, too, isn't built on reality.
This has been a legitimate problem of progressivism which strongly holds it back from gaining more popularity. You cannot be for public transit and environmentalism while simultaneously being against punishing anti social behaviors on public transit. If public transport doesn’t feel safe to riders they will use personal transport instead. But the notion that some people may hold some responsibility for where they may be in life by their own decisions is so repulsive that instead no one can be held accountable for the most extreme behavior in broad day light. Liberals should be thankful that Conservatives have collectively tied an anchor around their necks to someone so broadly repulsive and criminal as Trump, as if there were simply a boring Conservative alternative elections would have been blowouts against them.
Consider it an overcorrection to the sick and routine dehumanization of these individuals. I’ve actually seen people on this site say that they laugh at drug addicts on the street. If they could lock them in a dungeon and throw away the key, I’m sure they’d do it in a heartbeat.
As I said, everyone's experience has been different. Sorry you've had a bad experience in SF. This just hasn't been my experience (no gaslighting involved...)
SF is a deeply challenging city, and you really appreciate this by traveling and visiting other cities. You are constantly on alert, in ways that simply you are not in other places despite the fact that there are “good and bad” parts of town everywhere else.
Perhaps caused by the unpredictability in SF of often finding “bad” in “good” parts of town, with unpredictable drug addict behavior on top, which adds to the unpredictability of the bad experiences.
Anecdotally, my family got assaulted with a hammer in a “good” part of town, while carrying our 6 months old in a stroller. The individual was visibly on drugs. There is no amount of “bad” in other cities that results in hammering and smashing the back window of a car - assaulting a young family and traumatizing a newborn - for nothing. It’s unwarranted violence, it wasn’t even a robbery. I travel 150k miles a year all over the world, including 3rd world countries, and I have only felt unsafe in San Francisco.
And I have a lot more examples like this one. A friend of mine got assaulted with a baseball bat in SoMa by an individual that wanted to steal their dog for drug money, for example.
The whole town is a social experiment where we put families and working individuals into a drug den and see what happens.
These anecdotes aren’t unique to a city like SF though. I can find similar stories in my relatively small but dense suburb. The statistics just do not back up the claims that SF is uniquely dangerous or has worse problems than anywhere else of that size/density.
These anecdotes aren’t unique to a city like SF though.
But they are, because this is city that has established a record $1B+/year budget to solve the problem, without setting up a rigorous process to be accountable on how that money is being spent, with corruption cases (and arrests) linked to the recipients of those public funds [1][2].
Quite unique, indeed.
This speaks more to the inefficacy of the solution than the uniqueness of the problem to SF. Their problems are not unique, but as you pointed out, maybe the inefficacy of their solution is.
But what if you run out of air superiority and money to bribe those paying for this special party. And to have this is constant free adverisement for the right wingnuts..
I live and have an engineering office in SOMA and I've had the exact opposite experience.
In 8 years living here my dog has been viciously attacked twice, we've had people attack us on the Embarcadero and around the sidewalks and parks in our neighborhood, and just yesterday I was lamenting that there was a time in my past where I wasn't comfortable around drug use. Now when I walk out of my office and see someone smoking whatever or I injecting whatever else it's just normal to me.
That's the problem in this city, living like this, all of us, normalizes all these things that shouldn't be.
Even when I was there for GDC one week this year there was a young black woman who was being detained for assaulting an asian lady.
Would be somewhat normal except she started attacking the officer, stripping off and screaming racist slurs. She was clearly on drugs- which gave pause to the seriously large amount of homelessness and drug use that seemed incredibly normalised on my short commute from Mission to the Moscone Centrr
For what it’s worth homeless people were having sex on the windows of our office, another guy blocked our door by passing out with a needle next to him, and someone was stabbed and killed at a restaurant on the same block as my office within half a year of me being there. I also got yelled racial slurs and others tried to provoke me to fight them regularly.
Because being scared because one drug dealer shot another makes about as much sense statistically as being scared because there was a car accident outside the office. Actually less so since cars kill far more pedestrians than violent criminals.
Just thinking about the day-to-day elevated stress that this would generate makes me glad I will never live in a place like that. It is weird to read people trying to downplay it as if it is nothing.
I never understood why the company would put its employees in danger...
Like forcing them to drive to the office 2-5 days each week when they could continue working from home?
vs "I never understood why the company would not pay taxes to improve the environment around its chosen home"?
I don't think SF is an example of the place where the link between paying a lot of taxes and get the environment around improved is as obvious as you seem to imply.
Like paying $2m for a public bathroom?
Yeah, because that works...
This is peak HN - "stop putting me in danger be making me leave my house"
Go ahead and complete the thought in the context of the comment I was replying to and review if your "dunk" is conflicting with the point I'm making...
Companies inconvenience and put their employees in danger (of varying levels) at the whims of management. They will sign a lease in a high-crime neighborhood to get a tax break, they will force you to come to the office because the CEO loves and misses the "energy" of having butts in seats and the employees will be forced to take on the non-zero probability of being involved in a traffic accident - its not nothing; auto insurance companies sent refunds during lockdowns because of this.
Imagine they had to work on a field or something,
the most dangerous thing the average N American does every day is drive...
This sounds so ridiculous from an outsider perspective, it's absolutely crazy! Oh nvm, it's just a drug dealer shooting another drug dealer
When I was at Spotify in the Warfield building, something similar happened, and we dropped behind the windows. Later that day, a can of pre-made Starbucks coffee someone left on their desk exploded from baking in the sun. Caused quite a scare.
You are much more likely to die in a commute on your way to work than you are from some drug dealer.
Visited SF in the mid 90s, then again about 10 years ago, and the decline was real back then. Tents on the same streets we'd walked as tourists 20 years earlier. I can say the same with Paris as well. New York, not so much, actually.
Living in London I don't notice the day to day differences here, but I would imagine others on here will say the same about London. It seems 'the West' has a general problem.
Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get to an office in South Park.
This is not to impunge on your credibility, but it takes me 16 minutes to get from my door in 21st and Valencia to the door at 313 Brandan next to South Park.
This touches on some positive trends in San Francisco: of course, I e-bike, so I can get anywhere pretty fast, and the infrastructure improvements have made things faster and safer. I’m not really sure whom the bike is not a good fit for, so my expectation is commuters will catch up to this trend. More people will bike, resulting in vastly less toil, and better use of the city infrastructure overall.
Separately as a business owner, I’m not sure there is a generalizable strategy to office locations, even to tax avoidance. You want pretty smart people working for you, and smart people like spending 16 minutes on a journey instead of 50 minutes, and they can figure out how to do a lot of things more efficiently, and they’re going to all live together, and maybe that’s the value that locality in San Francisco provides: an aggregation of tradeoffs that people who apply themselves 100% to everything can enjoy.
This is not to impunge on your credibility, but it takes me 16 minutes...of course, I e-bike
The typical worker in SF doesn't bike to work. Only 3.4% of workers in SF biked in 2012 [1] and 4.2% in 2018 [2]. Furthermore, e-bikes represented 4% of the US bike market in 2022 [3].
There is value in considering how a company's location impacts the vast majority of its employees.
[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/archives/2014-pr/cb14-r09.ht....
[2] https://www.sfmta.com/blog/biking-numbers-san-franciscos-201...
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1405949/electric-bicycle....
You don’t really need an e-bike to go from the Mission to SoMa as it is pretty flat. I don’t think it will take you much longer on a regular bike. But your statistic that you showed is a bit flawed as it includes people that commute from outside and into SF, hardly any of whom does so on bikes, so this methodology will always show bias against walking or rolling (I don’t know a better methodology, it is just something to keep in mind).
Even so, this methodology still shows 13% walks to work in SF in 2019, and 36% took transit. So if we thinking about the typical worker in San Fransisco, they do indeed either walk, bike or take transit.
If we are only thinking about a typical worker that lives in the Mission and works in SoMa, I wouldn’t be surprised if this goes well over 80% that walks, bikes or takes transit (and most likely a mix of all of the above). And I very much doubt they spend more than 40 min commuting each day in each direction.
https://vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/indicators/commute-mode-choice
The problem with bikes is, in sf if a driver kills you, as long as they don't flee the scene, they'll be let off with a talking to or maybe a ticket. I don't know a single former coworker who regularly bikes who hasn't been at minimum doored.
45 minutes from mission and 24 to south park is about right if you use bart; see my timeline above.
A typical worker will probably work closer to Market and they may even live in the Lower Mission where the buses are a bit faster and land further south. So I think 45 min from Mission to SoMa is closer to the worst case commute rather then the typical commute between Mission and SoMa. 30-40 min is probably your average transit rider, and 20-30 min for the lucky ones.
And I very much doubt they spend more than 40 min commuting each day in each direction.
My point is that 16 minutes is not a a reasonable estimate for the commute the vast majority will experience from the Mission to SoMa. 40 is a more reasonable estimate and is pretty close to the grandparent's estimate of 50 minutes.
I know from experience that walking would take much longer than 16 minutes as would taking transit.
> infrastructure improvements
Rainy "season" in SF? That's January, and the past few years even January had been pretty dry.
That is in fact why I think SF has a bad rap for being dirty: it doesn't rain very much. I've lived in SF since 2007, before that I'm Chicago for 14 years. I was recently back in Chicago for a few weeks. It gets just as dirty as SF or any other city, but it rained three times in a single week in Chicago (two with tornado warnings), which does wonders for washing away just about everything, including all kinds of smells, detritus and (human or otherwise) excrement.
SF is rainy for Dec/Jan/Feb according to Wiki climate data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#Climate
Yeah, I’m not buying it either, I did a quick google map survey and it seems that commute times goes between 20-40 minutes between the Mission and South Park, depending on where in the Mission you start. In all cases biking is around 20 minutes.
Meanwhile only the trainride station to station between Menlo Park and SF is 45 minutes minimum (6 stops), assuming some commute time to the Menlo Park station and a 10 min walk after the train arrives, 50 min is cutting it short.
The commute from Mission gives you a variety of options, you could even walk it if you have the time (personally, I used rollerblades when I lived in the Mission and worked maybe half the way to South Park).
If you have a bike Menlo Park is close enough to the Palo Alto station that it might save you a few minutes to catch the Baby Bullet from there, which only stops three times.
I think the point here is we are comparing Menlo Park best case scenario to the Mission worst case scenario.
If you live in the upper mission you can take the J Bart or the 14, and walk for 15 min from Mission or Market. In total this would be about 40-50 min. Or you could bike the whole way which would be around 20 min.
If you live in the lower mission (which I did) you can take the 12 which should take you there in 20 + 10 min walk. But you could bike there in about 15.
I actually worked a bit closer and could walk in 20 min, which I often did, and didn’t bother with buses.
Employee in question took Muni + Walked. I biked and did a baby bullet from Menlo Park.
My estimates could be off by ~10 or so minutes it was a while ago.
It's not unreasonable. Biking in SF is a death wish.
If you take bart to Montgomery, it's an 0.8 mile walk to South Park. Calling that a bit under 20 minutes seems fair.
So a 10 minute walk to bart, a 5 minute wait, 7 minutes on bart, 3 minutes to exit the station, and 20 minutes to South Park is your 45-ish minutes.
Source: I used to do this commute. Getting around internally in sf is absolutely terrible the second you're not super close to the transit line.
Employee in question took Muni + Walked.
Is this a safe enough space to say that taking the Muni anywhere is kind of foolish?
I’d bet getting rid of sf tax nexus was a key piece of the reason.
You and I have a lot in common and face many of the same personal and business headwinds in the Bay Area community. Neither of us have really been affected by the business tax, have we? Whereas the far more impactful Prop 13 and Costa-Hawkins: where is the leadership around repealing / amending those laws from tech industry executives? Or from anyone? What to make of how homes are the de-facto savings mechanism for Americans? Or that everyone is driving everywhere, even when they don't have to? Or that our schools, private and public, kind of work like Ponzi schemes, where all the smart kids are concentrated in a few places, making everywhere else worse until those schools close and then, where do those kids go?
Many issues, no leadership, just leavership: solving your problems by changing the community you live in, not by changing your community. This is fine, we have little choice.
In my opinion, in order to show leadership, you have to be able to say, "The Muni is a bad choice for most white collar tech workers." You have to be able to tell people they are doing something wrong, and then also figure out how to tell them without hurting their feelings or violating the totally imaginary idea that your choice of commute is righteous, infallible, subjective self expression, like choosing your hair color or the lift of your Doc Martens. You'd have to write Hacker News comments like, "Well is biking really a death wish? Isn't that a bit hyperbolic?" to high-drama anonymous Internet personalities, whose power to downvote is the same as yours, so how could objectivity ever thrive? That's hard.
That said, most tech workers should be working remotely. But also, most tech companies have bloated payrolls, so we shall see how that all plays out.
That SF's payroll tax exemption was specifically created for Twitter: https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/twitter-will-get-pa...
Here's one summary of it as of last year:
The infamous "Twitter tax break" provided by former Mayor Ed Lee to lure companies, including Twitter, to mid-Market by exempting them from a portion of their payroll taxes, had its sunset in 2019. Many argued that it did little to revitalize mid-Market — and certainly Twitter former fancy cafeteria didn't help in terms of workers spending money at local businesses — and it just ended up costing the city about $10 million a year in lost revenue. > https://sfist.com/2023/02/09/mayor-london-breed-announces-ta...
When the Twitter tax break expired in 2019, the Chronicle also did a pretty thorough survey of the mixed effects: https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/mid-market/
$10 million a year in lost revenue
This assumes that the company would be based on the city regardless. It's very common to see these assumptions in news articles about tax breaks, and it never makes sense.
I dealt with the Twitter office move stuff and there was a real honest to goodness push to get is to love to an office in South San Francisco so we could avaint the payroll tax and have parking. Had it not been for the tax break I suspect they would have left SF completely.
Yes it's a thing people do. We tax oil and cigarettes and people understand it makes people not want to buy oil and cigarettes anymore. Tax something good like working in SF, people don't seem to understand it has the same effect.
I worked in mid-market/the TL from 2014 until 2017. The tech companies sort of helped. A handful of hip restaurants and bars sprung up, but the city never really dealt with the homeless. There are a lot of non-profits serving the homeless in the TL, and there wasn't really anywhere for them to go as an alternative.
> $10 million a year in lost revenue
That's 1.5% of the homeless budget.
Wow. I had to fact-check this. Wow.
https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-...
San Francisco is slightly smaller than Jacksonville, Florida. Yet San Francisco’s homelessness budget—$1.1 billion in fiscal year 2021–22—is nearly 80 percent of Jacksonville’s entire city budget.
I'm really curious if there has been a comprehensive study on incentive corporate tax breaks like these. It has become my understanding that these are rarely worth it.
Reminds me on this very interesting video on the subject focusing on Louisiana (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWTic9btP38)
A tax on gross receipts is going to discourage any big business from locating in the city. You shouldn't ask "what incentive of these tax breaks" are, but rather "was it worth have Twitter/Google/Stripe/... downtown" or not.
"I’ve never worked for musk or his managers — but I’d assume that if folks are high output he would not care how often they were in the office"
I have and believe me it's kind of random and dependent on the mood.
The problem is that even if you are a 100x engineer the guy in the bad mood today may not know or care who you are.
I can't understand why anyone would willingly take a job at one of his companies (but especially Xitter) at this point just knowing what's publicly known... but it's also not difficult to find someone who has worked for him and can tell you what that experience was like.
Generally agree but one cohort are folks on H1B visas that have their residency tied to their employment status with a particular company. It's transferable to a different company but requires getting an offer to another company large enough to do H1B sponsorships.
I wouldn't be surprised if the % of people working on X on an H1B rose since Elon took over.
Any US company could randomly fire you for no reason and many US companies do.
For highly competitive people, it's the perfect place to be. There's comradery in the suck, long hours and seemigly crazy demands of Elon. At the end of the day you are sourrounded by people obsessed with the mission and working extremely long hours on cool shit.
After two internships at Tesla i understood why people joined cults.
Didn't Elon also give a politically motivated reason for moving his HQs out of California? [1]
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
He’d been threatening it since at least the Covid/Alameda County spat. It’s transparently just him trying to save 13.3% on capital gains taxes
It was widely reported that Musk was moving X and SpaceX's offices to Texas due to a new LGBTQ+ reporting law for schools, which in turn was heralded as Yet Further Proof of California's demise.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/07/16/elon-musk-spacex-headquar...
Now we're hearing that he's moving X's offices to the South Bay Area. Go figure.
I could imagine him having a variety of reasons, but in certain situations pretending it's only one of them, to apply pressure.
I don't have any special knowledge in this situation, I'm just drawing on my understanding of people.
back when we did sf had a pretty aggressive additional payroll tax and gross receipts taxes
I always wonder what SF has done to deserve the added taxes? Did they keep the crime rate low? Did they keep improving the city's infra? Did they create a culture that people tolerate each other? Did they improve the quality of education? Did they improve the situation of the homeless community? Did they resolve the housing crisis?
Our forefathers fought for no representation no taxes. I don't know what representation I got in the city.
People want (wanted?) to live and work there, because not everyone wants to live in suburbia, and enough employers want (wanted?) to attract those people.
Before my employer made the adult decision to go remote only, it opened an SF office in additional to the peninsula one, because some people (like myself) wouldn’t commute to Palo Alto.
I can’t find it because X search sucks, but Musk has stated before he despises the concept of remote work.
Wonder if these SF targeted taxes contributed to the move. I think Musk was debating Benioff about the HGR recently, something about payment processing and gross receipts...
Overpaid Executive Tax (OE)
https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/overpaid-executi...
Homelessness Gross Receipts Tax (HGR)
https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/homelessness-gro...
Had a recruiter call with Twitter a few months ago. Mandatory in office 5 days per week. Among other things, an hour commute both ways to work was not acceptable.
Maybe they will have better luck in Santa Clara.
I don’t buy any of the flamebait reasons for leaving SF. Reason 1 is money and reason 2 is talent pool.
I’ve had several meetings, either in Twitter office or around it, and the street scene is very bad in that part of SF. If the claim is that this is a motivation for the move, it certainly passes the sniff test for me.
I'd far prefer to live in the tenderloin than south bay. People make it out to be far scarier than it is.
I’d be willing to be good money you couldn’t take the bus out of the old X headquarters at 11pm for a month straight and not get robbed at least once. I got robbed twice in the 3 months I worked in the TL.
Look I understand what you're saying, but it really doesn't take much survival skills to walk around at 2am without getting robbed. Living around people who haven't sold their soul is well worth the cost. I love the neighborhood and will forever defend it.
You know an area is fucked when people start trying to blame the victims for the crime.
I'm not blaming them for the crime, just their lack of understanding how the world works. If you want to understand poverty in america the only place to look is capital and americans' commitment to individual material comfort over all other values.
Both Australia and Singapore are very individualistic, capitalistic and materialistic, and yet you don't get robbed constantly.
the only place to look is capital and americans' commitment to individual material comfort over all other values
the only place to look is the disgust with which americans view enforcement of public order
Not to mention talk about "survival skills" as if that should be normal in a highly wealthy western country in a highly wealthy city. That's shit you talk about in developing countries.
old people love talking about shit. Younger people are more into survival.
Survival skills are nice to have. But it's even nicer to live and work in a location where robbery isn't something that someone might reasonably experience twice in 3 months.
Of course, I left a job when my lunch got stolen twice in 3 months; well 3 times, but one time I brought leftover pizza in a pizza box, that's understandable. Taking leftovers in plastic is just rude... especially when my shift started at 4pm and everyone else was working normal hours, other than the overnight person whose shift started when mine left.
If I had been robbed because of the location of my job, I'd probably show up one more time, to return my stuff (assuming it wasn't stolen when I was robbed).
I've been robbed before, too. I prefer that to the sterile antisocialness of the wealthy.
others may value personal safety (of themselves or their family) higher than you do. Twitter may not be optimizing for folks like yourself (you may be in the minority).
Incredible mental gymnastics.
"Survival skill" is a matter of looking like a scary scumbag who's more trouble than he's worth to fuck with. I'm good at it, I size up the real scumbags like they're meat I'm going to chew up and spit out and I have the physical build to back it up. They cross the street to avoid me. But many people will just never have this "skill".
So you've been able to gauge life and the street scene in SF based on several meetings? That's super interesting. I would argue the Embarcadero is fairly nice and I live here, but what do I know.
SF has had some cleaner parts - including north parts of Embarcadero, Presidio, etc. but the center and Market St. areas can be pretty scary to a person who's not used to it. As a large ugly dude, I didn't really feel _that_ threatened there, even if a bit uneasy, but I can only imagine how, for example, a woman would feel navigating it, especially at later hours...
Statistically speaking, women are almost never physically attacked by strangers, it is almost always someone they know.
Men are attacked by strangers at a much much higher rate than women are.
I'm not sure what your point is to be honest, are you saying women are safe in that area at that time of night because of global statistics?
"I didn't feel that threatened, but I can only imagine how X group would feel" doesn't make much sense if X group is actually at a lower risk.
I don't know if they're right at all, but the point seems pretty clear. And they're not saying anyone is safe.
I would also say woman fear strangers much more than somebody they know.
Maybe what’s the reason they can avoid getting physically attacked by strangers better than men.
I am nobody important living in rural middle of nowhere, but visited SF twice for work, and it was the most horrific city I have ever been to. I am a big man and didn't feel very safe.
The last time I visited SF for a conference, I witnessed first-hand more crime in two weeks than I have in my entire life before or since, and this was all during broad daylight.
About 20 years ago I was visiting SF for work and, in a moment of weakness, let someone else book me a hotel - they booked me into a rather rough hotel on Geary. When I got into a taxi at the airport the driver said "Do you really want to go there?".
Only visited for a few days for a conference, but I think if you live there you may have become desensitized to the situation. It's really really not normal to have all the stores boarded up and security guards at the entrance. It's really not normal to be outnumbered by fent addicts nodding off on the street. The worst vibes of any city i've ever been to in my life (Including many people would describe as shitholes). This is so messed up to everyone who hasn't been beaten into acceptance of it
My wife and I have lived in SF for over a decade and I go to the Fitness SF next door to this building at least twice a week these days. We can all play this game where we try to pretend that this area is really nice to people not from here.
But what that guy said was "the street scene is very bad in that part of SF." and he's dead right.
I love this city, but misleading people on the Internet is not right. Tell them the truth. I've lived here as long as I have because I think the benefits outweigh the pains. But not because there are no pains.
I visited Fisherman’s Wharf last year after dark and it was pretty poorly lit and not that clean. Maybe for a company where employees are expected be “extremely hardcore” (i.e. long hours) that is a consideration.
(Although if you’re truly hardcore you don’t care what the street looks like, you sleep under your desk.)
I don't know what you know, but one thing you apparently don't know is that Twitter HQ is nowhere near the Embarcadero.
This is disingenuous. Twitter is located in Civic Center, which is a different neighborhood. From the ferry building at the Embarcadero to Twitter HQ is about 1.8 miles away, or 3 BART stops.
Given the density of SF and how quickly spaces can change you cannot realistically compare the two.
Why do the citizens of SF like living in such squalor?
The obvious answer is they don't, and it is a tough problem to fix
The way I see it, the main way in which the citizens of SF can fix it is by voting for something different, but they don't. So it certainly does seem like they find the status quo preferable to alternatives.
Before you jump to that conclusion you have to be sure that: - such politician exist (politician is not where we humans shine) - you believe the ones who claim they will fix it - the one that you believe can fix it don’t come with values that you cannot accept (extreme example: “I’ll kill all homeless people. vote me!”
Given there are/were cities that are not in such decline and such a state, including SF itself, it definitely seems like there are politicians that can fix it.
The values conflict may be relevant. If, for example, you think it's critical to allow and facilitate your fellow man to become total enslavement to drugs that destroy their lives and health and eventually kill them, then I can get that you won't want to do anything to stop it, even if you have to live in squalor for that to be the case.
Not really. People have just deluded themselves into thinking that the current situation is somehow more humane than mandatory rehab and institutionalization.
Homeless industrial complex. First you cause the crisis then you profit off of the solutions that claim to fix it (but never fix it).
https://yandex.com/search/touch/?text=san+francisco+homeless...
But the citizens of SF can just stop electing local governments that fund this, yet they don't. I can certainly see how they contributed to causing the crisis (i.e. by electing people who caused it), but I don't see how they profit from it, unless the people in SF likes such conditions, which seems pretty weird, at least to me.
the people in SF likes such conditions
The people in SF like their million dollar shoeboxes to appreciate in value, with zero regard for the externalities that scheme creates[1].
1. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...
Blame the homeless and people trying to help them, take the blame off the real problem: few available homes with high prices[1].
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10574586/#:~:te....
I rode by their office in SF daily in 2015-2018 and even back then it was pretty rough. I've heard things have gotten only more difficult since.
I interviewed there around then, I remeber getting off at civic center bart station on my way in wondering to my self if I really want to do this commute everyday and what kind if effect it would have on me. Then I got the offer and was like, I'll figure it out hah. Sketchy mornings watching all the drug dealing happening hoping I wouldn't accidently look at the wrong person the wrong way or something.
Isn't van ness station closer to Twitter?
Maybe, I used to live closer to a Bart station and it was faster so I always took that down town if I could.
The Van Ness station is not particularly pleasant either. Come out of the subway and see this: https://x.com/sfdsrvsbttr/status/1809986173844279305?s=46
If he was going via BART, Van Ness doesn’t have a BART station. If he was going via MUNI, technically yes but not by a lot.
I used live in the Tenderloin and work in the Twitter building. My walk to work required me to be mindful of both stationary and recently minted poop in transit. This was in 2019.
That was also true in mission bay, is true in Lakeshore, and I assume other neighborhoods too.
It shouldn’t be like that, but those are the priorities we (as society and electorate) decided on.
That is a quite ironic statement considering that Twitter has been an integral part of modern social engineering to reprogram people into accepting and tolerating the intolerable and unacceptable.
So here we are, at a point where people not only self-censor, they will even get violently aggressive or simply will suppress speech or even the ability to read or hear what someone has said if it diverges from the cult rules that have been imposed on our whole civilization.
I used to live in the Tenderloin in late 90's early 00's. Nice affordable studio on Turk. There was always a diverse party going on during the day on the streets. Definitely had an old fashion skid-row vibe. Market street wasn't too bad then. Ah the memories.
That’s fair, I never visited the office. But if that was the only issue maybe they’d consider a different part of SF, which would be easier for current employees.
... a literal sniff test? from what I hear (not having been there in more than a few years), it's become quite a problem.
reading this as a mariner who works 2-4 months straight, on a ship, in deep sea, 12 hour work day, and no days off (working saturday and sunday).. lol you dont know how bad it really is..
Sounds like a prison work camp!
"you should feel good about that because my life has been much worse"
Let's not crab bucket each other. You deserve good working conditions and making life suck for everyone else, too, won't make your life truly better.
"You kids think you're being exploited? Haha that's nothing, I've been exploited 10x harder!"
I'm going to assume your work requires your physical presence on that ship, in the deep sea, though. My work, however, does not. Further, employers are, on the whole, cheap, and want to pack workers into as small a footprint as possible. (Literally, 4' or less.) I can build a better work environment at home, for under $1k.
"My [unrelated] job is worse" is not a logical reason for me to abstain from advocating for better work conditions for myself, where there is a possibility of better work conditions. I can dislike things about one tech job vs. another tech job while still appreciating that the conditions of either job probably far exceed that of a career I wouldn't like.
(And, I would also still default to advocating for sane worker's rights in your industry too, unless there is some compelling reason that working >8h/d, 7d/wk makes some sort of sense in your industry.)
Talent pool is downstream of the "flamebait reasons" though. Maybe they're not moving out of SF directly because of the high crime etc., they're moving out of SF because they can't attract talent in SF... but that may well be at least partly because of the high crime etc..
I've lived in high crime areas, and SF doesn't have the kind of high crime that would actually deter me. The monotony of a homogeneous population is enough to keep me away from the Bay for as long as I can; and I know plenty of other talented people that feel the same
The Bay doesn't have a homogenous population, you just don't know any locals.
I've lived all along the West Coast from Tijuana to Seattle. There is no place along this coast which I would call homogeneous except the Bay. I would challenge your locals statement, but at this point, I've wasted too much time on No True Scotsman fallacies for this lifetime.
Either way, my community was one of the last diverse communities to get priced out of the Bay (around the early 2010s). Yet, you can find my community in any other populated place along the west coast. The bay definitely has a diversity issue when it comes to interesting people.
I mean reason #1 is probably that they are getting evicted right? Didn't elon stop paying rent?
Paying rent is a woke mind virus, so Elon would never go for that. Fight the oppression!
Like just buy twitter, then you won’t have to pay rent. - Elon probably
Have you been to Twitter's SF site? It is a weird place, between super sketchy and plainly empty, what is missing is the peace of mind, definitely a valid reason to leave. It has all the downsides from being in the downtown, while none of the perks remain in today's SF.
Talent pool isn't a real issue for Twitter now, under Elon, I don't think they truly prioritize Twitter over any of his other companies, the mission is to keep Twitter's lights on, that is it, the website/app had basically stayed the same after he took over, what talents do they really need, I don't buy it.
I think it’s inaccurate to say that they don’t need talent to keep the lights on at Twitter. Maybe not a lot of new architectural development is happening, but you definitely need a lot of ops people that know what they’re doing to keep the lights on there.
If you use Twitter you would know it has been far from the same.
Santa Clara-San Jose area is relatively still damn expensive. (Ask me how I know.)
Anywhere with an RTO mandate is a hard pass. If they want to treat their employees like children and waste my time and money on pointless commuting to feel in-control, then count me out.
Yeah, this has been tested every which way by now, the entire point of in-person work is to monitor employees. My manager told me outright that the only reason I can stay remote is, unlike most of the team, I didn't seem to "disappear" during 2020.
Musk runs Twitter like a dictator.
The first and only reason is whatever Musk felt like.
Twitter was imperically a terrible financial decision.
It seems like a bold statement to say the #1 is de facto money.
I suspect non-money issues are much higher on the list.
If anyone on the planet doesn't need more money, it's Musk.
I lived for about 12 months in telegraph hill (got lucky with a solid apartment). I had my wife and 1 year old son.
Despite it being a really nice and affluent neighborhood, there was a weekly mugging outside my house. Any packages or items left outside were basically taken if left out for more than 1 hour. My neighbor’s car parked in front of the house was stolen, taken for a joyride and left in a random part of the city.
On top of that the schools were bottom of the stack in terms of scholastic achievement compared to where i grew up (upstate ny).
Bottomline, when you have a family you don’t have the luxury of tolerating political nonsense at the cost of elevated risk. Moved out.
Only things I miss is the natural beauty and outdoors of California, and the technical community. Nothing like it elsewhere.
Crime is a function of inequality.
Don't blame crime on the poor.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472....
There is compelling evidence crime is correlated with inequality.
Ok, but not all correlations are spurious. What makes that research spurious?
In an unequal society the crime could just be in the areas of high poverty because the government chooses to avoid improving those areas. Off the top of my head that's just one way to interpret "Crime is a function of inequality."
No, it's a function of low IQ and low impulse control.
IQ is a bullshit measure.
What do you think is a better measure of intelligence?
Agreed. Although based on the downvotes HN doesn't see it that way, who could have predicted?
Crime is a function of inequality
I think the prevailing attitude is more like, "Yes, crime is a function of inequality, but it's also a function of X, Y, Z other things, and leaving them out does more harm than good to the discourse."
Well, Dubai, Kuwait, Singapore and a bunch of other places clearly demonstrate that you can have high inequality and close to zero street crime.
Might be a lot easier to reduce street crime if you don't care about sentencing innocent people or human rights in general
This is a blanket statement and is lazy in the same way as "all government is bad" or "all business owners are bad".
Of course a small portion of all crimes is committed due to poverty. But it's super easy to come up with counter-examples.
Mass murderers are committing crime because they're evil / crazy, not poor. There have been lots of rich mass murderers.
Ponzi schemers do it because they're greedy. Just think Bernie Madoff - already super rich, then decided to steal some more.
Gangs do it because for them it's a business. Again, the gang bosses are already rich but they keep going.
Not one single rape has ever been about inequality.
And so on. In the past, inequality was much worse and more entrenched than it is today, and yet crime during certain historical periods were much lower. Here's an example from the UK: https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/oly...
I didn't make my comment in a vacuum. Look at the context. Notice we aren't talking about rape, or financial ponzi schemes. Context clues people, context clues.
Wet streets cause rain.
Question from someone who doesn't know the SF neighborhoods...
Can a single, childless tech startup-type person live comfortably walking car-free in contemporary SF, long-term? If so, how much does that cost, and in what neighborhoods?
Reason I'm asking: the East Coast city where I currently live isn't great for software startups, and, on top of some crazy downsides of this city, there's a possibly emerging new downside: panhandler demographics shifting more towards angry 20yo men who use borderline mugging approaches, very brazenly.
Ideal for me in tech work is what I'll call "mostly-WFH-in-town", where people get most of the WFH flexibility goodness, but can also easily meet up for in-person high-bandwidth focused collaboration, personalizing, working on hardware, etc. So I'd probably want a concentration of potential colleagues who also like mostly-WFH-in-town. So I'm wondering whether SF is that place.
Zillow searches for modern apartments in parts of SF proper look more attractive, for the same money, as places in my city.
But I don't know the SF neighborhoods, and I don't know how representative are the SF stories about stepping over needles on the sidewalk all the time, finding poo on your doorstep every morning, frequent casual break-ins, etc.
Socioeconomic diversity, social justice, and safety nets are great, and preferred. Excessive poo, and other hazards, aren't.
When you walk most places, the sidewalk environment matters even more than if you're usually insulated in either a building or a car.
Can a single, childless tech startup-type person live comfortably walking car-free in contemporary SF, long-term? If so, how much does that cost, and in what neighborhoods?
I used this when doing analysis. It's pretty good. https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/comparison.jsp
From a pure cost, POV you burn most of your money on rent and food. When we had visitors, I had to plan out my budget to cover meals for everyone. I remember paying >$80 for a decent bagels+coffee breakfast for me, my wife and her parents.
In terms of security, If you keep your head on a swivel then you're fine. I had the same alertness that I have when traveling a foreign country. You need to be on high alert all the time.
Otherwise is it's a wonderful place. If I was a single guy, I'd love the vibe, the people, and the opportunity. If your in a WFH situation then I'd suggest just trying it out for 6 to 12 months. The experience will be great either way.
Other place id recommend is the Folsom near Sacremento. It's ~1 hour to lake tahoe and lots of nature to enjoy there. Very suburban WFH tolerant with roughly 50% of the rental cost
Thank you for the info.
In terms of security, If you keep your head on a swivel then you're fine. I had the same alertness that I have when traveling a foreign country. You need to be on high alert all the time.
Are we talking only about having basic city street savvy (e.g., you're perceived as a savvy native rather than easy pickings, can spot the usual threats and risks without trying, and can avoid or handle them)?
Or more like someone who has that basic street savvy, but who is also feeling like they found themselves in a rougher neighborhood at the moment (e.g., getting closer to military head on a swivel mode, and looking to not spend more time there than necessary)?
I don’t know where the original poster is from, but I am kind of scratching my head at their comment. There is basically nowhere in SF I would have the slightest bit of fear walking around with the exceptions of bayview / hunters point or sunnydale.
Don’t live in SF, but was a frequent visitor. During the day you’ll be fine if you don’t look like a dumb tourist and mind your own business. Some of SF’s main cultural attractions are in “rough” neighbourhoods like Chinatown. As night falls and the street life thins out, you probably don’t want to wander the areas like the tenderloin or most dark red places on this map: https://gisgeography.com/san-francisco-crime-map/ but even the vast majority of the crime there is petty. You’re still unlikely to be a victim of violent crime, but the chances are higher that you’ll be assaulted by somebody desperate for a fix.
The actual violent crime rates in SF are still below the national average, but the drug issues are just very, very visible.
You need to be on high alert all the time. Otherwise is it's a wonderful place
That must do a number on your nervous system long term. I live in NYC where I'm on high alert in specific areas at specific times that amount to maybe 30% of my time outside home and office. Otherwise I'm earbuds in enjoying something, or staring into the middle distance processing something on my mind. Both feel essential to my mental health.
Holy shit i feel bad for SF folks. It's crazy how you've normalized:
In terms of security, If you keep your head on a swivel then you're fine. I had the same alertness that I have when traveling a foreign country. You need to be on high alert all the time.
do you not realize this is really bad and not some reality of the world? Just the terrible city you live in?
Can a single, childless tech startup-type person live comfortably walking car-free in contemporary SF, long-term? If so, how much does that cost, and in what neighborhoods?
yes-ish
In SF generally the areas are the most car dependent and the hilliest are also the quietest and have the least amount of bullshit.
SOMA, where you see a majority of those modern apartments, is going to have some of the worst problems. You get what you pay for in the city. Every part of the city is going to have some kind of street problem, but some, like Bernal for example, have them very rarely. It entirely is neighborhood dependent and there's tradeoffs.
Maybe you get a quiet apartment, but it's at the top of a hill. Do you want to walk up that every day?
The easiest way to tell is just to show up and walk around the whole city, it's only 7x7 so you can literally spend a weekend walking around and see all of it and make your own conclusions. Certain places change completely within a few blocks.
e.g. you can go from the Tenderloin which is easily one of the worst parts of the city to the yuppie paradise of Hayes Valley in like three or four blocks.
Edit: in terms of cost? prob 2-4k in monthlies for a good studio/one bed.
The rest is up to your budgeting, eating out and anything in the service economy is very expensive compared to the rest of the country. Including places like NYC.
Very few affordable places survive here, regardless of their quality.
I'd say you could tack on like another 1-2k a month as a single person and be pretty happy with the amount of things you're doing, plus some grocery cost depending on how much you cook for yourself.
SOMA, where you see a majority of those modern apartments, is going to have some of the worst problems
I dont think thats true once you get east of 4th and for sure 3rd street.
8th and Mission is a lot different than 4th and Mission that's for sure.
I actually work up near that area and would still say you'll have interesting characters, but not something like 8th and Mission where I feel terrible for everyone who runs a business around there.
Most new apartment buildings I saw for my move a few years ago were concentrated around the civic center + market area.
Regardless of what people say here, walking around is the most effective way of ensuring that you're comfortable with where you are planning on being.
I've lived car free in SF for 12 years it's very walkable! Just start out in the mission for max socializing and transit access and then you can live somewhere else when you've gotten to know the city.
You can take bike share and the bus everywhere, housing is expensive but less so than nyc!
Telegraph Hill is one of the most touristy parts of the city, hence lots of crime (especially at night). It might be pretty but you just chose poorly / naively if safety was a priority.
Raising a kid in SF is definitely tough, but places in the Sunset have yards, and there are some top-notch schools e.g. Lowell High School, UHS, Lick, etc.
A lot of tech people come from out of town and don’t take any time to adjust to the fact that SF has very distinct neighborhoods. Many will just draw high salaries and gravitate towards whatever is popular / flashy without considering the consequences.
Correct me if i'm wrong but that's haight ashbury right? The famous magnet for druggies and general sh*theads? Why is this being help up as an example of a safe place?
I think you either replied to the wrong comment or are maybe confused. Telegraph Hill is quite far from Haight Ashbury (as much as anything can be far apart in a 7x7 mile city).
You are right I got confused, but Telegraph Hill still was known for beatniks etc. And today it's close to the embarcadero which is ... well bad.
Actually due to a confluence of events the place we chose was the best deal we found. The decision was based on cost (not trendiness)
Regarding schools, school catchment is based on an esoteric lottery system loosely related to the area you place you live. If you have money, there are ways to game the system but otherwise it’s a low probability roll of the dice that you get a good school. Also, I didn’t have money
Also, Day cares generally have a waitlist that starts before children are born.
It’s interesting you feel you can judge the type of person I am almost no information. The internet makes everyone overfit their priors.
> It’s interesting you feel you can judge the type of person I am almost no information. The internet makes everyone overfit their priors.
Did you ever try the peninsula, like Palo Alto? Crazy expensive if you want a free standing house but condos and townhouses aren’t too bad (relatively) and always felt safe when I was there.
I wasn’t making very much actually and we were a single income household. We wanted to look into buying a house but it was north of 850k for a closet sized space. Rent+food basically ate up all my income.
Moving to Palo Alto was definitively not in the cards
While SF is a nice place to visit, but the sheer numbers of unreasonable, lemming-like people who will spend and do anything to cling to live there as some sort of Promised Land™ make it a hellish place to try to live a sustainable life for almost everyone who isn't already a multimillionaire. Keeping a car parked in SF to as far south as San Mateo on the street is a recipe for catalytic converter theft.
Visit the de Young museum's observation tower. It has a spectacular vantage point. The other things California have are: less annoying creepy crawlies, more variety of scenery and microclimates, weather, food, and relatively cheaper property taxes.
California is massive though, and I would argue there is nothing in the rest of California that resembles the Bay even a little bit. Redding is nothing like the Bay; Joshua Tree is nothing like the Bay; Orange County is nothing like the Bay; Big Bear is nothing like the Bay. None of those regions are anything like the other, too. Hell, the difference inside 10 miles of Los Angeles is enormous. Compare Venice Beach to East LA for example.
Realistically, X is better than its ever been; community notes have been a game-changer in terms of fact-checking. Higher quality and much more balanced.
Nor really. It used to work for all people with browser now it is only for logged-in.
That was already the case before Musk bought it.
What? No it wasn't! You used to be able to view entire Twitter threads without being logged in. It was also possible to go to someone's account page and see their posts in reverse chronological order. The latter went away shortly after Musk took over. The former took a little longer, but is now gone as well. In many cases you can't even view a single tweet without the site trying to get you to log in.
I clearly remember it wasn't, they would pop up with a login page as soon as you scrolled down.
Maybe for you, but not for most of the rest of the universe.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/tech/twitter-public-access-re...
I remember it being the case before too. It wasn't unconditional like it is now. For example, I distinctly remember being able to scroll through someone's profile in a normal browser window without being logged in, but in an incognito window, I was immediately told to log in or create an account.
They may have had other heuristics too that led to inconsistent behavior between users. So it should not be so surprising if some people report that that happened even though it didn't happen to others.
There was a feature flag for this that rolled out in 2021 or so.
Yes, but you could bypass the login page.
Wrong. I don't understand why people attempt to make corrections like this.
Anyone could browse Twitter anonymously, since the beginning.
Mate, you're wrong, as many others have said.
Here's proof right here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33769715
Funny that people also found ways to criticize Musk back then for doing that :D.
Do you understand now why we make corrections to patently wrong statements like yours?
There was briefly a log-in nag popup that would appear on scroll.
That disappeared and Musk got lots of praise for it, probably entirely unwarrented but it was basically the only thing that improved post-Musk. Then it came back with a vengeance.
No, it was much more possible to consume without being logged in than it is now, though sometimes tricks like closing a login popup were needed.
No, it wasn't.
That must have been a very long time ago.
~October 27, 2022. So yeah, about 2 years ago.
I have to admit, I have a loose understanding of what's going on with twitter or even how to use it. But my personal Mandela effect is that it didn't work right if you weren't logged in for a lot longer than that.
I'm probably mis-remembering.
You used to be able to look at people's profiles, tweets and entire threads without being signed in. If you go to my profile today signed out you see tweets from before 2022. If you click on a tweet signed out, you only see that single tweet without context. Some of those changes are only a few months back.
It's pretty undeniable that the bot problem is significantly worse than it was before Musk. (I'm not going to take a position on the value of any of the other changes to the product.)
It is interesting that they appear to have solved or at least dramatically reduced the porn spam. Still cant open a post though without seeing 10+ posts about something completely unrelated in the comments
I'm mostly reading political tweets, and for the last year or so I have never noticed that - the comments can be of very varying quality, as always on an unmoderated forum, but I don't remember too much offtopic. Maybe it depends on who do you follow and who the bots are targeting - except Musk, my follows are usually not celebrities, so maybe bots don't bother targeting them.
I don't recall ever seeing porn spam in my ~8 years of using the site pre-Musk. Probably a few incidents here and there, but nothing notable enough that I remember it happening.
If the skeleton crew has finally managed to fix it more than a year after causing it, I guess that counts for something.
No, they haven't. I have at least one porn bot start following me every day. In any thread, a porn post can just randomly appear. TBH, the rate at which it's getting worse is increasing.
I see much more right wing content boosted by the algorithm now, and the paid checkmarks ensures every tweet's replies have low quality and bot replies filtered to the top.
The bot problem is also infinitely worse now, I rarely post anything so I have about two dozen legitimate followers, mostly people I know, and then I have a few hundred obvious bot account followers.
I think it's because Twitter doesn't bury and ban moderate and conservative opinions now. It feels like there's more balance today. I'd say in my experience I've seen more of the far left voices I follow move away from the platform (although many moved back) and they're not as powerful not that the Twitter team isn't backing them exclusivly.
Community notes predate Musk. They're a lot more common now, but they're needed more than ever too. Meanwhile spam is everywhere (except in the "probable spam" section) and all ads are scams.
Community notes by themselves do not do much if the network administration has severe bias vs one side of political spectrum.
* No ability to browse the site without logging in
* Hundreds of spam account followers
* Sponsored content inserted in replies masquerading as real content
* Random bugs with video content constantly
* Twitter blue boosting replies to the top, making conversations effectively pay to win.
* Bot account spam comprising ~50% of the replies to any popular tweet
Despite the above, Twitter is still the best place on the internet to get the latest news and a feel for the zeitgeist. This to me is a testament of the incredible product created by Jack.
Balanced? Only if you like mob rule. Which maybe is the point.
Every day I get 5-10 new followers bot followers. I haven't gotten a real follower in months, I don't use the account that much.
Other than that, the fyp shows me a lot of right wing content (and particularly Elon Musk posts) that I ignore, but they do show them.
Regularly as I'm scrolling down the page, it'll randomly refresh or insert/disappear posts that I'm viewing. Yeah, the site is functional, but it is not better than its ever been. Not by a mile.
Community notes sometimes provide useful context I'll grant you that... but often they are just a popularity contest to see which side can upvote which community note.
The reply section of posts with any reach has become unusable on purpose, and they're making it even worse. Great!
Readers added context they thought people might like to know:
Twitter misinformation about a tragedy started far-right riots in the UK the other day.
And Musk commented approvingly that civil war was inevitable.
What are you talking about? Open any twitter link and there is a pretty good chance it just doesn't work lol. And even if it does work hopefully it isn't a thread because you won't see any of the parent comments or replies.
Twitter was given a famously sweet deal by the city to occupy that troubled stretch of Market St. In the time I lived nearby (until the pandemic) the area never really improved. San Francisco has an odd tolerance for the tent communities, no just that it largely allows them, but that it allows them in and around the busiest and most publicly-utilized transit hubs and the city center.
> San Francisco has an odd tolerance for the tent communities
When I visited SF for the first time in 2019, it felt really weird that such a rich place would have so many people living in tents in public spaces. Being naive, I saw dozens of tents in Sue Bierman Park and thought they were having an event or something. Then it dawned on me what I was seeing and it never made sense because certainly it doesn't take a lot of money to give these people something so they don't have to live in tents.
Where I live (South America), the city had this situation about 20 years ago and what they did was buy a bunch of cheap land in the outskirts, build small houses and relocate these people. To avoid it being called charity, they "lent" the money that these people could pay in >50 years without interest. And this is a place with no tradition of philantrophy or billionaries. So I'd imagine a single billionarie could fix SF's situation in a blink of an eye, no?
I don't think it's a resource allocation issue. SF government alone spends almost a billion a year[1] on trying to improve the situation. That's not including the non-profit spending. Money won't buy the city out of this situation as long as there exist people who don't want to live in homes and play by the rules.
Seems you need to evaluate the effectiveness of that spending to conclude that it can't be a resource allocation issue.
Maybe a problem could be on the allocation side rather than the resource side.
1 billion dollars / 8500[1] homeless people = 117 thousand dollars. The median household income in SF is 119 thousand[2]. I get that you wouldn't want to just pay them a salary because of second-order effects, but that kind of spend without even getting them sheltered strongly suggests resources are not being allocated well.
[1] https://www.sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-populat...
[2] https://smartasset.com/retirement/average-salary-in-san-fran...
If you gave them $117K a year they would be dead within a month ODing on the mass quantities of drugs they can now afford. Money is not the issue with homelessness, and until people get that out of their heads the problem will not be solved.
They cleaned it up for President Xi's visit.
https://sfstandard.com/2023/11/14/city-clears-homeless-encam...
spends almost a billion a year
That sounds like an allocation issue. There aren’t enough beds. If you became homeless in SF tonight, you would be on the street.
the city had this situation about 20 years ago and what they did was buy a bunch of cheap land in the outskirts, build small houses and relocate these people.
That will never work in SF because it involves moving the homeless someplace else involuntarily and moving them all to a singular place.
So the homeless “advocates” will accuse you of being a Nazi who is trying to create a literal concentration camp.
It doesn’t matter how nice the community is, nor that the people would own their space, nor anything else about your plan.
As a meta-consideration, part of the problem is that many of people who work “for” the homeless really enjoy living in SF. Threatening to move their jobs to someplace less desirable is the reason they will call you names.
Also, if you fix homeless, you no longer need homeless advocates. That goes to the core of their identity, so of course they will fight you.
But why are the homeless "advocates" such a force? Don't the rest of the people living and voting in the city outnumber them by multiple orders of magnitude?
In politics generally, there's much more incentive for a small interest group to lobby[1] or advocate for a policy that provides a concentrated benefit to the group, than there is for the whole population to fight back to eliminate the small per-capita cost of the policy to the population. Also, many of the voters in SF have at least progressive sympathies, which include not "oppressing" groups that are seen to be "oppressed", even if they happen to break the law or make life unpleasant. So lots of money is spent in an ineffective but superficially compassionate way.
[1] In the broadest sense, not at all restricted to professional political lobbyists.
Sounds like the sympathies of the majority of the voters play a significant role, and not only the "advocates", as the other commenter suggested. Or at least as I understood it.
I imagine most in the US would be more interested in reducing homelessness by producing soylent green than by producing housing - especially the billionaires.
The number of people in the comments blaming homelessness solely on homeless people is embarrassing. Sure, mental health, the economy, drug use, and housing costs have no effect, apparently.
I think it's mainly corruption. A significant amount of budget (hundreds of millions) is allocated to "deal" with homelessness in SF, so efforts to actually solve the problem are going to face significant challenges from existing beneficiaries.
The so called "homeless industrial complex" [1].
1 - https://www.nationalreview.com/the-weekend-jolt/californias-...
So I'd imagine a single billionarie could fix SF's situation in a blink of an eye, no?
There's no money in that though, and there's lots of money in keeping Americans divided.
If the problem were literally that "these people want houses and just can't afford them," I think that'd work. But that's not the issue in San Francisco.
The people of SF think that solving the problem as you have described, relocating the street junkies into cheap homes in the outskirts, is "literally fascism" because "how dare you tell these people they're not allowed to camp and shoot up heroin anywhere they like?"
That probably works when people have no money and no place to go. I used to live near Portland OR, and in that case many or most choose to be there, they wanted drugs and ANY house they lived in would soon be trashed.
What do you think the city should do with the tent communities?
Remove them. It is an abuse of the commons that creates a vicious cycle that will only exacerbate the problem. And for your next question, San Fran already spends $141k per year per homeless person. That’s 7x LA. It isn’t working because of the lack of accountability and oversight in the use of those funds and San Fran’s lax (even favorable treatment) of public drug use, public camping, and general lawlessness. Send them to a shelter, treatment, or jail. “Harm reduction” doesn’t work. Full stop.
Freakonomics have done some interesting coverage of the opioid epidemic and how spending more money on it doesn't necessarily lead to better outcomes. Having listened to what different people say about it, I'm not so sure that "harm reduction doesn't work" is something I can agree with. Addiction and homelessness just aren't trivial problems to solve. Sending people to jail sure doesn't help anything, does it?
That being said, seeing it first hand is pretty shocking for sure. We stayed a couple of blocks from Tenderloin a few weeks ago and at one point drove down a side street that was just full of people doing meth (I think). Whatever SF is doing, it sure seems like it needs a course change.
Remove them, many are causing ADA violations. You don't get to break the law because you feel like it.
Designate areas outside of the densest neighborhoods for tent communities to exist and clear out areas that have the highest public utilization.
For starters, tents shouldn't be allowed in the downtown area, which is the heart of business, shopping and tourism in San Francisco. It is one of the most expensive areas to live, so just like most residents cannot afford to live there, it is only fair that homeless people don't live there as well.
I recall seeing some stories years ago was that one issue with Twitter (and most Bay area tech companies at the time) was that due to the presence of an on campus cafeteria, surrounding areas never got much benefit from Twitter's presence.
That is, workers would show up to the building, and then essentially never leave (and spend money at nearby businesses) until the day was over and they went home.
Yes, that's how politicians and activists are shifting blame from their lack of interest in solving the issue to sacrificial goats.
The streets are full of homeless and drugged out people? That's not the reason restaurants are failing, it's the tech bro's cafeteria!
The house prices are sky high? It's not single house zoning and politicians blocking any house building, it's the rich tech bros gentrifying your neighborhood!
Why is the title of the HN post changed to read "Twitter", when the linked article title states correctly "X", and is otherwise identical?
I did that because I don't know anyone who doesn't still call it Twitter.
Well, when I got up this morning I didn't think I'd be doing this today:
please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
Both names are linkbait. I think 'Twitter' is less misleading than 'X', so it wins the guideline on points.
Not saying it's a strong case, just that it tilts that way. Others would call it differently and that's always the case with a close call.
Just because you buy something doesn't mean you get to change popular usage by decree. There's a whiff of corporatism about that which sticks in my craw.
(I am not, god help us, making any implicit point about the muskwars.)
Ideally you'd do the same for Facebook. That other thing they call themselves is immensely insulting to a good word, and stolen valor to boot.
No, Zucc, you're not cyberpunk. And your overgrown jumped-up Ivy league hot-or-not definitely ain't.
Well now that you mention it, the Twitter -> X, Facebook -> Meta, and Google -> Alphabet transitions are all kind of similar aren't they. I never noticed that before!
There's a difference
Meta owns Facebook so you can still talk about Facebook separate from Meta. Meta also owns Oculus
Alphabet owns Google so you can still talk about Google separate from Alphabet. Alphabet also owns Waymo.
X "is" Twitter. They aren't two separate things (a parent company and one of their subsidiaries) like the other two examples.
Those are distinctions without a difference in popular usage. Alphabet may own Waymo but in most people's minds (or at least in my mind) it's all one thing and the name of that one thing is Google. Similarly for FB and Twitter. You can change a name on paper but that doesn't determine how people talk.
There's another interesting aspect: the original names Google/Facebook/Twitter are so much more expressive than Alphabet/Meta/X. The latter feel like constructs of some imperious baron on his march up the abstraction ladder, leaving the rest of us cold.
But I'm ranting now, sorry!
X (formerly Twitter) is how I’ve seen it cited elsewhere.
That's the safest, but it runs up against HN's 80 char limit on titles and also feels clumsy and formalistic.
It's pretty common in my circles to call it X now. Things change, most people adapt.
It ultimately doesn't matter what a company wants to call themselves if the vast public just uses the old name
I mean, it does matter, and also HackerNews is the only bubble I interact with regularly that still holds on to the Twitter name like gollum and the one ring.
My understanding is that HN has rules against editorialization of headlines. This absolutely qualifies. The company is called X, the article calls it X. You don't have to like it, you don't have to use that name when you speak about the company, but editorializing the headline to name the company whatever the submitter wants is inappropriate.
I have never heard anyone in real life call it X.
I do agree that the headline shouldn’t be editorialized, though. “X (formerly Twitter)” at most.
"X" feels (to me) much more ambiguous than "Twitter".
If you say "Twitter", people know what you're talking about. If you say "X", are you talking about "X" marks the spot? Rated "X"? "X" the former project name for Paypal? "X" as in an unknown quantity? "X" is used in a lot of different contexts. I think if you want to use the name "X", then you should probably say "The company, X,".
Twitter is a verb, but when you use it as a noun, the listener instantly knows that you are talking about the company "Twitter". Plus, it's the name we are all familiar with.
I think there's a lot of variance between the different groups people here are part of and the different conventions they follow. That's broadly the case with HN actually.
Is the constant stream of flamebait (this action and other recent changes) helpful for twitter, or part of some larger strategy?
To me the service seems increasingly unreliable and unprofessional. Then again, I no longer feel like I'm the target audience. The numbers seem bad too; revenue was 22% down in 2023[1]. Also, "global active daily users of X via mobile apps had steadily declined during the year after Musk acquired the company, down 16% by September 2023"[2].
I'm puzzled.
[1]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_under_Elon_Musk#Statis...
Is the constant stream of flamebait helpful for twitter, or part of some larger strategy?
I don't think much thought was put into it, but I do think there will be a gradual numbing effect among the comments as people get bored of the criticism. Maybe very gradual though.
Edit: It just occurred to me that you might be referring to user posts on the platform being flamebait; my answer assumed that the action (moving the HQ) was perhaps flamebait, along with other recent changes.
To clarify, yes, by flamebait I meant the latter (this action and other recent changes). Added that to the original comment now.
Musk’s tweets and the unimpeded use of the platform for misinformation and coordinated violence give me the impression that he cares less about turning it into a profitable enterprise and more about its use as a tool to push his agenda and affect the cultural and political changes he desires.
There is plenty of evidence for this. E.g. banning the word "cis" as hate speech
No! It’s just bad management. There is not some secret 4D chess to discover here. A paranoid billionaire with a ketamine problem is running Twitter into the ground. I think Howard Hughes is becoming a more and more accurate model with time.
To me it's still useful but I exclusively read it through lists. That way it's always chronological and only consists of tweets from selected accounts and retweets from other (usually interesting) people.
Are these numbers that important when you're privately owned and slashing costs? I guess the motivators are different to a VC backed or publicly traded company.
The issue is the San Francisco gross receipts tax, which becomes problematic for any payments company because it applies to the payments volume
Twitter is planning to become a payments platform
Since a gross receipts tax hits anything other than small, local stores inconsistently, I'm not sure what behavior it's trying to drive. It also taxes revenue rather than income, so yes, it makes anything ulta-low margin like a payments platform DOA.
It seems the objective is to disincentive companies that have business outside the city borders.
There might also be a thing about being millions behind on rent...
Correct. Surprised more people aren’t aware of this. Twitter literally can’t launch it payments service while still having SF as HQ.
Does Elon still dislike/disallow remote work? Seems like that would be a competitive disadvantage.
There are plenty of people who have no problem working from the office 5 days a week, and even some who prefer it. On HN some people are vocal about insisting on remote work, but outside the bubble here people aren't so adamant. Your average person would prefer remote, but isn't going to refuse a job offer based only on that one factor.
It's also becoming increasingly difficult to get a remote job with a bay area salary.
But then, like with all of Elon's companies, the question is: who's the (serious) competition?
Rethorical question... There is none.
IMO, San Jose has been nicer than downtown San Francisco for about 10 years.
Which would be relevant if Twitter HQ was in downtown SF.
Ha! :) smh. Nah, it's relevant. What, you don't think it's in Downtown? Embarcadero's the only downtown for you?
For all the snark from people who dislike Elon, this is a bit of a sad ending. I remember when Twitter announced their presence in mid-market and the promises of how it would help the area. What people don't realize is that his will lead to real revenue losses for the city -- the largest companies in SF are overwhelmingly tech. Twitter is in the top 5 when it comes to how much tax they pay. Loss of revenue for the city will translate to cuts.
It doesn't matter, SF residents are so delusional and stockholmed i think they'll put up with literally anything. Even in this thread you have them acting like their city isn't a horrifying disaster to anyone not desensitized to it
SF public funds are horribly miss-managed.
Hopefully events like this contribute to speeding up the reform that the city needs.
Unfortunately the necessary austerity is going to cause more near-term pain, but hopefully results in some longer term prosperity for the city.
I don't think Twitter realizes how much the quality of employees will crater when they trash the brand and the workplace
You erroneously inserted the word “will” into the above comment.
the brand is already trashed, at this point the workplace doesn't really matter. only thing that will save it now is if elon sells it
Fun fact: There are 3 "south bays" in California.
1. SF Bay Area
2. Los Angeles Beach Cities
3. Orange County
4. Eureka
I'm puzzled by this move. The more and more I read about a business being political the less I want to support it.
I have been a long time twitter user for 15 years (some years daily and some years weekly) and I just made a threads account.
I don't know about the move to San Jose specifically but 9th-10th and Market in SF is arguably not a nice place currently.
This is 2 blocks away
https://www.ktvu.com/news/report-workers-at-sf-federal-build...
This is 2 blocks away
https://sfstandard.com/2024/07/15/sideshow-crash-market-stre...
This is 1 block away
https://sfstandard.com/2023/04/10/downtown-san-francisco-who...
I hope SF can fix itself but it's arguably on the government to make the city safe and clean. I wouldn't be begrudge any company leaving it currently. I'm not that's not the only reason they're leaving and if they wanted to say in SF there are probably some other locations, maybe Mission Bay, they could have picked. But, SF is ridiculously expensive and downtown still seems like it's got further to fall. There will need to be huge changes in zoning and lots of investment for it to recover.
But you don't think that will change with the executive order from newson to remove homeless camps?
Does Elon think that the talent he has in SF will just magically move?
That's why I'm puzzled
Twitter — which at the time was threatening to move to Brisbane
Wow, that does not seem like it would jive with the local character for Brisbane, from what little I know of it.
Brisbane, California not Australia.
The original headline says "X ...". Why was it edited to say twitter, which is not the companies name?
Somebody solved for X I guess .. it's unknown otherwise.
When did Palo Alto become South Bay? South Bay was always much further south.
Palo Alto is in Santa Clara County whereas Menlo Park and East Palo Alto are in San Mateo. That might be how.
It's about time.
"Musk took to the social media platform to announce that X would relocate to Austin, Texas, due to his fury over a California transgender protection law." What happened with going to Texas?
Musk might be coaching all his moves on twitter in political terms but to me the from the looks of it twitter was extremely bloated and wasting money. And Musk is doing his best to get out ahead on the money he spend to buy it. And as far as I can tell he will get out ahead. If Trump wins the presidency again I think he might get out ahead huge
I'm pretty surprised that they elected to stay in CA at all. Would have expected him to move the company to Austin.
I thought X/Twitter had stopped paying rent in SF.. so maybe this is related to that?
Yet another petty tyrant rants. In this time of cult of personality how is that newsworthy or unexpected? But this is "fortune.com", a corporate rag, so perhaps it is interesting to them.
I saw a guy get shot on Mission and 6th after picking a fight with the car in front of him at the light. Lucky for him, there was an ambulance already on the block loading up a tweaked out junkie.
I'm probably not a favorite amog the moderators here. I don't mean to sound snarky, but if Twitters moves out of San Francisco, will the no-nudity ordinance in San Francisco get repealed? I had understood it was the influx of the tech companies that caused the fiasco thet resulted in it being passed in the first place.
Don't you think the gross receipts tax that forced every other payments firm out of SF is also forcing X out because they are launching payments?
My understanding is that that part of Market street never quite recovered from BART construction few decades back. That building was abandoned and was beautifully restored for Twitter HQ. I vividly remember it opening and then the neighborhood improving gradually. Sad for SF - the final blow to one of the few once optimistic and truly SF-based utopian social media companies…
I have to say, the anti-elon meltdown vs the elon simps is quite entertaining to watch and it goes both ways.
Why are you getting so upset, angry, emotional and screaming over someone that doesn't care about you?
Very unhealthy folks. but regardless, until the next time you will talk about Twitter / X again.
Clever! Give a thousand+ high earners a reason to buy a car. Install Superchargers in all the best parking spots to reserve them for Teslas. Most X employees are loyal to Musk, so that is probably $50M in additional revenue for TSLA, and he gets people to show up early if they want to charge at work. /s
All: can you please not post low-quality angry/snarky junk comments to HN threads?
Perhaps change the inflammatory title? “kills” to “moves”
FFS.
I thought this wording was funny: "the famous Twitter sign ... [was] summarily removed" - extra-judicial signage removal! Musk is out of control.
This is the result of prop c 2018?
I mean it makes lots of sense. I'm in South Bay and the amount of vacant corporate buildings around here is ridiculous. The property prices have to be falling through the floor. Lots of companies substantially downsized their footprint during covid as they're now either partially or completely work from home places now, meaning they need a lot fewer seats in the office.
Twitter? Isn't it X now?
I wonder if Twitter is about to be evicted for non-payment of rent.
I like that. San Francisco is a dirty city with bazillions of homeless people and woke activists living in their bubble. It’s insane what happened to this once beautiful place.
I have always had mixed feelings about silicon valley expanding into San Francisco -- I felt there was a strong negative impact, though to some degree SF acted as a honey pot for those just interested in money.
I wonder if this will be a harbinger of a retreat or shrinking of the size of the overall "tech" sector, or if it will remain a one-off. I guess that when the blockchain and ai bubbles really burst we'll see. They have a higher concentration up there for some reason.
Might as well just skip all the intermediate steps and move the office to Austin. Twitter will fit right in.
All: can you please not post low-quality angry/snarky junk comments to HN threads? They're tedious and have nasty effects.
I realize this story is a cluster of divisive topics but that's why HN's guidelines say "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful.
I recently learned about Elon showing up to a Sacramento datacenter on Dec 22 2022 and personally moving server racks out of the datacenter, when his employees said it would take 6 months.
"Elon Musk moving servers himself shows his ‘maniacal sense of urgency’ at X, formerly Twitter"
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/11/elon-musk-moved-twitter-serv...
I live a few blocks from TwitterHQ.
Mid-market is in terrible condition, worst I’ve seen it.
I’d feel super bad asking employees to navigate those streets while commuting in.
Not discussed enough about RTO is what a mess downtown is. And an emptier downtown is a seedier downtown, feeding the cycle.
July 16: "Elon Musk announced that ... Twitter is moving to Austin Texas"
ref: https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=twitter+relocating+to+austin
August 7: Twitter moving to LA.
What made LA more appealing than Texas?
Way easier to recruit/attract talent in South bay. More senior/staff level engineers. SF talent pool trends more junior, more single, less experience, etc.
Just in response to your second point, I do think that's specific to you and your circles. I know multiple retired or semi-retired people who have moved towards the center of a city. Without work to keep them occupied, they want the hustle and bustle, which means something to do. And driving has become more of a hassle and a barrier to the kinds of lives they want to live. These are east coast or midwest cities, so maybe there is something about SF that's different, but that's my experience.
Cities' attractiveness feels u-shaped
Young adults love it bc they have the time to go to bars/restaurants/clubs
Middle aged folks hate it because they're so busy - they can't take advantage, and other people get in their way
(some) Older folks like it again bc they have the time to go to restaurants/theater
I don't know, the residential neighborhoods of SF are the perfect place to raise a family if you make tech money: dense enough that there is a ton of stuff to do and your kid knows other kid nearby, low density enough that you get 1500-2500sqft to yourself.
turn of the century suburbs truly are goldilocks neighborhoods.
genuinely curious which century you mean?
I'm sure he meant the early 1900s. I've usually heard these called "streetcar suburbs" for obvious reasons. They tend to have a good mix of urban and suburban vibes. Unlike the car-focused developments after the war, these neighborhoods are super walkable with local retail or other spots just a stroll away, or a short streetcar hop. The design is all about pedestrians, with narrow streets, plenty of sidewalks, and often tree-lined avenues. The houses, seem to have been more often built by skilled craftsmen, and have unique architectural details, unlike the cookie-cutter homes you see in later post-war suburbs.
This is all true (if only we could go back in time!) but don’t let selection bias ruin reality.
Most homes were crappy, only the ones built by skilled craftsmen survived. This was also the era that spawned protections against tenements.
Crappy? I'm not so sure about that. I've lived at maybe 15 Southern New England addresses in my life and the three built after 1920 were the cheapest quality. And it's not like they were one in a dozen, or even 1 in 3: from cheap triple deckers to mansions, the area I live is packed full of buildings from that era. The knob and tube electricity has mostly been replaced, but most places I've lived still had gas lamp pipe nipples sticking out of the walls in the common hallways. The entire area is jam packed with buildings from that era.
In what sense? I think people conflate "big brick building" with "quality". Sure, it's nice, as is some of the labour-intensive finishing work from that era. But nearly every bit of a modern house is "higher quality" than a home built 100+ ago, thanks mostly to the building code.
(please don't link me some story of a shoddy builder)
but all those buildings are up to code now too right? And the fact that people keep them occupied for so long and renovate speaks to their intrinsic quality I'd think.
but tbh - quality is somewhat a red herring. Today, quality is all because there is caulk (greatest invention), plumbing, and longer lasting paint. Yesteryear, quality was because they used all natural materials which are unaffordable now. Either way, keep a house dry and occupied, and it will stand for centuries, regardless of when it was built.
Selection bias, houses from <1920 that weren’t nice have been torn down. “Only the good ones survived”.
This is a depressingly good question. I hadn't ever considered we'd be far enough into this one to refer back to the 90's and early aughts as "turn of the century"
That's why I use the French term "fin-de-siècle" which is well understood by educated English speakers and yet always refers to the end of the 19th century without additional qualifications.
I agree with the other commenters that this is obscure. I coincidentally heard the term for the first time about 3 days ago (in the context of "socialism by fin-de-siècle" - the expectation that communism was inevitable among the left wing at that time.
Define “educated” and cite the survey showing how well understood it is among “English speakers” (British English? Commonwealth Nations Generally? N.A. English Speakers? Non-native/ESL?)
I use “fortnightly” to mean “in 2 weeks” because bi-weekly is ambiguous, and while the game is hugely popular I still assume at least 1 person on any email chain with me reads that and is thinking “the fuck does he talk like a Victorian English Dandy for?”
This may not be as well understood as you believe. I am an educated English speaker, who has many educated English speaking friends and family, I have never heard this phrase.
Turn of the millennium?
Sorry, yes, 19th to 20th century. Neighborhoods with the Full House house basically.
Unfortunately the US demolished such urban structures to make space for cars and parking spaces. We now get a small downtown with clusters of skyscrapers, and then endless urban sprawl. It definitely made the cities of the US ugly, especially when compared to the European cities.
They still exist in the northeast megalopolis where space to build postwar sprawl was limited.
I am visiting Boston and I cannot stop wondering why SF is not like that. The city feels so much more livable almost everywhere I went. I'm sure there are shady parts, but every time I need to go to SF for some reason I get really depressed.
Respectfully, you’re almost certainly going to the wrong parts. My source is that I grew up inside Boston and now reside inside SF.
Boston is amazing, and I love it. But SF is too. For similar reasons. SF is a city of neighborhoods. If you’re going to downtown, or any of the business centers, you’re not getting the good parts. The enjoyable nice parts of SF are all residential. Because of the hills, each residential neighborhood (a valley) has its own unique commercial street full of shops and restaurants, surrounded by beautiful old townhomes, and as you go up the hills you get vistas and nice homes. The city quality is inversely correlated with office space.
Boston has similar historic driving forces - instead of hills, it used to be a city of (now infilled) peninsulas. You get wonderful old homes in Boston, and lots of streets full of shops. Instead of tech money (which Boston also has) it was overrun first by the education industry, which anchors many neighborhoods today.
could you expand on what you mean by "the education industry"?
I was picturing an army of teachers, but I don't normally think of teachers as folks who earn enough to be compared to tech money :)
I've never been to Boston, but Wikipedia tells me they have several universities - Harvard and MIT, which I've heard of, and also Boston University, Boston College, University of Massachusetts Boston, Bentley University, Brandeis University, Tufts University, Northeastern University, Wentworth Institute of Technology and a load of others.
In a city with a population of 600k that's going to be a decent part of the local economy.
Yes, Boston is considered the educational capital of the planet.
Boston itself is about 700,000 people, but if you extend things to a 20 mile radius from Boston (say from DTX), in that area there is a transient student population of 400,000 people that are only there to attend higher education and ultimately call elsewhere home. Within 20 miles of Boston are several dozen (nearly 60?) universities, making education one of its six or seven tent-pole industries.
To be pedantic, MIT and most of Harvard is Cambridge--across the river from the city of Boston. But, yes, the Boston area has a very university-influenced vibe much of it urban with some exceptions like BC and Wellesley.
There are something like 30 universities in the Boston metro, including some extremely press and wealthy ones. Universities like Harvard and MIT have sprawling research industrial complex’s beyond teaching students. And many thousands of employees, many of whom are high paid professionals.
All that to say nothing of the students. The population of Boston itself is ~600k, while the metro region has ~4M people and roughly 300k students reside in the metro. These are obviously not all local students, but students from all over the world who have come to Boston for education.
I didn’t mean directly that the schools had money, but that neighborhoods and civic fabric was built around the universities. But many do have a lot of money. Students tend not to travel far, so you get lots of self-contained neighborhoods around school. Similar to SF where the hills limit how far you’d walk.
Some of them are even within the borders of cities! See, for example, much of Queens, NY. Forest Hills is especially pretty. If you're not a New York, go back and watch the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies and marvel (ha) over the difference between where Aunt May lives and where Peter works.
They still exist, but they are generally absurdly expensive because lots of people want to live there and they aren't particularly dense (although denser than plenty of other areas)
It is a great tragedy that the US with all its money and diversity of geography and people has only really managed to produce a single walkable city and a scattered handful of “I don’t always use my car” neighborhoods, which are always the most expensive places to live. So many cities outside the US manage to do this on a fraction of the budget.
Everyone wants what they can't have. Europeans want to drive in cities/suburbs and Americans want to walk. People in Paris/Madrid don't really value walkability all that much. It's an increasing trend to buy bigger and bigger SUVs.
No, I don't. Thank you.
Soccer moms disagree with you. In my area they actually removed bike lanes to make way for more traffic.
The majority (dare I say all?) of European kids just take public transport/their bikes to wherever they're going, from a young age. I took the bus 1.5 hours 1 direction every day to go to my swim practice starting from age 10, sometimes at night too.
I don't really think soccer moms are a thing outside of the US
The percentage of commutes by car in Northern and Southern European cities ranges from 50% to 75%
I’m not sure where Americans get the idea Europeans don’t commute by car.
We're talking about kids here though, not all commuters.
And at least in the Netherlands, sample size of my office (around 300 people) maybe a dozen people max commute by car because they live ~2 hours away or in tiny villages where the trains are only hourly rather than every 10 minutes. I'd assume that metric varies a lot depending on the country you're looking at, and if we're talking about how kids go to school/practice/wherever, I'm willing to bet even in car-heavy European countries that the vast majority of kids take public transport or their bikes.
I have friends with kids in the (rural) North of the Netherlands, and their kid's school is ~15km away from their house. The kids bike that every day, to quote my friend, "they've got legs and wheels, why would I chauffeur them around?"
And you'd take that 1.5hr each way (three hours of commute to go to swim practice, every day??) over having a parent (or a family friend carpooling) spend maybe 10-15 minutes driving you each way?
This sounds terrible. I would much prefer driving 10 minutes to my suburban sports complex.
"The majority" seems strong. When I was in middle school (collège in french), there was a long line of cars in front of the school entrance from parents dropping off their kids. At some point my friend and I started to take the RER to go back home, and we barely saw anyone else.
Of course, part of the situation was we were in a mostly-residential city, so most kids lived less than a twenty minutes' walk away. But those who didn't mostly came by car.
That's in the city, though. I don't know what things are like in the countryside. From what my friends tell me, they had to take a lot of public bus to go to school and places. I think soccer moms were more of a thing there, because you had a hard time getting anywhere without a car. Less hard than the US, but still.
Where I live in London there are football (soccer) pitches in most local parks, school grounds, etc, which kids tend to use. Most people have such a park in a 5-10 minute walk from their home. No need to drive for such short distances. It's better for kids to walk around and experience their neighbourhood, use the time walking to chat with their friends, etc.
Where I live in Texas there are football (soccer) pitches in most local parks, school grounds, etc, which kids tend to use. Also often baseball fields and sometimes tennis courts as well. Most people here have such a park in a 10-minute walk from their home.
They actually don't. I mean I do. My wife does, and one or two of our friends do. But almost everyone else we know aren't at all interested in having a walkable city. They love their cars and garages. US cities are the way they are because a great majority of Americans want them that way.
It 100% bums me out, but that's where we are at. Americans that want to walk are a small minority.
Children don't have the patience of parents. They melt down waiting for a bus/transit in snow or summer broiling heat and it becomes a nightmare. I didn't have a car most the time until I had a kid and found quality of life went way up with a car.
I was born in a walkable in Europe. School was 5 minutes (by walk) from home. High school was 10-15 minutes by bus, plus 10 minutes walking to the bus stops. The bus service was very frequent, there was no endless waiting on bus stops in snow or heat. If Communist Poland could pull it of, so could the richest country in the world.
Yeah, for a while I used to get around by bicycle a lot (faster and way cheaper than paying for parking on campus), lots of people thought it was very weird to do so. I'd show up at the usual bar scenes with my bicycle after taking the light rail down and most of my friends wouldn't begin to understand how I got there.
I take the local transit when I need to get deeper into the city and take the bus to the city parks around me with my kids. People think I'm a bit of a nut for doing so, seriously wondering why I wouldn't just drive.
I've met people that grew up in Dallas and didn't even know there was light rail. Most people don't have a clue how it works and don't care to spend a minute figuring it out. They don't even bat an eye at the thought of moving further and further out into the burbs, into developments that take ten minutes of driving just to leave one neighborhood.
Have you considered, then, that many people do not actually want this?
Young yuppies with their Silicon Valley salaries get to spend time in European city AirBnbs and wonder "why can't America be like this?"
If so, the European city planning wouldn’t be popular within the US, but it’s the opposite. The few European style cities are incredibly attractive to live in.
Right.. and? They’re not representative? Or it’s unrealistic? That’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask for those that do get the opportunity to see functional dense urban areas in other places, especially as they don’t require anywhere near SV salaries yet are still lively and safe.
I don’t think the US will drop car centrism, partly because of the perpetual lower class social issues that make it dangerous to share public space with strangers, but you can get pretty far if you mix in high volume public transit like in NYC (or even SF BART for a smaller example), which greatly reduces the dead spaces that prevent walkability.
I never quite figured out why the US is so allergic to enforcing the public order laws already on the books with any degree of vigour
The concept of supply & demand shows people obviously do want this, given that the cost of living in that walkable city and in walkable places is so high.
The real reason? Americans become infatuated with the latest technological marvel too easily. For a while, this was the car. And unfortunately, rolling back all these car subsidies takes a while and is heavily fought against because people hate the feeling of having something taken from them.
So many cities outside the US manage to have this as the only redeeming quality. It's nice to not have to walk - it's not so great to have to walk because you can't afford a car and public transit does not cut it for everyone even in the best rated cities of the world. And it's not really interesting to have a dense train network if you can't afford the train ticket; then you're just angry your tax money is spent on it instead of you.
I'm from Europe but I would be very careful with claiming it's just a few cities or neighborhoods in the US. I made a list of places I could move to eventually, and it's at least two dozen, and that's just because I was focused on cities with significant tech/business scene.
SF schools and traffic are terrible with kids. Suburbs are generally much mellower.
I mean this depends on what specifically you’re optimizing for.
A child in the suburb will need a chauffeur to get anywhere outside their immediate subdivision, and sometimes within it. Children are perfectly capable of taking public transit and using their two feet, though.
Kids still get driven to school in cities.
They don’t have to though, which is nice. And not all children do.
SFUSD lotto system, and the schools being far away enough. Yeah, everyone I know in sf drives their kids to school
I've heard about the lotto system but assumed the school district would be obligated to bus kids (i.e. not force them to use public transit alone). The parents have issues with the school bus??
Why don't the kids take the school bus
I made choices to live near a K-8 and high school, so hopefully my kid is walking from K to 12.
Kids still get driven to school in my neighborhood that wont let you enroll if you're more than a mile or so away (officially it's a walking school). Yet every day the street it's on becomes packed with cars trying to pick their child up instead of just letting them walk home.
Have you not heard of school buses or soccer moms?
Cities like SF tend to be okay for families in two different (and polar opposite) classes - those who are working poor, and the scare factor of public transit and hassle of traffic is something they just have to deal with, or quite wealthy - and they can afford drivers and/or private schools.
The public school system in SF is also notoriously terrible to deal with, even by US big city standards, as ‘equity’ changes results in bussing kids all over town so there are no ‘good’/‘bad’ schools due to demographics. So siblings will often end up in schools on different sides of town, or kids in a school very far from where they live.
The middle class tends to go to the suburbs where things are less crazy and easier to handle, and they get ‘bad’ things like a school where all the neighbors kids also go, and siblings can all be in the same school. And they can buy into a ‘good school district’. Among other things.
Yeah, I’m saying that parents can choose to live in cities to avoid being just a soccer parent forever.
School bus routes have been decimated in much of the country, creating long winding routes with horrible wake up times for children. And a school bus doesn’t take you to any place outside of school and the home.
Growing up as a school child in New York with a transit pass, it was nice to hang out with friends, or go to a museum, or head to a new park, or try a new restaurant, or any number of things without having to involve parents for transport. And I went to a pretty good public school.
I’m glad that all parents in suburbs are clearly wrong?
who said they're clearly wrong? i'm just saying that kids can be in cities.
I never said they couldn’t?
SFUSD only busses kids with special needs. Everybody else has to get to school on their own.
Siblings get preference for the same school, so it's pretty unlikely they'd be on different sides of town.
SFUSD has tons of problems but you are not accurate in your description of what they are.
The real problem is that the kids of parents who can't drive them to school end up having to go to a local school anyway, so the egalitarian idea of having kids go to any school did not actually work out as a positive for anybody but kids who were already privileged enough to have someone drive them to school.
no, as a kid I was able to go anywhere I desired with a bike or skateboard; I had few boring summer days.
this is much safer/practical in suburban environments. do you really believe public transport, in SF, is as safe for a kid?
e: md fix
Kids are, quite frankly, much smarter and more capable than modern helicopter parents give them credit for.
That doesn't matter anymore because although kids are probably as smart as they've ever been, everyone has a cellphone in their pocket and will rat the family out to CPS if the child exhibits independence.
BART is, quite frankly, much grimmer and less safe than you seem to give it credit for.
Just don’t drive.
We bailed for seattle because we could get a bigger house and have a better school situation. We did enjoy living on the border between the mission and noe valley before that though.
Seattle is an interesting area, so many different pockets. I moved to Seattle in 2016 from Southern California, could never shake the depression. Moved to Cupertino in Jan and am as happy as a (very busy) clam.
I visited Seattle the city proper recently, and also felt depressed. Not sure why I got that vibe. On paper Seattle is great, and no-doubt, the Pacific north west has good nature and tech-industry. It felt odd why Seattle felt "different".
The weather? it's well documented. SAAD.
Seasonal Affective Disorder, i.e. lack of sun? Not sure what the other A stands for.
The Seattle Freeze seems like one of those broad stereotypes, but I experienced it as very real. People are not unfriendly, but they are unsocial. I felt lonelier than any other place I've lived. There are of course many other factors, but I'm not the only one, which is validating.
I’m reading this from Ballard and I think we do alright on school quality and house size, although my east side colleagues think the deal is better in more suburban Kirkland or Bellevue.
Ballard hardly has houses left, it's a condo jungle now.
Townhome jungle. We still have lots of single family homes, especially north of 65th.
Without the townhomes it would be even more unaffordable.
Except schools, crime, and kids able to get into trouble.
Middle ages folks hate it because they are most likely to have kids and cities (in the US) tend to be kid hostile. What I'm calling city below is probably better described as downtown - most cities extend out farther and have areas that are nothing like what follows - but are also nothing like what you described as what people move to the city for.
Parks in the city tend to be focused on art. They often lack kid basics like swings and sand. They tend to be too small for a ball game. Often the people who are there will yell at kids for running off the path, yelling and the other ways kids play.
Bars and clubs are not kid friendly places. Middle age folks are much less interested. If you are middle aged and hang out in a bar you are an alcoholic. Clubs often have an minimum age, so going means an expensive babysitter. (bars might allow kids to eat there).
Theater is similar to bars - kids might not be banned, but they are not really welcome either. Both because the shows are not what kids would be interested in, and because they will kick out the kids if they are noisy (which they will be - not kid friendly shows).
Restaurants will allow kids, but often you get dirty looks for bring kids. Many of the others do not like kids and will let you know if your kids are misbehaving - what they define as misbehaving is normal for kids.
Then we add in costs - all of the above is affordable when it is just 1 or two adults, but with kids it is either a lot more expensive to bring this with or you hire a babysitter. You also need larger apartments - most are 1 or 2 bedrooms, but a family wants at least 3 and likely more. You can buy a house in the suburbs with 4 bedrooms and other extra rooms for less than the month payment on a city apartment.
Last there are schools which tend to be bad quality. I've concluded that this because of the other factors above - few families live there and so not enough people care to make them good. It does however stop many families that might want to try living in the city.
Cities are far more kid-friendly than suburbs, especially for kids from age ~9–18. Everything is walkable or can be reached by transit, many more amenities and activities are accessible, kids are dramatically less dependent on parents or other caretakers to constantly chaperone them, and there are a wider variety of other kids around with many niche interests.
Some kids' parents irrationally believe cities will be bad for their kids for one reason or another or consider the suburbs to be more personally convenient for the parents. For the kids themselves, cities are wonderful while suburbs are often boring and repressive.
I grew up in a mega city and I agree that cities are wonderful for kids, at least they were wonderful for me and my friends. I'd venture to guess that kids don't care. Cities or not, the world is just so much fun and exciting.
I don't know if suburbs are prisons for kids, though. My kids love suburbs, and they also love cities when they spend days and nights there.
It's not that parents falsely think that cities are bad for kids (it may be a factor for some people, of course), but that parents themselves do not want to live in a busy city. For instance, I have zero interest in bars or clubs. In fact, they are way noisy for my social needs. Instead, I just want to have walking distance to woods and shaded trails. And I want to have access to those large club houses that have full gyms and swimming pools and cozy libraries and all kinds of activity rooms, instead of those smallish ones in SF (probably because I'm not wealthy enough, but that's also my point). Or take Asian supermarket for another example. There are really not that many choices in SF or NYC. Even for the available ones, let's say H Mart in NYC, I really don't like the cramped space. I want to have those spacious walkways and shelving and big food court and etc.
Club houses? What are we talking about here? Country clubs? Our society is largely devoid of the fraternal organizations that colored 18th and 19th century social life, and the social isolation of not having any 'third places' to go is in fact one of principal complaints about suburbia.
I think they literally mean "Club house" -- the shared services center for the housing development. High-rises often have them, large developments have them.
In NYC, our high-rise had a reading room, yoga room, gym, entertainment center, as well as a paved playing area for building residents inside building premises. People met each other regularly at these places and socialized. This is very common (minus the paved playing area, which is rare.)
In the burbs we also have most of these, and also tennis courts and a pool.
Many of these served as a "Third Place" for residents, especially once you have kids because it isnt as easy to hang out elsewhere. Unlike previous centuries, I'm constantly on my phone or on call explicitly or implicitly, at least in my profession, so social clubs seem unrealistic, though I know the wealthy folks go there regularly.
This is either something in a luxury apartment building or an amenity you pay for via an HOA in a condo.
And what is your point?
Even cheap/mid tier apartment complexes around me have a clubhouse with a pool, a small gym, maybe a billiard table and what not. It is not very expensive to do when land is cheap.
My last apartment wasn't super high-end and it even had a golf simulator in it along with a billiard room kind of a theater room with a giant TV and some big couches.
Totally. There seem fewer kids in the neighborhood than before too. Play-date is such a suburb concept for the US kids. As a kid, I used to hang out with neighbor kids, sometimes more than a dozen, every day. Not any more for my kids in the suburb. To that end, I admire my Indian friends. Even during the most panicking days of Covid, they would organize weekly meetups of multiple families, so kids got to play together.
That seems like both a generational and cultural thing, vs a urban/sub-urban consideration. Prior generations in the US had kids just hangout with whomever in the neighborhood be it urban or sub-urban too. Playdates are probably just as common in urban areas now, the cultural change wasn't specific to the built-environment.
There are less kids outside, but that is just because families are so much smaller on average and there are less kids.
Most places that have woods at all also have this.
Golden gate park+presidio in SF, discovery+arboretum+Seward+ a bunch more in seattle, central park in NYC, fairmont park in Philly are all places I've loved walking/biking around (and to).
Personally, I grew up in a suburb that didn't have transit and it was miserable. I barely saw my friends until I got a car. Every time I go back with my lady it's miserable for both of us because, besides family, there's just nothing there but some cookie cutter parks. There was one historical park that's still nice but its also a mile away from my mom's house and there's inconsistent sidewalks (it's either take a much longer route or risk walking alongside a 1 ft wide shoulder with a 35mph speed limit and curves.
I suppose it heavily depends on the suburb.
Suburbs can be prisons if there’s not enough people your age around you. I lived in semi-suburbs and had friends I’d walk to after school. Makes it more fun than having to organize car dates until someone gets a car. But nowadays kids are so supervised I don’t know if they hang outside anymore
Please also consider that suburbs are often much cheaper to rent a 1800 sqft of living space (say a decent 3 BR 2 Bath) vs the city.
That's true. Housing is expensive because the city is great and people want to live here, but the direct results of expensive housing are harmful to the society (and high rent is a kind of giant tax on all economic activity, raising prices in shops, restaurants, etc.).
It would be a significant benefit to the people of SF if the western half of the city were significantly upzoned with a lot of new housing construction here and throughout the Bay Area, and ideally rent and house prices cut by something like half (gradually rather than in a market crash), so that more of the people necessary to run the city could afford to live here.
If by "great" you mean "where the jobs are" then I agree.
That has been the primary driving force behind urbanization since at least the industrial era.
The jobs are in the city because the people are there, and the people are there because the jobs and other people are there. Empirically, both residents and employers prefer to relocate to the city.
The city is convenient and fun: it provides easier transportation, more amenities, more other people to engage with, more companies of all types to do business with, etc.
You ignore the fact that many European cities are much smaller than the North American mega city landscape and still have lots of jobs in those cities. But it's also easier to have safer yet walkable and publicly transportabel neighborhoods in a city of 150k or 300k than 3 or 10 million.
There's plenty of American cities from 50k-300k, that's not a uniquely European thing.
None of the jobs where I grew up were in the city (Allentown/Bethlehem/Easton, largest employers were all suburban campuses save for the electric company and some colleges. Even the hospitals were off the highway.).
All the fun stuff was in the city though, so that's where we'd go once you got a friend of driving age.
If you run a business selling a niche amenity, you need to do so in a city because in the country you won't have enough customers nearby.
End result: cities have more fine-grained amenities. People who want more amenities live in cities.
There are? I see the opposite trend (at least in US East Coast) - cities only have generic amenities, while all the unusual stuff is in the suburbs, where the the land is cheap.
For example, let's take a relatively common hobby of sewing. The two stores in downtown closed tens of years ago, and the only ones left are in the suburbs, unreachable without the car.
I think at this stage, the only advantage of city is bars, restaurants, and expensive clothing/jewelry. If you like something else, you are better off in suburbs with a car.
> (and high rent is a kind of giant tax on all economic activity, raising prices in shops, restaurants, etc.)
I’ve long pointed out to conversation mates IRL that for a technological civilization like ours, shelter costs are a straight deadweight, Tsiolkovsky rocket equation cost upon the innovation throughput that is the civilization’s lifeblood. In the U.S., healthcare pricing policies are as well, but that’s a different conversation. Both are stranded capital that need unlocking towards increasing the technological development pace.
But most people with mortgages are trapped like a monkey’s fist around a fruit in a jar, by the siren song of house appreciation.
I’d rather have fusion, life extension, solar system colonization, mind uploads and AGI sooner than be “rich” in real estate.
The purpose of capitalism is not technological advancement, innovation, or efficient deployment of resources. The purpose of capitalism is that rich people get paid for being rich.
If you believe otherwise, you will learn the hard way when you seek your reforms and find that none of the people spouting the high-minded capitalist rhetoric support the actions that would bring it closer to reality. In short, the monkey's hand isn't trapped. The monkey is masturbating into the jar. It knows exactly what it is doing and you will not be thanked for interrupting.
This assumes that the parents consider the city safe enough for the kids to wander around unsupervised. The perceptions may be bullshit, but people still act on them. Statistically speaking the schools in the city are going to score lower on pretty much every test than the suburban ones, sometimes by large margins.
By far the biggest danger for children wandering around (in rural area, suburb, or city) is big cars moving quickly. But none of the suburbanites worried about cities seem to mind that there are SUVs whizzing around their residential neighborhoods at 40+ miles per hour. (Or more realistically, plenty do worry, and keep the kids indoors or drive them everywhere instead of letting them wander around independently.)
This has more to do with the more diverse mix of children in the class than it does to do with school or teacher quality per se.
But I'm happy to grant you that some upper middle class parents are also inordinately worried that their children might spend too much time near poorer children who get worse test scores because their families have fewer resources and they were not as academically prepared.
The pavements are often much wider in suburbs, and/or separated from the road by trees. That's the difference. You're not in a high rise apartment building that opens directly on to pavement, which is 4ft from a road.
Empirically the most dangerous cities for pedestrians are sprawling ones with large high-speed-limit pedestrian-hostile roads, not denser ones with walkable streets.
But that most places in the USA are pretty unsafe for pedestrians nowadays, especially children. We would do well to introduce traffic calming, improve pedestrian/bike infrastructure, and cut speed limits in all areas where people commonly walk down to a max of about 20 miles/hour.
It would also make streets much safer to reduce the proportion of SUVs and large pickup trucks. Disincentivizing these vehicles should be an explicit government policy goal.
Those are all great ideas, but to the average voter you might as well be saying we should outlaw apple pie. Political will behind reforms like this is very hard to find and always in danger of being voted out by angry drivers.
That’s it I’m moving back to the city.
I think it’s a pity you’re getting downvoted, I think it’s a very valid opinion and one that I think is getting underrepresented in this thread.
Right, sprinting back-and forth, ear-piercing screams at the top of their lungs, kicking chairs - all things we should just accept at a restaurant, for the sake of the parents. What terrible people we are for wanting a decent dining experience.
You were a helpless, innocent kid once too :)
my parents did not bring a 3 year old crying baby into an airport lounge
When I was a kid, going to a restaurant was a treat and a privilege. If my sister or I misbehaved, we were taken out to the car, and might not get to go to a restaurant again for a while.
I see kids in restaurants these days and mostly find their behavior appalling. And it's sad the best-behaved kids are only quiet because they have an iPad in front of them. (No headphones, of course, so that's another annoyance the rest of us have to put up with.)
Its just common courtesy.
Same as minimizing the amount of flights you have with a baby.
People with a baby that take multiple flying trips a year are rude, bordering on douchey.
Just because you want an experience doesn't mean you get to ruin it for hundreds of others. Who not to mention paid for it. Height of egocentrism.
When I was a kid the only restaurant I was allowed to go to was Friendly's, and only on my/my siblings birthdays. It was a HUGE treat and I knew to be on my very best behavior because if there was any acting up, even a little, I wouldn't be allowed out to eat out ever again.
Nowadays kids aren't expected to behave in a restaurant, so they don't. It's about expectations.
Leaving NYC my son was disappointed in almost any park we'd go to. Most smaller cities and towns have a few decent playgrounds but in the city we had 3-4 in walking distance that were amazing and another 10 within a single subway stop.
Where in NYC?
Greenpoint/Williamsburg
Any child older than a toddler should be able to sit quietly and respectfully eat a meal. If they can't, that's bad parenting.
Sitting still for long periods is naturally difficult for little kids. Of course they shouldn’t be allowed to go nuts, but a kid who just sits quietly for long periods with no signs of antsiness might be having their spirit crushed by authoritarian parents (or might just be unusually calm). Good parenting is a give and take.
The restaurant isn't going to complain about the kids chatting or pushing peas around on their plate. If the wait staff are willing to risk the ire of pissed off parents to say something, the kids must be going nuts.
San Francisco has really really good playgrounds, it's quite crazy.
This doesn’t describe Seattle or any other city I’ve lived in. We literally have 3 huge ball fields within walking distance of my town home, all full up on weekends and even most weekday nights with soccer, baseball, etc…
Don't forget access to doctors and hospitals. I browse city-data at times out of boredom, and it's a major concern for retired people considering relocating anywhere.
In fact I know a retired guy who moved to Maui, and then moved back. The principal reason was the saying they have, "If you have a pain, get on a plane."
You might get served in Honolulu. Quite often you're flying to the mainland, though.
That said, living right in the city isn't necessary at all. The 'burbs have almost every facility you could want.
I lived in Maui for a year and it was always in the back of my mind that my link to civilization was basically one road. And my apartment was just north of Lahaina.
That said I watched my dad die of cancer and let's just say he would have been better off chillin' on a beach or a balcony staring out into the ocean.
The doctors couldn't really do anything other than misdiagnose him and then put him on meds way too late.
I'd pick quality of life over fear of a potential medical issue.
It almost makes retiring to Southeast Asia reasonable. Yes, you don’t get Medicare, but then paying out of pocket reasonable prices for medical services means you aren’t eating for anything either, plus you get the beach and affordable everything else living. As long as you don’t get cancer.
?? might be a typo but I don't know for what
I told this guy I had rotator cuff surgery. One week wait for an MRI, and three for the surgery.
He said the MRI would have been a 4-week wait in Hawaii.
But it's a choice, for sure. There are lots of medical time wasters that are not life-threatening.
For people aging and not in the best of health, declining vision/response times makes driving riskier, and there is often a preference for homes without stairs as well, which might very well be a condo with an elevator. Then there’s also common area maintenance in condos vs. the manual labor of lawn care, pool care, etc.
Palo Alto is suburbs. It is also home to the best medical care in the world...
Better than Rochester, MN?
Exactly this. I grew up on a farm, was a student in the city, started a family in the countryside and I want to retire in a city, as long as it’s close to my children.
Did you… did you, ah, raise spiders on the family farm?
Is that a Thing? I'm so behind /s
Well, check out their username
I've polled my friends about this, and our group is a about 50/50. Some of us when looking at comments never read the usernames, we just completely skip over it. And some alway do - the next is right there of course you'd read it!
It seems like an interesting dichotomy - I didn't see any obvious correlation between other traits in my informal survey but I am very curious to see if there is some set of personality traits that correlates with reading vs ignoring user names.
I don't skip commentor names intentionally, but HN makes it really easy with the stupid (not sorry) light grey on slightly darker grey text. Contrast is an accessibility issue, and HN sucks at it.
oops. right.
I'm young, like cities, but dislike SF.
The main reasons are
- crime -- SF isn't like Asian cities where I can walk around safely at night
- lack of public transit AND lack of parking (either convenient parking OR good transit would be fine, but SF has neither)
- rents are unaffordably high and I need a lot of space for projects
- not clean
- Asian food is mediocre compared to suburbs like Cupertino and Fremont
I love cities like Singapore, Stockholm, Taipei, and Chengdu, though. These cities have everything I like about cities. Good transit, cleanliness, safety, and good food (by my standards) everywhere.
In SF, the northeast quadrant has most of the good public transit. Does that not fit your needs? And, I disagree that Taipei and Chengdu are significantly cleaner than SF -- about the same level of grime in my experience.
There’s different meanings to “cleanliness”. A bit of grime is fine. Drug paraphernalia, human feces, and tons of homelessness is another matter.
Yeah exactly.
Even I, a non-homeless tech worker, have been forced to pee in the bushes next to a sidewalk in SF, because I was refused restroom access by 5 businesses in a row and I was already getting heart palpitations trying to hold it in.
I have never been refused restroom access (and there was almost always a public one within 100m at all times) in most modern Asian cities. Or even south bay (which is basically Asia), people are usually nice here about letting you use restrooms.
No. The public transit there hardly goes anywhere in reasonable time. It takes a good 40 minutes just to get across it. Many times I've walked faster to my destination than the public transit estimates. The Muni trolleys get stuck at intersections and red lights and don't move faster than cars. The BART only goes down 1 smelly street. I'd spend 2 hours round trip (1 hour each way) just to buy a vegetable from the nearest Ranch 99. That's not city life.
Most Asian public transit systems blaze past all the cars on the surface. They actually save time from driving.
im probably an outlier but i love being able to walk to work as a middle aged city dweller.
That's so true.
In my experience everybody grown up outside a big city and especially in the countryside, look at big cities and say "no no, it's a mess, I'll never live there." That's independent from the age. Of course they go there for concerts, theaters, museums, maybe hospitals. People grown up in a big city tend to have the opposite reaction, ranging from "it's like being dead" to "there is nothing to do", which of course is false: there are different kind of activities. People that like sports usually will feel better outside a city.
It's very variable. There's also a lot of inertia once people are established in the suburbs/exurbs. I know some examples but I don't actually know a ton of cases of people moving into the city upon retirement.
For another couple data points - my middle aged friends with kids who moved to my city did so for much of the same reason as you suggest the younger and older folks do. There's just more services for their kids: clubs, day care, pediatrics, playgrounds, sports teams, museums, etc. I have a few middle aged friends who moved away from my city, but they moved to bigger cities (Chicago, NYC) for work.
Idk about your second point, it’s only because I live in the city that I have time to enjoy it, after work and kids commuting to and from the city is too much of a time sink and there’s fuck all to do everywhere else in the bay.
Also, a lot of older people don't want big houses, and having easy access to amenities and socialization is more important than having extra empty bedrooms.
Very true. At least to me, a modest condo will be more than enough, as I've learned long before that tidiness brings more pleasure than large space.
I will get downvoted for this comment: Size of living area does seem to be highly influenced by gender. I hear many more men say they would be happy living in a smaller place. I never once heard that from a woman under 50. (After the kids are gone, they may wish to downsize.)
Men are just content to have less, usually.
Also, are these single men with hobbies that don't take up a lot of space like gardening or woodworking?
Let me be the first one then - I am fully content on living in a 40-60m2 space with my partner and two cats. Considering we never lived in anything bigger this size is perfect for us, easy to clean and still enough space to live.
Is it because their kids have grown up? I can imagine myself living in a city like Paris or NY if I don't have kids. I get to enjoy a bustling city without needing to dealing with the challenges of raising kids.
cities cost more for smaller spaces. when you've got a family you need that space, but for two empty-nesters, a city location is smaller, easier to manage, and closer to things. elevators and small apartments on a single floor might even be preferable -- no stairs for bad knees.
also if you're not able to drive cuz your eyes or reaction time are bad, being walkable helps -- that exercise might even keep grandpa healthier, longer.
and in the case of my in-laws, a big draw was proximity to (good) medical care. literally walkable to the local hospital and medical services, and if something goes bad the ambulance can get them there ASAP.
and then you have more food options, more entertainment, etc.
anecdotally, city life becomes a net drain when one doesn't have time for themselves. In my mid-thirties now, and keeping up with family/travel/hobbies is more than I can handle on most days. I've gone to a great number of restaurants in the past and ... getting more sleep seems like a better bet for the day then going to another restaurant.
I'm sure that this will flip when I no longer have kids at home and have reached retirement.
Just a note that this reversal could just as easily be specific to you and your circles.
In this thread all we have is two people who find anecdotally that some older people move to live near where they themselves live. Given how many people make some kind of change in retirement that's hardly surprising. We'd need actual data to come to any conclusion about large-scale trends.
You're talking about different age groups. You mention retired people (who are likely empty nesters), but the age group OP is talking about are middle-aged CEOs with young kids or teenagers.
i concur. I think a lot of this is just sound business acumen.
Twit-er...X, isnt raking in cash like it used to. Musks changes like reinstating hate speech accounts and the blue check fiasco had a direct negative effect on advertising revenue and accelerated already downward subscriber trends. Leaning out the physical side of the already agile digital side was a good idea im not sure twitters old guard would have considered.
San Francisco has seen a talent exodus after the global pandemic. no senior SRE with 20 years of experience --whos also made to show up to the office five days a week-- is going to entertain San Francisco's traffic, crime, homelessness, or general congestion for even a minute.
fwiw, hiring senior talent in SF works just fine. If you pay at the right pricing tier. SF is a decent city. It could definitely do better, it has issues, but if we all could stop pretending it's a post apocalyptic hellscape, that'd be nice.
Yes, you pay an SF premium. You pay a premium for most major cities, and the worse housing is, the higher the premium. But I'd bet moving to the South Bay isn't happening for that reason. SF pricing has a halo effect on the South Bay, and your savings will be minimal, if any. (I see little differences in South Bay and SF salaries, for larger companies)
What I'd wager precipitated the move is SF rents are stupidly high , and then you combine that with half the twitter offices being empty. If you believe loopt, San Jose office space is ~ half the cost of SF. Half the space, at half again cost - their real estate bill shrinks by 75%. And given that Twitters bill is likely ~$40M-50M/month, that's a good chunk of savings.
South Bay & Peninsula housing is actually more expensive than SF, though you do get a bit more for your money. Compensation is often marginally higher as well, though most companies with offices in both have them in the same salary band.
I mean, obviously it depends on what city you choose, but given that the article is specifically about X moving to Palo Alto....
San Francisco is $957/sqft median listing price [1]
Palo Alto is $1800/sqft median listing price. [2]
Hell, I live in Redwood City and the median is $996/sqft.
1. https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/San-Franci...
2. https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Palo-Alto_...
San Jose is a bit less, about $700/sf:
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/San-Jose_C...
The Santana Row neighborhood ("Winchester Orchards") is pretty comparable, at $910/sf though. I was actually thinking of Mountain View & Sunnyvale, which are considered decent places to live in the South Bay but aren't quite as elite as Palo Alto. They are both about $1.2K/sf:
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Mountain-V...
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Sunnyvale_...
For senior engineers, I'd say opportunities weigh more than the difference in salary or even in overall package, unless the package correlates with the opportunities. I may complain about commute, but I'd still be happy to join an exciting startup in the city.
I’m very much not in the Valley or even the U.S. but I’ve seen a lot of videos and photos of SF streets being littered, about homelessness, drug use, something called bopping. Isn’t this real, or is it far less common than those videos make it out to be? Interested to hear this from people in SF.
There are a few very bad neighborhoods and the videos you are seeing accurately depict them. Most unfortunately, those bad parts are mixed into downtown where most offices are.
As a resident, it’s extremely disheartening and must be fixed. The Tenderloin has been bad for years, but fentanyl has taken it to the next level.
However, most neighborhoods are different. Most are free from encampments and open-air drug use. Many residents just avoid downtown and some aren’t wise to how bad it really is.
Hence why the city is still so expensive.
Musk Twitter stopped paying office rent a long time ago. I can only assume they finally couldn't keep doing that without getting evicted.
Musk has been following his hero Trump in not paying those he owes money to. So now X stands for shmuck.
IME this is definitely true and it's often very intentional. One of the major reasons SF stole the startup scene from SV is that younger startup employees wanted to live in SF. As a startup founder you are very strongly incentivized to go where the talent is (or wants to be). When I was considering where to set up my startup a few months ago this was a huge consideration. Not quite at the level of HQ, but there's a reason Google has offices in both SF and South Bay as well, or in both SLU/SLU-area Seattle + across Lake Washington.
Google has offices in San Francisco but it also has offices in South San Francisco, San Bruno, Redwood City, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and San Jose. And probably some other cities I forgot. The "reason" Google has an office anywhere has to do more with "why not" rather than anything else.
Acquisitions.
Not the case with the main Google SF office (except now some buildings are indeed the results of acquisitions) but definitely for San Bruno and varied for the other ones.
Yeah, like almost every other central-city engineering office of that era, SF was initially a sales office that SF-resident ICs would sometimes work from on Fridays...and then more often, and then eventually teams wanted to move there, and then...and then...
I had the impression the Google SF office was for capturing that talent that would not be bothered to commute south; but that for most people there it was a career dead end, if you weren’t in Mountain View you weren’t in the game.
At least that’s what the people I know who worked there told me, I don’t have any real inside knowledge and the stories could be wrong despite being plausible.
That's not really how the SF presence developed historically but I admire your confidence
Did you mean to reply to me?
I wish I understood what you're getting at, because Google does not consider it's employees at all at this point, it's late stage capitalism sweetie. Is there a point, can you clarify?
Sweetie, it's not that hard, google considered them before.
P.S. Late stage capitalism === Early stage communism
Back in the early 90s my wife and I moved to SF because it had a thriving art and music scene and more interesting culture than the 'burbs of palo alto. But as you say, the long commute to SV was a killer and we moved back down. Back then SF was a bedroom community for SV with no tech sector. Businesses up there were banking (Wells Fargo, BofA, Crocker etc), retail, the local stock exchange, and a bunch of manufacturing.
Nowadays there's a bland sameness -- barely any music or other art much less much craziness. You can't imagine anything like the psychedelic scene appearing in SF much less Palo Alto these days, and most of what's left is in Oakland. Sigh.
I lived in San Francisco in the very late 70s through to the 00s. My first apartment share was $50/mo. The late 70s had the dying embers of the Beat Generation and San Francisco was a sleepy town. San Francisco was great in the 80s with a ton of theater, music, dance, art, everything. It was good in the 90s although the late 90s dotcom boom pushed/priced artists out. The 00s became pretty boring and compressed. I moved to Oakland.
I would say that San Francisco is quite nice now, great bones, although too expensive for interesting people to live.
I've seen similar complaints from cities in rich countries around the globe
Basically to have thriving arts scene you need people in the 20s-30s to be able to live on a minimum wage job and do art/music/whatever in their spare time. Even better if it is a part-time job or some sort of government scheme.
If your cost of living is too high then you are restricting yourself to trust-fund 20yo and older people with a bit of spare time. Also high property reduce the number of venues.
20s really is the perfect time to live downtown.
What are your thoughts on Oakland now?
Oakland is more affordable for artists now than San Francisco but not even close to what San Francisco was in the 80s. But it's a very different time. I find myself occasionally trying to relive that and having to remind myself it's gone.
Oakland has crime now but 80s San Francisco had the drug wars with actual machine gun battles between the now gone high rise projects on Army (now Caesar Chavez).
they went to Santa Cruz, man.
Go Slugs!
The Taiwan of the countercultural Bay Area.
Depends on one's interests. It sounds like my preferences would be more in alignment with yours - music and art - and yes, SF is almost completely lacking that today. But if one were an active part of the LGBT community - SF is a buzzing option. They have various festivals and events almost daily.
Oakland music scene isn't particularly inspiring either. Definitely more independent music events in run down houses, but quality and inventiveness is too often of questionable value.
it's true, the techies of the '90s and '00s who lived in sf embraced the culture (and suffered the commute). what happened in the '10s kinda steamrolled it.
What did you mean by "move to south bay for good for worse"? I just couldn't parse your meaning.
My bad. I meant "for good or for worse". That is, I was trying to be neutral to the merit of moving from SF to the south.
Anecdotally, I've generally heard this phrased as "for better or for worse" :)
Oh yeah! Thanks!
They seem unaware that a lot of SF based people go to the east bay.
But it's not inevitable that families move to suburbs either. Commenter is partly perpetuating a 1960s era "white flight" kind of stereotype, where cities are said to be terrible for families. I happen to have two kids in SF.
Additionally, a lot of what drives people out of SF specifically is the expense.
Yes, but surely those people are not moving to the South Bay (which is just as expensive).
SF is a great place for kids of all ages. But housing is indeed very expensive, as is childcare. Families in rent-controlled apartments who want more space without significantly higher expense don’t have a lot of options; several such families we know ended up moving out of the city (sometimes to elsewhere in Northern CA but often across the country to be closer to family). I don’t know anyone who moved because they thought their kids were having a bad time in the city.
This is why return to office is such a joke. It’s really “return to the office near where the CEO lives or lived at one time”
Like if Tim Cook decided to move to Alabama that’s where Apple Park would be
So dumb
A current example of this is Walmart which is in the midst of trying to force a huge number of employees to relocate to Bentonville, AR. I can see why someone would move to NYC or SF for a job, since there are plenty of other options for career development, but you have to be pretty committed to Walmart for life (undoubtedly their intention along with workforce reduction) to decide to move your entire family to Bentonville.
Walmart has always been headquartered in Bentonville, AR so that's a huge difference from the other examples here. People in well paying jobs move all the time though so it's not the commitment or strategic retention plan you seem to imply unless you think everyone in NY or CA is so pretentious that they couldn't believe that Walmart employees are worth poaching despite their IT and analytics department being bigger bigger than most tech companies.
I guess not everyone working at Walmart headquarters are in well paying jobs though.
Relocating wasn't such a big deal when most family models were single income and women were basically all slaves and would follow their husband without having any say on the matter. These day, any relocation involve a discussion between 2 parties on the merit of relocating and possibility of career development for both. It is much more difficult.
>Like if Tim Cook decided to move to Alabama that’s where Apple Park would be
What a dumb take. Tim Cook lives in California because Apple was founded there over 40 years ago. And Apple will stay in California because most of the talent Apple needs to succeed is already there. And since Apple will stay in California so will their CEO.
You must be on some really good shrooms to think Apple will uproot itself just to move to wherever Tim Cook would move.
Here in India, it's a wide mystery why most startups prefer to headquarter in Bangalore. It made sense two decades ago but today there are several other Indian cities like Vizag, Nasik, Noida, Gurugram, Chandigarh, etc. which are more equipped, have better infrastructure and even lower cost of living. Still most folks prefer Bangalore just because it has been like that since ages and popularly called the "IT Hub". But logically, it doesn't make any sense at all!
It's a chicken & Egg problem. I run a startup in Pune, and we just don't get good developers here. We are open to remote, and most of the good candidates are in Bangalore.
What's the explanation? Better schools in Bangalore or something else?
better schools is not a factor at all. right out of college, or a little later most of the high quality engineers move to Bangalore because that's where the jobs already are. once people settle down a bit, they tend to be averse to move on average. it's network effect and sheer inertia. no one really wants it this way.
Access to better schools is a factor in selecting a locality within the city but I don't think it has been a deciding factor in deciding the city itself.
Many cities including tier-2 cities have a variation of one of those "international" schools that parents seek and there's no significant difference in the quality of education between them.
Apart from the usual cycle of available talent + job opportunities, Bangalore has better weather and location wise it can attract talent from 4 states(these 4 states are major contributors to IT workforce compared to other states) while not being too far from place of origin.
Not relevant to any current actions by Twitter, but an interesting historical perspective is that it was very rare for a tech company to be in San Francisco.
Approximately all tech companies were in Silicon Valley proper (thus named) which is about (depending on who was drawing the boundaries) about 30-60 minutes south of San Francisco.
When Twitter opened in San Francisco I distinctly remember how weird it was to see a tech company up in SF. Then found it was due to tax breaks SF was creating for these companies and then lots more tech companies started showing up in SF.
This is not correct at all.
When Twitter was launched, SF was overflowing with startups on every corner. In fact it was the second wave of SF startups, being a handful of years after the dot com crash.
The only thing even slightly surprising about Twitter's location was that they were way down in South Park instead of more solidly in South of Market. They moved to the Tenderloin building in 2012.
Can you name a handful of known startups headquartered in SF in the early 2000s?
I tried searching for stats on this but it seems more difficult than I have time for. So I turned to chatgpt, which (FWIW) agrees with my recollection:
In the year 2000, Silicon Valley startups were predominantly located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly in cities like Palo Alto, Mountain View, and San Jose. San Francisco itself was not as prominent a hub for tech startups at that time.
While exact percentages are difficult to ascertain without specific data, it is generally understood that a relatively small percentage of Silicon Valley startups were headquartered within San Francisco city limits in 2000. The tech startup scene in San Francisco began to grow significantly later, particularly in the mid-2000s and beyond.
So many startups in SF. Most dead now of course. The first round of post-money hiring at Twitter took a few of my coworkers.
There were launch parties in SF every week in the late 1990s. Often multiple per week. The startups coordinated to not conflict. It was a very active scene. The first wave ended in the early months of 2000. There were a few very slow years after that, but things were picking up again around the time of Twitter's 2006 launch (and 2007-2008 scaling).
We in SF didn't consider ourselves part of Silicon Valley back then, so that might be throwing off the search results. The relabelling came later, when the never-formally-defined scope of "Silicon Valley" expanded to include SF city (but still skipping the bedroom communities between the city and the Valley proper).
(Edit: sibling of GP is correct, SF was mostly internet and media startups, agencies, etc. The Valley got most of the hardware startups. Twitter was a descendant of Blogger/Odeo/Pyra/etc, so SF city was an entirely expected location)
historically there was a lot of media and some internet in sf. more interesting hardware type tech companies generally clustered in the south bay with some exceptions (oqo, sega).
twitter was notable because they put a big campus in midmarket... but there was plenty of internet and multimedia that preceded them. (organic, macromedia, razorfish come to mind but there were countless others)
sure, no sun or apple, but let's be clear, twitter was no sun or apple either.
The mentioned South Bay locations are xAI's Palo Alto office, and an office in Santana Row. Both locations likely have connections to Caltrain.
I don't know where xAI's Palo Alto office is, but transit in the corporate Palo Alto office are generally good. If xAI is in the Stanford Research Park, you'll be taking a shuttle that runs only during commute times, and takes 15-30 minutes, depending on where exactly you get off.
Santana Row is more confusing. You'll travel either to Santa Clara or San Jose and take a bus. From Santa Clara, the bus is ~15 minutes. From San Jose, the bus is faster, but you've got a half- or one-mile walk.
The Santana Row office is miserable to get to via Caltrain. You're going to want to bike or scooter and even then it's a trip on Stevens Creek/San Carlos, which is exceptionally busy at all times of day due to the two malls next to it and also it drops bike lanes for some portion of the road.
Santana Row will start charging for parking. https://www.ktvu.com/news/santana-row-is-charging-parking
I feel like this was the case already? Maybe not for 2 hours but I do distinctly remember that when I popped into the Twitter offices for a bit I was able to park there for a few hours but after that it would charge me
Boeing. That's what killed Boeing - moving HQ from the factory in Renton, WA to Chicago. Boeing has no plants anywhere near Chicago. But Dave Calhoun, the previous CEO lived in Chicago. He previously was the head of Nielsen, the TV ratings and marketing company, which has been in Chicago for a century.
It took far too long, but Calhoun is finally being eased out. Not fired outright, which would have been appropriate.
The move to Chicago was made by Condit. Ostensibly it was just a cover to stay far away from the wife while he kept his mistress shacked up at the HQ.
According to Wikipedia, Boeing moved its headquarters in 2001, a mere two decades before he became CEO, and the nearly half dozen that preceded him.
The 25-35 crowd are probably the worst employees that Twitter can ask for; too experienced to "keep their head down" and too young to suffer from ageism and be tied down with families. For companies like Google and Twitter that traditionally lean left and encourage employees to speak up, moving the company headquarters is probably the easiest way to filter out activist employees (since these days the company is making a hard pivot to a privately held conservative operating model).
These companies have never encouraged employees to speak up. James Damore thought that was the culture, and he got fired.
and let's not forget the increase in crime that SF has experienced. Even department/CVS/etc stores have had to close due to the increase in crime.
Suburbs on average have less crime. i wouldn't say that south bay is ideal but it's better than SF.
They are moving to San Jose, which is a city. It may not be as cosmopolitan as SF (certainly not as compact) but the differences have narrowed some in the last decade or so. Not to mention that it has a larger population than SF.
Your ideal suburb describes most of the Europe(excluding few cities).
That seems reasonable - even if companies aren't moving based on where their employees are, employees are taking into account where the company is when they decide which jobs to take, and are probably more likely to leave a job if they find their commute too long.
There’s no housing south of SF. That’s why the Menlo/PA/SC crowd originally invaded SF. It was cheap and hip.
off topic: do you have a name or a link for the paper referenced? My company just moved to a new office that's "coincidentally" closer to the CEO's house, and I'd love to send it to him.
The typical commuter suburbs for SF companies are in the East Bay, in my experience. South Bay is a lot more expensive.
I wonder if cheapish EVTOL travel might make a difference here. I.e. if CEOs effective travel time is reduced, does that affect headquarter location selection.