I just moved to the Bay Area and I have no good opinions about living here. It’s a 3 trillion dollar neighborhood that has broken infrastructure, an abysmal housing situation, crime through the roof, homeless people everywhere, traffic, outrageous costs and just generally an awful place to live. I don’t know about the business side, but from an employee standpoint, fuck the Bay Area. Oh, and my car got broken into twice, and someone asshat stole my license plates.
I mean the peninsula is mostly a dump but even historically “bad” neighborhoods like Richmond and Oakland are miles away from where they were 10-20 years ago. The East Bay and Silicon Valley proper are downright decent places to live.
If the exodus goes from a trickle to a torrent, the city budget propped up by property taxes is going to crater. Whatever problems there are now with homelessness, imagine what it will be like when social services can no longer be provided for them. San Francisco is a ship that lost power to its engines while coasting towards an iceberg.
It would need to be a real big exodus for property tax revenues to go down. Prop 13 limits and associated low turn property turnover means a large amount of the tax roll is assessed under current value. During the 2008 real estate crash, few of the California counties saw a decrease in property tax revenues.
Probably yes, however, because so many properties are assessed so far under their current market value, due to historic low turnover, the high turnover of an exodus would tend to raise the overall assessed value, unless the price drop was very extreme
You must not live in the Bay Area and are merely reaching for talking points.
Everyone in CA knows that property tax money goes straight to the state and is divvied up there. It's collected locally, then sent straight to the state. CA gets first crack at spending it, then it goes down to the local level. The social services are paid for mostly by bond measures, which are immune to real estate prices. Other things are paid for with consumption based taxes (mostly sales).
Didn't know property taxes go to the state first but the overall point remains that if there is an exodus of wealth from the Bay Area, that will affect the resources available for social programs. Also stories about companies and workers leaving the state beyond the Bay Area are hardly in short supply though some might be overdone for clickbait or political purposes.
Social programs are almost entirely funded through voter approved bond sales. Their funding won't take a hit if there's an exodus of wealth. The bonds are already sold.
Completely agree with you on the overdone clickbait!
If housing costs are a problem. They have too many people moving there and not leaving. All major cities in California has the same issue that people keep moving here and driving up housing cost and causing more traffic.
Sometimes I wonder if there’s a funded campaign against the Bay Area online. Where do you live, and where did you come from? I just moved to SF and yes it has homeless people, traffic and is extremely expensive, but these are things that every other big city I’ve lived in has. The costs and homelessness are worse than Seattle or NYC but not to the point that it’s a reduction in my quality of life. To say you have “no good opinions” is so extreme. The area is beautiful, has a rich history, amazing culture, food and art, and if you work in technology has the best availability of jobs in the world.
I had a company fly me out to interview at a startup in SF a few weeks ago. My hotel was a 20 minute walk from my interview. I almost walked. I'm glad I did not. Just about every block between my hotel and my destination was densely packed with homeless and tents. I watched a drug deal in broad daylight at a red light while just spacing out staring out the uber window, and found I accidentally made eye contact, and prayed the light would change over faster, as meanwhile a mentally ill man is literally roaming the streets screaming about the end of the world (not exaggerating).
The start up had about 20 people (maybe 2 of whom were over 30) in what was clearly an apartment at some point in the past, except the "bathroom" was what looked like a makeshift closet to me: a sliding glass shower door with a room divider behind it. For ~20 people. As the interview wraps up, one of the leads decides we should go for a walk so he can break the bad news about the job. We walked around the block about 5 or 6 times, every time passing the homeless man asleep on the sidewalk about 15 feet from their office door. No one there seemed to understand my astonishment/shock/horror about the state of that city.
The uber driver on my ride back to the airport who was native to the area sure understood though. That dude just drives around all day feeling out whether or not someone's going to report him if he speaks honestly about it. That conversation was by far the best part of the trip.
Flew back to ny and interviewed in nyc a few days later, and all I can really say is at no point in NYC did I feel physically unsafe like I did in SF. They're not even comparable in my book. I'm still unsettled by just how bad SF was, and I'm absolutely astonished that I don't hear people talk about this more.
Few agree with you, San Francisco is in a dire state. I work here and I walk past passed out people with needles in their arms, human feces littering the sidewalk, women with their toddlers on the street asking for money. BART stations smell like garbage. There is a homeless, mental health and drug crisis happening all at once condensed into a small geographical region. San Francisco still has some charm, but it's hard to appreciate these days.
It’s not just a matter of disagreement— take a look on here, Reddit and Twitter and you’ll find a swarm of people making it seem like the Bay Area is a dystopian hellhole. I was legitimately concerned about my move before I got here.
I agree that there's lots of people online who make exaggerated negative claims about San Francisco, and my best guess as to why is that it's part of the coastal/inland, liberal/conservative cultural divide/war. It's easier to put others down than to fix your own mess, and frankly, California's economy and social services are the envy of almost every other state.
San Francisco is a very liberal city and conservative publications like the WSJ love to vocally shit all over the city because of its many problems, but that doesn't mean it doesn't actually have those problems. It does. San Francisco is a shitty place to live for anyone but the wealthy. I've worked in the city for 9 years now (I live in the East Bay) and if you stay here long enough like I have you'll discover that the young single people that come to work here don't stay long, they do tours for about 3 to 5 years and then cycle out to someplace they can actually raise a family.
You simply haven’t lived here long enough. It’s crazy that you would dismiss a crisis that has been documented and growing for years as an online misinformation campaign because your few months here don’t align with what you’ve read.
I'm not dismissing the crisis- it's a separate conversation that can be had for SF, LA and Seattle. My call out is for this confusing picture painted online that the Bay Area is a crime ridden wasteland that should be avoided at all costs, which simply isn't the case.
Some of these complaints didn’t really pick up in earnest until after 2015, even though the underlying issues have not meaningfully changed in severity since then. In fact, rents in SF are lower today than at their peak in 2015. Homelessness is up, though the city has gotten slightly better at provisioning shelter and is slowly writing conservatorship legislation.
Of course someone will bring up the infamous up-and-to-the-right poop maps, but that seems primarily to be a case of response bias as 311 rolled out an app with increasing adoption.
It's not a funded campaign against California or anything (although I suppose our current president's campaign rhetoric comes close to meeting that definition), but I agree that the constant California bashing is annoying. My guess is that it's simply a result of the fact that more people here have experiences with California than anywhere else, and people like to complain about where they live. So you see a lot of negative California rhetoric, because lots of people here can relate to it. Whereas if I complain about the intolerance, ugliness, weather, etc. of College Station, Texas (all reasons why I moved away and have no interest in moving back to that state) few know what I'm talking about.
I'm no California booster or anything, mind you. Some people like it here (I'm one of them), and some don't. That's fine. We certainly have our problems that we need to work on, and we have also done a lot of things right. (For example, SF tore down the Embarcadero Freeway permanently when it was damaged in the earthquake. Brilliant move. Wouldn't fly politically for a second in Dallas.)
This response is the most callous and gutting. People are genuinely raising concerns about things that are objectively broken here like housing, transit, income disparity and drug use, and right on cue someone comes along and says "then leave". Isn't this allegedly most inclusive and welcoming region in the country?
Even though there is not much organized crime and no longer the same level of gang activity as 10 years ago, as a matter of policy, SF tends to either not convict or give lighter sentences to your everyday crime like shoplifting and breaking car windows though. The consequence is that there is a lot of broken glass on the street.
I'm originally from a much rougher part of the US than SF. Walking on the street here at night is still a relative dream (but not at all like in Asia).
(Also, another uniquely SF policy: blatant abuse of opioids, etc. here are not considered to be criminal.)
You live in the Bay Area now? I've never had any problems in NOLA short of a close call to a home invasion at a acquaintance's five years ago (who was involved in things he shouldn't have been)
Been in the Bay since 2000. I grew up in NOLA through the worst years. Can't unsee what I've seen there.
NOLA is bad because crime is everywhere. There are no good areas and bad areas -- it's everywhere. Even people in old Metairie need to deal with home invasions.
Uptown? Oooooo-lawd! Who was the rich uptown couple that had a home invasion where they tied up the husband and repeatedly raped the wife over several days as they went to the ATM over a long weekend? I honestly can't remember their names because that stuff happens so often (and said family was even friends with my dad).
Yes, SF does rank #1 nationally for property crimes. It stinks, but most people value life more than property. Violent crime in the Bay Area is still much lower than national averages, and that's what most people concentrate on.
You go from saying "people who live in actual high crime areas would like a word with you" to acknowledging that SF has the highest property crime rates in the country.
And then wave it all away as, I guess, it's only really non-violent crime.
If you gave weightings to crime categories (we all do this internally), property crime would probably be the lowest weighted next to white collar crime. Violent crime would get exponentially higher weightings.
It's one thing to have $200 worth of stuff stolen in a car break-in. It's another to be violently mugged for $200 in cash on your person. I've lived in bad areas and the Bay isn't one of them. I'll trade property crime for knowing my family isn't likely to end up the victim of a horrendous violent crime.
Manhattan also has high property crime rates but low violent crime. Even has high real estate costs, but you don't see anyone knocking it as a hell hole.
There are people with some weird agenda/vendetta against the Bay Area, and they're obviously pouncing here.
It is not a zero sum situation - you don't get high violent crime due to low property crime and vice versa. It's entirely possible to live in an area with low property and low violent crime. Besides, doing a quick search shows [e.g. 1] that the NYC has both violent and property crimes rates much lower than SF, this could explain why people are not saying it's a hell hole.
Those stats are based on city and not MSA. If it were MSA, the Bay Area would be equivalent to New York. The city of New York includes all boroughs, not just Manhattan. If you compared Manhattan to SF, I bet they would be similar.
Also, I'm talking about the entire Bay Area and you keep zeroing in on SF.
I would love to compare just Manhattan but I cannot find the statistics. Seeing that you assert that - care to show the numbers to support your assertion?
Also, seeing that the Bay Area includes Oakland and Palo Alto, I don't think comparing the entire Bay Area to NYC will give you results you have imagined.
