I Hate San Francisco (Walnut Creek, Walnut: cost, transport, retired)
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Yes it can be like that in SF. In winter there are usually periods of weeks on rain and cloudy weather with no sun at all. You barely see the sun for weeks!
Climate change has really changed things since I lived there. I go there (Including SF) mostly in the winter and while it's chilly, it's frequently quite sunny when it's not raining as it was when I lived in the Bay Area and went to the city. I don't know, may the city just likes me and clears up just for me LOL
A Lot of people enjoy SF's predictable weather as it's never too hot nor too cold. How are you defining cold? Seriously?
That is actually the problem. The lack of seasons! Its not that SF is too cold but its more like its never warm. So there is nagging wet cold and foggy cold year-round weather that most people find annoying! How many days do you get here in year when its shorts and T-shirt weather?? Its very rare, unless you are abnormally cold tolerant. And BTW, 50 deg temperature with strong wind is considered cold by most people, which is what summer evenings are like in SF. Having no snow and year round cold weather in my opinion is a strong negative!
Also if you look at mean annual temp, SF is pretty close to east coast cities like NY, Philly, DC (Normal Daily Mean Temperature, Deg F) etc which gets significantly more snow but also warmer summer and nice variation of seasons.
Yes the weather is very predictable and predictably sucks for 80% of the year!
That is actually the problem. The lack of seasons! Its not that SF is too cold but its more like its never warm. So there is nagging wet cold and foggy cold year-round weather that most people find annoying! How many days do you get here in year when its shorts and T-shirt weather?? Its very rare, unless you are abnormally cold tolerant. And BTW, 50 deg temperature with strong wind is considered cold by most people, which is what summer evenings are like in SF. Having no snow and year round cold weather in my opinion is a strong negative!
Also if you look at mean annual temp, SF is pretty close to east coast cities like NY, Philly, DC (Normal Daily Mean Temperature, Deg F) etc which gets significantly more snow but also warmer summer and nice variation of seasons.
Yes the weather is very predictable and predictably sucks for 80% of the year!
Mean temps do not accurate reflect what actually may be happening. It's not stupidly hot in SF nor is it stupidly cold. There was a response from someone from Boston earlier who made it clear that SF cold has nothing on east coast cold.
Mean temps do not accurate reflect what actually may be happening. It's not stupidly hot in SF nor is it stupidly cold. There was a response from someone from Boston earlier who made it clear that SF cold has nothing on east coast cold.
Once again, 50 degree weather with 20 mph+ wind is considered cold by most people. Are you denying this or what? And if that is the evening weather everyday in summer (and rest of the year too) then it is pretty pathetic. I actually liked the weather of Dallas far more. Because its really hot for 3 months, really cold for 1 month and outright gorgeous for rest 8 months. Of course there are people who prefer SF weather but most average human who had the chance to explore the world outside the tiny tourist town of SF would probably agree that SF weather is pretty pathetic!
Once again, 50 degree weather with 20 mph+ wind is considered cold by most people. Are you denying this or what? And if that is the evening weather everyday in summer (and rest of the year too) then it is pretty pathetic. I actually liked the weather of Dallas far more. Because its really hot for 3 months, really cold for 1 month and outright gorgeous for rest 8 months. Of course there are people who prefer SF weather but most average human who had the chance to explore the world outside the tiny tourist town of SF would probably agree that SF weather is pretty pathetic!
I'm denying that you're actually being fair. 50 degrees is almost never a daytime high. In December and January, the average high is around 55-56 degrees. The lows range from the low to mid 40's. That's warmer than 2/3's of the rest of the country at that time of year.
Summer highs are usually between 65 and 75 degrees and varies from day to day with lows in the mid 50's. Not terrible hot. Although sometimes the sea breeze can be a bit much (mostly in the wind tunnels downtown) it's never as cold as you say it is so yes I'm calling BS on what you said.
I'm denying that you're actually being fair. 50 degrees is almost never a daytime high. In December and January, the average high is around 55-56 degrees. The lows range from the low to mid 40's. That's warmer than 2/3's of the rest of the country at that time of year.
Summer highs are usually between 65 and 75 degrees and varies from day to day with lows in the mid 50's. Not terrible hot. Although sometimes the sea breeze can be a bit much (mostly in the wind tunnels downtown) it's never as cold as you say it is so yes I'm calling BS on what you said.
I never said 50 is an average daytime high (although it was the high temp of the day today) but if you ever lived in SF you would know that wind starts to blow from the ocean couple of hours before sunset and cools down the temp very fast. So yes it can be 50 deg @5 PM in summer with very strong winds. So stop selecting facts to make your case.
Summer average highs are nowhere near 75. As a matter of fact it gets above 70 pretty rarely. So here is record for average temp:
As you can see that average high hits 65 only for one month. Of course there are ocassional warm days but the general weather pattern is cold/foggy/wet. FYI, the fog actually can get so thick it feels like rain. You would notice that in western half of the city where the streets and sidewalks can stay damp and wet throughout the year whether its raining or not.
it's never as cold as you say it is so yes I'm calling BS on what you said.
Why dont you respond with verifiable facts (aka reliable links) like I do instead of talking about your fantasy about the weather of place you don't actually live? Are you confusing between SF and SD?
Why dont you respond with verifiable facts (aka reliable links) like I do instead of talking about your fantasy about the weather of place you don't actually live? Are you confusing between SF and SD?
Ok, I can see that you're going to be one of those that's impossible to talk to so I'll let you have this voctory as it seems to mean a lot more to you. You win, I'm done
For the life of me, I can't imagine anyone hating San Francisco. But some of the observations I have read here (and in the original article) do ring true (as such criticism could be found about any city). San Francisco is much more an object of love than hate, but it doesn't hurt it, or any city, to look itself in the mirror).
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America's cities were once about manufacturing jobs and were loaded with people who were rooted to their communities for generations.
Our cities shifted radically in the post-WWII years. Manufacturing died. Suburbs drained population. The shift was on to the Sun Belt.
Some major cities withered and came close to dying in the Rust Belt. Certainly places like Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo come to mind.
Larger, more powerful cities that had a strong white collar component as well as culturally strong institutions, withstood the decline better than the others. They also became part of the concept of "cities as lifestyle", places where critical mass, interesting people, cultural and entertainment possibilities, great restaurants, public and private ammenities became the rule.
Life style became key in places like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston.
But for San Francisco, like Boston, there was a down side that New York and Chicago experienced, but not nearly to as great of an extent.
New York and Chicago could absorb people coming into the city for life style, often the college grads seeking high end jobs. Neither Boston or San Francisco, due to size, could do the same.
Boston, for all its charms and resurgance...
(let's not forget that the first part of the 20th century, long before the Rust Belt decline, had been one of the worst periods of Boston's importance and role in the nation. Boston got its decline out of the way earlier than other major cities because it was in decline earlier. 20th centuryBoston with like St. Louis to a degree...but StL never bounced back)
...Boston comes across today as an overgrown college town. Not necessarily a bad thing, but limiting to a way.
San Francisco, like Boston, morphed in significatn ways. Both cities couldn't withstand the population changes that cities like NY, Chgo, and LA can...and still be themselves.
Small and with real estate at a premium, San Francisco, more so than any other city in the nation, transformed itself to a disneyfied version of its former self. New York managed to keep such bleeding more to a minimum despite Times Square and McDonald's spread rather thickly across the Manhattan street grid.
San Francisco stopped being San Francisco and became a parody of itself. San Francisco today is somewhat more like San Francisco, San Francisco...an invention of the Vegas strip. If SF were a nation, it could fit rather nicely, shrunk down, onto Epcot's world showcase.
I have heard the term "never so real" describe pre-1960 San Francisco, a place apart and a place of its own. Indeed the two great bridges were merely some 30 years old each at this point and they only partially eclipsed SF's delightful issolation.
The Giants came to town in 58 ushered in by the jet age. And SF was never the same. The problems of eastern cities never manifested itself to a great degree in San Francisco before that time. There never was an alabaster city undimmed by human tears, but San Francisco can arguably closer to that ideal than any place else.
SF was a place with its own culture. And own rules. And if it still plays with its own rules today, they are not the tradition rich variety of the city of yore. And those rules came with a chronicler of them, acutally a San Francisco Chronicler in the form of Herb Caen.
Old San Francisco, the one that I said sort of died (or transitioned to unrecognizability) was a city with a port and an Embarcadero that still owed up its names. Chinatown served the tourists who visited (great in number...but a fraction of what they are today) because it was serving itself as a true Chinese community. Fisherman's Wharf existed because Italian fishermen still plied the Pacific for fresh seafood; there was nothing fake about the scene through the windows of Grotto #9 or Tarrantino's; in the 1950s, Disneyland was still only in southern, not northern, California.
The Mission was the blue collar neighborhood of light industries, a kin to its counterparts in the East and Midwest, a time when going green in San Francisco meant attire on St. Patrick's Day. It, like other portions of blue collar SF, had their own feel of girt...and benefitted fromit. Telegraph Hill could sport real artists because price had no squeezed them out. North Beach was beat at a time when America was not, a mecca for a counter culture still far removed from being an American staple. Richmond and Sunset were pure middle class and purely American in the way that they were filled with families with children. Powell and Market didn't need to set up an "E ticket" line for cable car rides. North Beach restaurants were real Italian, not the sanitized version of today. When viewed from across the Golden Gate, from the Marin Headlands, or the Berkeley Hills, the core of San Francisco still had hills in the sense that the scaled skyline followed their contours and manhattanization hadn't compromised America's most fragile urban setting. Cliff House had real seals out there to warrant a view.
Everything changes. It is the only real constant. And that's fine. But San Francisco changed more so than elsewhere by replacing its roots and its reality through transitional into the ultimate life style city.
Kind of ironic when you think about it: the city that did the best job of keeping buildings and neighborhoods in place in a freeway revolt unlike any in the nation, did the worst job of keeping its rooted residents in those homes and neighborhoods, removing the cast, but leaving the stage set in place. With a few bread and circuses like Pier 37 to draw the tourists in to a city that became a characture of itself to serve them.
There may be no freeway barreling down the 19th Avenue corridor or connecting DT SF with the GG, but truth be known, there aren't all that many kids in the neighborhoods surrounding the proposed routes, nor the families they once belonged to either.
Well done, sir. You've summed up my love/hate relationship with San Francisco better than I could ever hope to.
Mean temps do not accurate reflect what actually may be happening. It's not stupidly hot in SF nor is it stupidly cold. There was a response from someone from Boston earlier who made it clear that SF cold has nothing on east coast cold.
Dude, the weather in SF sucks! Everybody knows it.
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