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Definitely disagree here. I've lived in SF for my whole life, and everyone I've ever known considers the Financial District as being part of downtown. Here's what I consider "downtown SF":
the Financial District
Union Square
Civic Center
the Tenderloin
the south/east sides of Nob Hill
part of Chinatown (around Jackson square)
large chunks of SOMA (Moscone Center, southern financial district, Rincon hill, and the area along Mission and Howard streets from south Van Ness to Moscone Center)
I've heard more than a few people call south beach/mission bay "downtown SF" too in recent years (such as every baseball announcer lol), and I can see why they do...it's a busy area with some highrises and is right next to the city's skyscraper core, so it must be downtown! But I think many people from SF wouldn't agree that it's part of downtown at this point. Maybe in a decade I could see more people considering it downtown, once all the new highrise construction down there and running up 4th street to moscone center is done. Of course I've also heard other people claim that the entire northeast corner of SF is "downtown", and others that claim that only the financial district is "downtown", both of which sound crazy to me.
This is true to an extent, but kind of inaccurate. Yeah the city of SF makes tons of money and there are some ultra wealthy neighborhoods and a relatively high average income (remember that SF has high pay due to the ultra high cost of housing though), but some of the poorest parts of the Bay Area are also in SF: the Tenderloin, Chinatown, parts of the Mission, the public housing projects, etc (SF has 100,000 people below the federal poverty line, and another 100,000 just above it), which are certainly poorer than the vast majority of what you'll find in SF's suburbs, let alone the average income of entire suburbs. Some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the Bay Area are in SF too of course (Pacific Heights, Nob Hill, Sea Cliff, St. Francis Wood, etc), but looking at statistics for entire cities, SF is surpassed by many of its suburbs, sometimes by a huge amount (such as Atherton, Woodside, Palo Alto, Hilsborough, etc). Also, I'd say the majority of the suburbs around the bay area are solidly middle class (lower to upper), with plenty of poorer areas and very affluent areas to go along with it. Don't get me wrong, there's a huge amount of wealth around here, but I feel like a lot of people get an exaggerated idea of how affluent SF/The Bay Area is. I guess it makes sense that so many people have that image of SF when there's so much extra media coverage in recent years about the growing tech sector, silicon valley start up millionaires, our Google overlords, the construction boom (which is of course mostly luxury housing and downtown office space), insane housing prices, gentrification, etc. Not to mention it already was stereotyped by many people as a wealthy tourist/yuppie/hipster town before the recent tech boom.
Didn't say I agreed with that assessment, just that I've heard it. Mostly from people who work there but don't actually live there. I worked for a bit at the Google campus in the FD.
I'm willing to bet a non-North America, non-European city will never make the top, simply because most people here have never been to China, Japan, or any other country outside Europe or North America for that matter. This is more a list of most-visited-by-Americans downtowns in the world.
Madrid is pretty wonderful. There are quite a few cities whose downtowns aren't included in this poll that in most ways are much better than several of the cities which were included.
This sprawls over a large area, this is not just few blocks.
It takes almost one hour to walk from the first to the last video and both place are not at the limits of the center.
Obviously, it is not everywhere as busy as these streets in Central Paris but the density is the same and everywhere it is full of shops, restaurants, with many activities, jobs, inhabitants.
Note that Central Paris sprawls on both side the Seine river.
I did mostly show large street but there are also many small streets.
Every of those pictures are taken in different districts and different arrondissements. DSC90179b by Minato ku, on Flickr
So if we are to summarize both the most inclusive and least inclusive definitions of "downtown" for the four leading international cities:
London: Central London [West End]
NYC: Manhattan south of 59th street [Midtown]
Paris: Central Paris as defined above [8th arondissment?]
Tokyo: ??? [Shibuya?]
Last edited by MissionIMPOSSIBRU; 01-27-2015 at 09:10 AM..
Reason: Fixed Twitter Link
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