I have to date visited San Francisco exactly once, in 2006. (I have a friend, a former Penn grad student who grew up in West Chester, who lives there. A cousin and a couple I know live in Oakland, and I stayed with the couple in their lovely 1940s rancher high in the Oakland hills for two nights and with my cousin at her apartment in the flats for two.)
I thoroughly enjoyed my visit, which was tacked onto a trip to Seattle to visit my brother and just-born niece. But after I got back, I told my friends that if I were told I had to choose between spending the rest of my life in San Francisco and spending it in Seattle, I'd spend it in Seattle.
San Francisco is gorgeous, and there is no more spectacularly situated city in the United States. (Wait: Pittsburgh gives San Francisco a run for its money in that department.) But I found San Franciscans, or the few I met, off-putting, nice though they were.
It struck me that they were living in some sort of fantasyland and had an overinflated sense of their city's importance and virtues.
The lead headline in the
San Francisco Chronicle the day I spent entirely in the city read: "S.F. officials move to stem African-American exodus."
City Hall was worried because the African-American share of the city's population had fallen by half - from 13 percent of the total to 6. And the ones who were leaving were the ones with money: they were heading across the Bay to Oakland.
Later that night, I popped into a bar in the Castro and wound up talking with a twentysomething young man who had recently moved there from Iowa. (Don't quote me, but I think this is where most young white gay San Franciscans come from.)
He told me he loved living there. When I asked him why, he replied, "It's so lively, it's so diverse..."
And as he went on after that, I thought to myself, "Yeah, and all the black folks are over there, in Oakland."
So are most of the poor folks. I get that in SF, "minority" means either Hispanic or Asian, but that makes the city as much of a statistical outlier as its median household income, which is on par with that of Fairfield County, Conn., home to many of New York City's most affluent suburbs.
And it hit me: I was in an affluent suburb full of self-satisfied people - the source of the
"giant cloud of smug" that threatened "South Park" in that one episode that made fun of San Francisco and San Franciscans. It just happened to have the trappings of a large city.
San Francisco streets may have less of the kind of litter you throw in trash cans than Philadelphia, but I found more of the chronically homeless - human litter, if you will - up and down Market Street than I see on the streets and in the subway concourses of Philadelphia. (I recently ran across a Tweet in which someone said that they avoid riding BART because they run across human feces on the trains too often. That's not to say I've never encountered it in SEPTA's rapid transit system, but I've never run across it on a train yet.)
Like Manhattan, San Francisco is one of those cities where only the very rich and the very poor can afford to live - the latter thanks to subsidies. People like me, and that Penn-grad friend of mine once he lost his job in pharma, find living there difficult.
I suspect the San Franciscan who started this thread will be startled to discover that there exists someone out there who is not totally enthralled by "America's favorite city." (I think most New Yorkers probably do know that many do not regard the true outlier among American metropolises with (quoting myself in
a Quora answer to a question about rivalry among the four biggest Northeast metropolises) "the slack-jawed awe they feel it deserves."
(And I should note at this point that more people move between New York and Philadelphia than between any two other American metropolises — and for about 25 years now, the flow has been net towards Philadelphia, consisting mainly of Brooklynites looking for big-city living at a price they can still afford.)
I also said in that answer that because Philadelphia knows loss on a scale none of these other cities have experienced, it may well be the only city of the four that truly has its head screwed on straight. Add San Francisco to that and make it "of the five." (And yes, there was that earthquake in 1906. I was referring to status and influence.) Yes, it has a high poverty rate. Yes, it's an emerging global city, not an established one. Yes, crime - which had fallen to levels not seen in some 30 years during the previous mayor's term in office - is back on the upswing, or at least violent crime is, and that has many of us here worried that it will blunt the momentum this city has had since 1987, when the completion of the first skyscraper taller than City Hall gave the city permission to build a real skyline. But this city isn't overrated - it's still underrated, and nobody underrates it more than the locals.
I'll end this post with the same song lyric I said captures the Philly
addytood almost perfectly in that Quora answer. Eagles linebacker Jason Kelce (who has a brother who plays for the 49ers) led hundreds of thousands of cheering Iggles fans in it after the Birds won their first NFL championship since 1960 three years ago:
"We're from Philly. F**kin' Philly. No one likes us. We don't care."
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