Where to live in the Bay Area (San Francisco, Oakland: houses, movie theater)

[jyore]

I'm graduating college soon and will be potentially taking a job out in San Francisco and will have to move cross country. Since the move is a pretty big thing to consider, I was trying to get an idea of good places to look into for residence.

The main considerations for me are safety, commute, and easy access to general stores and activity. I like the type of area I live currently where there are residential areas around a center that has a Target, publix grocery, movie theater, restaurants, and other shopping, which is within walking distance. There is a community shuttle that takes you to main public transits making travel to the airport and other areas of the city easy to get to. The commute to my current job is around half an hour.

What places should I look into? The job would be pretty much downtown
San Francisco. Public transit to and from work wouldn't be completely out of the question so long as it isn't too long of a ride and there is a reasonable way to get to and from the office.

Thank you for your input!

[mayorhaggar]

If you're sure you're working in downtown SF, the best public transit options are from the East Bay on BART or from within SF on Muni. Marin is expensive and your only options are driving, buses or ferries, all of which aren't really super convenient. The Peninsula isn't great because Caltrain drops you off over a mile from where most offices are, so that adds more time to your commute, you can take Muni from the Caltrain terminal up to Market Street but that adds more cost to your commute and Muni can be pretty unreliable. You can take BART in San Mateo County to downtown SF but most of the areas in SM Co. where BART runs through are foggy and kind of dumpy. Millbrae might be alright though but the trains don't run very often from there compared with from Daly City or the East Bay.

So yeah SF would be good but it's not for everyone, you could look into the East Bay which has a pretty wide variety of different cities with good BART access. If you want a denser place you could check out the nice parts of Oakland and Berkeley. If you want more suburban and are ok with way hotter weather, maybe look into Walnut Creek.

[jyore]

Thanks for the reply. I checked the work location and it looks like there is a BART station about 0.3mi away, and a BART bus stop even closer than that. That short of a walk or bike ride would be no problem at all. So living somewhere close to BART could make sense.

[mayorhaggar]

Not sure what you mean by "BART bus stop"...anyway, keep in mind that you can't take *regular* bikes on BART into SF. You can take folding bikes onto BART but those are well over $1000.

If you want to bike part-way to work then Caltrain could turn out to be useful since it has a bike car on every train. That way you could look at some places on the Peninsula like Millbrae, San Mateo etc. Get off at 4th and King in SF and it would be a pretty quick ride to your office.

Question is whether you'd have somewhere to park your bike at work, you definitely wouldn't want to leave it on the sidewalk no matter how well locked up it was, you want a secure place to keep it. Also it rains quite a lot in the winter here which makes biking rather more miserable.

[sfbayarea]

Why not live in SF and have the full on experience? I lived there out of college, moved from the East Coast. Was excellent, and really one that must be experienced while you're young.

Benefits: No commute, everything you need within walking distance, good public transpo, nice social scene - everything from coffee houses to bars to movies to live theater/opera - - amazing food/restaurants at all price levels...

The east bay amounts to suburbia.