Fleeing San Francisco
They seem to take yearly polls on the question, and the last few years the numbers wanting to leave San Francisco have gone up, up, up:
A poll released Sunday by a local advocacy group showed that 46 percent of Bay Area residents surveyed said they want to move out of the area within the next few years. That number is up from 34 percent in 2016 and 40 percent last year in the same poll.
The reason is cost of living, particularly housing. Oh, there are other reasons, too—for example, the homeless problem has grown, with tent cities in many places and unsanitary conditions. But (if they’re telling the truth) only 14% of respondents cite that as the most important problem. Cost of housing was cited by a whopping 42%. To get some perspective on that, “Bay Area median home prices hit $850,000 in April.”
I’ve been going to San Francisco just about every year since 1970, to visit relatives and friends there. It used to be an absolutely fabulous place to be. The vibe was fun, the restaurants amazing, and the air and views incomparable. The vibe is no longer so fun, and the restaurants not really better than in any large city in the US (partly that the other cities have caught up, and partly that the caliber of restaurants in San Francisco has dropped a notch, IMHO).
The air and the views are still wonderful, but who can afford to live there? Only a small percentage of people with very high-paying jobs, or those who have owned real estate from before the time it became unaffordable and are able to sell it now for a pretty penny.
California is said to be losing people at a rapid rate. According to a different poll, one that involved the entire state:
A statewide poll conducted by UC Berkeley last year showed 56 percent of voters have considered moving due to the housing crisis ”” and 1 in 4 of those residents said they’d leave the state.
I know some of those people. And they haven’t even left their hearts there.
Think about it: you can sell your fairly modest house in the area for a cool million, move somewhere else and live like a king, with less traffic and fewer tent cities. I’m sure it’s very appealing to a lot of current San Francisco residents. And yet I believe the Bay Area will always attract (and even hold) a lot of people, particularly the young.
That’s me! I wondered if I would get hit by terrible regrets and nostalgia after I left. Nope.
I moved to San Francisco in the early 80s. That was one cute cupcake of a town. Lots of jobs, affordable rents and interesting, fun people. Much less traffic. You could jump on the bridges to Berkeley and Marin without getting slammed. A perfect place to be young.
I miss that San Francisco.
Now I’m in Albuquerque. It doesn’t have everything, but now that I’ve settled in, I’m much more relaxed.
Tomorrow I start classes at UNM on a street much like Telegraph in Berkeley (a few homeless but not legions). As a New Mexican senior I will be paying $5 per credit.
They don’t have that in the Bay Area!
There’s also a great relief not to be in California, a state seemingly determined to drive off one of those windy coastal roads into the Pacific, if the San Andreas fault doesn’t get it first.
I have met several refugees from the area, the breaking point for many seems to be the arrival of children.
The flood of homeless may be too new to be a reason to leave. Or maybe it is just easy to adapt and ignore them. I was in Berkeley 12 days ago and was given a tour of some of the tent cities on the drive in from the Oakland airport, so people see it as a significant change. OTOH, pedestrians simply walk around the sleeping bags in the doorways and say no to the pan handlers. So adapting to the change is not that difficult.
There are certain places in the world that possess such innate beauty and charm, that people will try to overlook the depredations wreaked by politics and crowding. San Francisco, Monterey, and parts of SoCal are among them, along with the Amalfi Coast/ Bay of Naples. But, there is a breaking point for the average person. No wonder that those who are not trapped by circumstance, or who are able to live in insulated splendor, leave in significant numbers.
I haven’t visited San Francisco in years. A recent visit to Monterey was almost depressing. I can tolerate SoCal only because I don’t have to commute to work. Pity the poor souls who do. No wonder they are all stressed to the breaking point and beyond.
My sister and her family made the move from a cramped postwar bungalow in Silicon Valley to a very large house on the water in coastal South Carolina for a little bit more money (1000ish sq ft to 5000 sq ft). The public schools where she was in California were practically unusable, most “middle class” people sent their kids to private schools. When I visited her in California, I was astonished at the rinky-dink quality of the libraries in some of the the wealthiest towns in the world (Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto)–they were outclassed by many factors by the libraries I was used to in the suburbs of Detroit, which are very, very good.
It is true that the geography of the San Francisco peninsula is stunningly beautiful and the aggregation of technology talent is amazing, but it is accompanied by a NIMBY mentality that prevents enough high density development, even near the Caltrain stations. It is a wonderful place but they long ago passed anything like a healthy balance of mixed income levels. Manhattan seems to be in the same boat. Amazing, but unrealistic for all but the very wealthy. That’s fine except for the part where the elites who inhabit such Shangri-Las feel the need to impose their central planning on the rest of us.
“… And yet I believe the Bay Area will always attract (and even hold) a lot of people, particularly the young.”
And as long as they have a tent to sleep in and a sidewalk to relieve themselves on they will be happy there.
Seriously, you’re right about the young and the City. It’s just too cool for school when you are of an age. At the same time, it is hard to see how the city, right now, will not continue to decline and become more filthy and degraded than it is. I say that as a person who lived in the City and the Bay Area for nearly ten years for both my university education (such as it was).
The article, which I read before the Bee cut off my access for not paying for their rag, seems to be stuck on the concept that the REASON is expense…. but that is the only acceptable reason they can cite. They are not allowed to notice all the other things that degrade San Francisco.
My brother and his wife could sell their SF real estate, but they would move to Austin. Texas has no income tax. But they love CA too much. Blinders.
California is eliminating its middle class. California now has the highest poverty rate in the U.S. Name a socialistic society with a vital and growing middle class. Gradually, socialism creates feudal societies.
Ace Backwords is my go-to authority on Bay Area homelessness.
He was a late hippie, early punk, Berkeley guy, who had something of a career as an underground cartoonist in the 80s, ended up homeless in the nineties. He still hangs on Telegraph Ave and sleeps somewhere in the Berkeley Hills with a tribe of feral cats.
He keeps an intelligent blog of his thoughts and experiences. Here’s an applicable bit from a recent post:
____________________________________________
The homeless “crisis” is just a part of the housing shortage. In the 60’s there were no homeless in San Francisco. Zero. There were down and outs in residence hotels in skid row, there were flophouses, but everyone was indoors. There were the same exact percentage of drug addicts and mentally ill and so forth back then, it’s just that there were places for them to stay.
Comment by drycamp – April 11, 2018 @ 11:01 pm |
Yep. Exactly what DryCamp said. I’ve been saying this for decades. Now how come almost nobody else gets it?
Comment by Ace Backwords – April 12, 2018 @ 6:41 pm | Reply
https://acidheroes.wordpress.com/2018/04/11/i-few-random-thoughts-on-the-behavioral-aspect-of-the-homeless-issue/
This comment is a test of my setup with neoneocon.
I lived in San Francisco for 14 years and now loath The City. After the WTC attack on 9/11 I slowly came to realize that almost everyone who lives there is either a pacifist progressive or comfortably tolerates that ideology. My 14 years ended in 1986 when I was in a career transition. I now live near Monterey, which has a similar culture, just not as bad. A significant part of the housing demand on prices is because the weather and natural environment are the best in the world. Wonderful, year-round sailing, golf, hiking, biking, windsurfing, etc. are right here and great skiing is only four hours away.
Another great pressure on housing is development restriction, which I support. I don’t want to see Central California become like LA.
I am very fearful of what the future holds for California, politically. I especially fear that Gavin Newsom will become the next governor.
I have some friends who had lived in Bergen County for their working lives. He worked on The Street. They sold their “modest bungalow” for sufficient to build a custom log house with all the bells on a lake in northern Michigan, and, I’m told, lots to spare.
If you can do without the vibe–which natives of SF seem to think is declining–then moving down scale in terms of housing prices is certainly attractive.
Depends on what you like. Small to medium towns in rural areas are sufficient for most folks. You need to be fixated on top end restaurants and…whatever else to feel lost outside, say, Kansas City or Des Moines. Yeah, yeah, I know, those people spend every spare moment in museums. I know.
“pacifist progressive” i.e. someone for which there is nothing worth killing or dying for… which when faced with the barbarian, leaves only flight or surrender to whatever fate awaits. The perfect victim…
The English philosopher John Stuart Mill long ago described the pacifist progressive… “A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.”
I was stationed at NAS Alameda for six years. The Bay area and the City were fabulous then. (1960s) It was very progressive even ion those days, but it was much more live and let live. In later years I was domiciled at SFO (though I lived in Colorado) and spent a lot of time in the Burlingame and San Mateo area with occasional trips into the City. Still enjoyed the place, but did not want to live there. Too progressive, too dirty (even without homelessness), too many less than upright people.
California is a magnificent geographical setting. Superb sea coasts, Mediterranean climate, an agricultural powerhouse in the central; valley, and the magnificent Sierras. What’s not to like? Well, progressive policies of high taxes, intrusive regulation, and too many illegal immigrants to begin.
We intended to retire in So Cal. Moved to Carlsbad about five years before retirement. Two things drove us out – high/increasing taxes and illegal immigrants. The illegals were living in all the arroyos in North San Diego County. They were everywhere and obvious. Most weren’t criminals but I could see the pressure on government services and law enforcement growing. The Border Patrol and ICE were losing the battle and it wasn’t good for the area. We moved on to the People’s Republic of Puget Sound. At the time it was a low tax, geographical wonder of a state. 25 years on and it is morphing into another California – high taxes, stupid regulation, and, yes, illegal immigrants. No place that is geographically attractive is safe from progressives. We now realize we should have moved to Arkansas or Mississippi. 🙁
Unfortunately, too many move to CO and bring all that they hated about CA to CO. CO used to be more live and let live place, but not now. Getting way too “Progressive”.
The Puget Sound area is heading the same way. Really sad as this used to be a great place to live but between the high cost of living and the outrageous invasion of homeless it is getting tough to see a future here.
“California is eliminating its middle class.”
This is the dream of every idealist and ideologue to the Left of Left-of-Center (though some may not quite realize it).
This includes, of course, so-called “progressives”.
It is their program; and ultimately everything they stand for must include this key stepping stone. (Or keystone…for collapse!)
Venezuela has been a particular “success”; but it has precedents in the USSR and every Iron Curtain country, as well as the more “revolutionary” catastrophes in East Asia and Latin America. (To be sure, the Peronist-style right were nothing to emulate.)
I (more than) suspect that this dream was the impetus behind Obama’s economic policies, such as they were; paramount among them “ObamaCare”—the target here being small businesses and the need to hogtie that vast sector of income generation, job creation and social stability—and the reason for a relatively sustained lack of growth, along with less-than-impressive unemployment statistics throughout the eight years of the Obama administration. (Though to be fair, the first several years were encumbered by the burst economic bubble, but still, there should have been incentives for growth; instead there was the opposite.)
California is merely following suit in the “great experiment” of utopia (which really ought to work…it really should; it’s such a great idea!! Let’s keep trying!)
Yes, I left finally, or I left again let’s say. I had lived there since 1977, so my entire adult life, plus 2.5 years as a child. It is really hard to leave a place you’ve lived that long. I don’t drive, like many San Franciscans and that is a challenge. Of course, before I left, I was living in Richmond, in the hills there and not SF proper and not driving there was difficult already. Neo you probably remember all this. At any rate, I am not sure I can ever live there again and may just settle for long visits. The main reason is the cost of housing, and everything else is also more expensive. Also, every time I go back BART is smellier downtown and the smell of human excrement and urine is spreading from Civic Center to the Montgomery Street BART station which is in the heart of the financial district. I used to have the dry heaves going to work in the morning when I lived in the city last, in 2014 before moving to Richmond across the Bay. Still I miss it, but I don’t miss the politics, the hellish prices and housing costs, or the stench — which is very disturbing. The tents of homeless that are spreading…
So, it is not the city I landed in and not even as livable as it was in 2009. I am honestly feeling unmoored and not sure where to live but I am in Colorado now. It is also getting expensive though it doesn’t compare.
The left has ruined that city. Beware of it happening in other places.
I so miss the weather, and the scenery. But then I read an article about the upcoming water rationing, or some nonsense from Kamala Harris, or Gavin Newsom, and realize I got out in time. But too many other escapees bring their ruinous progressivism with them. They’re ruining Idaho…
I didn’t realize how brainwashed I’d become until I left. It took me a few years to recover. I think a lot of escapees don’t.
Rent Control is Evil.
I live in the Carson Valley, 45 miles south of Reno, which has been a “receiver area” for California refugees for at least 25 years.
Minden was an agricultural town (cattle, mostly) since it’s founding at the beginning of the last century, and is 25 minutes’ drive from Lake Tahoe and outstanding skiing and other outdoor sports. California yuppies are happy to move here, especially when they discover that the million dollars they got for an 800 square foot bungalow in Palo Alto will buy them 15 acres and allow them to build a 5,000 square foot baronial estate.
The trouble is, as Colorado and Idaho are finding out, transplanted Californians, who say they are fleeing destructive social and economic policies, bring a lite version of that life with them. So we all bemoan what we are becoming (with our bumper stickers “I don’t care HOW they do it in California”), but we are losing the fight in the long term.
The alternative, of course, is to say “well I’ve got mine, so the rest of you Californians stay out.” There’s a certain inconsistency there.
I didn’t move here to escape Governor Brown — I came from Ohio for the world-class soaring here. So I feel a little more entitled to stay “stay out.” Just a little.
But the point I wanted to make is that the Bay Area’s spectacular scenery and lifestyle has been irreversibly altered by liberal politics, and the same thing is happening now in all the places Californians are moving to. Glenn Reynolds suggests we conservatives set up a “welcome wagon” with flyers we give to newcomers, essentially saying “don’t do to our valley what you are escaping from.” It’s a good idea, but we don’t do it. Sloth, I guess.
My ultimate question is, can the liberal playbook ever be reversed? The USA has sort of done this in its move from Obama to Trump, but the future probably holds more Obamas, and once the huddled masses taste free goodies, how likely are they to vote for someone who wants to take that away?
Why is Progressivism the only evil that economic migrants from California do not leave behind?
It made California an unlivable place for them, but they desire and seek to institute the same in their new refuges from California’s political and economic insanity.
Progressivism is a contagious disease, It gets passed on by mimetic contagion.
The only treatment is isolation and a sentence of lifelong self-sufficiency plus mandated, though self-selected, charity. The Mormons are a good example.
And church-going devotion to Christianity is an unavoidable must. Judaism regrettably does not count since >75% of Jews are Progressives, irreversibly. They could all be Californians!
After living in California for nearly a half century (28 years in Bay Area, 22 years in LA), I moved east ten years ago. The housing premium was 5-1: what would cost a $1,000,000 on the west side of LA could be had for $200,000. I miss the scenery–there isn’t a more beautiful place on earth–but I don’t miss the traffic, the crowds, and the relentless governmental money-grubbing, as illustrated by Bill Whittle in this brief video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frsF0EpLLjU
Ask them if they don’t realize what they were fleeing is the product of them being themselves.
Story I’ve told before and it may differ slightly from other tellings. : Late 1980’s just getting started. Met a woman in a business I was working at. She was a main office secretary and a pleasant, social gospel/justice Episcopalian; very active back in the 1960’s and 70’s movements.
For those familiar with the Detroit area, she lived in the city just across from Northland; somewhat south of 8 mile road. It was an area where, for some reason a large number of socially progressive and active Detroiters lived; generally in newer style houses that were built in the late 1940s and early 50’s, when there was still room to build suburban style houses in the city.
Eventually she got what she had been campaigning for. And for a while she attempted to live it. But with the persecution of her kids and the thefts and so forth she decamped northwest to the safety of a redneck municipal enclave.
She related it all in the most unreflected and unselfconscious manner imaginable. Like it was just something that happened, and not something related to cause and effect.
After she told me this story I asked her why she didn’t stay on. “Because the kids, and the bicycles and …”
She liked me, and helped me with office politics and warnings and I liked her as a person. So I went as easy as I could while still probing for the moral core of her “argument”.
‘But isn’t that what you wanted? Should you not have lived what you created?’
What I remember is that she just looked silently at me as if I asked either a question her mind could not process, or I had mentioned something so intimate and intrusive and embarrassing, that not even outrage would have been an appropriate reply. I did not press it anymore. She was a slight, short woman well into her sixties, and what could I do? Punch her in the face for breathtaking hypocrisy? Grab her by the throat and demand a coherent answer?
But if it had been her husband telling me this, (he had died) I would have pressed the issue. Hard. I would have asked why he refused to stand the ground he had himself staked out. And I would have asked him what moral claim he imagined he had on the civility of those to whom he had fled.
But it never quite works out that way.
Californio (native). Moved in 2011 to Spokane (we considered Coeur d’Alene and Sandpoint in ID, but WA has no state income tax …still working for a living – I’ll never quit lol – so that was important). We won’t return. We haven’t looked back. We’re home.
…our decision was made during a pleasant late summer evening’s post-barbeque chat sipping beers on the patio, when we concluded that the [socio-political] problem in California wasn’t the idiot politicians, but was rather the idiot voters who kept electing them.
Voters. Sigh. What’cha gonna do about thirty million implacably moronic know-nothing voters.
The state was never going to recover its political sanity. The 1960’s were never going to return. There was no point to struggle for change; an effective swing of the pendulum was never going to come in our (my, at least) remaining productive lifetime.
We researched a bit, pondered a bit, made a brief visit to Spokane (liked what we saw and heard), added up the costs …and some months later, said our final goodbyes and packed up our lives into a huge rental truck+Jeep+trailers caravan …and at 60 escaped the political insanity that was the root of the fiscal irresponsibility of the Golden State.
Starting anew, like teenagers. Well, almost lol.
Crazy stuff.
Looking back, now, we should have moved a decade earlier. At least lol. Regardless, we’ve prospered.
Never to return.