As an European, I've never understand how is that possible that South Bay is such a bad place to live. Everything interesting like night life, public transport even groceries and restaurants are all either non-existent or so far away that you always have to drive. No wonder everyone wants to live in SF because there's nothing to do in the South Bay. What is the problem really? There's a lot of money in there, lots of potential customers, good geographical conditions, creativity and yet it's so badly planned and organized. This year I moved to London and there are lots of things to do in virtually every district. Public transport is amazing compared to the Bay area and you don't even need to own a car. That's completely impossible in the Valley and I have no idea why isn't there someone who tries to change that.
Everything interesting like night life, public transport even groceries and restaurants are all either non-existent or so far away that you always have to drive.
Nightlife, public transportation, grocery stores and restaurants are not non-existent in the Peninsula and South Bay. And if you live in one of the downtown areas, most of which are clean, safe and vibrant, all of these things are accessible by foot. Rents in these downtown areas are generally no more expensive than rents for comparable housing in desirable neighborhoods in San Francisco, and in many cases, the rents are meaningfully lower.
This said, it's worth considering that a lot of people prefer not to live in a dense, urban environment. One of the most attractive things about the greater Bay Area is that it offers different kinds of environments for different lifestyles within, by US standards, a relatively small geographic area, so there's something for just about everyone. What's wrong with that?
Well, maybe I've lived there for the period of time that has been simply too short to judge, but after being raised in an urban/suburban environment in Europe (Warsaw, Poland to be specific) it just felt like there's nothing to do in the Bay Area without a car. And believe me, Warsaw is certainly not the most exciting place in Europe. :) Maybe that was because of cultural shift I've experienced, but the fact is that distances are way larger than here in Europe. Yes, you have a relatively good network of bike lanes compared to for example Warsaw, but the distances between the places where you sleep and where you can spend time nicely (restaurants, pubs etc.) make it way harder to get there on the bike. It's not a big deal if there's a good public transport that gets you from point A to B quickly, but there hardly is any public transport in the cities like Santa Clara, Sunnyvale or even Mountain View. And there usually is just one main street where you can feel a bit of the city life and vast areas around where people just sleep or work. I don't question those cities are safe or that you can live in a more attractive neighborhood. I have also appreciated that those places are clean and close to the nature, but I've found myself feeling bad that I can't just cross the street and buy some food for the breakfast or cross another street and grab some coffee/beer/whatever with my friends. I guess this is because of cultural difference between America and Europe, set of things you're accustomed to, but I know quite a few people in London or London's sattelite cities who moved there from SF Bay Area and feel exactly the same: suddenly there's so much to do and everything is so much closer! Even when I visit my parents house on Warsaw's suburbs I feel I can get everywhere I want way faster than in for example Santa Clara.
It's not a "bad" place to live, it's simply suburban, thus younger people tend to prefer SF.
How would you "change" it? It's just not dense enough to support enough grocery stores/restaurants that everyone could walk everywhere. There are small downtown areas of each city where that may be possible but those areas are going to be expensive.
How would you "change" it? It's just not dense enough to support enough grocery stores/restaurants that everyone could walk everywhere.
Given the absurd cost of housing in the bay area (http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/11/san_francisco...), you'd generally just reduce or eliminate height restrictions, minimum building setbacks, and parking requirements. At that point developers will build structures that increase density and support grocery stores / restaurants.
Well I'd argue that suburban areas in Europe are sometimes even less dense, yet still there's much more places to go to. Maybe "bad" is a "bad" word here, but I think this is just a matter of urban planning. If you build a four-lane highway instead of one-lane street it discourages people from walking. Have there been a better public transport like buses, trams or subway, people wouldn't drive so much either. If they have to drive anyway, because there's no another option, they can drive further and thus don't care if the place they are going to is 5 miles away or 10. I guess the cities would have to make the first step and plan the new neighborhoods as more dense, more urban environments. Housing developers usually only care about earning money, so if it's cheaper to build everything the same way as before they'll do it no matter what. And people cannot even oppose it, because rents/house prices are already stellar in the Bay Area compared to other places even in the US. This makes it a vicious circle.
It isn't going to take "someone" – it is going to take a large cultural shift.
Out of the top 10 largest cities in the US only three of them are livable without a car - NY, Philadelphia and Chicago. (San Francisco is not in the top 10 for size)
Real estate developers like to build cheap and fast. Urban planners do what the book tells them. Public transportation is politically unpopular. And American's love, just love, their cars – don't do anything to get in the way (bike lanes, dedicated bus lanes, congestion pricing).
I do think that younger American's are more urban and are looking for a change. So we shall see what the future offers.
I live in the Chicago suburbs. The CTA ("The El" and the bus lines) and the Metra (light rail to the suburbs) are just barely adequate to be called public transportation. I'm in SF often, and would say its easier to get around SF without a car than Chicago.
Just my two cents. Demo: 30, male, owns a car but hates it.
EDIT: Our bike lanes are coming along very well in downtown Chicago, and almost everyone loves the new Divvy bike sharing program.
Which suburb? There are great suburbs (Evanston, Oak Park) and there are awful ones (Plainfield, Schaumburg).
Virtually nobody in our (sizable) office drives to work besides me, and I really have no excuse, since I'm a short walk from the Green Line. Public transportation is spotty in the suburbs, but in terms of coverage (both in space and time) the actual city of Chicago's system is among the best in the country. Is New York's better? Yes. But New York might be the only US city that can easily make that claim.
There is no comparison to be made between Chicago and San Francisco, or between Chicago Metro and SFBA.
I lived in Chicago for three years without a car. In terms of getting around downtown, the El is fine. METRA is far better for getting in from the suburbs than CalTrain.
I like how the labels obscure the fact that BART just cuts a line through the city of San Francisco. Also funny is how the legend at the bottom of the map blots out the parts of south bay where everything actually is.
Note also that the Chicago map is just a route map, and bears little relation to the geography of Chicago.
Barely adequate? There are on the order of 200 metra stations radiating out from two major and two minor downtown stations. On the north line, folks commute from Kenosha. Because of the line into Indiana, some folks have a very short commute.
I have worked downtown for the last four years, and only drive to Montana.
Unclear to me what more than adequate might look like.
Because engineers move down to the south bay to start their families. The reason why is SF's public schools are some of the worse in the entire nation, and private schools + mortgage is way more money down the drain than just a mortgage in the peninsula. If public schools were replaced with a voucher subsidy system, you would probably see more families up in SF, the city of singles.
Also being a city of singles and young people, it creates it's own sort of gravity well and you get this magnetic alignment effect. You get married families in the south bay, leading to boring suburbia and the young in SF, leading to all of the fun things up there.
Among the good schools, are really horrible schools. You put your top 3 choices, and there is a good chance you wont get any of those choices and be placed in a bad school. You get expectations like 5 year olds being expected to take muni for 50 minutes one way.
This all has come from conversations with people who grew up in the bay area, so the 50 minutes on muni might be different now from their childhood, but the top 3 school choice thing came from a coworker today talking about their friend's experience with their kids.
I recently went through the process for my kid, who is currently attending elementary school in SF. You list seven schools in order of preference. If you are not assigned any of the schools, then yes, you will get an assignment that wasn't on your list, and (because nobody requested it), it usually isn't a good one.
Your odds of getting something on your list depends of course in large part on the list. SF has a number of what we call "trophy" schools, as well as a number of highly in demand language immersion programs (Mandarin, Spanish, etc). If you list only those programs, your odds of getting skunked are high. Some people do this strategically, as people who went 0/7 on their list have a higher priority on wait lists than people who got one of their choices. They figure if they get one, great, if not, they have a priority position on the wait list. Other people play it a bit safer.
My approach was to avoid the trophy schools and focus on very good schools below the radar. In my opinion, there are plenty of very good schools in this range, but this is a matter of opinion. Here's the greatschools list.
I did get one of the schools on my list. That's partly luck, and partly going in with realistic expectations (even my first choice was only an 8/10, I didn't go for the 9's or 10's). It is absolutely possible to create a balanced list with a good chance of an assignment and still get skunked, it's just less likely.
There's good and bad in the ranked choice system. San Franciscans are very split on it (a recent non-binding vote to make district residence the determining factor in school assignments, prop H, actually failed by a few hundred votes, as close to a 50-50 split as you'll ever see in an election).
I think the reason article summed up the benefits from a libertarian point of view pretty well, so I won't expand on it here.
You have to understand that after the 1950s in the United States, everyone thought cars were awesome. They allowed you to go farther than anywhere else before and they allowed a greater mobility in general than ever before. Combined with the dream of having a house and a yard, this allowed for sprawl.
So cities were planned around this. San Francisco itself even had a boom where it tried to utilize cars as much as possible. There were either freeways or plan to build more freeways cutting through the city to get to places. There was going to be a 2nd Bay Bridge to San Leandro, why? Because they wanted more traffic to get into the city and they didn't trust his new fangled thing called BART (the train system for those of you who don't know it).
I don't know what the situation was in England or other European countries when cars started taking off but I imagine there had to be something similar, maybe just not with the same momentum as the United States.
There certainly were some attempts to introduce more cars to the city centers in Europe, tram lines used to be closed etc. but thankfully a lot of streets were too narrow to handle an ever-increasing traffic so they just had to give up. Not to mention that a good network of public transport has already been there, so people have always been accustomed to it. Nowadays most of my friends here don't use their cars in the cities, because it's way faster to get everywhere by bus/subway/tram or even bike.
Comments
As an European, I've never understand how is that possible that South Bay is such a bad place to live. Everything interesting like night life, public transport even groceries and restaurants are all either non-existent or so far away that you always have to drive. No wonder everyone wants to live in SF because there's nothing to do in the South Bay. What is the problem really? There's a lot of money in there, lots of potential customers, good geographical conditions, creativity and yet it's so badly planned and organized. This year I moved to London and there are lots of things to do in virtually every district. Public transport is amazing compared to the Bay area and you don't even need to own a car. That's completely impossible in the Valley and I have no idea why isn't there someone who tries to change that.
Nightlife, public transportation, grocery stores and restaurants are not non-existent in the Peninsula and South Bay. And if you live in one of the downtown areas, most of which are clean, safe and vibrant, all of these things are accessible by foot. Rents in these downtown areas are generally no more expensive than rents for comparable housing in desirable neighborhoods in San Francisco, and in many cases, the rents are meaningfully lower.
This said, it's worth considering that a lot of people prefer not to live in a dense, urban environment. One of the most attractive things about the greater Bay Area is that it offers different kinds of environments for different lifestyles within, by US standards, a relatively small geographic area, so there's something for just about everyone. What's wrong with that?
Well, maybe I've lived there for the period of time that has been simply too short to judge, but after being raised in an urban/suburban environment in Europe (Warsaw, Poland to be specific) it just felt like there's nothing to do in the Bay Area without a car. And believe me, Warsaw is certainly not the most exciting place in Europe. :) Maybe that was because of cultural shift I've experienced, but the fact is that distances are way larger than here in Europe. Yes, you have a relatively good network of bike lanes compared to for example Warsaw, but the distances between the places where you sleep and where you can spend time nicely (restaurants, pubs etc.) make it way harder to get there on the bike. It's not a big deal if there's a good public transport that gets you from point A to B quickly, but there hardly is any public transport in the cities like Santa Clara, Sunnyvale or even Mountain View. And there usually is just one main street where you can feel a bit of the city life and vast areas around where people just sleep or work. I don't question those cities are safe or that you can live in a more attractive neighborhood. I have also appreciated that those places are clean and close to the nature, but I've found myself feeling bad that I can't just cross the street and buy some food for the breakfast or cross another street and grab some coffee/beer/whatever with my friends. I guess this is because of cultural difference between America and Europe, set of things you're accustomed to, but I know quite a few people in London or London's sattelite cities who moved there from SF Bay Area and feel exactly the same: suddenly there's so much to do and everything is so much closer! Even when I visit my parents house on Warsaw's suburbs I feel I can get everywhere I want way faster than in for example Santa Clara.
It's not a "bad" place to live, it's simply suburban, thus younger people tend to prefer SF.
How would you "change" it? It's just not dense enough to support enough grocery stores/restaurants that everyone could walk everywhere. There are small downtown areas of each city where that may be possible but those areas are going to be expensive.
How would you "change" it? It's just not dense enough to support enough grocery stores/restaurants that everyone could walk everywhere.
Given the absurd cost of housing in the bay area (http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/11/san_francisco...), you'd generally just reduce or eliminate height restrictions, minimum building setbacks, and parking requirements. At that point developers will build structures that increase density and support grocery stores / restaurants.
Well I'd argue that suburban areas in Europe are sometimes even less dense, yet still there's much more places to go to. Maybe "bad" is a "bad" word here, but I think this is just a matter of urban planning. If you build a four-lane highway instead of one-lane street it discourages people from walking. Have there been a better public transport like buses, trams or subway, people wouldn't drive so much either. If they have to drive anyway, because there's no another option, they can drive further and thus don't care if the place they are going to is 5 miles away or 10. I guess the cities would have to make the first step and plan the new neighborhoods as more dense, more urban environments. Housing developers usually only care about earning money, so if it's cheaper to build everything the same way as before they'll do it no matter what. And people cannot even oppose it, because rents/house prices are already stellar in the Bay Area compared to other places even in the US. This makes it a vicious circle.
It isn't going to take "someone" – it is going to take a large cultural shift.
Out of the top 10 largest cities in the US only three of them are livable without a car - NY, Philadelphia and Chicago. (San Francisco is not in the top 10 for size)
Real estate developers like to build cheap and fast. Urban planners do what the book tells them. Public transportation is politically unpopular. And American's love, just love, their cars – don't do anything to get in the way (bike lanes, dedicated bus lanes, congestion pricing).
I do think that younger American's are more urban and are looking for a change. So we shall see what the future offers.
I live in the Chicago suburbs. The CTA ("The El" and the bus lines) and the Metra (light rail to the suburbs) are just barely adequate to be called public transportation. I'm in SF often, and would say its easier to get around SF without a car than Chicago.
Just my two cents. Demo: 30, male, owns a car but hates it.
EDIT: Our bike lanes are coming along very well in downtown Chicago, and almost everyone loves the new Divvy bike sharing program.
Which suburb? There are great suburbs (Evanston, Oak Park) and there are awful ones (Plainfield, Schaumburg).
Virtually nobody in our (sizable) office drives to work besides me, and I really have no excuse, since I'm a short walk from the Green Line. Public transportation is spotty in the suburbs, but in terms of coverage (both in space and time) the actual city of Chicago's system is among the best in the country. Is New York's better? Yes. But New York might be the only US city that can easily make that claim.
There is no comparison to be made between Chicago and San Francisco, or between Chicago Metro and SFBA.
I lived in Chicago for three years without a car. In terms of getting around downtown, the El is fine. METRA is far better for getting in from the suburbs than CalTrain.
I think its all relative. I compare Chicago mass transit to London, Tokyo, and New York. Hard to compete with those cities.
Sure, but you were comparing it to San Francisco.
I forgot to add SF to that list. I admit most of time was on the BART and not on CalTrain.
There is no way SF compares with New York, London or Tokyo.
This is the BART map: http://sf.metblogs.com/archives/images/2008/02/big_bart_map....
This is the El map: http://sites.williams.edu/thea228/files/2011/09/Chicago-El.j....
This is the New York subway map: http://images.nycsubway.org/maps/calcagno-2010-06-28c.gif
There is no contest.
I like how the labels obscure the fact that BART just cuts a line through the city of San Francisco. Also funny is how the legend at the bottom of the map blots out the parts of south bay where everything actually is.
Note also that the Chicago map is just a route map, and bears little relation to the geography of Chicago.
Barely adequate? There are on the order of 200 metra stations radiating out from two major and two minor downtown stations. On the north line, folks commute from Kenosha. Because of the line into Indiana, some folks have a very short commute.
I have worked downtown for the last four years, and only drive to Montana.
Unclear to me what more than adequate might look like.
Because engineers move down to the south bay to start their families. The reason why is SF's public schools are some of the worse in the entire nation, and private schools + mortgage is way more money down the drain than just a mortgage in the peninsula. If public schools were replaced with a voucher subsidy system, you would probably see more families up in SF, the city of singles.
Also being a city of singles and young people, it creates it's own sort of gravity well and you get this magnetic alignment effect. You get married families in the south bay, leading to boring suburbia and the young in SF, leading to all of the fun things up there.
For an urban school district, San Francisco isn't that bad.
http://www.greatschools.org/find-a-school/moving/slideshows/...
Amusingly (considering how unlikely SF is to implement libertarian ideas), reason magazine kind of liked SF's approach
http://reason.com/archives/2006/04/01/the-agony-of-american-...
Among the good schools, are really horrible schools. You put your top 3 choices, and there is a good chance you wont get any of those choices and be placed in a bad school. You get expectations like 5 year olds being expected to take muni for 50 minutes one way.
This all has come from conversations with people who grew up in the bay area, so the 50 minutes on muni might be different now from their childhood, but the top 3 school choice thing came from a coworker today talking about their friend's experience with their kids.
I recently went through the process for my kid, who is currently attending elementary school in SF. You list seven schools in order of preference. If you are not assigned any of the schools, then yes, you will get an assignment that wasn't on your list, and (because nobody requested it), it usually isn't a good one.
Your odds of getting something on your list depends of course in large part on the list. SF has a number of what we call "trophy" schools, as well as a number of highly in demand language immersion programs (Mandarin, Spanish, etc). If you list only those programs, your odds of getting skunked are high. Some people do this strategically, as people who went 0/7 on their list have a higher priority on wait lists than people who got one of their choices. They figure if they get one, great, if not, they have a priority position on the wait list. Other people play it a bit safer.
My approach was to avoid the trophy schools and focus on very good schools below the radar. In my opinion, there are plenty of very good schools in this range, but this is a matter of opinion. Here's the greatschools list.
http://www.greatschools.org/california/san-francisco/schools...
I did get one of the schools on my list. That's partly luck, and partly going in with realistic expectations (even my first choice was only an 8/10, I didn't go for the 9's or 10's). It is absolutely possible to create a balanced list with a good chance of an assignment and still get skunked, it's just less likely.
There's good and bad in the ranked choice system. San Franciscans are very split on it (a recent non-binding vote to make district residence the determining factor in school assignments, prop H, actually failed by a few hundred votes, as close to a 50-50 split as you'll ever see in an election).
I think the reason article summed up the benefits from a libertarian point of view pretty well, so I won't expand on it here.
You have to understand that after the 1950s in the United States, everyone thought cars were awesome. They allowed you to go farther than anywhere else before and they allowed a greater mobility in general than ever before. Combined with the dream of having a house and a yard, this allowed for sprawl.
So cities were planned around this. San Francisco itself even had a boom where it tried to utilize cars as much as possible. There were either freeways or plan to build more freeways cutting through the city to get to places. There was going to be a 2nd Bay Bridge to San Leandro, why? Because they wanted more traffic to get into the city and they didn't trust his new fangled thing called BART (the train system for those of you who don't know it).
I don't know what the situation was in England or other European countries when cars started taking off but I imagine there had to be something similar, maybe just not with the same momentum as the United States.
Loma Prieta, the earthquake, removed some freeways and opened up the Embarcadero, which was an industrial zoned ringed by a double decker freeway.
http://lostsf.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/the-elephant-obstruct...
There certainly were some attempts to introduce more cars to the city centers in Europe, tram lines used to be closed etc. but thankfully a lot of streets were too narrow to handle an ever-increasing traffic so they just had to give up. Not to mention that a good network of public transport has already been there, so people have always been accustomed to it. Nowadays most of my friends here don't use their cars in the cities, because it's way faster to get everywhere by bus/subway/tram or even bike.