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Comment by necubi | Hacker News Reader

This is a weak rant that has little business being on HN. Just a bunch of random complaints that poorly reflects the totality of SF. Some hits are totally misplaced, like this one:

> But the culmination of local incompetence and misplaced priorities has to be the blackouts and fires. The monopoly utility, PG&E, began rolling blackouts this past autumn to prevent sparks in dry and windy weather. Millions went without power for days.

What on earth does this have to do with SF? PG&E is a state-wide utility over which SF has no particular authority, and SF wasn't even affected by the rolling blackouts.

Certainly SF has problems with property crime, homelessness, housing costs, and NIMBYs. But clearly people still love living here, as evidenced by the continual inflow of people to the city and the region. Articles like that this attempt to paint it as a wasteland feel completely out of touch with the actual reality of living here.

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> Certainly SF has problems with property crime, homelessness, housing costs, and NIMBYs. But clearly people still love living here, as evidenced by the continual inflow of people to the city and the region. Articles like that this attempt to paint it as a wasteland feel completely out of touch with the actual reality of living here.

San Francisco, objectively, has a net-outflow. This is not a normative statement.

https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/bay-a...

That's not what your article says?

> The overall population of San Francisco County increased by 78,121 people between April 1, 2010 and July 1, 2018. Besides the annual thousands of deaths and births that occurred within that eight year span, the county had a total net migration of 52,066 people.

They distinguish between domestic and international migration, but that's not relevant to whether SF has net inflow or outflow.

If you'd read the immediately following paragraph, you'll note that this distinction between domestic and international migration is extremely relevant to whether SF has net inflow or outflow.

> The discrepancy between international and domestic migration in the Bay Area can likely be explained by what economists call "gateway cities." These cities, often planted along the coast, serve as entry points for foreigners moving to the U.S. The immigrants will register in the gateway city, but often move to other parts of California or the country within months, according to Phuong Nguyen, a research specialist at the California Department of Finance.

Once you control for this variance, San Francisco, objectively, has a net outflow. That's the conclusion of the linked article, as well.

As someone who lived between SF and LA for the last decade, most everyone wants to leave after they "make it." It's a minority, mostly naive newcomers who came from the suburbs like myself, who are enamored by it.

It's understandable to be biased against admitting a mistake, most people are, but eventually most see objective reason.

2500 people left over 8 years. While technically a net-outflow, it's statistically insignificant. The outflow for immigrants was around 80k.

The inflow for immigrants is attributed to the fact that SF is a gateway city, and doesn't really tell us much about SF's quality of life.

And while it might be statistically "insignificant" in the absolute, you have to look at how it compares to other cities to really understand how healthy that number is. A contrast: the net domestic migration of Sacramento County was +15,224. -2500 looks far less healthy next to that.

“Santa Clara and San Mateo counties grew by 46,048 and 16,727 people respectively, but they had negative net migration totals for domestic residents, at -99,374 and -20,960”.

That’s way more than -2,500, maybe you should have written articles about those counties.

1) I didn't write the article

2) If your argument is that Santa Clara and San Mateo counties are also bad (if not worse), I don't disagree...

Having lived there for 3 years in downtown and recently moved away I couldn’t be happier. For how much tax Californian residents pay, San Francisco is a disgrace of a city.

> This is a weak rant

I challenge you to do the following:

- Define what your assessment of the article as a "weak rant" means in objective terms.

- Pick a random sample of op-eds from major news outlets and measure them using your chosen metric

I claim no reasonable definition of weakness/rantiness will disqualify the OP while allowing more than 20% of opinion pieces. But maybe you can prove me wrong.

Agreed, SF has it's fair share of problems as most cities do. I'm not sure why the "well techies live there, why isn't it a utopia by now" comment still pops up.

I think the problem with SF is not that it isn't a utopia — it would be unfair to expect that of any city — it's that it's worse than nearly every other in the US, especially for those in the middle class and lower class.

You might argue, "well so many people continue to live here and love it" — and that's true...except most of the people that happily live in SF are rich tech workers that are comfortably in the top quintile of the income distribution.

The tech worker might love SF, and indeed it might even be a beautiful city — but what of the teacher, police officer, firefighter, janitor, and waiter? Is SF really the beacon of progressivism it claims to be if it's (quite possibly) the only city in the US where a teacher can't afford to live within a 30 minute commute of their school without roommates?

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