
Why San Francisco Is Not New York - wslh
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/why-san-francisco-isnt-the-new-new-york/
======
nextstep
Not to mention, New York is relatively clean compared to San Francisco. San
Francisco shuts down at 10pm; New York truly is the city that never sleeps,
and many neighborhoods feel busy and alive at all hours of the night. The
public transportation in SF (and the larger Bay Area) is a classist,
unreliable nightmare. New York has probably the best public transit systems in
the country. Owning a car in NY is unusual and unnecessary. In San Francisco,
most people own a car, just like any other suburban area in the US. The number
and quality of restaurants in NY is unrivaled. New York is unquestionably more
diverse. The list goes on and on.

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wdewind
> The number and quality of restaurants in NY is unrivaled.

NYC native and mostly SF-hater here. Hate to say it but SF has us beat for
food. If you want to go have a 5 star meal you're going to pay about the same
and get about the same food in both cities (NYC obviously has the edge here,
but not hugely), but San Francisco has NYC (especially Manhattan) absolutely
dominated at the everyday eating level (ie: burritos, sandwiches, cheaper
restaurants). The general ingredient quality just blows NYC away - both meat
and produce.

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raverbashing
" The general ingredient quality just blows NYC away - both meat and produce."

Well, west coast (meaning: access to Australia and some other selling
markets), good climate, etc

~~~
mike_herrera
SF's neighbor to-the-east, The San Joaquin Valley, is "the nation's salad
bowl." Which also happens to be home to many cattle and sheep operations.

Access for foreign imports are important for the gourmet scene, but not
necessary.

~~~
autodidakto
"Virtually all non-tropical crops are grown in the Central Valley, which is
the primary source for a number of food products throughout the United States,
including tomatoes, almonds, grapes, cotton, apricots, and asparagus."
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_(California)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_\(California\))

Minor correction: The San Joaquin Valley in the south half of the Central
Valley, and The Sacramento Valley is the north half. The dividing line is the
Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta

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pg
I lived in NYC at one point, and I'd agree that the two cities are
fundamentally different, but I think he missed what may be the biggest source
of the difference: the proportion of people playing zero-sum games. A lot of
the most ambitious people in NYC work in finance, whereas in SF hardly any do.
Nearly all the most ambitious people in SF make money by creating things that
other people are willing to pay them for. That means SF attracts different
people than NYC, and changes people who live there in different ways.

You get the money later when you do that, which is another big reason people
in SF don't spend so much. In finance you get paid as you go, and a lot of
people in NYC spend it as they go. Indeed, friends who've worked in the
finance industry have told me firms have a deliberate policy of encouraging
new recruits to spend all their salaries and bonuses, as way of getting them
hooked. Whereas in SF a lot of people's net worth is tied up in illiquid
stock.

~~~
rayiner
In don't think "zero sum game" means what you think it means. Lots of people
in San Francisco engage in transactions, and lots of people in New York engage
in reducing transaction costs. Neither are "zero sum" endeavors. Insurance is
a great example. My office used to sit in the shadow of the Met-Life building.
They don't make anything, so they must be zero sum. Wrong. Insurance enables
transactions to happen that wouldn't otherwise happen, adding value to the
economy. That's the crux of many of New York's economic sectors: finance,
advertising, insurance, law, consulting. Its abstract, and service oriented
rather than product oriented, but its not zero sum.

Now one can argue about the amount of value created by these industries, or
rather how much of the value created is absorbed by the industries themselves.
You can also question how much value is created by yet another web app getting
funded in SV, so I don't know if you're on firm ground there.

~~~
wpietri
Having worked in finance, I can promise you that a lot of people in finance
are playing zero-sum games. All trading is basically zero sum. No trader goes
home saying, "Hey, honey, I imperceptably increased global liquidity today;
yay me!" They say things like, "I'm fucking awesome. I gutted those chumps in
the LIBOR pit. Whores for everybody!" [1]

Anybody working for those people is also essentially playing a zero-sum game,
in that their activity is just aiding in shifting value from one pocket to
another. Which is why I no longer work in finance; I wanted to do something
useful.

[1] Yes, I have actually heard traders say "Whores for everybody!" in the
office. At least in the office they were joking.

~~~
dennisgorelik
Even if some traders think that they are playing zero-sum game - it does not
mean that traders actually play zero-sum game.

Benefit of trading is increased liquidity.

~~~
wpietri
It matters entirely for the psychology of the industry's culture.

However, increased liquidity is of no direct value. It only matters if people
get better prices, or get deals closed significantly sooner. For a trader's
participation to be positive sum, the benefit of their capital has to be
larger than the costs they impose. Given that every trader is working to make
the opposite true, surely many of them are negative sum. Especially given that
capital can be deployed to reduce liquidity just as well as increase it.

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fennecfoxen
The other difference? Layout.

If New York were the Bay Area, then all the big tech employers would be in
places like White Plains and Greenwich, while all the tech employees still
would want to live in Chelsea and the Village and the usual spots.
Theoretically there's public transit from one to the other, but it's really a
bit of a strain when you get down to it, so they'd need to run private buses.

New Jersey would replace Oakland and the East Bay - downmarket reputation but
you've got a few excellent clusters of local culture, and you can get into
town from there easily enough for your commute. You just don't actually _feel_
like integrated with the rest of town where everything is happening. Staten
Island replaces Marin, eastern Long Island replaces wine country...

and the entirety of Brooklyn and Queens would be underwater. :P

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bsenftner
Year after year, decade after decade I hear "SF is the next this, that or the
other". I believe SF is the city with an inferiority complex. No matter how
accomplished SF becomes, it can't simply be itself, it has to take somewhere
else down. I've given up the discussion at social events; SF simply want to be
anywhere else but itself, and that creates all kinds of f'ed up logic spewing
out of it's citizen's mouths.

~~~
raldi
One of the strongest examples of SF's inferiority complex is how some
residents insist on capitalizing "The City" mid-sentence when referring to it.

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qwerta
> So what exactly is San Francisco? When I came across a passage in the book,
> “The Annals of San Francisco,” about the 1840s Gold Rush, I found the answer
> to that question.

So SF is bunch of gold diggers?

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qwerta
> The lack of diversity between social groups in San Francisco isn’t going to
> change anytime soon, as the number of tech employees in the Bay Area is only
> going to continue to rise.

I am not sure I understand. Tech sector brings people from all over the world
including India, China, South America and Europe.

~~~
silvestrov
Real diversity is not how you look or where you come from, but what's inside
you and how you think and the culture you belong to.

~~~
qwerta
It kind of sounds like 'No true Scotsman'. Could you explain what sort of
diversity you miss in tech sector?

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eddieroger
I think the argument is that if everyone in SF is tech focused now, despite
different backgrounds, there is a lack of diversity in the interests of the
groups taking over SF (techies), where there used to be diversity. So now,
everyone's a techie, instead of maybe musicians or artists, etc. I'm not sure
it's a good argument, but I think I agreed with it briefly.

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dannyrosen
I wouldn't mind an article titled: "Why New York is Not San Francisco"

~~~
PLenz
One isn't needed. New York is very happy being New York. It's San Fran that
isn't happy being San Fran.

~~~
bhc3
Having lived in SF since 1996, I'd like to formally refute your point here.
I'm quite happy with SF. I also live outside the Mission gentrification world,
but do work in the tech industry. SF is still weird, it's still got its
distinct character and it's still part of an incredible geography. I like
being in the West because it's as much a psychological distance as anything. I
say this as someone born and raised in Virginia.

I'm always amused at people's attitudes about San Francisco, and San
Franciscans. Keep 'em coming.

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hoodq19
It's easy to confuse the negative effects of scale with cultural similarities.
I've lived in both cities and you'd have to step outside the US to find two
cities less like each other.

Its easy to understand why New York magazine would publish high-brow link-
bait: the decreasing relevance of banking-- NY's primary economic engine.

The funny thing is that the importance of banking is cyclical. Banker
misbehave, markets punish them, they pretend to cower, they quietly recover...
and then they misbehave again.

These kinds of comparisons will diminish once it's misbehaving time again.

~~~
cyclecount
The tech:SF::banking:NYC comparison is false for a number of reasons. Chiefly,
no single industry in New York overwhelms the city the way tech overwhelms San
Francisco. Finance, fashion, media, and many other industries are very big in
NY. But NY is still bigger, bigger than people from San Francisco can fathom.

San Francisco is already overwhelmed with tech culture, and this sector
continues to grow. Everywhere you turn, it feels like you meet people who work
for startups or large software firms. There is no comparable industry in NY
that is so pervasive. This lack of economic diversification breeds the other
diversity deficits this article mentions.

~~~
Bahamut
Well said - NYC is big in many different facets. It has a large tech presence,
but when considering all the other large presence of industries, it's just
another sector.

To give an idea, companies like IBM and Pepsico (Pepsi, Frito Lays, etc.), and
Kraft have a large presence just north of the city and/or in it. NYC is one of
the largest cities for fashion. It is home to the finance capital of the
world. It has one of the largest music scenes in the world. It has a huge
advertising agency presence.

There is a lot more than just the aspects I mentioned even. That is how
massive of scale NYC is - San Francisco's legacy is primarily tech.

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vonklaus
ITT: Subjective 'Facts' and Emotional objectivism.

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whatgoodisaroad
It hardly seems likely that NYTimes could be unbiased here.

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paulhauggis
The only reason I would pick SF is because of the weather.

~~~
bsenftner
you like freezing? you've confused SF with southern california; worlds apart
in attitude and temperature: laid back and warm.

~~~
moss
Having lived through this winter in the Northeast, I can promise you that SF
is beautifully warm all year round. Case in point: it is a place where people
use the word "freezing" to describe temperatures 10-20 degrees above the
melting point of water.

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kpanda
ok?

