San Francisco Nostalgia...

[icewater5 181]

25 minutes ago, virtuali said:

My first time in San Francisco was in 1992, with some friends, but then I came back the next year with my then girlfriend (now wife since 22 years), and we both seriously loved the city.

We took one of the usual open dual deck tourist bus that went through most of the notable places, and I recall very well what the tour presenter said when we passed close to some Victorian Houses: she said the could be quite "expensive", at even 500-600 US$. Even if in 1992/1993, the US$ was worth almost half compared to what was our national currency at the time ( italian Lira ) which later became the euro but, as much as we liked the place:

- 500K seemed to be a lot of money back then.

- We were a bit afraid of the quakes.

So, we decided to let go of the idea of moving there. Had we done it, we could probably retire comfortably now, if we sold that house today. Or anything in San Francisco, even a shed, most likely...that's what "San Francisco nostalgia" means to me.

I know what you mean. We were out there not that long after yourselves. Even then prices were slightly edging up i think. And then of course all the tech companies were established, and new ones moving in.

[icewater5 181]

So its Spokane now! Its difficult for many younger people here ATM. In the 90s maybe live 20 or 30 miles out of town - now they may go

to the west country or the midlands. Not far by US standards i guess but still aways from their family.

Edited March 6, 2022 by icewater5

[birdguy 3,988]

27 minutes ago, icewater5 said:

now they may go

to the west country or the midlands.

Well, I just looked up housing costs here in Roswell. 

4BR 2Bath 2214sqft $240,000

3BR 2Bath 1118sqft $79,000

5BR 3Bath 3036sqft $299,000

4BR 2Bath 1215sqft $89,000

But there's nothing here.  No bars as such although they have bars in some of the restaurants.  I movie theater.  Several restaurants.  A zoo.  A couple of museums.  A 4 mile bike and walking path.  Three 3 golf courses.  No nightclubs.  Horse racing and a casino 70 miles west up in Ruidoso. 

It's quiet.  No real crime.  No homeless people downtown or in the parks.

It suited us because we could drive up to the Sacramento mountains and go hiking two or three times a week.  Campgrounds and fishing up there too.

Noel 

[icewater5 181]

I am sure its a great location, but a little quiet on the bar front by the looks of things. Just enough to do though, at least for me,.Although

i would be hitting those restaurants, now and then, for a nice eat and a beverage.

Dan

 

Edited March 6, 2022 by icewater5

[Mike A 357]

An opinion piece in today's San Francisco Chronicle:

The media made me think San Francisco would be an apocalyptic hellscape. But it was lovely

Billy Binion

March 5, 2022Updated: March 6, 2022 10:41 a.m.

 

Comments

   

CNBC host Jim Cramer says he won’t let his staff members go out alone on the Embarcadero.

Noah Berger/Special to The Chronicle 2021

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard more discussion about a city over my lifetime than I have about San Francisco. That’s a weird thing to write, because, up until about a month ago, I’d never actually been.

An East Coaster for most of my life, my exposure to the city had mostly been confined to the apocalyptic, 24-hour news and social media cycle of crime and drugs and poverty that has come to define it.

San Francisco is currently the place most of us can’t stop hearing about because its story arc has been, I suppose, propped up as an archetype of the contemporary American story.

And that story is a tragedy — a once-golden place now irreparably tarnished.

So when I finally traveled there for the first time in late January, I was confident there would be no level of decay that could surprise me — a far cry from that hopeful place I’d seen depicted in the 2008 screening of “Milk” I attended as a high-schooler.

I checked myself into my hotel next to the Tenderloin, dropped off my stuff and steeled myself for a weird and perhaps dangerous few days. I expected to find something evocative of a war zone — one where crime ran so rampant that you couldn’t walk to dinner, and if you were brave enough to do so anyway, you’d have to climb over rolling hills of drug paraphernalia and human feces to get there.

Instead, it was lovely.

My solo trip mostly consisted of a self-guided walking tour over the course of four days: from Union Square through the Tenderloin and down to the Mission, through the Panhandle and the Haight, from the Ferry Building to Chinatown and over to the Castro. What I experienced was a charming, colorful, animated place — a city that, like any city, appeared to have its share of problems, but still managed to coalesce in a way that only it can.

That’s not to say that San Francisco’s issues don’t require addressing. There are onerous housing regulations that exacerbate homelessness, myriad rules hamstringing would-be business owners, high tax rates that impact those without means and a decadence that sometimes prioritizes government virtue-signaling over the needs of constituents.

I would never presume myself capable of diagnosing every problem within a four-day tour of the city. But my introduction to the Bay Area was a helpful reminder that the media, of which I am a member, have a general tendency to ratchet up the negative while all but eliminating the positive, leaving consumers with a much bleaker story than exists in reality.

There’s certainly no short supply of that when it comes to San Francisco, especially over the past year.

“I don’t let (my staff) go out there by themselves,” Pennsylvania-based CNBC host Jim Cramer said last week, referring to the tourist-friendly waterfront the Embarcadero. “Even in daytime.”

Activist Michael Shellenberger regularly beats a similar drum that, as he tells it, is meant to serve as a corrective to left-leaning media indulgence. But his approach — which recently included scaling a fence to break into the Tenderloin Linkage Center — is more likely to put himself at the center of a doomsday culture-war story than to tell the full one.

So let’s look at a more full one.

Much has been made, for example, of the supposed recent spike in property crime in the Bay Area. The numbers, however, are inconvenient for that narrative. In 2021, property crimes were down about 11% from 2018 and 2019, and down even further when compared with 2017.

Property crimes in 2020 were a low for the decade.

But what about violent crime? It’s also down from pre-pandemic levels; in terms of homicides, you’re more likely to experience violence in Hampton, Va., than you are San Francisco. The city does not crack the top 65. As it usually goes, that trend is particularly applicable to the more upscale neighborhoods like the Embarcadero, where Cramer puzzlingly says he is afraid to let his people go for a walk.

I don’t mean to denigrate the way Cramer or Shellenberger or any number of people may feel — particularly those who live in the city and have watched it change. Though I’ve always considered myself to be politically homeless, I view the world broadly through a libertarian lens, which is to say: Mayor London Breed and San Francisco’s supervisors aren’t exactly my kindred spirits. I have no problem conceding that San Francisco has issues to tackle. But feelings, by their nature, are subject to the beholder — just as my blissful four days exploring San Francisco could never paint the definitive picture of what does or does not plague the city.

San Francisco is no stranger to people projecting their feelings onto it. In the 1970s, it was a bastion for diversity and acceptance at the forefront of changing cultural mores; today, it’s a crime-ridden cesspool reflective of the American decline.

I posit a simpler alternative: It’s a pretty place, rich with culture, that will continue to experiment with mixed results, as places tend to do. You likely won’t hear such a benign story on cable news. So turn it off, log off of Twitter and go outside.

Billy Binion is an editor at Reason Magazine.

[birdguy 3,988]

3 hours ago, icewater5 said:

but a little quiet on the bar front by the looks of things

Quiet for the younger crowd.  About right for the retired folk.

Noel

[birdguy 3,988]

That was a nice story Mike.  And it echos the trip my daughter and I took two summers ago.

We stayed at Fisherman's Wharf and early one morning we took the Hyde Street cable car from Fisherman's Wharf to Pacific Avenue.  Then we walked two blocks to the house I grew up in.  It was actually the ground floor of a two story duplex.  Everything looked the same as it did when I was a boy except for the bars on the windows of the street level apartments.

Then we walked to Polk Street and wandered the shopping area where my Mom used to shop for dinner every day.  No freezers then and just s mall refrigerator.

From there we walked to my old grammar school, St. Brigids on Broadway.

Back up to Hyde Street and walked back to Lombard and down the crookedest street in the world, as it is commonly known.

We had lunch and then wended out way to Muni pier and Aquatic Park.

Back to Fisherman's Wharf and the hotel where we rested until we dined for dinner at Scoma's.

No pan handlers.  Not a  homeless person in sight.  And nothing much had changed except tor the tourist traps at Fisherman's Wharf.

We went into one where they were selling live oysters the clerk would open and if there was a pearl inside you got to keep it.  I was lucky I got a large one and when I got home I had it mounted in a neckace for Betty.

One more story.

When I was sent to the Presidio after the Loma Prieta earthquake to do weather support for the 6th Army Emergency Operations Center I attended the morning briefings.  At a couple of them I briefed the weather for the day.

A couple of generals and an admiral were present as well as the mayor of San Francisco and his entourage.

One of the admirals told the mayor that an aircraft carrier, the USS Peleliu, was docked at Alameda and was staffed by female sailors to assist families who had been made homeless by the earthquake.

The mayor sent a couple of busloads of alcoholics and winos and homeless drifters over there.

The Navy was furious and sent them right back.  That very afternoon the Peleliu got orders to sail.  I saw it cruising toward the Golden Gate bridge and out to sea from my motel window that afternoon.

Noel

I don't know where they rounded them up from but the relations between San Francisco and the US Navy took a nosedive.  I never saw the mayor at the briefings after that.

Noel

[icewater5 181]

Wow, two stories from people in the know. Like you said Mike, San Francisco does attract a lot of attention, sort of like a social "feelometer" for everywhere else

even here in 'Blitey' sometimes. Media certainly plays their part in peoples perceptions (or often misconceptions of actual crime levels for example).

Heartwarming read iff im honest, thanks guys.

[Christopher Low 5,514]

I have very fond memories of the San Francisco Bay area, but these are from the amount of time that I spent adding scenery packages to the San Francisco high resolution photoscenery region in Flight Unlimited 3. I became intimately familiar with the area during that time, and it still holds a special place in my heart.