San Fransisco [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

2D8HP

2017-02-25, 09:43 PM

From an old thread:

Um ok I guess I should tell more about where I live and work for comparison purposes (I hope I can give a good feel for it).
In and near San Francisco jobs are very plentiful, and by American standards pay very well, but housing is very expensive compared to most of the U.S.A. (probably cheaper than London I imagine).
The homes are typically "attached" in San Francisco, either "town houses" (two walls touch your neighbors houses), or apartments and Condo's that have neighbors above and below you as well. This is not typical of most of California farther away from San Francisco were single family homes on large lots predominate.
You would need to look a very long time to find any liveable properties in or near San Francisco that the $450,000 cited as expensive can buy. This wasn't true just five years ago, and most people who own property bought it years ago. In fact a lot of people sleep in motor vehicles and in the last couple of years tents have started to appear on sidewalks (spots under freeway overpasses have been filled with sleeping bags much longer). Some of those who sleep in the motor vehicles actually go to houses away from San Francisco during the weekend that they rent or own, I've worked with a number of guys who've done that.

The climate near the coast most of the year is between 50 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit (10 to 22 degrees Celsius), and it's only a few days out of the year that it will get below 35 degrees, or above 80 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 27 degrees Celsius).
The further you travel inland the less true that is. Just 20 miles away above 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius) day and night for weeks in the summer, and months below freezing at night are common.
Also that same $450,000 that could maybe buy you a toxic wreck of a house in San Francisco or nearby, will buy you a palace inland, but you'll be likely be spending hundreds of dollars a month for electricity to power air conditioning many months of the year (a San Francisco and nearby home typically was built before air conditioning, and most likely still doesn't have it, most inlanders do have it).

San Francisco has many immigrants and it's common to hear many, many languages and accents (most of my coworkers were born either in the Philippines or the old Soviet Union, but they seldom talk about their birthplace)..
Less and less elderly stay in San Francisco
Also many relatively young, well educated adults without children, both American and foreign born, are replacing them, and despite a big increase in the number of adults living and working in San Francisco this last decade, the number of children has decreased, and some schools are being torn down and a lot of tall apartment buildings are going up, they are construction cranes all over.
Inland your likely to hear only two languages English and Spanish, and often the Spanish speakers have had family in California longer than the English speakers (before California was part of the U.S.A. it was briefly Mexico and before that it was part of the Spanish Empire, incredibly up the coast at Fort Ross was once a Russian Colony!).
A higher percentage of the population is either children or elderly outside of San Francisco than is the case in what we who grew up here call "The City" (yes they are other "cities", but only one "The City").

While the drivers here are often courteous at other times, from about 3PM to 7PM the streets are filled with a mad scramble of cars filled with people trying to leave their jobs and get back to their homes outside of SF. More and more pedestrians have been killed in recent years by motorists.
Interestingly since some of the freeways and bridges leading to and around San Francisco have lanes that are "carpool only", a form of hitchhiking has developed, and I have co-workers, who gather at certain pick up spots and get in the cars of strangers who our looking for enough riders to make the lane quota. Surprisingly this has been quite reliable, and the expected assaults and thefts of stranger upon strangers does not occur. Many thousands get to and from their jobs this way. While this "casual carpooling" (hitchhiking really) started by happenstance decades ago, there are now signs that City government has put up to control where people wait to be picked up. I have at least four co-workers who tell me that they spend 3 to 6 hours every work day getting to snd from work. My boss is not one of them because he drives in at 3AM and then sleeps in wish office for 3 to 4 hours, so dreamland.is his commute! Of our 17 man crew in building matinance (there hundreds more who work in the building, plus just over 800 who live in either the County Jail on the 7th floor or the Jail next door.
Of us only two live, work, grew up, and were born in San Francisco, three more were born in the U.S.A. but not San Francisco, two were born in the old Soviet Union, and live in San Francisco, the rest are foreign born and live from 2 to 80 miles away.
I'm sometimes considered almost a native San Franciscan because my brother was born in the City, and I work there, but I'm mostly considered a foreigner because I was born at a hospital 15 miles away in Oakland, and have lived most of my life there.
We have one Englishman on the crew and we used to have a Canadian born man who grew up in England. Both married Americans.
Where you live (in, near or far from San Francisco), and your work matters more than what Nation you were born in, and despite what's been in the news lately were very welcoming of immigrants (at least at my work).
I actually imagine that a San Franciscans life more resembles the life of a European than the life of a typical Californian only 20 miles away (in between is in between).
A San Franciscan spends the bulk of the earnings on housing, and quite a bit on restaurants, and there are money very good ones to choose from. A sandwich in San Francisco will usually cost twice what a similar meal elsewhere in California will.
Often a San Franciscan does not own a motorcar, and can get around be public transportation, my old boss who lived in the City referred to it as his BMW, that is "Bart, Muni, and Walking" (Subway, Bus and walking), most hospitals are within two miles, and you would have to try hard to walk an hour without finding a restaurant.
For someone who lives in "inland" California life is often quite different.
The rents are very much cheaper, but the wages are also lower, in contrast to the small apartments of "The City", inland there are miles and miles of big houses on big lots, separated by multi-lane highways and sometimes farmland. Instead of corner markets, inlanders typically drive many miles to "big box stores" that surrounded by giant parking lots, where usually items can be bought for much cheaper than in San Francisco, in fact sometimes San Franciscans will rent a car drive inland, load up on groceries etc. and even after paying for gasoline, and car rental will still considered themselves to have gotten a bargain.
For those in far inland "exurbia" drives of more than a hundred miles to see a physician are common.
Life in what are called "inner ring" suburbs is something in between. My doctor's office in Oakland is a seven mile drive for me. Two of my coworkers who live in San Francisco have a hospital a 30 minute walk away, a coworker who lives in the town of Fairfield tells me he travels 65 miles to visit his doctor.
So in general a San Franciscan spends their money on rent and restaurants, while a typical Californian will spend less on those, and more on gasoline, automobile matinance, and on electricity for air conditioning.
Surprisingly unless they live near a National Park, or Forest Service land a typical Californian will often need to travel farther to stand in a grove of trees than a San Franciscan or inner-ring suburb dweller. This is because while the inlanders may live closer to an apple orchard, those are in private hands, and unlike what I've read on Britain, there are no "ramble rights" in the U.S.A. San Francisco in contrast has the large and beautiful Golden Gate Park, and The Presidio, which is a former Army base now park, that is very forested, nearby Oakland was Tilden Regional Park, which is similar.
A co worker who lived in the Soviet Union, and Germany told me that unlike Europe, in California the cities just border each other for miles, without countryside in between. He said that in Europe there were big cities and than countryside, and not the "sprawl" of housing that he see's in California.
EDIT:
I just saw a television story on archaeological excavations in London, and while I know that London is a much larger city with a deeper history, from what the showed of it, London looks like a bigger, older San Francisco without hills!

Grey skies? - check
Near ship traffic? - check
Older buildings? - check
New giant skyscrapers? - check
Construction cranes? - check

I haven't seen anywhere else in California that has all these features, but when I visited the older parts of San Diego, even with San Diego's blue skies, detached housing, and no construction cranes, there was definitely a resemblance.

I haven't seen anywhere near as much building construction outside of San Francisco, and SF itself did not have anywhere near this much building during my lifetime before ten years ago.

Is that true of London as well? Or is most of the U.K. building, and has been for some time?

What's the situation were you live, around the world, and in the rest of the U.S.A. as well?

When I worked 50 miles away in San Jose, California sometimes my co-workers would say I had a "strange accent" and ask me were I was from, I'd tell them Oakland but my dad migrated from New Jersey, and my mom from Orange County (My great-great-grandparents would be from what are now the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland in the U.K., Kansas in the U.S.A., Germany, and Poland, so a Lutheran German married a Jewish Pole, who's daughter married an Anglican British-American, who's daughter married an Irish Catholic, that's the way of the U.S.A.). Many of my old co-workers commuted in from outside the metropolitan San Francisco Bay area, and often had what sounded to me like accents of the old Confederacy (SE USA and Texas), including one guy who commuted from Stockton and had a "Southern" accent, while his brother who lived in San Jose did not! The "inland" guys would be more likely to listen to "country" music, "inner-ring suburban" guys to "rock" music, and "inner-city" guys to "rhythm and blues".
Growing up I often heard people speaking derisively of "L.A." and southern California.

With the possible exception of "Appalachian" West Virginia, which seperated from "Tidewater" Virginia in the Nineteenth century, most of the state boundaries in the U.S.A. don't seem to map very well with what feel like different regions.

Some books I've read on regional cultural differences in the United States:

The Nine Nations of North America (http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/07/03/where-do-borders-need-to-be-redrawn/nine-nations-of-north-america-30-years-later),
and the latter
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/08/which-of-the-11-american-nations-do-you-live-in/),
but one is cited by other books and periodicals more often:
Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion's_Seed) by David Hackett Fischer
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f5/David_Hackett_Fischer_-_Albion%27s_Seed_Four_British_Folkways_in_America. jpeg/220px-David_Hackett_Fischer_-_Albion%27s_Seed_Four_British_Folkways_in_America. jpeg

Which details how four different folkways in the United States got their starts from four different migrations:

East Anglia to Massachusetts:
The Exodus of the English Puritans (Pilgrims influenced the Northeastern United States' corporate and educational culture).

The South of England to Virginia:
Distressed Cavaliers and indentured Servants (Gentry influenced the Southern United States' plantation culture).

North Midlands to the Delaware Valley::
The Friends' Migration (Quakers influenced the Middle Atlantic and Midwestern United States' industrial culture).

Borderlands to the Backcountry:
The Flight from North Britain (Scotch-Irish, or border English, influenced the Western United States' ranch culture and the Southern United States' common agrarian culture).

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