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Parts of Manhattan which are popular with the very wealthy are certainly pretty well tapped out (the West Village comes to mind as a neighborhood with well-prot

Parts of Manhattan which are popular with the very wealthy are certainly pretty well tapped out (the West Village comes to mind as a neighborhood with well-protected zoning regulations and lots of low to mid-rise buildings similar to many San Francisco neighborhoods). In other parts of Manhattan though new neighborhoods are being created from underused space (look at the Hudson Yards project, creating thousands of housing and commercial units on top of an active rail yard on the west side of midtown). Dozens of new towers are currently under construction in Manhattan. I've lived in both SF and NYC and feel like Oakland has much more of a stigma than Brooklyn does simply because of transit access. You can live in SF and enjoy walkable local communities. You can live in Oakland and enjoy walkable local communities. But getting between the two can be a much more arduous process via Bart or bus than the many plentiful subway connections between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Visiting friends, of even the prospect of a commute, between SF and Oakland would have given me much more pause than getting over to Brooklyn. BART and the transbay buses are woefully inadequate for an area which is trying to pitch itself as a region rather than two distinct cities with a bridge between.

ghaff 11y ago
That seems a good assessment. I suspect that there may be a bit of hindsight bias about Brooklyn, given that we know today that (parts of) it did gentrify and quite rapidly. But your point about transportation links--and, heck, a bridge you can walk over--is well taken.
mahyarm 11y ago
I really don't understand the entire BART tube fear. You can get from fidi to downtown oakland in 12 minutes on a consistent schedule. I think it's more the bridge with it's horrible 1 hour traffic and how most of the bay area is a very car dependent place.
- ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
  BART can be standing room only quite often during commutes, but if you're going from Market Street to an Oakland station, its really not that big of a deal.
  - mahyarm 11y ago
    NYC is standing room only during most commutes too. I'd rather stand for 15 minutes than be stuck in traffic for 45 minutes any time.
- rsync 11y ago
  "You can get from fidi to downtown oakland in 12 minutes on a consistent schedule." Yes, but that's all you can do. If you're in pac heights or the presidio or ... anywhere west ... you're going nowhere.
  - mahyarm 11y ago
    That is a failure of SF transit. It takes 30m to get from the west to the east side of SF already. 20m to get to the mission from pac heights with an uber, 45m with muni! For east side SF friends in the mission, oakland is closer than ocean beach.
eastbayjake 11y ago
I think the only stigma is that BART closes at midnight while New York subways run all night long, which means people who live in Brooklyn can go out in Manhattan until 4 AM and still get home, while people who go out in SF on Saturday night can't get back to Oakland from midnight until 8 AM Sunday unless they take the bus.
- sethhochberg 11y ago
  The other thing is getting to BART - if you live in the Mission or within a handful of blocks of Market St; and your destination is in downtown Oakland or on the west side... you're fine. But if not, you need to coordinate your trip between BART and two different bus networks on either side of your train trip (or shell out for a car service / cab). Not only are train lines between Manhattan and Brooklyn much more plentiful, they fan out to a much larger collection of destinations on either end. It can be a one-system trip, which makes a big difference. BART isn't bad by any means, and SFMTA/AC Transit do a decent job, too. I've lived in Miami and around Tampa, two other large cities which do an almost immeasurably worse job with transit. But BART is still a very commuter-centric network for getting commuters from suburbs to downtowns, and isn't a substitute for a true local subway network. Thats where the stigma comes from, in my opinion.

ghaff 11y ago

That seems a good assessment. I suspect that there may be a bit of hindsight bias about Brooklyn, given that we know today that (parts of) it did gentrify and quite rapidly. But your point about transportation links--and, heck, a bridge you can walk over--is well taken.

mahyarm 11y ago

I really don't understand the entire BART tube fear. You can get from fidi to downtown oakland in 12 minutes on a consistent schedule. I think it's more the bridge with it's horrible 1 hour traffic and how most of the bay area is a very car dependent place.

ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
BART can be standing room only quite often during commutes, but if you're going from Market Street to an Oakland station, its really not that big of a deal.
- mahyarm 11y ago
  NYC is standing room only during most commutes too. I'd rather stand for 15 minutes than be stuck in traffic for 45 minutes any time.
rsync 11y ago
"You can get from fidi to downtown oakland in 12 minutes on a consistent schedule." Yes, but that's all you can do. If you're in pac heights or the presidio or ... anywhere west ... you're going nowhere.
- mahyarm 11y ago
  That is a failure of SF transit. It takes 30m to get from the west to the east side of SF already. 20m to get to the mission from pac heights with an uber, 45m with muni! For east side SF friends in the mission, oakland is closer than ocean beach.

eastbayjake 11y ago

I think the only stigma is that BART closes at midnight while New York subways run all night long, which means people who live in Brooklyn can go out in Manhattan until 4 AM and still get home, while people who go out in SF on Saturday night can't get back to Oakland from midnight until 8 AM Sunday unless they take the bus.

sethhochberg 11y ago
The other thing is getting to BART - if you live in the Mission or within a handful of blocks of Market St; and your destination is in downtown Oakland or on the west side... you're fine. But if not, you need to coordinate your trip between BART and two different bus networks on either side of your train trip (or shell out for a car service / cab). Not only are train lines between Manhattan and Brooklyn much more plentiful, they fan out to a much larger collection of destinations on either end. It can be a one-system trip, which makes a big difference. BART isn't bad by any means, and SFMTA/AC Transit do a decent job, too. I've lived in Miami and around Tampa, two other large cities which do an almost immeasurably worse job with transit. But BART is still a very commuter-centric network for getting commuters from suburbs to downtowns, and isn't a substitute for a true local subway network. Thats where the stigma comes from, in my opinion.