>> I don't get what's so great about the area, anyways. Every time I've been it's just seemed like an insanely expensive shithole...but I guess I'm not the one

>> I don't get what's so great about the area, anyways. Every time I've been it's just seemed like an insanely expensive shithole...but I guess I'm not the one splashing billions of dollars around. > If you are an entrepreneur in a certain field... more prosaic: sure, it's changed some, but it's still pretty hard to beat culturally for certain sorts of people. if you like both art and technology, especially if you want access to both internationally recognized things and little-known indie things, the only other places in the US that feel like they really compete with SF are LA and NY. i don't have a job at a tech giant, but i do have what i think is a very interesting software development job, that'd be harder (but not impossible) to find in other places. realistically, because i'm cheap/frugal and interested in saving money, rent control is the only reason i can still afford to live here. but i also really take advantage of the city that i live in: in the past couple months, i've seen p-funk, actress, flying lotus, a local industrial-ish electronic duo, a handful of local noise acts, JLin, hauschka, a screening of "sun ra's space is the place", pharaoh sanders, philip glass & kronos quartet, curren$y, and a bunch i'm forgetting since i'm just listing stuff off-hand. that's an especially good few weeks in an especially good year, but even in slower times, i'm usually going to at least one show i'm really excited about every two weeks to one month. i can also eat delicious food for cheap either from taquerias or by going to the grocery store, or if i have the disposable cash, i can choose from a wide variety of higher-end options across a range of prices. i get to meet people from all over the world. i went to college here, and because of all the above, a number of my good friends from school stuck around, and so i have a very solid social network here. i volunteer at a great community radio station, where i met my girlfriend. so, for a lot of people, even transplants, wanting to stay isn't so crazy. if my GF and i both happened to get evicted, i'm not sure what we'd do. that seems unlikely, but it does always feel like a bit of a worry. i don't quite understand the resistance of the natives to the influx of new people, esp since this has literally always been kind of a gold rush town. but hey, i moved around a bunch as a kid, and i like meeting people from different places. when i told a cabdriver that i'd lived in SF for 11 years, he joked that i wasn't a native, but that i could say i was a local. so as a local, i'd say i'm very strongly YIMBY. fucking build. build housing. build better/faster/more regional transit. e.g., make it fast and easy to get from the SJ suburbs to SF and vice versa, whether it's rush hour or post-last-call. some old stuff will have to come down, some neighborhoods will change character. so it goes. better than steadily pricing out all but the most affluent and pushing them to the far edges (or entirely out of) the region.