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San Jose is hell on earth
- kirubakaran 18y agoI'm glad to know I am not the only one who felt this way. I felt like I was in one huge shopping mall. Malls give me head aches. Human brain has an upper limit on the fakeness it can take before it makes you throw up, I think. (I seldom complain and I don't drink 'orange mocha frappuccino') [edit] deleted --> "SJC is the most depressing airport I've been to."
- tptacek 18y agoSJC is a much better airport than SFO, but OAK is the one the cheap flights go to, and is inexpensive to get to SF from.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- bmj 18y agoHaving never been to SFO or OAK, I find this shocking, since SJC seems kinda slummy, especially when flying via NWA.
- tptacek 18y agoI guess it all depends on what you're looking for in an airport, but if your metric is "time taken to get from the expressway exit to wheels-up in your plane", I'd rank the Bay Area OAK, SJC, then SFO. I'm not really looking for amenities; if I needed them, I'd probably just pay for the Amex Platinum and get into the airline lounges.
- ajmoir 18y agoSFO International is pretty cool. Very open and light with decent A/C.
- gibsonf1 18y agoSFO is one of my favorite airports because they designed it for convenience. There is a parking garage at the core of the airport, so you can drive into this garage and drive in a circle and park adjacent to your terminal, and walk out on the axis directly to your flights. The new very large international terminal links directly to BART, which is quite a good idea as well. I've always had a very low opinion of SJC.
- menloparkbum 18y agoI'm confused as to how SJC could be considered a much better airport than SFO. Many cheap flights do go to OAK but Virgin and JetBlue also fly out of SFO. I've never had a problem finding a cheap flight that goes out of SFO, if I have time to plan ahead.
- sabat 18y agoI used to think that. I think it less now. SJ definitely does not have the taste and cosmopolitan charm of SF, but as places to live go, it's really pretty good. Access to the ocean and amazing open spaces, etc.
- mkull 18y agoHows San Diego?
- henning 18y agoIt has a similar sprawling ticky-tack faux automobile-metropolis feel, and the food except in places like downtown generally sucks.
- sabat 18y agoOn the other hand, San Diego's weather is probably the best in the whole US, the people (except maybe for the far-righters and far-lefters) are pretty cool, there's nice history, beach access, culture ... sigh. Wish I was there.
- henning 18y agoIf you're close to the beach, where property and rent is ridiculously expensive, yes, the weather is pretty nice. East County, though (El Cajon, Santee, etc.) lack nearly everything that is good about San Diego. No biotech startups, no weather, no college kids, no nothing.
- ericb 18y agoHow is San Diego for tech jobs and startups? I generally like to work at startups and would look at rails type jobs (if my startup does not work out for some reason). If it does work out, I'd be interested in whether there is a decent population of high tech folks in San Diego as a talent-pool. Edit: I'm in Boston, now, for comparison.
- soundsop 18y agoI moved from Toronto to South Bay for work a couple of years ago. I couldn't face the commute from San Francisco to San Jose, so I decided to live close to work in San Jose. I almost cried when I first visited San Jose's "downtown". The descriptions of the link are pretty much bang on, although I don't find the smog in San Jose so bad. And San Jose does have one attribute that's better than San Francisco: the weather. It's sunny and warm in San Jose with cool nights. Whenever I go to San Francisco, it is cold, windy and foggy. The San Francisco Zoo is situated close to the ocean in a part of the city that is seemingly permanently overcast and cold. I feel sorry for the animals. Other than the weather, the best thing that can be said about San Jose is that it is close to a lot of interesting events and places that are not in San Jose.
- davidw 18y agoAgreed about the "downtown". To me it feels little larger than the downtown/college area in my home town, Eugene, which is only about 130K people, instead of a million. In terms of a 'real' downtown, such as that found in a European town like Padova, Italy, the European one is "fractally better" - on every level and scale it's nicer, from the interesting bits of frescoes in Piazza San Nicolo to the Basilica di Sant'Antonio, to the overall layout of human-scale streets. The depressing thing about all this is that you'd like to take bits and pieces from all over and utilize them to create the perfect place, which is very easy to envision, but impossible to realize.
- idea 18y ago> I feel sorry for the animals. I have that with any zoo. They may be treated well, but wild animals shouldn't be locked up for entertainment and profit.
- modoc 18y agoWhat if they're locked up for a safe breeding of more of a threatened or endangered species, or for the purpose of education and awareness of the threats facing wildlife around the world? I've been to some zoos that just make you want to cry, and I've been to other ones where the animals seems happy, well taken-care-of, and had enough activities/entertainment to keep them from getting bored, and where there was a huge amount of focus on education around what species are threatened, why, and what you can do about it. How to co-exist with wild animals locally, and how to support efforts around the world. It's a lot easier to feel sympathy/empathy and DO something when you see a real live cute endangered animal, than if you read a paragraph in your paper. It's definitely a mixed bag, but overall, I'm pro good-zoos.
- steveplace 18y agoHeh. You haven't seen pre-fab until you've been to Orlando.
- SwellJoe 18y agoWhen I came out for StartupSchool three years back, I went back to Austin with the impression that the bay area was perhaps the most awful thing I had ever seen--strip malls, Starbucks, and on the "good" streets there would be a Restoration Hardware. Everywhere I looked, my first thought was "Do not want!" I would never live in a place like that. Then we got into YC, and I had another look around, and it turns out there are little pockets of nice living on the peninsula. The downtown Mountain View area is great, as long as piece and quiet are positive attributes for you. It lacks the suburban sprawl and mini-malls of Sunnyvale and Santa Clara (the Rengstorff/Showers area excepted), and actually has a very walkable central core. And, I guess in 12 years a lot of good restaurants can happen, as there are at least a dozen good places on Castro and a few good ones sprinkled about in the rest of town (Amber India, for example). The library is awe-inspiring, the parks are numerous and just crowded enough to be interesting, and there are two little Asian markets within walking distance. I always see dozens of people walking when I'm out. There is a patch of soulless hell at the distant end of Castro, where the Starbucks and other polished up corporate turds reside, but one can avoid it easily (just stop and turn around at City Hall).
- menloparkbum 18y agoSan Jose is not a nice looking place. However, the locals are pretty cool. There are nicer places on the peninsula and in the south bay, if you are looking for suburbs. Menlo Park, San Mateo, Mtn. View, Palo Alto etc.
- ardit33 18y agoWhile nice people, I would say the locals in SJ are "provincial" people, mostly boring. Anybody that is interesting and that has traveled a bit, will avoid that hellhole at any cost. And let's not mention the fakery of places like Santana Row. It is almost comical. Addition: Call me crazy, but I think that living in a boring enviroment, might make one boring, over time. Just as boring jobs affect a person's brain, there is a chance that living in a place where there is little human interaction, (car driving everywhere), might affect a person in the long run. No matter how strong a individual is, the enviroment around affects us a great deal. Live in a interesting place, where there is a lot going on, might affect creativity in the good way.
- rantfoil 18y agoWow, I don't know what it was like when jwz wrote this (12 years ago?) but these days Palo Alto is the epicenter of mediocre expensive food. Mountain View, however, has some really great ethnic food for cheap, especially on Castro Street. The other thing that people don't really know until they've lived here is that you typically don't have to live in suburban hell so long as you know where the "main drags" are. The peninsula / south bay used to be all orchards with "main streets". Today there's a "main street" in nearly every city that is worth living near -- walking distance, and only a slight premium (University Ave excluded, thanks to Facebook). Santa Cruz Ave in Menlo Park, Castro St in Mountain View, 4th St in San Mateo, and California St in Palo Alto come to mind.
- axod 18y agoPalo Alto has taxis, cpk, cheesecake factory, that wraps place. All nice enough. Not to mention the creamery. Also it has a borders and Apple store. Out of all the towns in the area I'd choose Palo Alto every time.
- comatose_kid 18y agoPalo Alto is nice. Los Gatos is a little nicer to me - I like the hills. Downtown Campbell is also nice (with a great farmers market).
- mlinsey 18y agoAgreed in spirit though I disagree completely with your actual list. What's with all the mediocre mega-chains? How about Paxti's, gyros gyros, Homma's Brown Rice Sushi, the Counter, Vino Locale? A bit of a walk north will take you to Cafe Borrone and Jan's Deli, the latter of which happens to have one of the greatest turkey sandwiches ever. If you have a car and you venture away from trendy downtown PA you can find some pretty good authentic taquerias as well as any variety of Asian you would want.... ...Damn, I need to move back to the Bay Area.
- ericb 18y agoHold up. Living in Boston, I can say that winter is just not that fun. I can't say, go for an enjoyable jog, for at least 4.5 months of the year. I basically hibernate for 5 months of the year. This is true for large swaths of the northern US. Is it really so bad in CA, or is the grass always greener?
- sabat 18y agoThe grass is always greener. In CA (for the most part) the climate is mild and you could jog all year without much trouble. Funny aside: CA is also one of the most varied states in climate. There are places that are under snow for 4-7 months of the year; you'd think you were in WI or MN except there are mountains.
- menloparkbum 18y agoI've lived in Boston (Allston and Cambridge). Weather in San Jose trumps Boston winters for sure. However, Boston proper in the summer is better than San Jose in the summer. If you grew up elsewhere, one thing you may miss is hot, steamy summers. The weather in the Bay area is almost always a little bit chilly. In San Francisco, the weather in the summer is actually colder than it is during the rest of the year.
- breck 18y agoYou can't beat summers in Boston. But ericb is right, winter's in Boston are terrible. Not going outside for more than an hour for 5 months is no fun.
- tokipin 18y agoi love san jose, and the whole bay area. i feel so deprived not being in cali right now. i would state reasons but i don't really know them. my best guess is the mesh of civilization and nature. the hills are so beautiful, the trees are lush, starbucks is on every corner yay!
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- mynameishere 18y agohttp://www.morganquitno.com/cit07pop.htm#25 http://www.morganquitno.com/cit07pop.htm#25 Safest city >500,000 population.
- run4yourlives 18y agoSafest City in US < Most violent anywhere else. Point being it's all relative, hence next to meaningless. :-)
- hugh 18y agoSafest City in US < Most violent anywhere else. Johannesburg? Rio? Manila? Bogota? London? Honiara?
- run4yourlives 18y agoYou missed my point. It's all relative.
- hugh 18y agoWhat is relative to what, precisely?
- run4yourlives 18y agoHow "safe" a city is to whatever you're comparing it to. You can make pretty much anywhere look safe just as easy as you can make anywhere look unsafe. Studies like this are virtually meaningless. I'm surprised I've being downmodded so much, I figured the crowd at hacker news would be a little less reactionary than that.
- hugh 18y agoYou're being downmodded for making assertions which are either false or meaningless. I can't quite figure out which just yet. In case you're still under the impression that the US is a particularly high-crime country, check out http://rechten.uvt.nl/icvs/images/graph05.jpg http://rechten.uvt.nl/icvs/images/graph05.jpg. The grey bars show that the US is safer than an awful lot of other developed countries including the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Iceland (!), Switzerland (!), Belgium and Australia. And that's not even counting undeveloped countries, which tend to have much higher crime than developed ones.
- mjterave 18y agoWhat's with all the hate for the South Bay? Seriously, I see posts like this from people in San Francisco all the time. I understand that they like where they live, but why the seething hatred for San Jose? Nobody's making them go there. :) Does this sort of whining happen in other metro areas too?
- p_alexander 18y agoDefinitely. The North Side/South Side fighting in Chicago was pretty crazy to see after coming from California, especially as the borders seem to be drawn on socio-economical/racial lines.
- mhartl 18y agoIndeed. The phrase "hater in the house!" kept running through my head. If you live in a place you hate, shut up and move. If you don't, just shut up.
- sah 18y agoIf everyone shuts up, how are people supposed to figure out where to move to? I hate the idea that no one should ever be critical of anything.
- mhartl 18y agoI'm not saying everyone should shut up, just the haters. They're so loud and shrill that they drown everyone else out. There are lots of people who like suburbia (and dislike cities). They're just not smug and self-righteous about it, and they don't shout it from the rooftops while looking down on everyone else.
- cstejerean 18y agobashing on the alternatives allows people to feel better about the choices they've made.
- ardit33 18y ago
- p_alexander 18y agoSan Jose, like any major US city, has its awesome points and its disgusting monstrosities (Santana Row, I'm talking to you). And come on, San Francisco has its share of fake and cliche (North Beach? Haight? The area around PacBell Park?). Since the link focused on the negatives, I'll throw some positives out there (coming from a San Jose native who has lived in SF, LA, Chicago, and now Morgan Hill - mushroom capital of the world). 1. There are some cool little neighborhoods in the San Jose metropolitan area: Willow Glen, Rose Garden/Burbank, Campbell, Saratoga, Almaden Valley. 2. Good ethnic food, especially from Latin America, Vietnam, India, and China. Even some good fine dining opportunities (La Foret in New Almaden comes to mind). 3. A great Latino/Chicano cultural scene. 4. Decent transit that's been getting better (much, much better than LA, lagging a little behind SF and WAY behind Chicago/New York). 5. Retail tech stores all over (even SF lacks this).- Central Computer, any number of Fry's. 6. A developing downtown. If you'd been here ten years ago, this place was dead. If you'd been here 20 years ago...well, you wouldn't have been downtown. The fact that you can go there at night at all now is AMAZING considering what this place was like when I was a kid. It's fairly jumping now, with a decent selection of restaurants and good parking. 7. Cheaper than SF by a bunch. San Jose is great, especially if you aren't into the trendy hipster scene and don't mind heading into "scary" (aka non-Anglo) parts of town like East San Jose, Little Saigon, etc.
- mattmaroon 18y agoLot of Santana Row hating here. I liked the place. Some people just like nice things and convenience, and Santana Row has plenty of both. It doesn't necessarily make you "fake" or materialistic. I personally enjoyed having a Brooks Brothers, a Diesel, a Cole Haan, and a Tommy Bahama store all next to each other. Mix in some decent (though overpriced) restaurants, and it's altogether a nice place. I did have to be sure to route my wife around the Donald J. Pliner shop though. I guess maybe it's just due to the inordinate amount of time I spent in Las Vegas, but I find it fairly easy to coexist peacefully with the materialist mindset, and simply take advantage of the perks while opting out of the pseudo-religion. You can like nice stuff without that defining you.
- ardit33 18y ago
- neilk 18y agoSan Jose does indeed look like the most godforsaken sprawl. This town is more populous than San Francisco and yet people still refer to SF as "the city". However, if you live here, you'll find that it's not quite that simple. There are creative and life-affirming things here, but the only architecture that's available is the strip-mall, so that's what people use. For my money, the best coffeehouse in the entire area (including places like Ritual in San Francisco) is located in an unassuming strip mall in Santa Clara, next to a big-box TV retailer. (http://barefootcoffeeroasters.com/ http://barefootcoffeeroasters.com/). And there are vibrant immigrant populations here, particularly Vietnamese, and they bring their cuisine with them. San Francisco itself is so expensive that it's getting older, richer, and more ethnically homogenous all the time. Pretty soon it's going to be just twentysomething white trustafarians and fortysomething white management consultants. But that just barely modifies jwz's critique. For now, if you want to feel like your soul is enriched just by walking down the street, you have to live in SF. If you want a place to put your bed and TV, live in San Jose.
- mattmaroon 18y agoI mostly feel my soul endangered, rather than enriched, when I walk down the street there. Someone assaulted my wife the first time we visited (long before I joined YC). I wasn't around, but thankfully a passerby helped out. That's undoubtedly atypical though. I think it's relatively safe for a city its size.
- dgentry 18y agoIf thats what he thought in 1996, I wonder what the 2008 version would say?
- sealedidentity 18y agoSan Jose is heaven compared to anywhere in NJ. That place reeks, ancient infrastructure, tolls everywhere, dirt everywhere and not to mention awful weather for the better part of the year. I'd rather live in the Bay Area with more expenses on the same pay than anywhere else in the east coast. Although, I concur Austin, Vegas and Phoenix are fantastic places to live.
- natrius 18y agoTolls are a bad thing? God forbid people pay for the roads they drive on. Free highways are a huge cause of the Bay Area's sprawl.
- natrius 18y agoHm... I thought we only downmodded comments that didn't add to the discussion here, but it looks like people just disagree with me. Care to explain why instead of just downmodding?
- iamtooch 18y agoPlaces that grow really fast are going to have trouble building a gracious old downtown with lots of character. I moved here from New York State 25 years ago, having grown up and gone to school in little towns and small cities with tons of character and no jobs. When I got here, it was obvious that outside of SF and legacy downtowns, most of the rest of the peninsula and south bay had been built in a continuous pour from about 1950 to today. Relax. LA looks like that. Phoenix looks like that in spades. Suburban Seattle looks like that. Kansas City. Atlanta. Urban Texas. It's what places look like when people are moving there as fast as they can to get jobs and raise families (and spend money and pay taxes, I might add). It's an uptown problem. As the south bay ages, and infill and redesign happen here and there, the area will develop [more] character and idiosyncracies. But for now it's pretty sweet living in one of the most dynamic places in human history. By the way, there are very nearby places where you can live in the country or in the city, and still commute fairly easily to your job, but I'm not going to spoil them. Look around.
- talleyrand 18y agoYou all ought to move to New Orleans. No strip malls, the best food in the world, and plenty of fun. It's just as good as anywhere for coding....
- Prrometheus 18y agoAtlanta has some very nice places. Little Five Points, Virginia Highlands, and West End all have lots of character. I had a friend who was a trapeze hobbyist stay at a cheap and huge repurposed warehouse (I wouldn't quite say "refurbished") on the west side. She had her trapeze rope strung up in a cavernous main room with brick walls decorated with her friends' art. She had bitchin' parties at which she would get a little drunk and perform (not the smartest idea, but entertaining). Sure, you have to drive places in Atlanta. We just had more people crash at our place after going out, or we would crash at theirs. The music scene is healthy, if you care about that sort of thing. People are friendly. And I paid $340/month in rent in 2005 (that is not a typo). The food is great. I have yet to experience anything quite like it outside of New York, and NY can't match the prices. The Vortex serves the best burgers this side of the grave, and Highland Bakery has a shrimp and grits with a spicy cheddar sauce that cannot be described in any earthly tongue. Add in a very international flavor, 2 of the 10 gayest counties in America (Sorry to stereotype, but any city without a gay population probably sucks. They sense backwards boring closed-minded people and stay away.), and you have one cool city. I can't speak for Atlanta's start-up scene, but gawd, what a city. I hear Austin is better, but Atlanta is like a mini-Austin from what I can tell.
- rtf 18y agoLast Sunday I walked through San Jose, about five or six miles. I got sunburned.
- motoko 18y ago"New" Mountain View on Castro Street is OK. It's not SF, but there are now decent restaurants, two bookstores (the used bookstore is fantastic), and acceptable (not good) independent cafes. It's also near the train station.
- mattmaroon 18y agoWow is he wrong about Sushi. It's quite easy to screw it up, and I have a few friends with hospital trips to prove it.
- berecruited 18y agoVery funny read - mostly because of the hyperbole and awesome formatting (including dead links). That said, I don't exactly agree with any of it!
- pl0nk 18y agoYou are surprised that a webpage from 1996 has dead links? I am more surprised that any of the off-site ones work.