9 ms·

Nobody says hi in San Francisco

47 points by jashkenas 6y ago

outsomnia 6y ago
Rents per square ft / tatami mat are not that reasonable in Tokyo. Westerners are generally treated with caution rather than friendly greets on the street too...
- benrbray 6y ago
  As a Tokyo resident I have to disagree with you on both points. Rent is cheap (just don't live right next to Shibuya crossing) and people are incredibly welcoming. Sure, they'll politely ignore you on the train, but that's the same as any big city in the states.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    Yeah - I swear patio11 has written extensively about this, but on a quick search I couldn’t find it. Basically Tokyo builds proper housing supply so it’s easily affordable, but as a result housing is not a good place to invest money. In the US housing is seen as an investment which creates bad policy and perverse incentives to constrain supply in order to enrich existing owners. Housing can be affordable or a good investment, but it can’t really be both. Tokyo does this the right way and SF (along with the Bay Area and America generally) does it wrong. Housing in Tokyo is relatively cheap. Somewhat unrelated I found this one while looking which I loved when I first read it. It’s about a super cool tax policy Japan implemented to help rural areas that people leave for the city, it incentivizes people to send some of that money back: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2018/10/19/japanese-hometown-tax/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2018/10/19/japanese-hometown-tax/
    - patio11 6y ago
      I write about it on Twitter a bit, and should probably upgrade it to an essay at some point just so people who share my intersection of interests have a convenient entry point.
- gkanai 6y ago
  > not that reasonable in Tokyo It depends on which part of the 23 wards of Tokyo you refer to. Central Tokyo, yes, it can be expensive, close to Manhattan rents. But farther outside of central Tokyo, you can get very reasonable rents. And there's a lot more options in Tokyo when you factor in reliable public transport and a much larger metro area than the 5 boroughs of NYC.
noodlesUK 6y ago
I would say, yeah people in SF can come across a bit cold, but so do people in most larger cities, especially now during COVID. I now go out of my way to avoid people in a way I never would have before. SF pales in comparison to the overall apathy of places like NYC or London though. I find the weird outgoingness to strangers off-putting (as a Brit) in the smaller towns and cities in the states. People are always asking invasive questions, and it can start to get grating after the first few dozen times.
- portalcell 6y ago
  I lived in London for a decade before moving to SF. SF is significantly more friendly, even now during COVID - walking along a random residential street, chances are > 1 in 4 that passersby will say "hi!" if you acknowledge them. This does not happen in London. Sure if you walk down Market you're unlikely to find a lot of folks wanting to pass the time of day but Market != SF
  - ipnon 6y ago
    Londoners are famously brusque, no? Try holding up a queue and wait for the pleasant greetings.
    - Apocryphon 6y ago
      Are there any megalopolises that don't have a culture of quick paces and impatience?
    - dmje 6y ago
      We're big on queuing
  - mellosouls 6y ago
    I have a Londoner friend I stay with there sometimes (I'm from the North of England). I wind him up by threatening to walk around his neighbourhood being "weird and dangerous-looking" (his unnerved words) by using friendly eye contact and saying hello to people I walk by.
p2pai 6y ago
This might be more about covid and not so much about sf?
tolbish 6y ago
My understanding is that you move to SF to optimize for money/status, not for livability.
- jacobolus 6y ago
  Other than the insane rents and housing prices (and obviously tempered this year by the pandemic), SF is a very livable city. Tons of stuff within walk distance, great weather all year, lots of interesting distinct neighborhoods, much better than average public transit for the US (still garbage by world standards), lots of restaurant choices, all sorts of "cultural" stuff happening all the time, plenty of neighborhood festivals of one kind of another, etc. There are certainly some people very concerned about money/status (as you will find anywhere), but SF is also chock full of weird people doing their own thing, much more than most places in the USA.
  - tolbish 6y ago
    Livability also includes traffic, how much space you have, cleanliness, and safety of public transit. Is it really the city to start or raise a family in?
    - jacobolus 6y ago
      Well... livability for who then? For someone who wants to have a large home workshop to build boats in, built on cheap land, yeah, it's not a great place. For someone who wants to live on a farm and grow all their own food, not so great. For a childless couple who needs a 5 bedroom house and professionally landscape-architected decorative garden to show their coworkers they have made it (I know several such people in the South Bay), not great. For a family of 7 who want each kid to have their own room, not so great. However it is great for anyone who doesn't like making every trip by car, or who wants to live somewhere where there are constantly new things to do. > Is it really the city to start or raise a family in? I have a 1.5 year old and a 4 year old, have been living in SF for about 8 years and intend to stay indefinitely. So for me, yes. But many middle class families have different criteria. e.g. there are many families who move out of SF because they feel they have run out of space in a small rent-controlled apartment and can't afford a bigger one; or they need childcare help from family who live elsewhere; or they don't want to send their children to public schools alongside working class children ('the average test scores are too low'), but can't afford expensive private schools. Etc. In my personal opinion, for anyone under the age of 20 it is a much more fun place than almost anywhere in the USA, with a much wider variety of resources available. Suburbia sucks for young people (speaking from personal experience after growing up in a "nice" suburb). YMMV.
cmdshiftf4 6y ago
Yes yes, we get it, San Francisco bad.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  Yes terrible place. In fact the whole state bad.
mgraczyk 6y ago
idk, depends on the neighborhood. I've lived in North Beach for around a year. Both before and during Covid, I've found people to be super friendly and willing to have a short conversation if it makes sense to have one. A simple "hi" would be welcomed the majority of the time. On the other hand, I used to love in lower polk, fairly close to the tenderloin (sutter st). No way would I talk to anyone on the street there, and I suspect most people would ignore or become fearful of a "hello".
quantified 6y ago
My experience too. In Chicago, saying “hi” is super common. Took me a long time to lose the habit in the Bay Area, and I feel poorer for it.
- jgwil2 6y ago
  That's the midwestern culture. Chicago is unique among the big American cities in that respect.
  - onecommentman 6y ago
    Only for a fairly restrictive definition of “big”. Kansas City, St Louis, Twin Cities...easy to say hi or start up a conversation. Unfriendliness only an issue in dense cities with a high quasi-transient population or maybe a boom town. Even there, if you look for the persistent villages beneath the city...which is the classic NYC response. Intermountain West, Deep South sans south Florida, Appalachia, Desert Southwest (maybe not Las Vegas or Phoenix or the boutique tourist towns in high season, hard to say), New England sans Boston...not really a problem.
    - quantified 6y ago
      Right, Boston wasn’t great for it but not so discouraging that I gave up.
gonewest 6y ago
I say hi to people on San Francisco, but I don’t get discouraged if some don’t respond. There are all sorts of people with wildly divergent circumstances. I’m not or rushing to reach a conclusion about others (or about the overall fate of the city) just because some people don’t say “hi” back.
raldi 6y ago
I lived in Manhattan for a decade and SF even longer. I noticed no difference whatsoever between the two cities regarding how likely strangers on the street are to say hello.
ardit33 6y ago
I think this is the same for every major american city. I don't know how is Chicago, or LA, but in NYC for sure nobody is saying hi to random folks. The only time you say hi is to old neighbors (which are few, as people move in and out often), and to the coffee place/restaurant/bar you frequent often. NYC does have plenty of homeless as well, but the cold clears them up pretty quick. By late November, NYC is too cold, and during the summer it can get too hot. SF definitely has other major problems. It is just too lenient on crime. NYC has seen somme uptick as well, since last year (pre-covid), and the culprit might be the no-bail reform. While might seen progressive in nature, it is letting out folks that have done multiple crimes back to back, and they return doing the same. SF has implemented this earlier and the uptick in crime is reflecting it: There was a guy that got arrested 14 times in the last 18 months for car theft. And he is still free: https://twitter.com/SFPDTenderloin/status/1337280516609884161 https://twitter.com/SFPDTenderloin/status/133728051660988416... When you have car-thieves/robbers running free around, immagine all other lower level of criminals. They know they can operate with impunity and they act accordingly. Ps. (I lived in SF for 7 years, and now in NYC for 6 years. NYC folks are less friendly in general, and more direct. SF-ers are more polite, but also more flakey).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kstenerud 6y ago
  "NYC does have plenty of homeless as well, but the cold clears them up pretty quick." That comes off pretty cold-hearted...
  - meddlepal 6y ago
    Perhaps, but it's a practical observation. It's the same for most of the major Northern cities including Boston and Chicago.
  - ardit33 6y ago
    I used to be pretty compassionate, but you can't deny a dense population of homeless do have a negative impact in a neighborhoods/street/block quality of life, especially if you have kids. Random fires in encampments, and drunk people passing out in front of your apt are not fun either. Last time this happen (a drunk guy cracked his head in front of my building, bleeding all over) I called 911, and the ems came. They knew the guy as he did drunk pass out often, and this was not his first time.
Apocryphon 6y ago
> San Francisco is functionally divided into a set of groups that, as far as I can tell, rarely talk to each other. [...] SF has all the pieces of a kaleidoscopically diverse city, and yet the pieces don’t talk to each other. They walk the same streets but they live in parallel, non-interacting universes. This reminds me of how LA is often described, to bring up a rival city that us NorCal denizens might bristle at being compared to. LA County is a hugely diverse area, but each distinct ethnic and immigrant group has its own enclave, its own self-sustaining community. So the need for them to intermingle is lessened.
ALittleLight 6y ago
I know this observation may infringe on the boundaries of good taste, but this line stuck out to me - "I noticed that the group was one Black guy, one South Asian guy, one East Asian guy, one White girl, and one guy who might have been Hispanic. It was like some sort of promotional photo from an HR department. And suddenly I thought of the Axis powers, and their insane delusions of racial purity and supremacy, and I thought: 'How could you idiots ever hope to beat us?'" The United States was ~90% white for World War 2 [1]. Other major allied powers, the USSR and the UK probably were even moreso. It doesn't make sense to suggest that modern diversity had anything to do with World War 2. A better, modern example, might be comparing the modern US to modern China, which is 92% Han Chinese[2]. Only, I'm not sure US dominance against China will be as decisive as it was against Nazi Germany. 1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_demographics_of_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic... 2 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- daniellarusso 6y ago
  Are you saying it is just a numbers game? I think of ‘Mythical Man Month’ and the notion that having more humans is not necessarily an advantage.
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    All I'm saying is that modern diversity isn't a factor in America's performance in World War 2 as the author suggests.
    - daniellarusso 6y ago
      Like the Navajo code talkers? https://www.intelligence.gov/index.php/people/barrier-breakers-in-history/453-navajo-code-talkers https://www.intelligence.gov/index.php/people/barrier-breake...
daniellarusso 6y ago
My experience from a few years ago, most people were already engaged communicating with somebody. So, it would be odd to ‘interrupt’ somebody while they are in conversation. It was interesting to see lots of people communicating, but with somebody not physically present. Anecdotal, of course.
Apocryphon 6y ago
Most of the comments here are hung up about the accuracy or lack thereof of the saying hi observation, which is just the article's title and hook. I'm more curious to see if anyone agrees with the author's point about the lack of intermixing in SF between people of different classes, and the seeming lack of urban social cohesion, unlike other cities such as NY or perhaps Boston ("Boston Strong"). Certainly, if one works in tech in SF, it's easy to get stuck in an industry bubble where the first questions strangers ask each other at social events is "oh who do you work for?" and it just becomes a parade of corporate logos, tech stack holy wars, weekend side projects, and comparing option offers.
- somethoughts 6y ago
  I think its also where the new transplants end up. They end up in the recently gentrified areas such as the Mission/Castro/Dolores due to affordability/closeness to the GBUS, etc. Being fairly adjacent to the Tenderloin/City Hall/Haight, people are generally going to have the guard up higher and you'll have more interaction with the folks who've been gentrified out. YMMV but if the author was in the more residential areas such as Marina/Cow Hollow/Inner Sunset/Noe Valley and jogged the same routes regularly, perhaps he'd have had a more small town interactions.
- jrockway 6y ago
  I am not sure we have a ton of social cohesion in New York necessarily. Among the well-to-do, sure, we're not only working in tech, but there is still the discomfort with there being many classes of people. (The gig economy killed any hope of there ever being a middle class again.) I think if you want people to say "hi" to you, you have to act the part. Some single 20-something walking around with headphones and a hoodie... nobody is going to talk to you. Get a dog and a partner, and people will talk to you while you're out walking the dog. They're walking their dog, and so you have something to talk about. (The dogs will break the ice!)
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    Granted, he's talking about something that's very subjective, but there does seem to be a popular conception of New Yorkers having a shared identity regardless of class- > There is certainly class separation and racial division in New York, but there is an inherent camaraderie to the city itself, a shared feeling that everyone is in the belly of the same vast urban beast. Of course, that could just be something unique after the collective trauma of 9/11 (and Hurricane Sandy, etc.). You see it in pop culture depictions- "this city sucks, but it's our city!" Again, getting random city dwellers to say hi to you is the opener of this article, it shouldn't be the last word that everyone fixates upon.
dmje 6y ago
We notice it here in Cornwall, UK. Most of the time everyone is super friendly, lots of hellos and smiles between people you see in the street, even strangers. Then it's holiday season and the place fills up with visitors - there's a palpable change in the interactions. I make a special effort to say HI and smile very enthusiastically during these times, see if I can break people out of their misery :-)
golergka 6y ago
I've never in my life have been in a city where it would be OK to just say "hi" to a person you don't know and are not planning to get to know. This sounds... like something out of pure fantasy. Where on Earth do people do that?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
threwawaysoff 6y ago
I noticed a large decline in friendliness, and it was one of the reasons why I moved out of California; Chico to the SF Bay Area were basically the same. And, new mail people eventually wouldn't even acknowledge my presence. It seems like most average people were struggling and near the boiling point of discontent. Even worse, because so many people in the SF Bay Area are semi-temporary transplants, they are often in "vacation"-mode and don't care about the area or other people as much because they're uninvested.

47 points by jashkenas 6y ago

Rents per square ft / tatami mat are not that reasonable in Tokyo. Westerners are generally treated with caution rather than friendly greets on the street too...

benrbray 6y ago
As a Tokyo resident I have to disagree with you on both points. Rent is cheap (just don't live right next to Shibuya crossing) and people are incredibly welcoming. Sure, they'll politely ignore you on the train, but that's the same as any big city in the states.
- fossuser 6y ago
  Yeah - I swear patio11 has written extensively about this, but on a quick search I couldn’t find it. Basically Tokyo builds proper housing supply so it’s easily affordable, but as a result housing is not a good place to invest money. In the US housing is seen as an investment which creates bad policy and perverse incentives to constrain supply in order to enrich existing owners. Housing can be affordable or a good investment, but it can’t really be both. Tokyo does this the right way and SF (along with the Bay Area and America generally) does it wrong. Housing in Tokyo is relatively cheap. Somewhat unrelated I found this one while looking which I loved when I first read it. It’s about a super cool tax policy Japan implemented to help rural areas that people leave for the city, it incentivizes people to send some of that money back: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2018/10/19/japanese-hometown-tax/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2018/10/19/japanese-hometown-tax/
  - patio11 6y ago
    I write about it on Twitter a bit, and should probably upgrade it to an essay at some point just so people who share my intersection of interests have a convenient entry point.
gkanai 6y ago
> not that reasonable in Tokyo It depends on which part of the 23 wards of Tokyo you refer to. Central Tokyo, yes, it can be expensive, close to Manhattan rents. But farther outside of central Tokyo, you can get very reasonable rents. And there's a lot more options in Tokyo when you factor in reliable public transport and a much larger metro area than the 5 boroughs of NYC.

noodlesUK 6y ago

I would say, yeah people in SF can come across a bit cold, but so do people in most larger cities, especially now during COVID. I now go out of my way to avoid people in a way I never would have before. SF pales in comparison to the overall apathy of places like NYC or London though. I find the weird outgoingness to strangers off-putting (as a Brit) in the smaller towns and cities in the states. People are always asking invasive questions, and it can start to get grating after the first few dozen times.

portalcell 6y ago
I lived in London for a decade before moving to SF. SF is significantly more friendly, even now during COVID - walking along a random residential street, chances are > 1 in 4 that passersby will say "hi!" if you acknowledge them. This does not happen in London. Sure if you walk down Market you're unlikely to find a lot of folks wanting to pass the time of day but Market != SF
- ipnon 6y ago
  Londoners are famously brusque, no? Try holding up a queue and wait for the pleasant greetings.
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    Are there any megalopolises that don't have a culture of quick paces and impatience?
  - dmje 6y ago
    We're big on queuing
- mellosouls 6y ago
  I have a Londoner friend I stay with there sometimes (I'm from the North of England). I wind him up by threatening to walk around his neighbourhood being "weird and dangerous-looking" (his unnerved words) by using friendly eye contact and saying hello to people I walk by.

p2pai 6y ago

This might be more about covid and not so much about sf?

tolbish 6y ago

My understanding is that you move to SF to optimize for money/status, not for livability.

jacobolus 6y ago
Other than the insane rents and housing prices (and obviously tempered this year by the pandemic), SF is a very livable city. Tons of stuff within walk distance, great weather all year, lots of interesting distinct neighborhoods, much better than average public transit for the US (still garbage by world standards), lots of restaurant choices, all sorts of "cultural" stuff happening all the time, plenty of neighborhood festivals of one kind of another, etc. There are certainly some people very concerned about money/status (as you will find anywhere), but SF is also chock full of weird people doing their own thing, much more than most places in the USA.
- tolbish 6y ago
  Livability also includes traffic, how much space you have, cleanliness, and safety of public transit. Is it really the city to start or raise a family in?
  - jacobolus 6y ago
    Well... livability for who then? For someone who wants to have a large home workshop to build boats in, built on cheap land, yeah, it's not a great place. For someone who wants to live on a farm and grow all their own food, not so great. For a childless couple who needs a 5 bedroom house and professionally landscape-architected decorative garden to show their coworkers they have made it (I know several such people in the South Bay), not great. For a family of 7 who want each kid to have their own room, not so great. However it is great for anyone who doesn't like making every trip by car, or who wants to live somewhere where there are constantly new things to do. > Is it really the city to start or raise a family in? I have a 1.5 year old and a 4 year old, have been living in SF for about 8 years and intend to stay indefinitely. So for me, yes. But many middle class families have different criteria. e.g. there are many families who move out of SF because they feel they have run out of space in a small rent-controlled apartment and can't afford a bigger one; or they need childcare help from family who live elsewhere; or they don't want to send their children to public schools alongside working class children ('the average test scores are too low'), but can't afford expensive private schools. Etc. In my personal opinion, for anyone under the age of 20 it is a much more fun place than almost anywhere in the USA, with a much wider variety of resources available. Suburbia sucks for young people (speaking from personal experience after growing up in a "nice" suburb). YMMV.

cmdshiftf4 6y ago

Yes yes, we get it, San Francisco bad.

Gibbon1 6y ago
Yes terrible place. In fact the whole state bad.

mgraczyk 6y ago

idk, depends on the neighborhood. I've lived in North Beach for around a year. Both before and during Covid, I've found people to be super friendly and willing to have a short conversation if it makes sense to have one. A simple "hi" would be welcomed the majority of the time. On the other hand, I used to love in lower polk, fairly close to the tenderloin (sutter st). No way would I talk to anyone on the street there, and I suspect most people would ignore or become fearful of a "hello".

quantified 6y ago

My experience too. In Chicago, saying “hi” is super common. Took me a long time to lose the habit in the Bay Area, and I feel poorer for it.

jgwil2 6y ago
That's the midwestern culture. Chicago is unique among the big American cities in that respect.
- onecommentman 6y ago
  Only for a fairly restrictive definition of “big”. Kansas City, St Louis, Twin Cities...easy to say hi or start up a conversation. Unfriendliness only an issue in dense cities with a high quasi-transient population or maybe a boom town. Even there, if you look for the persistent villages beneath the city...which is the classic NYC response. Intermountain West, Deep South sans south Florida, Appalachia, Desert Southwest (maybe not Las Vegas or Phoenix or the boutique tourist towns in high season, hard to say), New England sans Boston...not really a problem.
  - quantified 6y ago
    Right, Boston wasn’t great for it but not so discouraging that I gave up.

gonewest 6y ago

I say hi to people on San Francisco, but I don’t get discouraged if some don’t respond. There are all sorts of people with wildly divergent circumstances. I’m not or rushing to reach a conclusion about others (or about the overall fate of the city) just because some people don’t say “hi” back.

raldi 6y ago

I lived in Manhattan for a decade and SF even longer. I noticed no difference whatsoever between the two cities regarding how likely strangers on the street are to say hello.

ardit33 6y ago

I think this is the same for every major american city. I don't know how is Chicago, or LA, but in NYC for sure nobody is saying hi to random folks. The only time you say hi is to old neighbors (which are few, as people move in and out often), and to the coffee place/restaurant/bar you frequent often. NYC does have plenty of homeless as well, but the cold clears them up pretty quick. By late November, NYC is too cold, and during the summer it can get too hot. SF definitely has other major problems. It is just too lenient on crime. NYC has seen somme uptick as well, since last year (pre-covid), and the culprit might be the no-bail reform. While might seen progressive in nature, it is letting out folks that have done multiple crimes back to back, and they return doing the same. SF has implemented this earlier and the uptick in crime is reflecting it: There was a guy that got arrested 14 times in the last 18 months for car theft. And he is still free: https://twitter.com/SFPDTenderloin/status/1337280516609884161 https://twitter.com/SFPDTenderloin/status/133728051660988416... When you have car-thieves/robbers running free around, immagine all other lower level of criminals. They know they can operate with impunity and they act accordingly. Ps. (I lived in SF for 7 years, and now in NYC for 6 years. NYC folks are less friendly in general, and more direct. SF-ers are more polite, but also more flakey).

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kstenerud 6y ago
"NYC does have plenty of homeless as well, but the cold clears them up pretty quick." That comes off pretty cold-hearted...
- meddlepal 6y ago
  Perhaps, but it's a practical observation. It's the same for most of the major Northern cities including Boston and Chicago.
- ardit33 6y ago
  I used to be pretty compassionate, but you can't deny a dense population of homeless do have a negative impact in a neighborhoods/street/block quality of life, especially if you have kids. Random fires in encampments, and drunk people passing out in front of your apt are not fun either. Last time this happen (a drunk guy cracked his head in front of my building, bleeding all over) I called 911, and the ems came. They knew the guy as he did drunk pass out often, and this was not his first time.

Apocryphon 6y ago

> San Francisco is functionally divided into a set of groups that, as far as I can tell, rarely talk to each other. [...] SF has all the pieces of a kaleidoscopically diverse city, and yet the pieces don’t talk to each other. They walk the same streets but they live in parallel, non-interacting universes. This reminds me of how LA is often described, to bring up a rival city that us NorCal denizens might bristle at being compared to. LA County is a hugely diverse area, but each distinct ethnic and immigrant group has its own enclave, its own self-sustaining community. So the need for them to intermingle is lessened.

ALittleLight 6y ago

I know this observation may infringe on the boundaries of good taste, but this line stuck out to me - "I noticed that the group was one Black guy, one South Asian guy, one East Asian guy, one White girl, and one guy who might have been Hispanic. It was like some sort of promotional photo from an HR department. And suddenly I thought of the Axis powers, and their insane delusions of racial purity and supremacy, and I thought: 'How could you idiots ever hope to beat us?'" The United States was ~90% white for World War 2 [1]. Other major allied powers, the USSR and the UK probably were even moreso. It doesn't make sense to suggest that modern diversity had anything to do with World War 2. A better, modern example, might be comparing the modern US to modern China, which is 92% Han Chinese[2]. Only, I'm not sure US dominance against China will be as decisive as it was against Nazi Germany. 1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_demographics_of_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic... 2 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
daniellarusso 6y ago
Are you saying it is just a numbers game? I think of ‘Mythical Man Month’ and the notion that having more humans is not necessarily an advantage.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  All I'm saying is that modern diversity isn't a factor in America's performance in World War 2 as the author suggests.
  - daniellarusso 6y ago
    Like the Navajo code talkers? https://www.intelligence.gov/index.php/people/barrier-breakers-in-history/453-navajo-code-talkers https://www.intelligence.gov/index.php/people/barrier-breake...

daniellarusso 6y ago

My experience from a few years ago, most people were already engaged communicating with somebody. So, it would be odd to ‘interrupt’ somebody while they are in conversation. It was interesting to see lots of people communicating, but with somebody not physically present. Anecdotal, of course.

Apocryphon 6y ago

Most of the comments here are hung up about the accuracy or lack thereof of the saying hi observation, which is just the article's title and hook. I'm more curious to see if anyone agrees with the author's point about the lack of intermixing in SF between people of different classes, and the seeming lack of urban social cohesion, unlike other cities such as NY or perhaps Boston ("Boston Strong"). Certainly, if one works in tech in SF, it's easy to get stuck in an industry bubble where the first questions strangers ask each other at social events is "oh who do you work for?" and it just becomes a parade of corporate logos, tech stack holy wars, weekend side projects, and comparing option offers.

somethoughts 6y ago
I think its also where the new transplants end up. They end up in the recently gentrified areas such as the Mission/Castro/Dolores due to affordability/closeness to the GBUS, etc. Being fairly adjacent to the Tenderloin/City Hall/Haight, people are generally going to have the guard up higher and you'll have more interaction with the folks who've been gentrified out. YMMV but if the author was in the more residential areas such as Marina/Cow Hollow/Inner Sunset/Noe Valley and jogged the same routes regularly, perhaps he'd have had a more small town interactions.
jrockway 6y ago
I am not sure we have a ton of social cohesion in New York necessarily. Among the well-to-do, sure, we're not only working in tech, but there is still the discomfort with there being many classes of people. (The gig economy killed any hope of there ever being a middle class again.) I think if you want people to say "hi" to you, you have to act the part. Some single 20-something walking around with headphones and a hoodie... nobody is going to talk to you. Get a dog and a partner, and people will talk to you while you're out walking the dog. They're walking their dog, and so you have something to talk about. (The dogs will break the ice!)
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  Granted, he's talking about something that's very subjective, but there does seem to be a popular conception of New Yorkers having a shared identity regardless of class- > There is certainly class separation and racial division in New York, but there is an inherent camaraderie to the city itself, a shared feeling that everyone is in the belly of the same vast urban beast. Of course, that could just be something unique after the collective trauma of 9/11 (and Hurricane Sandy, etc.). You see it in pop culture depictions- "this city sucks, but it's our city!" Again, getting random city dwellers to say hi to you is the opener of this article, it shouldn't be the last word that everyone fixates upon.

dmje 6y ago

We notice it here in Cornwall, UK. Most of the time everyone is super friendly, lots of hellos and smiles between people you see in the street, even strangers. Then it's holiday season and the place fills up with visitors - there's a palpable change in the interactions. I make a special effort to say HI and smile very enthusiastically during these times, see if I can break people out of their misery :-)

golergka 6y ago

I've never in my life have been in a city where it would be OK to just say "hi" to a person you don't know and are not planning to get to know. This sounds... like something out of pure fantasy. Where on Earth do people do that?

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threwawaysoff 6y ago

I noticed a large decline in friendliness, and it was one of the reasons why I moved out of California; Chico to the SF Bay Area were basically the same. And, new mail people eventually wouldn't even acknowledge my presence. It seems like most average people were struggling and near the boiling point of discontent. Even worse, because so many people in the SF Bay Area are semi-temporary transplants, they are often in "vacation"-mode and don't care about the area or other people as much because they're uninvested.