I lived in SF/East Bay across 10 years (eventually owned a house in El Cerrito) and moved up to Seattle in 2011. I love both the Bay Area and Seattle deeply. W

I lived in SF/East Bay across 10 years (eventually owned a house in El Cerrito) and moved up to Seattle in 2011. I love both the Bay Area and Seattle deeply. What's happening to SF is very similar to what has become of Portland. That, my friends, is not a downtown I would recommend anyone visit until something changes. Simply walking around any time of day it becomes immediately obvious that if you're walking downtown you're either a hapless tourist or homeless. Most of the locals seemingly drive into downtown, jump in and out of stores and restaurants that are still in business, then they drive back home. The suburbs and surrounding areas are gorgeous, but large sections of downtown are just ... terrible. (And often scary.) Seattle was teetering on this fate, but Amazon forced their enormous workforce to come back to the office. And, it produced a lot of blowback from the employees. But, local employees went back. What has that done? It has created a TON of downtown traffic. Not fun at all. But it has also injected the downtown core with (you guessed it) lots of people and money, keeping small businesses downtown alive in some areas. At least for now, Seattle seems to have dodged the ghost town blues that have befallen beautiful SF and Portland.