17 ms·

I don't know, the residential neighborhoods of SF are the perfect place to raise a family if you make tech money: dense enough that there is a ton of stuff to d

I don't know, the residential neighborhoods of SF are the perfect place to raise a family if you make tech money: dense enough that there is a ton of stuff to do and your kid knows other kid nearby, low density enough that you get 1500-2500sqft to yourself.

trgn 2y ago
turn of the century suburbs truly are goldilocks neighborhoods.
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  genuinely curious which century you mean?
  - cheschire 2y ago
    This is a depressingly good question. I hadn't ever considered we'd be far enough into this one to refer back to the 90's and early aughts as "turn of the century"
    - kccqzy 2y ago
      That's why I use the French term "fin-de-siècle" which is well understood by educated English speakers and yet always refers to the end of the 19th century without additional qualifications.
      - moate 2y ago
        Define “educated” and cite the survey showing how well understood it is among “English speakers” (British English? Commonwealth Nations Generally? N.A. English Speakers? Non-native/ESL?) I use “fortnightly” to mean “in 2 weeks” because bi-weekly is ambiguous, and while the game is hugely popular I still assume at least 1 person on any email chain with me reads that and is thinking “the fuck does he talk like a Victorian English Dandy for?”
      - November_Echo 2y ago
        > the French term "fin-de-siècle" which is well understood by educated English speakers This may not be as well understood as you believe. I am an educated English speaker, who has many educated English speaking friends and family, I have never heard this phrase.
      - tempfile 2y ago
        I agree with the other commenters that this is obscure. I coincidentally heard the term for the first time about 3 days ago (in the context of "socialism by fin-de-siècle" - the expectation that communism was inevitable among the left wing at that time.
    - lukas099 2y ago
      Turn of the millennium?
  - jacobr1 2y ago
    I'm sure he meant the early 1900s. I've usually heard these called "streetcar suburbs" for obvious reasons. They tend to have a good mix of urban and suburban vibes. Unlike the car-focused developments after the war, these neighborhoods are super walkable with local retail or other spots just a stroll away, or a short streetcar hop. The design is all about pedestrians, with narrow streets, plenty of sidewalks, and often tree-lined avenues. The houses, seem to have been more often built by skilled craftsmen, and have unique architectural details, unlike the cookie-cutter homes you see in later post-war suburbs.
    - vineyardmike 2y ago
      This is all true (if only we could go back in time!) but don’t let selection bias ruin reality. Most homes were crappy, only the ones built by skilled craftsmen survived. This was also the era that spawned protections against tenements.
      - chefandy 2y ago
        Crappy? I'm not so sure about that. I've lived at maybe 15 Southern New England addresses in my life and the three built after 1920 were the cheapest quality. And it's not like they were one in a dozen, or even 1 in 3: from cheap triple deckers to mansions, the area I live is packed full of buildings from that era. The knob and tube electricity has mostly been replaced, but most places I've lived still had gas lamp pipe nipples sticking out of the walls in the common hallways. The entire area is jam packed with buildings from that era.
        itsoktocry 2y ago
        >were the cheapest quality In what sense? I think people conflate "big brick building" with "quality". Sure, it's nice, as is some of the labour-intensive finishing work from that era. But nearly every bit of a modern house is "higher quality" than a home built 100+ ago, thanks mostly to the building code. (please don't link me some story of a shoddy builder)
        2y ago
  - trgn 2y ago
    Sorry, yes, 19th to 20th century. Neighborhoods with the Full House house basically.
- hintymad 2y ago
  Unfortunately the US demolished such urban structures to make space for cars and parking spaces. We now get a small downtown with clusters of skyscrapers, and then endless urban sprawl. It definitely made the cities of the US ugly, especially when compared to the European cities.
  - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
    They still exist in the northeast megalopolis where space to build postwar sprawl was limited.
    - kolbusa 2y ago
      I am visiting Boston and I cannot stop wondering why SF is not like that. The city feels so much more livable almost everywhere I went. I'm sure there are shady parts, but every time I need to go to SF for some reason I get really depressed.
      - vineyardmike 2y ago
        Respectfully, you’re almost certainly going to the wrong parts. My source is that I grew up inside Boston and now reside inside SF. Boston is amazing, and I love it. But SF is too. For similar reasons. SF is a city of neighborhoods. If you’re going to downtown, or any of the business centers, you’re not getting the good parts. The enjoyable nice parts of SF are all residential. Because of the hills, each residential neighborhood (a valley) has its own unique commercial street full of shops and restaurants, surrounded by beautiful old townhomes, and as you go up the hills you get vistas and nice homes. The city quality is inversely correlated with office space. Boston has similar historic driving forces - instead of hills, it used to be a city of (now infilled) peninsulas. You get wonderful old homes in Boston, and lots of streets full of shops. Instead of tech money (which Boston also has) it was overrun first by the education industry, which anchors many neighborhoods today.
        MikeTheGreat 2y ago
        could you expand on what you mean by "the education industry"? I was picturing an army of teachers, but I don't normally think of teachers as folks who earn enough to be compared to tech money :)
- galdosdi 2y ago
  Yes they are. We don't have enough of them and should make more. Literally all of Philadelphia (and its suburbs going quite far out) resembles this, thanks to rowhouses which allow true single family you-own-your-own-land-with-your-own-(tiny)-yard housing while still hitting enough density to get economies of scale and insanely great walkability. It would be paradise on earth if the public schools were good. Queens is like this too (except I have no idea about public school quality there, and it's probably hard to afford these days -- but balanced by access to the Manhattan job market) Governments need to accept that winner-take-all massive metro areas are the way of the future and just adjust zoning and incentives to flood the zone with transportation and housing (which help substitute for and encourage each other anyway), otherwise you're stuck choosing between affordable housing and access to education and jobs. Concentrating more jobs nearby creates more than the sum of their parts because workers are often more productive in industry clusters.
lazide 2y ago
SF schools and traffic are terrible with kids. Suburbs are generally much mellower.
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  I mean this depends on what specifically you’re optimizing for. A child in the suburb will need a chauffeur to get anywhere outside their immediate subdivision, and sometimes within it. Children are perfectly capable of taking public transit and using their two feet, though.
  - lazide 2y ago
    Have you not heard of school buses or soccer moms? Cities like SF tend to be okay for families in two different (and polar opposite) classes - those who are working poor, and the scare factor of public transit and hassle of traffic is something they just have to deal with, or quite wealthy - and they can afford drivers and/or private schools. The public school system in SF is also notoriously terrible to deal with, even by US big city standards, as ‘equity’ changes results in bussing kids all over town so there are no ‘good’/‘bad’ schools due to demographics. So siblings will often end up in schools on different sides of town, or kids in a school very far from where they live. The middle class tends to go to the suburbs where things are less crazy and easier to handle, and they get ‘bad’ things like a school where all the neighbors kids also go, and siblings can all be in the same school. And they can buy into a ‘good school district’. Among other things.
    - bobthepanda 2y ago
      Yeah, I’m saying that parents can choose to live in cities to avoid being just a soccer parent forever. School bus routes have been decimated in much of the country, creating long winding routes with horrible wake up times for children. And a school bus doesn’t take you to any place outside of school and the home. Growing up as a school child in New York with a transit pass, it was nice to hang out with friends, or go to a museum, or head to a new park, or try a new restaurant, or any number of things without having to involve parents for transport. And I went to a pretty good public school.
dunham 2y ago
We bailed for seattle because we could get a bigger house and have a better school situation. We did enjoy living on the border between the mission and noe valley before that though.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  I’m reading this from Ballard and I think we do alright on school quality and house size, although my east side colleagues think the deal is better in more suburban Kirkland or Bellevue.
  - throwaway48476 2y ago
    Ballard hardly has houses left, it's a condo jungle now.
    - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
      Townhome jungle. We still have lots of single family homes, especially north of 65th.
    - dnissley 2y ago
      Without the townhomes it would be even more unaffordable.
- ad-astra 2y ago
  Seattle is an interesting area, so many different pockets. I moved to Seattle in 2016 from Southern California, could never shake the depression. Moved to Cupertino in Jan and am as happy as a (very busy) clam.
  - throwaway19423 2y ago
    I visited Seattle the city proper recently, and also felt depressed. Not sure why I got that vibe. On paper Seattle is great, and no-doubt, the Pacific north west has good nature and tech-industry. It felt odd why Seattle felt "different".
bushbaba 2y ago
Except schools, crime, and kids able to get into trouble.
throw__away7391 2y ago
> if you make tech money It is a great tragedy that the US with all its money and diversity of geography and people has only really managed to produce a single walkable city and a scattered handful of “I don’t always use my car” neighborhoods, which are always the most expensive places to live. So many cities outside the US manage to do this on a fraction of the budget.
- throwaway48540 2y ago
  So many cities outside the US manage to have this as the only redeeming quality. It's nice to not have to walk - it's not so great to have to walk because you can't afford a car and public transit does not cut it for everyone even in the best rated cities of the world. And it's not really interesting to have a dense train network if you can't afford the train ticket; then you're just angry your tax money is spent on it instead of you. I'm from Europe but I would be very careful with claiming it's just a few cities or neighborhoods in the US. I made a list of places I could move to eventually, and it's at least two dozen, and that's just because I was focused on cities with significant tech/business scene.
- ricardobayes 2y ago
  Everyone wants what they can't have. Europeans want to drive in cities/suburbs and Americans want to walk. People in Paris/Madrid don't really value walkability all that much. It's an increasing trend to buy bigger and bigger SUVs.
  - dkdbejwi383 2y ago
    > Europeans want to drive in cities/suburbs No, I don't. Thank you.
    - ricardobayes 2y ago
      Soccer moms disagree with you. In my area they actually removed bike lanes to make way for more traffic.
ahaseeb 2y ago
Nah. We moved out of SF to East Bay for the same reason. It's not safe with kids

trgn 2y ago

turn of the century suburbs truly are goldilocks neighborhoods.

KerrAvon 2y ago
genuinely curious which century you mean?
- cheschire 2y ago
  This is a depressingly good question. I hadn't ever considered we'd be far enough into this one to refer back to the 90's and early aughts as "turn of the century"
  - kccqzy 2y ago
    That's why I use the French term "fin-de-siècle" which is well understood by educated English speakers and yet always refers to the end of the 19th century without additional qualifications.
    - moate 2y ago
      Define “educated” and cite the survey showing how well understood it is among “English speakers” (British English? Commonwealth Nations Generally? N.A. English Speakers? Non-native/ESL?) I use “fortnightly” to mean “in 2 weeks” because bi-weekly is ambiguous, and while the game is hugely popular I still assume at least 1 person on any email chain with me reads that and is thinking “the fuck does he talk like a Victorian English Dandy for?”
    - November_Echo 2y ago
      > the French term "fin-de-siècle" which is well understood by educated English speakers This may not be as well understood as you believe. I am an educated English speaker, who has many educated English speaking friends and family, I have never heard this phrase.
    - tempfile 2y ago
      I agree with the other commenters that this is obscure. I coincidentally heard the term for the first time about 3 days ago (in the context of "socialism by fin-de-siècle" - the expectation that communism was inevitable among the left wing at that time.
  - lukas099 2y ago
    Turn of the millennium?
- jacobr1 2y ago
  I'm sure he meant the early 1900s. I've usually heard these called "streetcar suburbs" for obvious reasons. They tend to have a good mix of urban and suburban vibes. Unlike the car-focused developments after the war, these neighborhoods are super walkable with local retail or other spots just a stroll away, or a short streetcar hop. The design is all about pedestrians, with narrow streets, plenty of sidewalks, and often tree-lined avenues. The houses, seem to have been more often built by skilled craftsmen, and have unique architectural details, unlike the cookie-cutter homes you see in later post-war suburbs.
  - vineyardmike 2y ago
    This is all true (if only we could go back in time!) but don’t let selection bias ruin reality. Most homes were crappy, only the ones built by skilled craftsmen survived. This was also the era that spawned protections against tenements.
    - chefandy 2y ago
      Crappy? I'm not so sure about that. I've lived at maybe 15 Southern New England addresses in my life and the three built after 1920 were the cheapest quality. And it's not like they were one in a dozen, or even 1 in 3: from cheap triple deckers to mansions, the area I live is packed full of buildings from that era. The knob and tube electricity has mostly been replaced, but most places I've lived still had gas lamp pipe nipples sticking out of the walls in the common hallways. The entire area is jam packed with buildings from that era.
      - itsoktocry 2y ago
        >were the cheapest quality In what sense? I think people conflate "big brick building" with "quality". Sure, it's nice, as is some of the labour-intensive finishing work from that era. But nearly every bit of a modern house is "higher quality" than a home built 100+ ago, thanks mostly to the building code. (please don't link me some story of a shoddy builder)
        2y ago
- trgn 2y ago
  Sorry, yes, 19th to 20th century. Neighborhoods with the Full House house basically.
hintymad 2y ago
Unfortunately the US demolished such urban structures to make space for cars and parking spaces. We now get a small downtown with clusters of skyscrapers, and then endless urban sprawl. It definitely made the cities of the US ugly, especially when compared to the European cities.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  They still exist in the northeast megalopolis where space to build postwar sprawl was limited.
  - kolbusa 2y ago
    I am visiting Boston and I cannot stop wondering why SF is not like that. The city feels so much more livable almost everywhere I went. I'm sure there are shady parts, but every time I need to go to SF for some reason I get really depressed.
    - vineyardmike 2y ago
      Respectfully, you’re almost certainly going to the wrong parts. My source is that I grew up inside Boston and now reside inside SF. Boston is amazing, and I love it. But SF is too. For similar reasons. SF is a city of neighborhoods. If you’re going to downtown, or any of the business centers, you’re not getting the good parts. The enjoyable nice parts of SF are all residential. Because of the hills, each residential neighborhood (a valley) has its own unique commercial street full of shops and restaurants, surrounded by beautiful old townhomes, and as you go up the hills you get vistas and nice homes. The city quality is inversely correlated with office space. Boston has similar historic driving forces - instead of hills, it used to be a city of (now infilled) peninsulas. You get wonderful old homes in Boston, and lots of streets full of shops. Instead of tech money (which Boston also has) it was overrun first by the education industry, which anchors many neighborhoods today.
      - MikeTheGreat 2y ago
        could you expand on what you mean by "the education industry"? I was picturing an army of teachers, but I don't normally think of teachers as folks who earn enough to be compared to tech money :)
galdosdi 2y ago
Yes they are. We don't have enough of them and should make more. Literally all of Philadelphia (and its suburbs going quite far out) resembles this, thanks to rowhouses which allow true single family you-own-your-own-land-with-your-own-(tiny)-yard housing while still hitting enough density to get economies of scale and insanely great walkability. It would be paradise on earth if the public schools were good. Queens is like this too (except I have no idea about public school quality there, and it's probably hard to afford these days -- but balanced by access to the Manhattan job market) Governments need to accept that winner-take-all massive metro areas are the way of the future and just adjust zoning and incentives to flood the zone with transportation and housing (which help substitute for and encourage each other anyway), otherwise you're stuck choosing between affordable housing and access to education and jobs. Concentrating more jobs nearby creates more than the sum of their parts because workers are often more productive in industry clusters.

lazide 2y ago

SF schools and traffic are terrible with kids. Suburbs are generally much mellower.

bobthepanda 2y ago
I mean this depends on what specifically you’re optimizing for. A child in the suburb will need a chauffeur to get anywhere outside their immediate subdivision, and sometimes within it. Children are perfectly capable of taking public transit and using their two feet, though.
- lazide 2y ago
  Have you not heard of school buses or soccer moms? Cities like SF tend to be okay for families in two different (and polar opposite) classes - those who are working poor, and the scare factor of public transit and hassle of traffic is something they just have to deal with, or quite wealthy - and they can afford drivers and/or private schools. The public school system in SF is also notoriously terrible to deal with, even by US big city standards, as ‘equity’ changes results in bussing kids all over town so there are no ‘good’/‘bad’ schools due to demographics. So siblings will often end up in schools on different sides of town, or kids in a school very far from where they live. The middle class tends to go to the suburbs where things are less crazy and easier to handle, and they get ‘bad’ things like a school where all the neighbors kids also go, and siblings can all be in the same school. And they can buy into a ‘good school district’. Among other things.
  - bobthepanda 2y ago
    Yeah, I’m saying that parents can choose to live in cities to avoid being just a soccer parent forever. School bus routes have been decimated in much of the country, creating long winding routes with horrible wake up times for children. And a school bus doesn’t take you to any place outside of school and the home. Growing up as a school child in New York with a transit pass, it was nice to hang out with friends, or go to a museum, or head to a new park, or try a new restaurant, or any number of things without having to involve parents for transport. And I went to a pretty good public school.

dunham 2y ago

We bailed for seattle because we could get a bigger house and have a better school situation. We did enjoy living on the border between the mission and noe valley before that though.

seanmcdirmid 2y ago
I’m reading this from Ballard and I think we do alright on school quality and house size, although my east side colleagues think the deal is better in more suburban Kirkland or Bellevue.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  Ballard hardly has houses left, it's a condo jungle now.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    Townhome jungle. We still have lots of single family homes, especially north of 65th.
  - dnissley 2y ago
    Without the townhomes it would be even more unaffordable.
ad-astra 2y ago
Seattle is an interesting area, so many different pockets. I moved to Seattle in 2016 from Southern California, could never shake the depression. Moved to Cupertino in Jan and am as happy as a (very busy) clam.
- throwaway19423 2y ago
  I visited Seattle the city proper recently, and also felt depressed. Not sure why I got that vibe. On paper Seattle is great, and no-doubt, the Pacific north west has good nature and tech-industry. It felt odd why Seattle felt "different".

bushbaba 2y ago

Except schools, crime, and kids able to get into trouble.

throw__away7391 2y ago

> if you make tech money It is a great tragedy that the US with all its money and diversity of geography and people has only really managed to produce a single walkable city and a scattered handful of “I don’t always use my car” neighborhoods, which are always the most expensive places to live. So many cities outside the US manage to do this on a fraction of the budget.

throwaway48540 2y ago
So many cities outside the US manage to have this as the only redeeming quality. It's nice to not have to walk - it's not so great to have to walk because you can't afford a car and public transit does not cut it for everyone even in the best rated cities of the world. And it's not really interesting to have a dense train network if you can't afford the train ticket; then you're just angry your tax money is spent on it instead of you. I'm from Europe but I would be very careful with claiming it's just a few cities or neighborhoods in the US. I made a list of places I could move to eventually, and it's at least two dozen, and that's just because I was focused on cities with significant tech/business scene.
ricardobayes 2y ago
Everyone wants what they can't have. Europeans want to drive in cities/suburbs and Americans want to walk. People in Paris/Madrid don't really value walkability all that much. It's an increasing trend to buy bigger and bigger SUVs.
- dkdbejwi383 2y ago
  > Europeans want to drive in cities/suburbs No, I don't. Thank you.
  - ricardobayes 2y ago
    Soccer moms disagree with you. In my area they actually removed bike lanes to make way for more traffic.

ahaseeb 2y ago

Nah. We moved out of SF to East Bay for the same reason. It's not safe with kids