While I live in the city and love it, his comment about not being able to make meaningful friendships made me think along the same lines as you did. I think he'

While I live in the city and love it, his comment about not being able to make meaningful friendships made me think along the same lines as you did. I think he'd find parts of Oakland or Berkeley to be much more appealing. There's a younger vibe there from the proximity to the university and the lower housing prices that I think would work better for him. You do have to work a bit harder to feel "at the center" of the tech scene (i.e. you're less likely to hear conversations about startups and programming when you're out at dinner and tech meetups are much less convenient), but it's not that much harder. The east bay also has nicer parks, better weather and it's easier to get away on weekends (this past weekend, it took me 90 minutes to get from my home in SF across the Golden Gate Bridge). Still, I understand the compulsion to live in SF proper. It's like living in Manhattan or the city center of a large European city...illogical in almost every way, but with that "je ne sais quoi" that makes it feel wrong to live anywhere else. It's an alternate reality wherein the pains of living here select out the people that we wouldn't want to spend time with and what's left feels like a community built on kind of shared suffering that gives us a form of pride...we can sleep through anything, tap dance around shit on the sidewalk, find a parking space where there are none, eat food from a random food truck without getting sick and walk everywhere. It's bizarre, dysfunctional and yet oddly compelling.