I moved from Cali (SF then LA) to Montana. I love it but I think it is because I grew up in a small town. My employer HQ is in the Bay Area so I head there a couple times a year. I do miss CA but I don't know if I'm just an old curmudgeon, but I liked SF a lot better 10 years ago.
“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
0
Options
Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
I moved from Cali (SF then LA) to Montana. I love it but I think it is because I grew up in a small town. My employer HQ is in the Bay Area so I head there a couple times a year. I do miss CA but I don't know if I'm just an old curmudgeon, but I liked SF a lot better 10 years ago.
You're not. As a local it's turned into a place I don't want to live in anymore even though me and @Melinoe will have a house there someday courtesy of her dad.
I miss San Francisco, but it really is a dirty, dirty city.
Haha, I like it less because it's cleaned up too much. Tech bros and bicycle shops selling fixies and moustache salons. Even DNA Lounge is probably going to have to shut down because their clientele moved away. Everything that made SF great is over in Oakland now.
It was already starting then but it's really accelerated since you left. When rents for a studio hit $6k in some places it really forced the artists out.
I want to like SF... I just don't. Which is weird, as I grew up in Marin.
I love the coastline up there though. SoCal is just sandy beaches for days. Except Malibu, which you can't even get to (mostly).
When I lived there I took every chance to go to Point Reyes (McClures beach was my fav), Mendocino (gf family had a cabin there) or even Shelter Cove. Rugged coast was probably my favorite thing in North Calif.
“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”
― Marcus Aurelius
I grew up living in Prunedale and going to school in Monterey. Monterey is still gorgeous, but it gets insanely crowded now. The sheer mass of humanity is getting overwhelming if simply because amazing places are not growing in supply fast enough.
Most of Monterey has a residential height limit of 35 feet, even the multifamily apartment buildings. Single-family residential zones also have minimum setbacks (distance from front door to street), minimum lot sizes, and required parking of at least 2 cars per unit.
Nearby Carmel and Santa Cruz have similar requirements.
Basically, all three towns want to maintain their small beach town aesthetic, but these artificial limitations on density make it virtually impossible to control housing costs. The parking requirements in particular become self-defeating. More housing construction is started outside of the city limits, which means more people drive into town for work and play, which means more cars, which means more congestion and less parking. Whoops!
The hostility towards growth is a major reason why I left Santa Cruz.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
One of the things I respect immensely about Seattle is how good their city planning is.
I have some quibbles - the signage is remarkably poor, as I mentioned above. I dislike the road nomenclature; where they basically gave up naming roads sometime in the 1900s (edit:) in 1895 and just started numbering everything. (When they annexed Ballard, they forced Ballard to change their perfectly acceptable street names into numbers.)
Numbers are fine as long as your numbered streets are parallel. When you have a three-way intersection between 104th St and 145th Pl and 99th Ave, I want to flip all the tables. When your city has two different 104th Streets on opposite sides of the city, then your city planners need to be disciplined with rolled-up newspapers and spray bottles.
But what impresses me is how much of the city is walkable and how much the density is mixed up. You have apartment buildings next to duplexes next to single-family detached homes. In most parts of the city, it switches up between residential and light retail so you never have to walk more than four or five blocks to get to a real grocery store or pharmacist. And for the most part, the density doesn't feel oppressive. Except for a couple of designated high-density areas (like downtown) you're never surrounded by skyscrapers. Maybe there's an 8-story apartment building on your left, but on your right is a 1-story house and some trees.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Posts
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
You're not. As a local it's turned into a place I don't want to live in anymore even though me and @Melinoe will have a house there someday courtesy of her dad.
I love the coastline up there though. SoCal is just sandy beaches for days. Except Malibu, which you can't even get to (mostly).
Haha, I like it less because it's cleaned up too much. Tech bros and bicycle shops selling fixies and moustache salons. Even DNA Lounge is probably going to have to shut down because their clientele moved away. Everything that made SF great is over in Oakland now.
It was already starting then but it's really accelerated since you left. When rents for a studio hit $6k in some places it really forced the artists out.
When I lived there I took every chance to go to Point Reyes (McClures beach was my fav), Mendocino (gf family had a cabin there) or even Shelter Cove. Rugged coast was probably my favorite thing in North Calif.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
Nearby Carmel and Santa Cruz have similar requirements.
Basically, all three towns want to maintain their small beach town aesthetic, but these artificial limitations on density make it virtually impossible to control housing costs. The parking requirements in particular become self-defeating. More housing construction is started outside of the city limits, which means more people drive into town for work and play, which means more cars, which means more congestion and less parking. Whoops!
The hostility towards growth is a major reason why I left Santa Cruz.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I have some quibbles - the signage is remarkably poor, as I mentioned above. I dislike the road nomenclature; where they basically gave up naming roads sometime in the 1900s (edit:) in 1895 and just started numbering everything. (When they annexed Ballard, they forced Ballard to change their perfectly acceptable street names into numbers.)
Numbers are fine as long as your numbered streets are parallel. When you have a three-way intersection between 104th St and 145th Pl and 99th Ave, I want to flip all the tables. When your city has two different 104th Streets on opposite sides of the city, then your city planners need to be disciplined with rolled-up newspapers and spray bottles.
But what impresses me is how much of the city is walkable and how much the density is mixed up. You have apartment buildings next to duplexes next to single-family detached homes. In most parts of the city, it switches up between residential and light retail so you never have to walk more than four or five blocks to get to a real grocery store or pharmacist. And for the most part, the density doesn't feel oppressive. Except for a couple of designated high-density areas (like downtown) you're never surrounded by skyscrapers. Maybe there's an 8-story apartment building on your left, but on your right is a 1-story house and some trees.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.