San Francisco Gripes

A list of com­plaints about San Fran­cisco from Alex Payne that I hap­pen to vehe­mently agree with:

• An obscenely high cost of liv­ing for com­par­a­tively poor real estate and social services.
• Lim­ited and mediocre cul­tural insti­tu­tions. It’s easy to exhaust muse­ums, the­ater, and other forms of the arts in SF. Most of what you’ll find out­side the main­stream is dim, ama­teur­ish, and – as above – obsessed with being dif­fer­ent rather than sim­ply being bet­ter. (The bal­let is the major excep­tion. It’s quite good.)
• Entirely a mat­ter of per­sonal pref­er­ence, but I dis­like much of the archi­tec­ture in San Fran­cisco. Some find the end­less peel­ing Vic­to­ri­ans quaint. I pre­fer build­ings that are truly his­toric or aggres­sively modern.
• Vast dead spaces between and within neigh­bor­hoods. For a city of rel­a­tively small size, you’ll find that most of it isn’t worth repeated vis­its. Areas worth spend­ing time in are usu­ally just sev­eral blocks, scarcely enough to occupy an hour or two with win­dow shop­ping and a stroll.
• Enor­mous com­pe­ti­tion for lim­ited resources. You will wait for every­thing. The bet­ter a thing is (food, cof­fee, a nice place to sit), the longer you’ll wait for it. When you finally get what you want, you’ll be crammed in with oth­ers try­ing to enjoy the same place/thing, dimin­ish­ing everyone’s enjoyment.

via Alex Payne