San Francisco

I’ve lived in SF for a year, but haven’t really written about it much. All of 2020 seemed so hectic, chaotic, and messy that I never really had the chance to evaluate my relationship to the city. I also moved to SF during the pandemic, making it difficult to actually get a vibe or feel for the place due to everything being closed. I figured I might as well write about the way my feelings about San Francisco have evolved over the past year through my masked walks around the neighborhoods as I got to know it better.

I flew out to SF in late February of 2020 for a handful of on-site interviews at big tech companies. I somehow managed to sync them all up in the same week to avoid the inconvenience of flying out multiple times. I stayed for around ten days, not knowing if I’d actually get to come back to live in SF. Job offers can often feel like a big gamble, even if you think the interviews went well, so I really wasn’t sure what to expect. During my trip, I stayed with my brother for a few days outside the city in the East Bay. We explored Mt. Diablo, I met up with some other friends in SF where we hit up some bars and restaurants, and I headed back to Boston.

I had visited SF before a few times as a tourist, but this was the first time where I truly thought about what it would be like living in the city. I was trying to figure out which neighborhoods I’d explore first if I moved there, which coffee shops I’d frequent, and roughly where the major transit stops were. I was calculating the commute time on foot and bike if I was to start working at the companies I interviewed at, and was trying to estimate where the best area to live in would be in my first year there.

After a few weeks of considering the job offers I had, I accepted the job offer at Lyft. Their office was in China Basin, near the edge of SOMA and Mission Bay. So naturally, I looked for apartments in the area and found one in Potrero Hill, which put me at around a 15-20 minute commute by walk (5-7 minutes on a bike). I did a virtual tour of the place with my future roommate and signed the lease. This was in early March 2020.

We all know what happened next. Cities went into lockdown and everyone started working from home. At the time, everyone thought this would last a few weeks at most (ah, the naïveté), so it didn’t seem sensible changing any major life decisions about our future based on it. I even remember asking my Lyft recruiters if I should even bother moving from Boston to SF because everyone’s working from home anyway, and I remember them saying that I should just go ahead with my move because San Francisco’s shelter-in-place order was to only last until May 4th. One of them even went as far to say that they’d be shocked if they weren’t back in the office by then (#CriesIn2020).

It was still March. I actually had two months in-between jobs here. I quit my old job in early March and was preparing to go on an international trip to Colombia for a month or so before moving to SF. That never happened due to the pandemic travel restrictions, so I figured maybe I’d just go to SF early and get a feel for the place for a month or so before starting work. That also seemed pointless because everything was closed in SF, so I just stayed in Boston working on side-projects, playing video games, spending time with loved ones, and saying goodbye to friends (virtually). I had tentatively booked my flight for May 4th because I figured at the earliest, this would be the latest date I could fly into the city when things have opened up and I get to experience the city before starting at Lyft a week later.

Come May 4th, we were still in the pandemic and still in lockdown with no end in sight. Nevertheless, I flew out to SF on that day and moved into my apartment. The first thing I vividly remember feeling when I stepped out of SFO is the light. As weird as this is to say, I “felt” the way the sunlight was illuminating the environment, from street signs to freeway underpasses to parking lots. It was different from the light in Boston and had an airy, surreal feel to it. It had that hazy filtered-through-fog feel, which feels even more dramatic and exaggerated on days with clear skies.

The second thing I had to get used to in my first week was the weather. You see, the way the light feels tricks the mind into thinking that it’s a nice, sunny day outside. I wake up and see the sun shining brightly, so I figure it’s a good day to go for a walk in shorts and grab a coffee. Cue instant regret after being blasted by cold winds and chilly updrafts in the streets as I try to trek uphill to get to the coffee shop. I learned to never trust the weather outside and always carry a light jacket with me. The “beautiful sunny skies” are nothing but a trick to fool you into thinking that it’s warm outside.

My favorite activity in a typical city that I newly move to (or visit) is to go exploring in all of the coffeeshops and neighborhoods. Of course, the pandemic made this impossible, so I had to settle for walks or bike rides with getting coffee for takeout wherever I could. I also wasn’t used to biking uphill, so this made accessing certain areas of the city especially tricky. Even with the e-bikes, it’s challenging to consistently keep going up on steep hills. I’ve always preferred walking as my mode of transport, so I just tried walking as much as I could.

I would go on walks around Potrero Hill, Mission Bay, Dogpatch, and the Design District. These were the neighborhoods in immediate walking distance, so I tried making the most out of the lockdown by trying to explore these areas. They were all interesting but a little too sterile and clinical for my taste. Most of Mission Bay and Design District is office buildings and hospitals, whereas most of Potrero Hill and Dogpatch seemed to be extremely residential.

I was surprised to see that public transit in SF just wasn’t that great. To go to the Marina or the Presidio, it would take upwards of an hour on the MUNI lines. Granted, the pandemic had forced much of the transit system to greatly reduce the number of lines operating, but this was surprising to me. I had gotten very used to the small dense neighborhoods of Boston being easily accessibly on foot, and getting from one end of the city to another (or even back-and-forth between Cambridge and Boston) in under 10-15 mins on the MBTA. It looked like in San Francisco, the only options to explore the farther neighborhoods of Sunset, Pacific Heights, Nob Hill, etc. were on bike or car.

So yeah, most of my life in SF for the first several months I lived here was just going on walks in my immediate neighborhoods. I would often walk by the Lyft offices in China Basin and wonder how different my relationship to the city would have been if I was commuting in there every day. I’d likely ride the Lyft e-bikes to the office but walk back, taking a different route and grabbing takeout at some new restaurant on the way back home. There would probably be happy hours and team outings at the local bars, restaurants, and parks. The city would just feel more alive in general.

One thing about San Francisco that certainly caught me off guard was the homelessness. I was acutely aware of this problem before moving, but seeing literally hundreds of tents popping up just outside my own apartment was just insane. The city boasts massive wealth, had a ton of empty hotels in the pandemic, and still continued to struggle solving the homelessness crisis. I looked into the policies being enacted and got familiarized with how the city deals with this issue, and was disgusted to see that most of the approaches relied on measures to “control the spread” of the homeless to certain neighborhoods rather than addressing the root cause of homelessness in the first place. The lack of affordable, low-income housing was nuts and this is a bigger issue with not being able to build more housing in the city in the first place. Needless to say, I was disappointed to see how the city was handling the homelessness issue by trying to shrug it off or brush it under the rug while portraying a different image to the world.

What I did like about the city, however, was its handling of COVID. San Francisco was one of the first cities to go into lockdown, and had one of the stricter guidelines around it. Of course, none of it was ever really “enforced,” but the city had one of the highest degrees of mask compliance in the whole country. Everyone seemed to take the pandemic seriously and everywhere I went on walks, everyone was wearing masks and (usually) practicing social distancing guidelines. This led SF to have a lower transmission and infection rate than entire states that have lower population densities.

My girlfriend eventually ended up moving to SF a few months later, which helped in having someone to explore the city with as a newcomer. We went to the deYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park, the SF MOMA, and visited the Palace of Fine Arts. We also wanted to take advantage of the city’s proximity to nature, so we did some small roadtrips as well. We drove up to Mount Shasta in Northern California, we did another trip to Yosemite in the fall, and even did a longer trip driving up to Oregon on the Pacific Coast. It blows my mind how big this state is, and to think that we’ve only really been exploring the northern part of it. We made plans at least three times to go to Los Angeles, but kept scrapping them due to the worsening COVID cases in Orange County. Didn’t seem like it was worth the risk.

Later in September, I was stunned to wake up to an orange sky at one point. I had heard about the fires in California in past years, but this was extraordinary. The entire world looked like it had an intense Sepia filter stuck on it, and I was in shock. Even longtime SF residents mentioned that they had never seen something like this, and boy was that something to experience. It was dark almost the entire day with nothing but the yellowish-orange tinge of the sky to remind us that the sun was still shining. It was even difficult to tell whether we were looking at the Sun or at the Moon for big chunks of the late evening.

A snowless winter was yet another thing to get used to. For the past five years, I had grown accustomed to swapping out my wardrobe with the “winter clothes” whenever December rolls around and just wear those for the next several months, but the passage of time is much harder to keep track of in San Francisco. The weather always feels like it’s the same, so I often forgot that we were in the “winter months.” I’d see Instagram stories from friends in Boston posting about the snowfall and go “Oh right, it’s February, this makes sense.” On one hand, it was super nice to just walk out in summer clothing in the dead of winter while the sun was shining so brightly, but a part of me missed the snowfall and the large swaths of the city blanketed in a white heap of powder.

I knew a handful of folks in SF from past jobs and friendships. Many former co-workers had moved out here to work at tech companies headquartered here and a few of my friends were actually from here. So I met some of them occasionally in socially distanced park hangouts or coffee runs, but never really had the chance to spend time with them unmasked in non-pandemic times. Regardless, it was good to know at least some people who had an idea of life in the city in the “before times” and maintain a small but effective social circle.

Something else I loved about the city was the fog. Affectionately named Karl by its residents, the fog would roll in suddenly throughout the day and clear up as the winds guided it. It wasn’t uncommon to wake up to Karl touching the top of Salesforce Tower or licking the Transamerica Pyramid and slowly revealing Sutro Tower as it cleared up. It often felt like living amidst cloudy hills when Karl roared through the city at low altitude. This kind of weather phenomenon was not a common sight in Boston, so I was all for it.

As I was building my relationship to the city, others were ending it. Many designers and tech workers decided to permanently move out of SF, taking advantage of the new remote work opportunities afforded by the pandemic. Many moved just outside SF to other parts of the Bay Area, others moved back to their home states, and a lot of them just chose to move to a different city that wasn’t as expensive. I felt like I had come to the city at a strange time when everyone in it was re-evaluating their relationship to it. I got to do both.

I wasn’t prepared for how often the cost of living was on my mind. Folks who live in SF aren’t exaggerating when they complain about how expensive it is to live here. The rent is nuts, the taxes are crazy, and everything has its market rate jacked up to ridiculous percentages. I’m fairly well-compensated at my cushy tech job, but wow, you burn through the income really quickly living in the city. Despite all the rent drops and folks moving out of the city during the pandemic, it was still a city with an extremely high cost of living. And I frequently had thoughts about moving out myself because of how little space I had in my tiny apartment for how much I was paying per month. It didn’t make any sense if I could work from anywhere. Eventually, my partner and I decided to move out of the city due to not being able to find what we needed in a living arrangement at an affordable price in the city.

In a way, it’s a little unfortunate. I lived in SF for about ten months and then moved out. Working remotely has made me more aware of my own needs and desire for flexibility, so it’s unlikely that I’ll be coming back if I can make a permanent remote situation work from elsewhere. I need more space than a tiny apartment gives me for a ludicrous price. The way I justified my ideal “city life” of spending hours at cafés on the weekends and going to restaurants or libraries has entirely lost its appeal as I was never really able to experience it in San Francisco during the pandemic. As my partner and I move on to the next stages in our lives, small SF apartments will not be able to sustain our lifestyle choices either.

At the end of March, we moved to Portland, OR. We still get to maintain the feel of a city while not having to deal with the absurdly high cost of living in San Francisco. We get to be a little closer to nature in the Pacific Northwest and the beautiful Oregon coast. It’s a bit of an experimental move in a way, since no-one knows when and how we’re going to return to offices later this fall. I’ve personally grown accustomed to working from home and prefer it to in-person work, so if I can make a remote job work without needing to be confined to a specific geographic location, I’m all for it.

So yeah. San Francisco. It’s beautiful, it’s messy, it’s surreal. It’s expensive, it’s strange, and it’s maddening. I wish I had a chance to experience it in its “old normal,” but am glad I got to get some sense of it now, even if the conditions weren’t ideal. I learned a lot about its neighborhoods and problems. I learned a lot about its relationship to the rest of California and the west coast. I got to experience strange days of smoky skies and sunny winters. I got to sweat walking and biking uphill only to curse at Karl for obscuring my beautiful view of the city. I got to imagine and daydream of how different things would be in an alternate timeline where I was experiencing the city more vividly. And I got to make some major life decisions as well as grow in ways that I’m glad are attached to my memory of living in this glorious, wild, and intriguing place called San Francisco.