Quixote writes:
It's odd to me how bad San Francisco is, when other large cities like New York or Paris are basically utopias.
But just a few comments down, Lasagna says:
I despise (I'm choosing that word carefully) [New York City]. I still commute there every day, and I can't stand it – the broken infrastructure, the horrible smells, the $14 for a yogurt and coffee in the morning, the massive crowds of unpleasant people (how could we NOT be? We're walking through an open sewer). There's a litany of other things that keep me permanently angry and depressed (just the thought of how much earlier I would have started a family if I didn't live there….) I find it decadent, selfish, shallow – pick your bad adjective. I'll stop now.
Where I live now is nice. We have a town we can walk to, a lawn for the kids to play on and me to mow, we cook at home, we have enough room for our family to live and the kids to get exercise, even indoors. There's no WAY I'm giving that up so I can live in an apartment again, all so NYC can squeeze MORE people into its area.
If I had my way, we'd be much further away from the metro area than we are now, in a bigger, cheaper home with more land. But that isn't possible; NYC is where my job is, and that's that. Fine. But let's not make things worse, and make NYC (and San Francisco, and DC, and Boston) even MORE indispensable generators of jobs. And please don't think for a second that there aren't sizable numbers of people like me, and like you, who do not want these things for our families […] Thanks for letting me rant. You should have seen the first draft of this thing. Twice as long, Scott. A litany of woes and anger.
This would be fascinating if it weren't so predictable. One person describes NYC as "basically utopia", and another person can't stop ranting about how much he hates it and is glad to have escaped it.
In the same vein, from :
