However I like both areas very much, and find my life and opportunities to live as I would like to live greater in the SF area.

It was tempting at first to compare, but I ended up realizing that downtown San Francisco, nice and urbane as it is, isn’t enough to compare it to any part of Manhattan really at all.

Just live and learn friend of mine got back from Hong Kong and said it makes Manhattan seem like a suburb, so the world keeps changing and we just have to take each thing as it is.

#1 I am a faithful MUNI rider and I am neither poor, creepy, old nor homeless. MANY people use MUNI to get to and from work. Its fucking PUBLIC transportation.

#2 I usually hear people make LA/NYC comparisons more often than SF/NYC is bc LA aka La La Land is “fake” and “not as down-to-earth as Nor Cal”. So to say that NYC ppl are “more real” is a bogus ass statement. SF is leading when it comes to green initiatives and people are more into nature and their health. While the latter may sound a little misinformed (bc Ive never been to NYC), I’m going to just assume that the guy with the long-winded response abt why “SF is lame” just hates SF. SF isn’t for everyone.

When I take my trip to NYC (next month), I’ll use this as a point of reference to see if the neighborhoods compare.

I wouldn’t hate the NYPD as much though. Just spent a week in SF surprised st how few police I saw, then utterly unsurprised at the abundance of dangerous, confused people in the streets.

I agree with the person who said you can’t compare a neighborhood in San Fran to an entire borough in NYC like “queens” or “brooklyn.” There are so many different neighborhoods within each borough. But I like the overall idea of the San Fran/NYC neighborhood comparison! So carry on!

The best comparison is San Francisco and Boston. They’re like mirror images of one another.

Both San Francisco and Boston:
–are located on peninsulas on the coasts
–are preternaturally beautiful and filled with amazing nineteenth-century housing
–are home to less than one million people in the middle of rather large metro areas
–have idiosyncratic though decent public transportation systems (compared to the NYC subway, which is clearly better than any other system in the country, recent fare hikes notwithstanding)
–are highly segregated, stratified and filled with outrageous inequality, despite their claims to diversity and liberalism
–are controlled by one type of person (Boston frat boys; SF hippies), with an overlay of bourgie dominance

That said, having just returned to BK from SF, some things struck me as odd about the city:
–One would expect there to be way more universities in SF than there are
–The micro-climates are totally, utterly wacky
–This whole West Coast hippie vibe is so un-self-conscious, it’s hilarious. People strike yoga poses in parks! People walk around strumming guitars and singing folk songs! People actually wear tie-dyed shirts and aren’t afraid of being snarled at! It’s almost a different planet.
–In SF, are jaywalking and littering punished by death?
–Policing in SF is much, much more mellow than in NYC. If people in McCarren Park even came close to smoking as much weed and drinking as much booze as people do in Dolores Park, they’d have the crap beaten out of them by the NYPD.
–Pound for pound, the Mission is probably cooler, less pretentious, less careerist, less self-obsessed than Williamsburg. But Williamsburg seems to have more bars.
–Fixies in Brooklyn can be silly; in San Francisco, with all the hills, they’re insane.