Why I Don’t Live In San Francisco
It’s not so much the idiotic rents, it’s that toxic cloud of smug hanging over everything.
I get asked every now and then why I don’t live in the City (especially since I work there). I give my standard response: when I got here a couple of decades ago, San Francisco felt so small, so stiflingly provincial, so self-absorbed and self-satisfied after London, that I decided that if I were going to live in a small town, it might as well be somewhere like Berkeley. At least in Berkeley they weren’t always telling themselves that they’re the centre of the universe and the best of all possible places to live. (And all of this was before the techie invasion added a strutting sense of entitlement and self-importance to the mix.) So I settled in Berkeley. And later moved on to Oakland.
And almost all of that is sort of true.
