10 Things I Wish I Knew BEFORE Moving to San Francisco

When I moved to San Francisco over 10 years ago from Orange County, I thought I would only be here for a couple of years and plan to move back home where I'm from, but instantly I fell in love with the city and haven't looked back since. I've been here ever since. And based on my experience and the experience of my clients, both who have moved here and who have left the city, there are things that definitely you need to know that I wish I knew before moving here. And in this video, I'm gonna break down what those things are so that if you are thinking about taking the leap and moving to San Francisco, you've got the information you need upfront. What's up everyone? This is Austin Klar, your lawyer turned real estate agent in San Francisco in Marin County. I moved to San Francisco over a decade ago to work as a lawyer at one of the biggest law firms in the world where I represented Fortune 500 companies and C-suite executives in state and federal courts all across the country in multi-billion dollar cases. And now I represent buyers and sellers with one of the most important decisions of their lives, their homes. I create these videos because I love San Francisco and Marin County. It's where I spend almost all of my time. I love the views, the food, the architecture, the walkability, their history. It's incredible. So if you love any of those things too and want to learn more about what it's like to live in San Francisco and Marin County, make sure to subscribe to my channel so that you stay notified about other videos just like this. All right, now back to the things that you definitely need to know before moving to San Francisco. Number 1, cost of living is absurdly high, but I do think it's worth it. I have clients right now, they're moving here from New Jersey. They sold a gorgeous home on multiple acres for $1.6 million, and it's a little bit of shell shock learning that $1.6 million doesn't even get you a nice condo in certain parts of the city, uh, let alone acres of land. So bit jarring for them changing from that lifestyle to this one, and something that anyone looking to move here and set down roots, whether it's to rent or to buy, needs to know up front. And it's not just housing. Food here is crazy expensive. If you're going out to eat, like, try ordering a salad from a casual place for under $18. Uh, good luck to you. If you're going out to a restaurant, even if you're not drinking, I feel like I spend $100 every single time I go out. I spend so much money every single day, it seems, just doing basic things, not even being extravagant. So just be prepared. The city is incredibly expensive. Second thing, really hard to figure out the right neighborhood to live in unless you spend a lot of time in the city. There are over 80 different subdistricts in San Francisco, and each of them is vastly different from the next one. And some of them are only just a few blocks wide. Others are much larger than that. But unless you spend meaningful time walking the streets, driving around, biking around, experiencing the weather, experiencing the food, learning what shops and restaurants are around, what parks are available, you really have no idea what it's actually like living day to day in that specific neighborhood. You really have to be here and experience it to understand it. I didn't find my favorite area in the city until I had lived here for several years, and every time I moved to a new neighborhood, that new neighborhood became one of my favorite neighborhoods. So there are just things that you don't really understand and experience until you've spent some meaningful time in a place before you know what really is your home. And every time I work for someone who is moving here from out of town, sometimes they're really in a rush and want to have a place all set up before they actually move here. And I tell them every single time, like, obviously happy to help you do that, but it is really, really tough to find the right place for you without you actually being here. Obviously you need to see a house in person, but you also need to see the neighborhood in person because every single neighborhood here is so different from each other. Number 3 is microclimates. What do I mean by that? Well, all those different neighborhoods and even within those little neighborhoods, the weather can be significantly different at the exact same time of day. You've got cold fronts and fog fronts from the Pacific Ocean on the far west end of the city, you've got kind of a middle ground through the middle of the city, and you have warmer climates on the east side of the city. But even within those boundaries, there are vastly different neighborhoods with different weather patterns, and they also change pretty wildly throughout the day. You almost— if you're going to be gone all day long, you don't want to go anywhere without a coat because at some point, if it is warm, it's it's not gonna stay that way forever. San Francisco summer here is actually like October slash November. I did a deep clean of my outdoor furniture in October of last year because that's when I was gonna actually be able to start meaningfully use it. June, July here, they're actually a lot foggier, a lot colder than those later months. So it's not the typical weather pattern you would expect for a summer. Number 4 is earthquakes. Not something that you really need to think about from a day-to-day living perspective, just something that you need to be prepared for. And there are certain parts of the city that are actually built on infill, some parts of the Marina and places that are closer to the East Bay and the North Bay that are built on liquefaction and expansive soil. So you need to be on the lookout for that stuff when you're figuring out where to live, because if it's not built the right way, then it's going to cause a problem for the structure of your home. If you don't know what I mean, just Google Millennium Tower San Francisco and you'll figure it out pretty quickly. Number 5 is how expensive it is to own a car here. I'm from Southern California. Like I said, one of my favorite things to do is drive with a podcast cast on, and it is so incredibly expensive to own a car here, so I don't recommend it unless you absolutely need it for work. And by expensive, I mean both mentally and financially. From a mental perspective, driving here is kind of a nightmare. The streets aren't always in the best shape. There's a lot of two-way roads that turn into one-way roads. I remember visiting here with my parents when I was really young. My dad went down the wrong way of a one-way road and he freaked out. Remember it very vividly to this day. It was kind of hilarious but scary at the same time. It is a little scary driving here. It's a little stressful. So that's the mental side of it. From the financial side of it, parking is super, super expensive. If you're, you know, working downtown and drive downtown and park for the day, for example, you could be spending $25 to $40 a day just to park in a parking garage there. If you're doing street parking just to go to a restaurant, you could expect to spend, you know, anywhere between $3 and $5 an hour easily. If you want to go across the Golden Gate Bridge to get to Marin, or you go to the East Bay and you're coming back to the city, you need to pay bridge tolls. Bridge tolls across the Golden Gate Bridge are almost $10 now. When I first moved here, it was about $5 to get across the Golden Gate Bridge, so it's doubled over that time frame. So every single time I go show a house in Marin County, or every single time I, you know, visit friends or family up there, or go to dinner up there and come home, it's an automatic $10 no matter what. You don't need to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge. You could take a ferry, but then you need to take a ferry toll. You need to pay to park at the ferry as well. So, you know, no matter which way you're traveling, you're gonna have to pay something if you're going across the bay. First building I moved to when I lived in San Francisco, I rented a parking spot in the building. It was about $275. If you can find garage parking for $275 today, that is a deal and you should take it in a heartbeat. Most places parking is going to be a lot closer to $400 a month or even more. But luckily one of my favorite things about San Francisco is how walkable it is. You don't need a car. And until I got into real estate, I didn't really need a car for work, so I didn't own a car. For the majority of time that I lived here, I didn't need a car. So you can get around very easily without a car. But, you know, depending on what you want to do on the weekend or depending on what you need to do for work, you may want a car. And if you don't own one, you can rent one just for the day. You can take the bus. But one of my favorite things about the city is how close it is to so many things like Carmel and Napa and Sonoma. So personally, for me, recreationally, like it helps to have a car, but do I truly need one barring work? No, I wouldn't need one but for my job. And if you're looking to buy a spot in a new condo building, new construction condos, they don't always come with parking. You can buy it separately. You're spending between $75,000 and $100,000 just for the spot. So it is incredibly expensive to own a car here. Yeah. Luckily, San Francisco is one of the most walkable places in California. So for the most part, unless you need to get all the way across town and you absolutely want to drive, you really don't need a car here to get to most things. You can walk to most things that you need. Now, I just talked about how you don't really need a car, but on the flip side of that, unfortunately, public transit here isn't all that great. You have the BART line, which runs through kind of the southern end of the city along Market Street and then further south. If you want to get to the north side of San Francisco or anywhere other than immediately around that southern end of the city, you need to take a car or the Muni line or bus line to get there. There is no BART option there. So I used to have really good friends that live in Oakland, and when they would visit me when I lived in Pacific Heights, they would either drive all the way here, which is insane for bridge traffic, or they would take BART and then would have to Uber, or I'd have to pick them up, or they'd have to take a bus to get to my house. So, you know, not the easiest thing in the world to do, even though we don't really live that far from each other from a mileage standpoint. Another thing is crime and homelessness, and these things have really gotten worse over the years as I've lived in San Francisco. It always this way when I first moved here over 10 years ago. That said, despite what you hear on the news, the city is nowhere near as bad as it's played out to be. The problem areas and the areas that you most likely hear about or, or see in the news are very heavily concentrated in just a few subdistricts in the city. For the most part, 90+% of the city, incredibly safe place, incredibly beautiful. Not a lot of crime, not a lot of homelessness. For the most part, you can avoid these issues if you live in the right neighborhoods. If you want to know what those neighborhoods are, you can ask me and definitely want to subscribe to the channel because I go over all of that in a bunch of different videos. Another big one right now, and this is a relatively recent phenomenon, is that insurance costs are rising to own in California. Many of the large carriers have pulled out of California because of a recent uptick over the last several years in wildfires. And what that has done has left owners with a lot less optionality when it comes to choosing a homeowner's insurance policy. . And with less optionality, prices for homeowners policies have increased over time. It's not quite as bad as say Florida, for example, where, uh, homeowners insurance has increased, you know, several hundred percent, but it is getting a lot more expensive and a lot more difficult to find homeowners insurance here, especially if you're looking up in Marin County, for example, where a lot of the areas are in fire zones or in parts of San Francisco where you have a lot of very old infrastructure and maybe the building from a seismic perspective isn't sound enough for, uh, insurance purposes and you know, you could still get that insurance. It's just going to be a lot more expensive and you might have to do some remediation work in order to fix the issue. So when I'm, you know, working on a potential offer or, you know, doing diligence on a house for a client, always looking into insurance options upfront because we want to make sure that the house is going to be insurable, especially if they're going to get a loan because you need that insurance in order for the loan to close. And on the sell side, always good to do some diligence upfront just to make sure that there aren't any, you know, major red flags from an insurance perspective. And if buyers want to know that information, you can put them in touch, you know, with those insurers so that they have options. And it makes the whole buying process a lot simpler and less stressful when you know you can get insurance. Another one you should know, and this is kind of a bummer, and again, another more recent phenomenon, is how much downtown has changed since the pandemic. Once, you know, remote work kind of really took over and office vacancy started rising, the downtown area kind of died. It was, you know, I worked in downtown for, you know, over 8 years as when I was a lawyer. I loved going to the bars and restaurants there, and it just doesn't have that same, you know, lively vibe anymore. Yes, a lot of those bars and restaurants are still there and I still go to them, but it doesn't have that like 5 o'clock going after work, you know, super, super upbeat, you know, feeling that it used to. It's a lot more dead and a lot slower than it is because of how much remote work has taken over and how much people have moved out of the downtown area. That said, I do think it is getting better. I mean, this is just anecdotal, but like when I go to the gym, in downtown, if I'm going to that particular gym on that day, it is noticeably busier and traffic leaving it is a lot heavier than it was, you know, say 1 to 2 years ago, especially during kind of the height of the pandemic. So I do think it's getting better. I think as AI kind of continues to take over and AI companies look for, you know, literally hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space and tech companies like Apple and Google and Facebook and all these finance companies and law firms like my old law firm starts demanding people come back to work at least, you know, 3 days a week. Sometimes full-time. That dynamic is going to change, but I think it's going to take several years to get back to what it was. The last one, and I say this having lived in New York for law school and also, you know, in Southern California, I think San Francisco kind of just shuts down at night. It's not like New York City where you can be out till, you know, 4 a.m., you know, drinking or, you know, have 24-hour restaurants or convenience stores available to you. Literally every single day on every single corner, it seems, of any part of the city. That's not what San Francisco is like, except in a few spots. Most of San Francisco is going to shut down by like 10 p.m. There are other places in SF that are, you know, open very late into the night, 1, 2 o'clock. But it is nothing like living in a bigger city like New York where you can get literally anything you want at literally any time of day. So for me, as you know, someone who's a little bit older and, you know, more established in my relationship, I'm not necessarily looking for that. So not a huge deal. But if you are, you know, 25 years old moving to the city and you're single, uh, and you like going out and that's how you expect to meet somebody, that's something that you definitely should know. Now, despite all of those negatives that I just rattled off, I do think that San Francisco is one of the best places to live in the country. There's so many incredible things to love about the city. The beautiful homes, the views, um, the food is insane. Uh, there's so many great outdoor amenities, great things to do all times of year. The weather overall is very mild, very great. I genuinely feel that every single day in the city is a new day. There's so many things that I and explore that I've yet to explore, even having lived here, you know, over a decade. There's so much to do. You will never get bored. That is the reason why it's so expensive to live here. It is a very desirable place to live. There are so many great things about it. And I know people here who move here and are shell-shocked about the prices, you know, once they spend some meaningful time here and get into a rhythm and start, you know, finding what they love to do here, they really love the city and have no regrets. I personally love living here because it is so much more walkable. Than where I'm from in Orange County. There's such a, you know, higher concentration of incredible food. And I'm talking, yes, the Michelin-starred restaurants, but also like just, you know, the street food, the food trucks, the food truck gathering places. There's so many great casual and upscale places of all varieties of food. There are so many places I still haven't eaten and there are new places popping up here all the time. Eating is one of my favorite things to do. Cooking is one of my favorite things to do. And there is, I think, no better place to do it than in San Francisco on this side of the country. So if you're thinking about moving to San Francisco or even Marin County on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge, or you're thinking about leaving the city, I'd love to be a resource for you. My contact information's in the description below. You can call me, email me, text me. There's a link in the description you can click that to directly schedule a call with me. Super easy. And before you go, if you're thinking about moving to the area but don't know which specific neighborhood is right for you or how one neighborhood ranks, you know, in relation to another neighborhood, I have a whole separate video where I rank in tiers some of the most popular, most talked about neighborhoods in the city. It'll answer a ton of your questions and it'll definitely save you some time driving around a bunch of different neighborhoods and hopefully save you from making the wrong decision. So I'll link it up top, go check it out. And if you have any questions, you know how to reach out to me and I'll see you in the next video.