I’ve Lived in SF for 13 Years… My Honest Thoughts

When I first moved to San Francisco over 13 years ago, my initial plan was just to live in the city for a couple of years and then move back home to Southern California. Most of my family and friends were in either Orange County or Los Angeles, and I had always envisioned myself moving back home. But that self-imposed deadline for myself came and went over a decade ago. I'm still living in San Francisco and haven't looked back since. This is Austin Klar, your Lurcher real estate agent in San Francisco, and I've completely fallen in love with the city. I absolutely love it. I think it is one of the best cities to live in in the entire world, but it's definitely not It's definitely not without its problems or drawbacks. There are things that I've learned having lived in multiple neighborhoods across the city for all that time, and things that I've learned from clients who have lived here for much longer than I have but have decided to leave. All of these things are things that you need to be thinking about and understand if you're considering relocating here. So in this video, I'm going over some of the unique characteristics of San Francisco that made me fall in love with it, and some of the issues and drawbacks as well. An honest take after over 13 years of living here. Let's kick it off with— San Francisco. Some of the things that I love about the city, and then I'll get to some of the drawbacks toward the back half of the video, so definitely stick around. First up, one of the things that I like about this city the most is how surprisingly walkable it is. When you first think of San Francisco, you know, you think it's one of the most hilly terrains of any major city in the entire country, but it's actually surprisingly walkable. And a lot of people think it isn't because a lot of the tourist attractions or the heavily touristy areas where people who, you know, come to the city to visit once or twice spend most of their time, places like Nob Hill and Lombard Street and Lyon Street steps, places like Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower, you know, all of those places are in some of the most hilly parts of the city. So they see that and they think, who on earth could walk up and down these hills on a day-to-day basis? The city's not walkable at all. But that's not actually reality for most people living in San Francisco. First of all, there are a lot of neighborhoods that are largely flat. The Mission, the Marina, Mission Bay, SoMa, South Beach, Dogpatch, Jordan Park, Richmond, Sunset, Seacliff, and many others. Second, there are a lot of neighborhoods where even though there are gigantic hills, there are stretches of those neighborhoods that are largely flat in ways that you can avoid a good chunk of those big hills to walk to a particular place. Take my neighborhood, for example. I live in Pacific Heights, which has one of the steepest hills in the entire city. If you travel in the north to south direction, you're going to be going up some pretty big inclines. But if you travel in the east to west direction,— in a bulk of the neighborhood, it's actually largely flat. So it's much easier to get from point A to point B. Where I specifically live, I'm 1 block flat walking to the closest park, 2 blocks flat walking to the closest corner store, 4 blocks flat walking to the closest grocery store. The major commercial corridors of Sacramento Street and Fillmore Street are 3 blocks and 4 blocks away respectively for me, basically entirely flat walking to those areas. So I can get to grocery stores, retail, you know, coffee shops, bars, whatever I need on a day-to-day basis walking and largely avoid the hills. Now, that's not going to be true everywhere that you live in my neighborhood in Pacific Heights, for example, there are going to be parts of the area where, you know, hills are unavoidable. Like if you live at the peak of the neighborhood, you know, like close to Billionaires Row, for example, at the very top of Pac Heights. Well, if you're going to walk anywhere and you're at the peak, you're obviously going to have to go down and then to walk home back up some major hills. But even in those places with those big inclines, because you have so many amenities close by, shops, restaurants, grocery stores, your day-to-day things that you need very close by, it's not like you're walking up and down those major hills for extended time periods. Actually represented someone purchasing a place near the top of Pacific Heights, right next to Billionaires Row on Broadway, one of the steepest streets in the area. But even though it's so steep to get up there, one of the reasons he ended up buying the place was because of how walkable it was to everything else that he needed on a day-to-day basis. It's a couple blocks to the closest park, 10 minutes to the grocery store, 15 minutes to the gym. So not difficult to walk anywhere, even though he was living on a steep hill. He does not have a car. He walks literally everywhere. And the same experience can be had in other neighborhoods that are very hilly. Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Noe Valley, Bernal Heights, Potrero Hill, Glen Park. There are neighborhoods all over San Francisco that themselves are very hilly, but because you have so much of what you need on a day-to-day basis relatively close by, it's— Mm-hmm. Still walkable. And then on the flip side of that, there are certainly neighborhoods with little to no walkability that are, you know, principally residential, and you have to walk a great distance to get to the closest businesses. So you definitely need a car in those areas. But those neighborhoods are fewer and further between. For the most part, San Francisco is very walkable. In fact, there are several places in the city where, depending on what your job is, you could get by without a car entirely. First neighborhood I moved to when I moved to San Francisco, North Beach. I didn't have a car for years. I walked to and from work every single day. Grocery stores, gyms, parks, you name it. I did not use a car at all. Second area I lived in, South Beach, didn't have a car there either. Had a grocery store in my building. I could walk to work every single day and it was basically entirely flat. So depending on where you live, depending on where you work and how often you need to go to work, you can get by walking just fine. If you wanna learn more about the walkability of various neighborhoods or what parts of the city best fit your particular lifestyle or goals, reach out to me. I was a lawyer at one of the biggest law firms in the world before getting into real estate, and I've helped numerous people relocate here from all over the country. I'd be happy to be a resource for you. I'll put my contact info in the description below. Reach out anytime. And if you like videos about San Francisco lifestyle, current events, new developments, history, or all things San Francisco real estate, subscribe to my channel because I make videos about that stuff every single week. And back to the reasons why I love this city, and I promise I will get to some of the things that I don't like about it, but I'm going to get through these first. And the next one on my love list is the food scene. I'm a former fat person. I'm still a fat person at heart. I love to eat. When I am eating meals, I am spending that time planning my next meal. I cannot get enough food. And the amount of food in San Francisco at every echelon of any type is unmatchable. It is unbeatable. It is available in abundance everywhere you turn. LA has an incredible food scene. It's got like 10x better since I've left there. The food scene in LA is very hard to beat. But the problem with LA, for example, is how spread out. All of that great food is, how much you have to travel to get to all those places. In San Francisco, I can go 10 minutes in any direction from my house and get pretty much any kind of food I want at every level, from street food or casual food all the way to multiple Michelin-star food of any variety within just a few minutes of my place. And I think the city is particularly cool because there are certain parts of the city that really lean into a particular food or particular culture. North Beach, is the Little Italy of San Francisco. The Mission has insane Mexican food. Richmond has a ton of Asian food. On Clement, we have one of the few Japantowns in the country. We have the largest Chinatown outside of Asia. All of those places are within just a few miles of each other. Remember, San Francisco is only 49 square miles, 7 by 7, so it is very small. It's easy to get to pretty much any kind of food you could ever possibly want. I also feel that we are genuinely spoiled here, not only with the variety of food, but just how good it is. I'm lucky enough to have traveled to a lot of amazing places in the world and tried all types of food, and a lot of it is great, but in many instances it does not compare to what we have available right here in the city. And another thing I like about San Francisco's food scene is like the food truck culture in the city. There are food pop-ups at all times of year all across the city, sometimes in spectacular places with incredible views, places like Fort Mason and the Presidio. There are food pop-ups or food events of all types all throughout the year. So if you like food, really hard to beat a place like San Francisco. My next favorite thing about the city is the architecture. I'm personally not into super modern houses. I like things that have been modernized in the sense that they've been updated, but I'm still looking for character and charm when I'm looking for a place in San Francisco. That's what attracts me, and SF has that in spades. I live in an Italianate Victorian that was built in the 1860s. It's got all the classic markings of an old-school Victorian, the 11-foot the ceilings, the giant bay windows, big fireplaces with big mantels, ceiling medallions, crown moldings, all the things that we know and love about that old-school classic San Francisco architecture. I get a very special feeling when I walk into places like that, and the city has that flavor of home all over the place. And it's not just Victorians. There are Edwardians, Georgian Colonials, Spanish Revival, Tudors, Marina style, Craftsman, contemporary homes, mid-century homes, all of it. And if you do happen to be into modern homes, there's a ton of that new, and it's not just like modern high-rise condo buildings. There are a lot of modern architecture and a lot of neighborhoods that focus specifically or have a high concentration of modern architecture. And it's not just residential architecture that I love in the city. There are so many historic landmarks throughout. You've got the Palace of Fine Arts, you've got Grace Cathedral, the Ferry Building, Legion of Honor, the former San Francisco Center, multiple hotels, multiple members clubs, all of them built in historic buildings. You have historic office buildings, you have historic military buildings that have been repurposed into hotels and office buildings. No matter where you go, there's almost always something to admire from an architectural perspective about our city. It makes it one of the most special and unique places in the entire world. The last reason I love this city that I want to talk about in this video is its proximity to nature and what that means for views. San Francisco itself is a nature paradise. First, it has one of the most robust park systems in the entire country. The two crown jewel parks that cap it off are 1,000+ acre parks, Golden Gate Park and the Presidio, with miles of trails, lakes, golf courses, you name it. I've got separate videos on both of these parks and their incredible history and amenities available there. I'll link them in the description below. Go check them out. But you also have gorgeous smaller parks throughout the city, each of them with stunning views. Alta Plaza Park, Lafayette Park, Lincoln Park, Dolores Park, McLaren Park, and many more. Basically anywhere you live in San Francisco, you're literally within a 10-minute walk of some sort of park. Second, San Francisco is a peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and the San Francisco Bay. So from many places throughout the city, you can get some sort of water view, be it bay view or ocean view. And because of the elevation, because of those hills, the views are spectacular. And San Francisco is very close to some of the most beautiful landscapes and beautiful regions in the entire world. Napa and Sonoma are each less than an hour away. Marin County is just across the Golden Gate Bridge. Some of the best hiking and biking in all of California. Carmel, Monterey, and Big Sur, a couple hours south. South of San Francisco, some of the most spectacular coastline views you will see ever. You can't get this combination of nature and views, especially in such a major metropolitan area, in any other place other than San Francisco. All right, so those are some of the things that I love about the city, that I appreciate it the most compared to other cities. But I'm going to shift gears and tell you some of the things that I don't like about San Francisco that you definitely need to be aware of before moving here. And first of those issues is that I think we don't have that robust of a public transit system, or that effective of a public transit system, and it's at not effective enough to warrant going without a car except in rare cases. The two main transit systems in the city are BART and Muni. BART only runs through basically the southern part of the city starting on Market Street near the Embarcadero then heading south, so unless you live along a BART line and your destination is along a BART line, you're most likely going to need to take another form of transit to get to your ultimate destination. So for example, when my friends would come in from the East Bay to visit me in Pacific Heights, if— unless they were driving in, they would take BART in, and once they got off BART, they would have to take either the bus or rideshare to get to my house on the north side of the city. There isn't a single system that will take you from outside of the city to anywhere within the city. You have to take multiple public transit systems to do that if you're taking public transit. Now, aside from BART, we do have Muni, which does go to pretty much anywhere in San Francisco. But the problem that I have with Muni is that for the most part, it's an above-ground transit system. It's just a bus system. So there aren't really any efficiencies generated related by taking Muni other than avoiding the need to park in your, you know, future destination. Like, when you think about driving a car in New York, how much traffic there is in New York, it actually takes longer to get to, you know, from point A to point B by car in New York. Whereas if you take the subway, not only are you paying substantially less money, you can get to your destination way faster because you actually avoid a bunch of traffic, not traveling on street level. Here, that doesn't exist. Like, there's no time advantage whatsoever to taking Muni in most cases, and that's before you even factor in all the ways of the bus system. It's almost always going to be more efficient and certainly a better experience to take a Lyft or Uber or Waymo. Obviously that's more expensive, so if you're optimizing for cost, then, you know, your analysis is gonna, you know, end up different than mine. But if you're optimizing for time, there's no way meeting wins. There are very few instances here where it's more efficient to take public transit than it is to take a car. So for being a big city, I feel like the public transit system is somewhat lacking, at least for what I'm looking for out of public transit, which is efficiency. And related to that is how about how expensive it is and difficult it is to own a car in the city. And that's all the more frustrating because how ineffective a lot of our transit is. Many of the roads are not well maintained here. I've had to replace my tires because of flat tires multiple times a year here, every single year I've owned a car. Traffic is a nightmare, especially during rush hour. A lot of roads don't have dedicated turn lanes, so if someone is turning left and yielding to oncoming traffic, it's going to back traffic up the whole stretch of that road. If somebody is pulling over to let somebody out of a car, or a bus is pulling over to let people off the bus, it's not pulling over into some dedicated lane. It's just blocking one of the main lanes of what's maybe a two-lane main highway or roadway through the city. So it creates a ton of traffic. Bikers here are incapable of following rules, so it makes driving all the more unpleasant, and you have to be on edge at all times looking out for crazy bikers who don't obey the law. Parking here is awful, and it's becoming worse. A lot of the new buildings that are being built in the city don't have a lot of parking, so we're getting a lot of new residents and not as much new parking, so it's creating a strain on already limited parking availability. The city is also removing existing parking spaces. For example, the city has removed a number of street parking spaces in the city within 20 feet of an intersection to increase visibility of pedestrians pursuant to state law. So there are even fewer parking spaces than there used to be. Those laws, the daylighting laws, make sense near schools or major commercial corridors with heavy pedestrian traffic, but personally don't really think they make sense in more residential areas where there's less heavy pedestrian traffic, in my view, but that's a debate for a different day. Bottom line is, if you don't have parking in your house or in your building, you could be driving around multiple blocks, many laps, trying to find a spot. It's really inconvenient. And then you got to deal with the cost of parking. Let's say you drive to work. It might be $40 or $50 a day to park at your office building. Or if you're running errands and need to park on a major commercial corridor, it could be like $10 an hour to park. So it is extremely expensive. Like I mentioned before, depending on where you live and what what you do for work, you could get by without a car. There are places where you can live where you really don't need a car. But for the most part, I think most people who live here own a car or use a car on a regular basis. The next thing I don't like about San Francisco is how most of the city doesn't have any lot line setbacks. So homes are built basically edge to edge or lot to lot on top of each other. So that's why you see a lot of homes in the city that appear to be touching each other. Now, they're not literally sharing walls. They're not literally attached to each other, but they have the appearance of being attached to each other because they're an inch or two apart. And this is true even for houses that are $5 million, $10 million, or even $20 million. Even some of the most expensive homes in the city are touching their neighbors. That means less privacy because of noise transfer because your houses are basically on top of each other. It means you might have large structures overlooking your outdoor spaces. You might be, you know, trying to enjoy time in your backyard and you have these towering structures looming over you next to you. It means you might have more property disputes with your neighbors because more issues arise when your two properties are literally or almost literally touching each other. Maybe it's water issues, Maybe it's landscape issues, maybe it's, you know, fence repair issues or retaining wall issues when you have shared walls, shared fences, all that. And having attached homes means it's harder to come by good natural light unless your house is in a very specific orientation on specific parts of the block and specific streets. Depending on how the block is oriented, homes on the west side of the street and on the north side of the street tend to get more light than homes on the east side and south sides of the street just because of how the sun travels during the day. In relation to where the other neighboring houses sit in relation to those houses. I actually had clients that only wanted to look at houses with the specific orientation on the west side or north sides of streets because those homes got more natural light. They work from home, they needed brighter open spaces, and spaces like that that don't have that specific orientation are harder to find with good natural light. Now, not all homes in San Francisco are attached. They're not all like that. That, there are some areas in San Francisco where actually none of the homes are like that because of historic zoning, how these homes were built over a century ago, for example. And you can imagine those neighborhoods tend to be more expensive. You know, homes are detached on all four sides means you have proper side yards, you have more privacy from your neighbors, you have bigger yard spaces, you have more natural light coming in from all four sides because you don't have things blocking you on multiple sides of your house. But because of how our building code is set up with no lot line setbacks, it is much more common in San Francisco to find buildings and homes that appear attached to their neighbors, and that means less light, limited privacy, and the potential for more property disputes. The next thing that I didn't really have a firm grasp on when I first moved here, but I much more understand now, is how truly expensive it is to own a home here. Now, you might be saying to yourself, yeah, we all know San Francisco is an expensive place to buy a home, but I'm talking about expenses that go beyond just the initial purchase of the home, the actual cost of ongoing ownership of property in the city. Depending on the type of property you own and what building you own, alone, the actual cost of ownership can be astronomical. SF has property taxes like everywhere else, but there are special assessments over and above ordinary property tax that depending on where you live can be several thousand dollars. Someone spending $2.5 million on a 1,200-square-foot condo in a new building in the East Cut near like Yerba Buena, for example, might be on the hook for an additional $10 a foot in property tax. So for a unit like that, that's almost $15,000 a year on top of the $27,000 a year in property taxes. HOA. HOAs. Depending on the building, you might pay a couple hundred dollars a month, you might pay several thousand dollars a month. And HOAs almost always go up every single year as the cost of utilities and the cost of insurance goes up every single year. There are numerous retrofit requirements and inspection mandates that you're subject to if you buy into larger condo and co-op buildings. Fire sprinklers, fire alarms, seismic retrofits, balcony inspections, and et cetera. These can cost owners tens or potentially even hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on what work is needed to comply with those rules. Insurance is getting more and more expensive every single year, and the requirements that insurance companies are putting in place in order to qualify a unit or a building for insurance are getting more and more onerous, which means more repairs. And as construction costs go up every year, those repairs get more costly as time goes on. That could be updated electrical, updated plumbing, updated roof, HVAC, water heater. That means you could potentially be spending tens of thousands of dollars a year immediately upon closing. Over on top of the purchase price. So there's a lot more than just the cost of actually purchasing a unit in San Francisco. And it's not just owners who are subject to these things potentially. Imagine renting, you know, you're a new renter looking for a place in San Francisco, and you're renting in a building where landlord has to comply with these rules. You better believe that that cost is gonna be passed on to the renter. That's part of the reason why rent is going up so much in San Francisco on top of the scarcity of available units. Units. Mm-hmm. And then you have all the other things that feed into overall cost of living in a city that are unrelated to housing— things like parking and groceries and, you know, going out to eat, entertainment, all of those things. It is incredibly expensive to live here, and it keeps getting more expensive. Last thing I want to talk about that really annoys me about the city is its microclimates and how variable the weather can be within a single day. We have dozens of microclimates throughout the city. Neighborhoods that are literally right next to each other can have vastly different weather, and during the day, the weather can fluctuate dramatically on a moment's notice. I feel like I can't go anywhere in the city without a jacket, even when it's sunny and warm outside, because you never know when the weather's going to turn on you and when you might need to put that jacket on. There have been many instances where I've been out at parks with friends. I'm in shorts and a t-shirt. It is sunny, it's clear, and within an hour the weather has changed completely. And if you don't come prepared, it's miserable. I've got an entirely separate video about microclimates in San Francisco and my favorite neighborhoods to live in the cold zone, the mild weather zone, and the Sunbelt zone of the city. I'll link that in the description below. Go check it out if you want to learn more about San Francisco's ridiculous weather. There are a lot of other things beyond what I listed in this video that I don't like about the city and that I love about the city that I'm happy to talk about with you. If you're curious or want to better understand what neighborhoods better fit your particular lifestyle or goals, reach out to me. I've lived in San Francisco for over 13 years. I've helped numerous people relocate here from all over the country. Happy to be a resource for you. I'll put my contact info in the description below. Reach out anytime. And remember, if you like videos about San Francisco lifestyle, current events, new developments, history, or all things San Francisco real estate, subscribe to my channel because I make videos about that stuff every single week. And before you go, make sure to go check out those videos that I mentioned, the one about microclimates. I've got one on Golden Gate Park, and I've got one on the Presidio. I'll link those in the description as well. I hope you enjoyed the video, and I'll see you in the next one.