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My mother had loved one man (pictured above) all her life. I guess some women simply do.Ufa, Soviet UnionMy parents met in Ufa State Aviation Technical University. My father Vladimir (now known as Vlad) enrolled there, because being Jewish, he had been denied entrance to the vast majority of universities, while this particular one willingly accepted Jews.My Russian mother, Elena, finished high school with a gold medal and could pick and choose any university in the Soviet Union. However, she wasn’t confident in her abilities. He mother suggested Moscow but she, she wound up taking entrance exams in Ufa, Bashkiriya.Vladimir was a year younger Elena. She felt pretty helpless on her own, in another town, without parents, and Vladimir arranged everything for her. For the purpose, he engaged help from his local friends who would get him tickets to concerts, fetch delicatessen and fix him up with a car.Strange as it may sound, I met one of my father’s Ufa friends a few years ago in Forte De Marmi, Italy.At the time, I was tutoring his godson - whose father Iskander was his best friend and helped Iskander financially to launch his business, which eventually made him rich.Iskander’s father taught economics in the same university where my parents studied at, and helped open doors for Jewish students, including my father.Perhaps this is just a coincidence.My parents’ love affair continued after they graduated from the university. My father moved back to his native Crimea, and during their summer vacation in Yalta my mother became pregnant with me.When she found out, she tried to get in touch with Vladimir, but he was unavailable. She flew to his hometown, Simferopol, where she was confronted by his mother, Bronya.“Go away, Chiksa,” she said. “My son’s not interested in you. He’s a romantic man and now on a merchant ship in the Black Sea.”This encounter haunted my mother for the rest of her life. And possibly not only hers…Ulyanovsk, Soviet Union/RussiaMy mother returned to Ulyanovsk where her father, lieutenant colonel in the Red Army, was just given a one-bedroom apartment by the state. My mother was very upset and was heading for a hospital to do an abortion, but my grandmother, Alexandra, talked her into keeping the child.There had been this invisible, strong connection between my grandmother and me until she passed away in 2009. She felt responsible for me and I felt that I owed her my life.A few months after my mother gave birth to me, my father showed up. He wanted to see his son, but my mother told him, “don’t come back, don’t try to contact us, don’t try to see us.”Coincidentally, my father’s cousin Boris lived in the same town and was the head of the engineering department in the Interregional center of Microelectronics. Boris was angry with his cousin for what he had done to my mother and stopped communicating with him. He hired my mother right away.My grandmother told me the whole story. She loathed my father and became quite an anti-Semite.In 1994, my mother learned she had stomach cancer. Eight months later she was dead. In her painkillers’ induced delirium, she kept returning to the scene in Simferopol when my father’s mother told her off. What kind of family is that? This is what she really wanted to know. I vowed to find out.My grandmother realized she didn’t have money to bury her daughter - her pension and my granddad’s pension were barely enough to buy basic food for the three of us. This was a very dark day for her, as she lost her only daughter and the state she had worked for all her life couldn’t provide for the funeral. She was sitting on the couch and weeping, when the doorbell rang.She opened the door and saw a delegation of Jews headed by Boris.“Alexandra, I told folks in the Jewish community center that Elena was a wonderful person who helped everyone around her, and now we want to help you,” said Boris.He promised they would cover all the expenses with the funerals. They did, and also booked one of the largest restaurants in the city so there was a nice wake, and would bring food for us free of charge.After this incident, from being an anti-Semite my grandmother became a die-hard Judeophile. Whenever I’d have conflicts with Jews, she’d always take their side and scold me to tell me I was wrong and “don’t be like your father; he is a bad person.”A couple years later, I met Boris (he lives in Israel now) and told him I was going to meet my father. Prior to that, I found in my mother’s address book my father’s address in San Francisco, which was provided to her by Boris. She wrote to him asking to take care of me when she found out she had cancer, but he never answered. Maybe he didn’t get the letter. Maybe he did.Boris filled me in on what transpired in my father’s life, which he learned from his relatives who were still in touch with him.A few years after visiting paying a visit in Ulyanovsk, Vladimir married a woman, a singer, and they had a son, Stanislav. The singer was not Jewish, but this time his mother accepted him into the family, and helped bring him up.In the meantime, Vladimir did a PhD, and launched a business importing computers to the Soviet Union. He became rich, bought a yacht, hired a crew and was the first citizen of the Soviet Union who docked on a private yacht in Israel.Later his business was raided and he decided to leave the country, which was now Ukraine.In order to immigrate to the United States as a Jewish refugee he needed to bring in a family. Two persons qualified as family.He paid his ex-wife eighteen years worth of child support and took his son with him to San Francisco, California. There was a sponsor in California, who financed their first steps in the new country.Next, Vladimir’s mother, his sister, her husband and their two sons followed.Boris hadn’t heard from him in three years, so he didn’t know for sure Vladimir’s current address.And then he gave me a piece of advice. “Your father is a hard man. He’s not going to accept you. You’d be bitterly disappointed. Don’t go looking for him.”But I remembered my mother, who till her dying day wanted to know what was wrong with my father’s family, and so I decided to disregard his advice.Bay Area, California (1)It took me years to get to the United States, until I finally did in 2001. Once there, I found out that my father changed his address.I headed for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. After three hours in line, I was told that they can’t provide the address of my father because they had to protect his privacy.Next, I went to a Jewish Community Library. A librarian listened to my story, and was sympathetic to me. She gave me my father’s address. I took the BART to Millbrae and walked down El Camino Real to Burlingame. I rang the bell at a dingbat apartment building. Nobody answered, but I already somehow knew he did not live there.I walked out and saw a public phone. On the spur of the moment, I opened the phone book and found my father’s family name. There was a new address, in the same town, Burlingame.It was a short walk, and when I reached the house, I felt I was at the end of a long journey. I sat on the porch of a single-family house, and watched a plane slowly move across the sky. I remembered what Boris told me that I shouldn’t look for my father. There was still time to get up and leave and never come back.I stood up and pressed the bell.A young woman opened the front door. She looked Russian, but just to be on the safe side I said, “Hello.” “Who are you?” “I’m Misha. Vladimir’s son.”She shut the door in my face. I sat on the porch and waited. It was too late to run away. About five minutes the young lady opened the door again and let me in. She was Russian. She and her ten-year old son lived with my father. “Vladimir is coming”, she said.About fifteen minutes later there came my father. He was a tall, burly man with a beard and black hair. He spoke in a monotonous, trembling voice. He didn’t look directly at me, but sort of circled around the living room like a bull around a toreador.“Are you Elena’s son?” he asked from a safe distance.“Yes.”“Where’s Elena?”“She passed away.”He stopped and stared me. I wondered if it came as a surprise or he knew. I couldn't tell.“There is no Elena…things would have been so different. No Elena,” he mumbled. “Mind coming with me for a ride?”I nodded. He drove me in his Lexus to a park by the San Francisco Bay.“I’m going to ask you a direct question,” my father said, not looking at me again. And then after a pause, said, “What do you want from me?”There were many things that I could tell him - that I wanted to be part of his family.That I wanted to get to know him.But I just felt he didn’t want to hear it and so all I managed was “Help me with getting a US citizenship.”“All right,” he breathed a sigh of relief, “and please call me Vladimir. Don’t call me “dad” or “father.””Vladimir let me stay in his house, while he was sorting out my request. I somehow knew he wouldn’t help me “adjust my status” but I also felt that he wouldn’t kick me out, not while his girlfriend was watching, and introduce me to his family.Only Vladimir didn’t, although they all lived nearby. While he was at work in Silicon Valley, where he was employed as a coder, I became friends with his girlfriend and told her the whole story. Stressed out, she kept borrowing cigarettes from me, and I could hear them argue in the evening. They would break up after I left.Vladimir took me to see his lawyer and she dutifully announced that my status couldn't be adjusted, and Vladimir said he wouldn’t pay for my college studies.When we left his lawyer’s office, Vladimir said, “That’s it. Now you can see that I can’t help you in your request.”Next morning, he woke me up and said it’s time for me to leave California. He handed me a one-way train ticket to New York. He took me to the train station and stood on the platform to make sure I didn’t get off the train.I spent four and a half days on that train smoking weed with some students from Boston. They wanted to take me with them to their campus, but I decided to get off in New York.Vladimir didn’t inquire if I had any money, and I’d given my last hundred dollars to a French guy in the hostel where I was staying before I found my father. The French guy was looking for the girl he was in love with, so I really wanted to help him out.New York, NYI had thirty five bucks on me, but even half of a Jew would never go hungry or sleep on the street in New York. I went to a random Orthodox community in Brooklyn, and they gave me money and a job taking care of a rabbi with Parkinson's disease in Manhattan hospital.The rabbi’s brother took me late in the evening across the Brooklyn Bridge. As I watched the wall of lights, mesmerized, he said, “G-d gives, G-d takes.”A few days later, I woke up to the smell of smoke in the air and breaking news on the TV. My new roommates were shouting “the twins have fallen.” I went outside and watched half-burned scraps of paper fall from the sky. People were numb, silent. I took a bus and got off by the Brooklyn Bridge.Smoke was billowing from where the Twin Towers used to stand. Five days prior, I was in the lobby of one of the towers, and was told by the security the day was too cloudy and the observation deck was closed. Office workers covered in soot were walking from the bridge like zombies, their eyes blank.I didn’t give up and decided to stay put. I got a job in a laundromat, and rented a room. My neighbor had a famous guest staying over at his place, the Uzbek-Russian singer Aziza.Aziza toured Brooklyn and spent afternoons sitting with me and my other roommates in the backyard. She told us stories and sang songs. It turned out she met my father’s ex-wife.“She was an alcoholic. Slept with every man in town. Your silly father needs to do DNA test and see if his son is actually his, you know, biologically speaking.”And then suddenly, out of the blue, Vladimir called on my cell.“My mother wants to meet you,” he said. “I’ll buy you a flight ticket.”Bay Area, California (2)I flew to San Francisco the very next day, and my half-brother picked me up in the airport. Stas smoked the same brand of cigarettes, and that’s all the things we had in common. He was out of the army, working as a bank teller. His car was his pride. He took me to meet his Russian friends. They drove around a Starbucks in a circle, showing off their cars and their choice of music blaring from the speakers.I stayed at Vladimir’s house in San Mateo, where he lived with Stas. Next, I met my two cousins, Misha and Sasha. They were both coders. Sasha lived with his mother and grandmother. I think my grandmother changed her mind, because I wasn’t being invited over, and continued to stay at Vladimir’s place waiting for the meet.On the spur of the moment, Sasha, with whom I was now spending most of the time, as I had more in common with him than with my brother, took me to his place. I sat in the living room when his - our - grandmother showed up.“This is Misha, my cousin,” said Sasha.My grandmother stood in the doorway, not sure what to do. She was befuddled, completely taken aback. She hesitated - I could see she was fighting with herself. Finally, she turned away and went upstairs without even saying hello to me. That meeting, too, was anti-climactic.Next day, Vladimir introduced me to his former girlfriend and tutor, Della Peretti. She invited me over to her house in Oakland. Her children, Jonah and Chelsea, lived in New York. We spent a nice time chatting and I told her that I write short stories in English, but I can’t get them published.I flew back to New York the next day, again, without any money. I found another Jewish employer to give me a job. I felt morally exhausted and really wanted to leave the United States once I earned enough money for a flight ticket. Boris was right - my father didn’t need me. There was nothing wrong with their family - I was just not part of it nor would ever be.Vladimir called me up and said, “My mother passed away…I think it’s time for you to leave America.”My grandmother didn’t get a chance to speak with me. I was there, in her living room, all smiles. She could have come over and said what was in her heart and mind.My mother lived with her pain of a broken heart, and the pain killed her. Or perhaps it was just a coincidence?I was exchanging emails with Della, and then out of the blue she invited me over to California. Instead of flying home (and where was my home anyways?), I bought a bus ticket and crossed America from coast to coast.With other passengers, I applauded a man who saw snow for the first time in his life as he caught snowflakes with his open palms.I saw a boy slowly walk around the bus station with a golden belt of a wrestling champion in his outstretched hands.I watched sunrise over the desert with a black woman who was on her way to visit her children.I played snowballs in the mountains with passengers.In Oakland, I stayed at Della’s house. We hit it off. She drove me around North California in her PT Cruiser visiting coastal towns. Della had a career of teaching English at school, then earned a PhD and became a deputy head of the teacher training program at UC Berkeley. I wrote short stories and Della helped me edit them, as we sat together behind her Mac. She said I’m a fast learner.In a matter of weeks, I began to get published in electronic magazines. But I wasn’t good enough to get published in reputable publications. I gave up on writing believing I wasn’t good enough.In the meantime, I tried to establish a connection with Vladimir, but all my efforts were in vain. He was irritated that I didn’t get lost, and tried to talk Della into kicking me out. In one comical episode, he found a distant relative in Canada and flew to visit him.Della also told me that she suspected that Stas wasn’t Vlad’s son, as he didn’t look a bit like him, not physically, nor behavior or character-wise.Her son, Jonah, who'd soon launch HuffPost and BuzzFeed, came over. He was getting married. I attended his reception. As I mixed with the guests, I managed to speak with him for five whole minutes. Della’s daughter, comedian Chelsea (Brooklyn 99) also came over, but she just ignored me. They were both mildly irritated by my presence in the house where they grew up, but I guess they were just used to their mother’s antics.I had a crush on this girl, Rebecca. Della was the one who hooked me with her. We spent three or four days together, visiting her mother in San Francisco and her father in Los Angeles, and then I received a weird email from Della.She confessed that she loved me and begged me to abandon Rebecca. Rebecca was in a relationship, and she promptly kicked me over to Della, “go to your sugar mama.”Della suggested that we should get married, so that I could get a green card and study in UC Berkeley. She would pay for my studies. However, I wasn’t allowed to have any girlfriend. That was the deal.“Take your time, think it over” she said and to persuade me, she took me back to LA.At the end of the trip, we sat at this fancy restaurant in Beverly Hills Hotel, eating crème brûlée. Della’s old mother was there, too. She looked like she just stepped from a black and white silent movie with her high brow, a pre-Revolutionary Russian.She was nobility in Russia before Bolsheviks kicked them out. I was a grandson of peasants. It seemed like Della’s offer was a fair deal. A serf will always be a serf.When we returned to Oakland, I packed my bag and left Della’s house.About two years later I was planning to take a month-long course in teacher training and asked Della for a $1,500 loan. After all, Della was a teacher, too, and I thought she would want to assist me. But she refused outright.I realized that she had just used me and told her so. She took offense and wouldn’t speak with me again. My grandmother gave me the money, which she had methodically put aside from her small pensions. I did the course and became a tutor.I haven’t been in contact with Della for 12 years.Moscow, RussiaI continued to be in touch with Vladimir for some time, on his condition: “I can give you advice, but I can’t do anything for you.” I met him in Moscow, when he came to visit his new girlfriend and partner.My wife had just given birth to our daughter, and Vladimir was flying in to Moscow to meet his new business partner. “Would you like to see your granddaughter?” I asked him.“Only if I have time.”Vladimir spent three days in Moscow, but he didn’t find time to meet his granddaughter. He never came to see her.This is when I finally realized it was pointless to pretend to have a relationship with him.I haven’t been in contact with my father for 6 years.__Here’s my take from the story. Everyone made a choice and then paid the price. I think it’s a fair game.My mother chose a life of martyr, and martyrs die young.My father chose to adopt another man’s son and abandon his biological son, his flesh and blood. I didn’t know these things happen, but apparently they do.My Jewish grandmother chose to protect her son once, but not twice. She learned from her mistake.Della chose to push her children away only to fill the void in her heart (and house) with someone who could never be her son. I sincerely hope she has a better relationship with her children these days.I have a daughter now. She needs me. If I’d had a daughter then, I wouldn’t have gone looking for my father.There’s one good thing for me that came out of it though.All my childhood I had to listen to my mother and grandmother telling me how I look like my evil father. Finally, I could find peace to live my life like a normal person without looking for demons inside of me.

I’m going to take a crack at this question, despite there already being 30 answers, because a lot of what other people have written is overblown or just plain incorrect. A lot of these overblown and incorrect statements come from the most upvoted answers, the top two of which make some pretty remarkable claims that are difficult to back up and seem to betray a lack of understanding of the history of the region, current trends, and the nuances of various issues here.In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a San Francisco resident since 2008, having moved to the Bay in 2007 during the initial surge of the second boom. I've been a homeowner here with my wife since 2011. I'm one of the reviled 'techies' that, as a group, is supposedly singlehandedly tearing the Bay Area to shreds.MigrationFor starters, while some people are migrating away from the Bay, overall it is growing. San Francisco added 90,000 residents between 2014 and 2015:Bay Area’s population grows by more than 90,000 in a yearContra Costa and Alameda counties were among the fastest growing in the state in the same period:Two Bay Area counties named as fastest-growing statewide - San Francisco Business TimesIf people are leaving California, it's not from the Bay Area, at least not in terms of net numbers. Again during the same period, census data shows that the entire 9-county Bay Area is growing faster than the US:Census Estimates Show Bay Area Growing Faster than ExpectedThat said, it's true that many long-term residents are being displaced by people moving in.It's worth noting, though, that not all of those people are being forced out. Quite a lot of long-term homeowners are cashing out with home prices being at an all-time high. On my own street, several houses have been sold under those circumstances. The prevailing wisdom, even among natives, seems to be that quality of life is better elsewhere, in terms of cost-of-living, weather (I personally love the weather here, but many people, never having lived somewhere with real weather think it's 'cold'), and the like. If your house is paid off and you can sell it for a million dollars, that's pretty tempting, particularly in my neighborhood, Miraloma Park, which is historically working class. Having sold their homes, however, these people can't remain here: they would have to spend all of the proceeds to purchase a new home, and might still need to pay a mortgage. So they sell off their homes, pocket the cash and move somewhere cheap.However, San Francisco is becoming less diverse. As many as 10,000 long-time residents are being displaced annually according to the data cited in this article:Who is moving into - and out of - SF? - 48 hillsAs the article shows, San Francisco is becoming more White and Asian at the expense of the Latinx and Black communities. At the same time, San Francisco is still a city where you can ride the bus and hear Russian, multiple variations of Spanish, French, Mandarin, Cantonese, Tagalog and Hindi spoken on the same bus trip.So where does this leave us? Yes, gentrification is certainly occurring here and displacing some residents. As in other cities where this process is occurring, it disproportionately affects low-income ethnic minorities. This is something San Francisco needs to address, and while it is currently failing to do so, it is not for lack of trying. Quite a lot of San Franciscans care about this issue, including 'techies' like me who are supposedly indifferent. At the same time, the overall trend in the entire region is toward net growth.Unfortunately, this isn't the first time this has occurred in the Bay or San Francisco, from the anti-queue riots in 1877 to the displacement of tens of thousands of Filipinos in the 1970's to build the FiDi. It's certainly a cause for concern, but the popular notion of the Bay Area emptying out into a ghost town roamed at night by packs of feral computer geeks is a myth.HousingThis issue is directly related to the previous one, and is very deep and very complex. I don't have enough space to go into it in full detail, so I'll touch on some highlights.For starters, yes, housing prices here are insane. Keep in mind this has been true for a very long time in San Francisco. When we moved here in 2007, we moved to Foster City, a small suburb on the edge of the Bay. Foster City is often referred to by Bay Area residents as 'Foster Shitty'. While I didn't actually find it that bad, the point is, it wasn't considered a desirable location to live, mainly because it isn't very central. Even there, for a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment, we were paying over $2,000 a month. In San Francisco, the same apartment would have cost nearly double. And that's before the current housing bubble.Eventually, we ended up at a relatively swank building at 4th and King streets in SF, catty-corner from the Caltrain station I took to work. We were paying nearly $3,000 a month for a one-bedroom loft apartment. Being garden level and near the ball park, people freqeuently sat on our front doorstep, which they mistook for a back door, and got high or drunk before a game. Parking was $300 extra, so we took our chances with street parking, which around that area is even worse than most of the city. The second year we were living there, rent across the city spiked several hundred dollars. That's when we decided to buy a house, in 2011.We bought a two-bed, one-bath, 900 sq. ft. house for the bargain price of nearly $600,000. Again, this is before the housing bubble here began. In fact, the market at that time was still depressed after the housing melt-down. Now our house isn't as small as the above specs make it sound. It's a typical San Francisco row house, meaning that the above square footage is built on top of garage level the same size of the house. In many homes, the garage is the entire first floor - that's how they were built originally. In ours, we have a workshop, a well-finished bonus room and a laundry room. We also have a back yard, although most of it is on a hill, and a relatively large deck on the back of the house. All of that is a huge improvement over our previous living situation in one apartment after another. Still, it cost as much per month as we could possibly afford. Even on a six-figure salary, most of my take-home pay was spent on our mortgage, which, because we had to tack on PMI as FHA buyers, cost over $4,000 a month. At the time, that was about 2/3 of my net income, and wife wasn't employed. But it was worth it for the increase in space and the knowledge that the mortgage payments would never increase. In fact, having refinanced to remove the PMI after the first couple of years, our mortgage payment is down under $3,000 now - basically, back to 2007 levels. So our gamble paid off.For a lot of people, however, even with high incomes, they don't have the savings necessary to make a down-payment. And even if they did, out-of-town investors might out-bid them with a cash offer. This is something the two most upvoted answers didn't even touch on - the fact that our city has been descended on by speculative investors from Canada, Europe, China and other US cities who are buying up real estate just like they did in the events that led up to the last housing crisis.As a result, today our house could probably sell for a little over $1M with no modification. The house across the street from us was inherited by a nephew of the former resident, who passed away. A 4th-generation San Franciscan real estate agent with ties to city and state government, he renovated it and is now selling it for $1.9M - and he'll probably get a little more than that. The house in question is the same size as ours. He excavated a new lower level and refinished the house, and it looks great and has probably 1,500 more square feet of livable space than our house - but it's worth $900,000 dollars more!? And our house is worth $1M!? I still can't believe it.So this claim is pretty factual. However, it isn't driven simply by tech-fueled gentrification. In fact, San Francisco is notorious for rabid NIMBYism. While many other US cities have boomed over the past decades, San Francisco's growth been fairly slow until recently. The federal government's 12-county definition of the Bay Area is more expansive than California's 9-county one. According to the 12-county definition, current population stands at around 9M. But if the area had grown at the same rate as other parts of the country, it should be 16M+. The problem is a chronic lack of housing. Now, this is a complicated, contentious issue, with some claiming it is 100% the fault of a NIMBY attitude from homeowners that want to preserve their quaint single-family houses, and other claiming it is 100% the fault of those damn techie invaders. This is a false choice, as it isn't binary between these two options, which aren't even truly polar opposites of each other. The reality is a complex combination of (in no particular order):NIMBYismLocal corruption, which is waaay older than the current tech boomGreedy developersA speculation boom in local real estateNow, I maintiain that NIMBYism and the tech boom aren't polar opposites - but they are definitely related. While NIMBYism did not lead directly to the tech boom, ironically, since those same homeowners also bemoan the loss of culture due to the 'techie invasion', it has added fuel to the fire, as the chronic lack of housing means there is a large excess of capital available to local investors.So - housing is expensive, yes. But the cause? It's complicated. Here's some further reading, spanning the spectrum of opinion noted above:Don’t blame SF’s “left-leaning, anti-growth, NIMBY homeowners” for the city’s housing crisis: It’s not as easy as building our way to victoryHow San Francisco Progressives Betrayed the City They LoveGrowing painsThe Complex Connection Between Gentrification and DisplacementCost-of-livingThis one is again related to the one above, primarily because housing is really the only area where it's really notable.Other people have mentioned food costs. Here's the thing, most people aren't going to go broke because of a $5 bottle of milk. I mean, yes, it's more expensive, but I haven't found the claims of absurd food prices to be true. If you are on the poorer end of the spectrum, this might be an issue for you; but that's true anywhere. I used to live in Denver, and I went through a really rough patch for a few years after the first dot com bubble burst. I was making less than $10,000 in annual income for about a three-year period. It didn't really matter that I lived in a relatively cheap city. All I could afford was cheap stale rice, canned beans and generic pasta from a bodega in my neighborhood. For most people, the cost of groceries in San Francisco or elsewhere in the Bay Area isn't really an issue.I used to work in the FiDi and my less-well-paid co-workers would give me hard time for being a foodie and eating at the 'fancy' restaurants at the Ferry Building. And don't get me wrong - the Ferry Building is pretty fancy. However, I would spend maybe $14 on lunch on a typical day - granted, sometimes I would splurge and spend maybe $20 or so. Meanwhile, they ate at the Subway downstairs. For chips, a nasty footlong, a cookie and a large soda, they would spend a little over $10. So they saved a few bucks at lunch - say $20-30 a week - to put disgusting, flavorless food in their faces every day. Personally, I'd rather take care of my body by putting good food in it, preferably of the tasty variety, but to each their own. I thought it was funny though that they never complained about going to Super Duper, a local burger joint, where they each spent at least $15 or more on a burger, fries, and often a shake. Anyway - the point is, there are still plenty of choices. We have all the same fast food chains everyone has - McDonald's, Burger King, Chipotle... Jolly Bee? I have no idea what that is, but we have one. If you want to spend less on food, there are plenty of options.What about bills? We added solar to our house a year ago, so our energy and gas bill now ranges between -$20 to $20 a month. However, even before that, it peaked around $100 a month. San Francisco has very mild weather, so heating and cooling needs here are very light. Water/sewer? About $30-40 a month. Trash service is around $80 I think. For people in apartments, all of this is going to be even lower.All of our other bills are for services like streaming video, Internet access, cell service and the like, or things like gas, which are pretty much the same everywhere in the country.So housing - way more expensive than every other city but Manhattan. Everything else is the same or slightly more expensive, but nothing bank-breaking. Parking can also be expensive if you plan to commute via car every day, but most people don't do that.TaxesOne person claimed that after taxes, half of your income is gone - poof. This is just completely false. I have never lost more than 35% of my income to state and federal taxes, and I have gotten a refund nearly every year I have lived here at both the state and federal levels - even before buying a house.'Counter-culture'This one is probably the hardest to back up. First of all, what does it even mean? When people refer to 'counter-culture' in San Francisco, it probably means some combination of the arts and left-leaning political movements, particularly the hippies. Truthfully, a lot of that culture was dead or dying quite a while ago, long before the current boom or even the one before that. Yet, if you go to Haight/Ashbury, even today you find roving bands of unwashed hippies heckling 'squares' and tourists trying out the local cuisine or shopping.San Francisco has always attracted fringe elements. And what people often leave out of this argument is that geeks are one of those fringe elements - that's why the computer industry was attracted here in the first place. At the same time, it's also just sort of a coincidence. The founders of Apple grew up here, so when Apple took off, this is where they set down roots. Other elements of the local tech industry, like the local military-industrial complex, NASA, JPL, SRI - a company that has been contracted for work with DARPA for a very long time - and the local biotech industry (which is actually bigger than digital tech industry here) have been around for decades. The Bay Area is also home to two large, notable universities, Stanford and Berkeley, and dozens of smaller institutions like SFSU.So this ostensibly overnight transformation has been going on for quite a long time.The fine arts have definitely suffered, although recently they have been making a comeback. The theater scene here is actually quite rich and diverse. The once-famous music scene has probably suffered the most. Yeah, it's pretty much dead. Truthfully though, that was already the case after the first bubble burst.The Castro is still going strong. There are still plenty of naked dudes hanging out at Castro and Market. The kink scene in San Francisco is still strong - the Folsom Street Fair isn't going away any time in the near future. Political activism is far from dead here, and is going strong fighting for fair housing and fair treatment of minority communities. Chinatown isn't going anywhere either. Cyclists are a force to be reckoned with here. You can still find a giant cloud of pot smoke emanating from Golden Gate Park on most weekends.The truth is, there is still plenty of counter-culture in San Francisco, both old and new. The contention that it's all gone, just because there has been some change, in my opinion, is a very straight, white, cis-gendered perspective. Now, I'm straight, white, cis-gendered and male myself. But I choose to look outside my own biases from time to time; and the fact is that these elements of San Francisco culture are still quite strong and nowhere close to being in a state where they can just be written off. I think that's unfair to the people who still practice those elements of culture. Except dirty hippies. Good riddance to those bastards.CommuteA lot has been made of the commute around here. I've had a variety of commutes here, some not that bad, some pretty awful. Then again, I'm from Denver originally, where it isn't uncommon to drive, train or bus an hour each way to work. So when I encounter similar commute times here, it doesn't honestly bother me all that much. The fact is, it depends where you are starting, where you are going and what time of day. Honestly, I think the transit system here gets a bum rap. It's honestly pretty good. Certianly not the best; but pretty good. Sure, people occasionally commit suicide via BART or Caltrain - I don't think we have a monopoly on that, though. I'm pretty sure people do that anywhere in the US where trains or lightrail runs. The worst part of the transit system is mainly the number of providers. Back in Denver, which has a huuuuge metropolitan area, there is one - RTD. Here, it's a crazy patchwork - BART, Caltrain, SFMTA, Golden Gate Transits, SamTrans, VTA, blah blah. However, most of those providers now run on something called a Clipper card, so these days it's pretty seamless.A lot of fuss is also made about tech busses. These are bus systems chartered by local companies to ferry their employees to work. People have protested them as a sign of gentrification, for the fact that they don't pay to use city busstops in San Francisco, and for making traffic worse. I don't see how the latter can possibly be true, since they are removing several cars from the road. I'm all for having them pay for using the stops, because it's only fair, and the city should be earning revenue in exchange for that service. I don't really understand the folks that think locals should be allowed to ride them. For the most part, they go straight to their destination and straight back, with a few stops in the city. I used to ride one when I worked at EA, which is headquartered down on the peninsula. EA hasn't gotten the hate other companies have, probably because they only have a few busses, and they only run a couple of times in the morning and a couple of times at night. I remember we once had someone sneak on the bus. It was pretty funny, because we pulled up to the EA campus they lease in Redwood City, which is kind of in the boonies, and he said, bewildered, "This is the only stop?" Yup. Have fun on your ride back to the private bus depot where the bus is going to be parked until this evening. Honestly, the bus was a godsend - before that, I had to walk to the light rail, take the M line to a BART station, take BART to Millbrae station, transfer to Caltrain, take that to San Carlos, then catch the EA Caltrain shuttle. If I missed my connection with the shuttle, I had to pay $20 for a gypsy cab (Lyft and Uber did not exist yet), or walk half an hour. With the bus, I got a lift to the stop, then rode 30-45 minutes to work.In any event, that was the worst commute I ever had in the Bay - most of them were much more tolerable than that.As far as driving, yes we have gridlock - but you aren't going to find better conditions in any other major US city - certainly not LA or NY. One thing I will say about San Francisco is that it is a bit difficult to drive if you aren't used to the city. They ripped up large sections of highway after the Loma Prieta quake that used to make it easier to get around - but also improved the view - and it seems like the city government is constantly trying to make it harder for car drivers to get from point A to point B with an endless stream of 'traffic calming' measures. However, the city is really small - only 7 miles by 7 miles - and once you learn all the shortcuts, it's pretty easy to get around by car or bicycle. Just learn how to avoid the hills if you opt for the latter.RudenessI haven't found this to be the case. The rude people are as rude as they have always been, and the nice people are as nice as they've always been. As far as armies of tech-bros clogging the streets knocking over pregnant women, I haven't found this to be the case either. My wife is disabled, and gets a surprising amount of hate for it. If you have a disabled loved one or friend, you know what I'm talking about. The level of hate she receives for being disabled has remained steady over the years - I haven't seen an increase or a decrease. People hated on her an equal amount in Denver in 2004 as they do in Oakland in 2016. San Franciscans are generally pretty nice - not as nice as a Midwesterner, for sure, but way nicer than someone from LA or NY. As far as rich, powerful people moving here in droves - rest assured, there are still plenty of rich a**holes in NY and DC. Those people are a tiny minority of the people moving here - afterall, a startup can only have one CEO and typically has a handful of founders. Yes, we have 1-percenters here - just like everywhere else.As far as lacking social graces and asking what you do for a living as soon as they meet you - yes. Where is this not true, anywhere in the US? This is a common complaint Europeans visiting or working here have about US culture, regardless of the city.'Lack of space'Not really a thing. I mentioned how small our house is - but this is only by the inflated standards Americans have. For Europeans or Asians, it's a perfectly normally-sized house. Moreoever, it's small even by San Francisco standards. The houses on the top side of our block, which is on a hill, are all almost double the size of our house. Even when we lived in smaller apartments, there was always ample storage available.EducationI can't speak as much to this one, because I haven't gone to school here and we don't have kids yet. I have heard that getting your kids into the school of your choice is tough due to the way they handle it here. Getting into a school in your own neighborhood is nearly impossible. However, the quality of education is fairly high here. Even the 'bad' schools are much better than in cities like DC. As far as higher education, I don't think it's any higher than elsewhere in the country - in fact, in the case of Stanford, I believe they still subsidize lower-income students, which is the whole reason the school was founded. Higher education costs are high everywhere in the country, as far as I understand it.ConclusionSo are many people having to leave the Bay Area? Yes. Why? Mainly, due to the housing crisis, which is a very complex issue as I've laid out above. Most of the remaining 'reasons' are myths, speculation, exaggerations or subjective opinion that have nothing to do with why people are actually leaving. People are leaving because they can't afford to own or rent housing, period.The Bay Area is still a great place to live, so I hope it's a problem we are able to overcome. The Bay is far from the hellhole other posters have made it out to be - apart from housing, most of the problems we are facing are not new, not unique to the Bay and no worse than in other regions of the country. If they were, we wouldn't be attracting record numbers of new residents, which itself, unfortunately, with no solution in place, is amplifying the housing crisis even more. The weather is great, the views are breath-taking, the culture remains diverse despite gentrification, the food is amazing, it’s close to LA, Seattle, Portland and several smaller cities, it’s in driving distance of any number of outdoor activities, et cetera.People claim we can't 'build our way out' of the housing crisis, and maybe that's true on some level. But the fact is, we have too many people for the amount of housing. Large swaths of San Francisco are blanketed in single-family homes. That will have to change if we want to accommodate the future. If not, the housing crisis will only get worse.Update 07/01/2019:The narrative that ‘techies ruined San Francisco’ is so compelling that people just can’t let it go. Just today I read this article in the Guardian:'We all suffer': why San Francisco techies hate the city they transformedDespite being written by someone living in San Francisco, the whole premise of the article, and its contents, are wrong, apart from observations about the worsening of the living conditions and continued homogenization of the culture. There was no concerted effort by ‘techies’ to conquer the city - if there had been, they would not themselves also be driven out now by rising housing costs. The truth is that 90% of San Francisco’s, the Bay’s and Silicon Valley’s woes are and were caused by a lack of adequate housing. There are other issues, to be sure, like tax breaks for corporations (happens everywhere in the US), and a shortage of funds and solutions to deal with homelessness and mental health (also happens everywhere); but most of the issues people complain about, like the rent being too damn high, and beloved businesses closing, is due to lack of housing and residential rental inventory. A secondary cause is greedy and corrupt developers, property owners and real estate firms. But really, the latter are just the vultures on the carcass. Meanwhile, local homeowners continue to block measures at the ballot box and efforts in their districts and coming from the city government (talking about San Francisco specifically again here) that would alleviate the crisis by allowing more dense housing construction.‘Techies’ moving here en masse - I moved out way back in 2007 - is correlative, not causative. If instead of a tech boom, we had had say, a mime boom (I know, mimes are the worst), then people would blame the ‘ruination’ of the area on mimes. You would see ‘Mimes Must Die’ bumper stickers, and people would throw invisible rocks at invisible mime buses (actually, I’m kind of loving this alternate reality). But the mimes didn’t cause the lack of housing construction that has plagued the area since the 1970’s, and has been driving housing costs up since then. My parents actually complained about California homeowners way back in the 1980’s, when I lived in the suburbs of Denver, because we saw a huge influx of Californians moving to Colorado back then. Because housing was so much more expensive in California than in Colorado, they were paying cash for houses and driving up costs for locals in the Denver metro area. That was four decades ago.Instead of making pointless, childish, tantrum-like - and dangerous - symbolic gestures like throwing rocks at Google buses, protesters should have pooled all of their collective political power and focused like a laser on this one issue like a drum beat - affordable housing, affordable housing. I’m not blaming the victim here: I’m just saying that the protesters and organizers here have fallen victim to this false narrative as much as anyone else, and their cause has suffered as a result. They certainly did fight for affordable housing during that time, and continue to do so, but their message has been diluted by the narrative of techies as gentrifying scum that must die. Now technology workers have started to internalize it, except annoyingly, just like guilty white people and white privilege, all they do is whine about it and never take any action on it. They complain about the homeless not being taken care of, but they’re part of the crowd that never gives the homeless the time of day, for instance (pro tip: homeless people are human - give them a buck and chat them up, it’s not that big of a deal). They complain about ‘dangerous’ conditions in a city, that as far as I am concerned, and statistics agree, is still one of the safest in the country. Basically what is boils down to is that a bunch of privileged kids thought they were fancy because they got a job in the Bay Area out of college and could afford to move here, only to find that privilege doesn’t buy you as much as it used to.Look, ‘techies’ - a term so overly vague now, it means nothing - are here to stay. The ‘tech’ in ‘techies’ is specifically computer technology, and even more specifically, usually refers to services delivered via software written in high level programming languages and hosted in a cloud computing environment. As specific as this technology is, it is ubiquitous. It runs literally everything: The age of ubiquitous computing, like so many other technologies touted in the past decades as bringing transformation to the future and breathlessly imagined in magazines like Scientific American and Popular Science, sort of just… arrived. What I mean is, it was speculated about for a long time, with people wondering whether it would even materialize, and then ‘one day’ it just sort of did without anyone noticing. In reality, it was a gradual process happening behind the scenes, but people were surprised by it because most people don’t read the Scientific American. The point is, it’s everywhere, it’s integral to every system that comprises culture and society now. You can’t extract it without destroying society at this juncture. This is true to such an extent, that along with the word ‘techie’, the term ‘software industry’ doesn’t really mean anything anymore either, because every industry is the software industry. And if you work at a company delivering services via this technology, regardless of whether you code the software, you are a technology worker. Technology workers are the new factory workers. Absorb it, deal with it, and move on.The fact was, and the fact remains, that lack of housing, not any one group of people, is most to blame for this. If there is a single group to blame, it would perhaps be the one-percenters behind most of the world’s problems today - but certainly not their employees, who only came here for the jobs. I ended the original post by saying that the issue will only get worse until the housing issue is resolved, and not surprisingly, just in the past two years, it has. I might revisit this post every few years with an update like this - it might be an interesting archaeological record of how, and whether, people finally wake up to the real issue and actually deal with it, rather than whinging about techies and throwing political tantrums.

There is a false assumption in your question that they “know” that voting Democratic is destroying the state. While Republicans and to a certain extent Libertarians believe that, Democrats clearly don’t. There are several reasons for this:California is the third largest state in the United States in terms of size, and the largest in population. It has a long a beautiful coastline and majestic mountain ranges. In the winter you can literally go surfing early in the morning and go mountain skiing in the afternoon. It has a huge national and state park system. It is home to world famous amusement parks like Disneyland, Knotts Berry Farm, Universal Studios and Magic Mountain. It is the film and television capital of the world. When people say “Hollywood” everyone knows they mean the entertainment industry, although there is no actual city by that name anymore (Hollywood only existed as a city for seven years, from 1903 to 1910). It has historic missions, one of which in San Juan Capistrano is known for its swallows (birds). Huntington Beach hosts an internationally famous surfing contest; near UCLA is the Getty Museum; the state has Native American gambling casinos and and is only a relatively short drive to Las Vegas. Bordering California to the south is Mexico.The state is home to world-class colleges and universities, such as UCLA and USC in Los Angeles and UC Berkeley and Stanford University in Central California; prestigious CalTech (California Institute of Technology), Pepperdine and Claremont universities in Southern California that specialize in STEM courses and business/economics; and for musicians there is the Musicians Institute containing the Guitar Institute of Technology in Los Angeles. It also has some of the top religious institutions such as Loyola Marymount University, Biola University, Westminster Theological Seminary and Fuller Theological Seminary. Nineteen California colleges and universities made the best list put out by U.S. News and World Report for 2016. All of this attracts students from different parts of the world. Just for example, 31% of the students accepted at USC had perfect 4.0 grades and almost 25% are international students. http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/search?location=california&school-type=national-universities, University of Southern CaliforniaMany of the biggest sports teams are in California such as the Los Angeles Rams, the Oakland Raiders, San Francisco Giants, San Diego Chargers, L.A. Dodgers, Anaheim/Los Angeles Angels, San Francisco 49ers, San Diego Padres, Oakland A’s, Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers, Sacramento Kings, Golden State Warriors, Anaheim Ducks, Los Angeles Kings, San Jose Sharks, L.A. Galaxy and San Jose Earthquakes. That covers American football, baseball, basketball, hockey and soccer (international football) [not all are in order]. That’s a huge base for sports fans and tourists.California has a humongous business base from the Silicon Valley that is home to Google, YouTube, Quora, eBay, Apple, Yahoo, Hewlett Packard, Netflix, Oracle, Tesla, Cisco, Intel, Adobe, etc. Most states can only dream about having such important companies, and they provide a significant source of tax revenue. There is the aforementioned Hollywood and the many sports teams, and the natural environment conducive to individual sports. Since the state encourages development there is a large construction and building industry. Despite suffering a severe drought, California is still a major agricultural power. The state has several international ports in San Diego, Long Beach, San Pedro, Los Angeles and San Francisco. California is the largest GDP out of the 50 states and generally ranks between the 8th and 6th largest economy in the world.For all these reasons comparisons to Kansas are not fair. Kansas simply has nowhere near the number of pull factors that California has. Kansas is a much smaller state in size and population and has no coastline. California’s climate is temperate while Kansas has hot and humid summers and very cold winters. Kansas is also prone to super thunderstorms and tornadoes. Its largest industries are agriculture/farming, oil, aerospace, telecommunications and chemical technology, which gives it a 32nd ranking out of 50 states. There is nothing any governor or political party can do to make it competitive with California.So with the above in mind, many California voters believe the state can afford to spend more than it should and make unwise decisions that will have adverse consequences in the future.Governor Jerry Brown has been pushing for, and succeeded in getting, a humongous boondoggle in a wasteful high-speed rail that was originally supposed to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco, but has since been moved eastward to inland Central California cities like Bakersfield. Surveys have shown that it will never get the ridership necessary to sustain it, so it will have to depend on unreliable federal subsidies. Gov. Brown intentionally understated the costs by tens of billions of dollars and overstated the estimated ridership. He said there would be private funding, but it barely existed then and it hardly exists now. Naturally Democrats give it the highest level of support, especially Far-Left San Francisco, while Republicans and Libertarians give it the least. Older people support it less than younger, and among ethnic groups Asians give it the most and blacks the least. Train rides are likely to be expensive, more so than simply flying from L.A. to San Francisco. California High-Speed RailCalifornia has the highest personal taxes in the nation and among the most highly regulated, making it one of the least free states. States with the Highest and Lowest Taxes, How free is your state?The state’s pension system is out of control. In March 2016, the Sacramento Bee reported that it has unfunded liabilities of over $175 billion. California’s pension debt puts it $175.1 billion in the red. However, if all the cities and counties are added up with realistic figures, the true amount approaches $1 trillion: O.C. Watchdog: Unfunded pension debt approaching $1 trillion?Meanwhile, it has been pointed out for years that CalPERS, the California pension fund for government employees, has been mismanaged and underperforming: The Pension Fund That Ate California. Things continue to get worse: Borenstein: CalPERS running up record pension debt on your credit card. Part of the reason for this is that it now makes “politically correct” investments that don’t pay off: Calpers Earns 0.6% as Long-Term Returns Trail Fund’s Target.The state has more illegal/undocumented immigrants than all others and encourages it with sanctuary cities in violation of federal law: California is a state with many sanctuary cities and basically the entire state is one large sanctuary. Jerry Brown and the Democratic legislature even gave driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants: There's been a boom in driver's licenses issued to immigrants here illegally. Moreover, the state allows an illegal immigrant who graduated law school to obtain a law license: Undocumented immigrant can practice law in California, court rules. The Left-wing Public Policy Institute of California estimates that there are 2.67 million unauthorized immigrants or 6% of the state’s population and about 1/4 of all illegal immigrants in the United States: Undocumented Immigrants. However it is likely that this is a low estimate: How Many Illegal Immigrants? The costs they use are far greater than the benefits they provide: Welfare Use by Legal and Illegal Immigrant Households.Since California includes a large area of desert land, it is naturally prone to droughts. The El Nino weather phenomenon also has a large effect on decreasing the amount of rain the state receives. Yet environmental extremists have also made significant contributions to making the state dryer: Man-Made Drought: A Guide To California's Water Wars. Obviously the illegal immigration industry, by increasing the population, decreases the available water. If Gov. Brown was serious about the drought he would take serious measures instead of half-assed ones. He has ordered cuts in lawn watering (while cities and counties often water as much as they want on their property) with fines for violators, but was unwilling to give up the high-speed rail for desalination plants. Notably, UCLA has developed a more efficient method of desalination: Hold the salt: UCLA engineers develop revolutionary new desalination membrane.Crony capitalism has been around since the days of Arthur Samish and Willie Brown, and it is likely still involved in schemes such as the high-speed rail. Elon Musk’s Tesla and power companies require government subsidies and enable him to become a billionaire. Without taxpayer funding his companies wouldn’t be in business: Elon Musk’s Subsidy Aggregation, Elon Musk.Democrats led by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco brought Obamacare to the state, called Covered California. She is notable for saying “we have to pass it so you will know what’s in it”: Pelosi: People won't appreciate reform until it passes. Brown and the Democrats agreed to cover illegal immigrants: California Moves Toward Extending Obamacare to Illegal Immigrants. Meanwhile, premiums continue to jump: In California, Obamacare premiums to jump 13.2%.Democrats have also been working on destroying religious colleges and universities by forcing them to include sexual behaviors and orientations against their beliefs. The legislators did not expect that backlash they received and cut back their demands, but continue to violate the First Amendment right to religious freedom: Faith-based colleges say anti-discrimination bill would infringe on their religious freedom. Such broad based hostility to religion is unprecedented in the 20th and 21st centuries.Large cities with a history of Democratic control like Los Angeles, Oakland and Santa Ana continue to have high crime rates and implement regulations that make them less business-friendly. Increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour is killing jobs as employees see their hours cut or are laid off. Businesses often face the tough choice of automation or shutting down altogether. Small business and franchises are hit especially hard because their margins are small.Restaurant employee of the futureSo most Democrats are not yet seeing the consequences of their actions, but eventually they will come. State debts cannot rise forever and sooner or later the house of cards will fall. By then some Democrats may realize their mistakes while many others, after years of drinking from the poisoned well, never will. But with a GDP slightly larger than France, when it falls it will take much of he world with it.