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What is san francisco like?

What was San Francisco like in the early to mid 1990's, compared to today?

  • Affordability wise, culturally, safety, what neighborhoods had the action etc. I'm interested in knowing what San Francisco life was like pre-Dot Com era...when I watch old episodes of The Real World San Francisco which was filmed in 1993, SF looked far more laid back and less pretentious.

  • Answer:

    I lived in the Bay Area from 1994-2000, really right before the dot com boom started, when it took off, and right up to the collapse. I think that South Bay changed much more than San Francisco. San Francisco was still pretentious, everyone still talked about how much money they made, and tried to make the part of the city they lived in seem cooler than whatever part of the city you lived in. It was just a lot more affordable, although still expensive. The gap between the rest of the country was just not as great. Santa Clara county had a much more suburban, even rural feel in some parts. I moved there after living in San Francisco for about a year, as I hated the weather, and the pretentiousness. I really loved living there until the dot com boom got into full swing, real estate prices started exploding, and office buildings went up everywhere, and traffic became a nightmare. I moved to Fremont in southern Alameda county for a couple of years, before I got fed up with the cost of living and headaches of the area and moved to Florida. San Francisco of today has kicked up the pretentiousness a notch, but it was always there, I don't think it would have lived up to your romanticized notions unfortunately.

Deepak Bansal at Quora Visit the source

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In general it didn't feel all that different.  Rents and house prices were cheaper (though still seemed high).  SOMA was grittier, and had a lot fewer corporate tenants and fewer residents -- that was before the ball park and Mission Bay and a lot of the development south of Market.  The Mission had just started gentrifying.  It was more unusual to find high tech companies in San Francisco -- almost all the action was down in Silicon Valley then. There were a few more small movie theaters.  The 1989 earthquake had already happened, and resulted in taking down the freeway through Hayes Valley and the one along the Embarcadero during these years, with the associated new developments.  There was a fairly big punk element in youth culture, with some people living in squats, including an old brewery.  There probably was more affordable housing, since now it seems almost the whole city is gentrifying, which was happening then, but has had 20 years more gentrifying now. Housing prices have been going up since the 1960's, and the city has been getting more  upper-middle class more or less gradually for decades.

Jonathan Simonoff

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