I'm from the Bay Area, lived in San Francisco, and now live in Portland, Oregon (where the author of the blog post intends to move). Portland is a place I am completely blown away by on many levels (civic, workflow, rawk, wackiness, food), and in other ways impatient with (won't take the time to criticize Portland here, but it's not perfect).

I agree with most every criticism he has of San Francisco, but maybe don't hold the same vibe of judgement.

Ultimately, he seems to be on the right track, that San Francisco is not working for him. That's really all we should focus on when deciding where to live. Look inside yourself, think of what you need, and what type of place makes that easier to achieve.

Unique Challenges for him

I imagine holding a high-profile job at red-hot company (Twitter) in San Francisco/Silicon Valley could be claustrophobic socially and physically. Also, a bit of a monoculture, intellectually, as he described. (In the middle of a really diverse place, I've witnessed an eery lack of diversity when attending some SF tech events.) And he totally fairly introduced his blog post as such (for young tech types). But many tech types might be able to overcome some of the challenges he had, just because it's extremely unlikely they have the same work + media + community demands that Alex has.

Anyway, I'm not really disagreeing with anything he said. His post was great. Also, if he reads this, I want him to not stop writing things that actually state an opinion, no matter how rowdy reactions get. :D

San Francisco workarounds (for everybody else)

If you're stuck in San Francisco, and getting annoyed by things, i have some workarounds:

* Live "on the other side of the hill." I lived in the inner Richmond district (the San Francisco neighborhood, not the city). Every time there was a massive fair/festival (mentioned in the blog post), I didn't know about it.

* Living on the other side of the hill also changes up the sorts of people you live around. Less dot-commers.

* Take BART/Car out to the rest of the Bay Area. Cities like Fremont and Redwood City have lots of interesting destination to get you out of the bubble (indian movie theaters, streets where you HAVE to speak Spanish (as a speaker of Spanish, a pleasant experience for me.)).

* Seriously evaluate whether your friends are d-bags

* Seriously evaluate whether you sometimes are a d-bag

* If you are for sure not a d-bag, and are sure your friends are not d-bags, avoid places where d-bags are. You are who you are around. You are probably ruling out places in the Marina right about now. Sorry, not agressive enough. Even really cool places on Saturdays might be making you sick.

* Make sure there is meaning in your life. This is not a San Francisco thing, but almost everybody I've witnessed who is extremely unhappy with the place he/she lives, has something else pretty heavy going on in his/her life. Real talk.

I left San Francisco extremely annoyed with the ridiculous real estate situation, my quality of life, and lots of other stuff. All those opinions still hold true, but I now sit back and see some things I did to make life more difficult for myself.

After experiencing the civic magic of Portland, I'm more patient, interested, and appreciative of ALL city landscapes and experiences, including San Francisco's. I could easily see moving there again one day.