Also, does one need to show some type of credit report or can one just come in with a bunch of cash and wave it around and get a place?
East Palo Alto is probably more dangerous than the Tenderloin.
The most dangerous parts of SF are Bayview / Hunter's Point and the eastern half of the western addition (near Jefferson Square Park).
Within the last month, for example, there was a stabbing at Laguna and Fell (which is highly unusual) and a shooting around Laguna and Turk (less unusual).
In 2007-2008 I believe the area around Jackson Square Park wad THE most dangerous place in SF.
This is juxtaposed with Hayes Valley immediately to the south, which is filled with lots of 20-something professionals.
Edit: Why am I being down voted? Everything I said was accurate.
>This is juxtaposed with Hayes Valley immediately to the south, which is filled with lots of 20-something professionals.
Accurate? Orly.
Let me tell you, 20-something professionals are a dangerous f'in lot. Stab ya fer yer VC soon as lookit ya.
i lived in the tenderloin for a year and some change and i kind of liked it. there's good night life on polk street and good cheap eats there. i had four indian restaurants within a block of my apartment and could walk to the great american music hall or BART. but it takes a certain kind of person to live amongst that kind of drudgery for so long.
if you want true danger, head down to bayview and hunters point. even the tenderloin has its share of wine bars and quaint coffee shops. the 'view is like another world.
http://dougmccune.com/blog/2010/06/05/if-san-francisco-crime...
The tenderloin is the most ghetto in the middle of the city. Personally I feel the danger in this area is overrated but it definitely seems sketchy. The 2nd sketchiest seeming part of the city is 6th and Market. It's like a zombie movie after midnight.
In the city I had more trouble from roving bands of drunks looking for fights in North Beach than I have from either crazy people or muggers.
I have been mugged in both Oakland and Berkeley near the Ashby stop. There are many more spaces where you can be walking around in the dark with nobody around in the East Bay.
You generally need a credit report but the last 2 apartments I rented in SF, the landlord did not ask for one. If it is being rented "by owner" it is up in the air. If it is a management company they will usually want a credit report. If you have no credit report (like, you're from overseas) you can often get by if you pay for a number of months up front.
True. And it also has Tu Lan, Julia Childs' favorite San Francisco restaurant, as an old greasy newspaper clipping in the window used to proudly substantiate.
I would never again live in Mountain View because it's too damn boring. Palo Alto might be tolerable.
Having lived in London, I personally find San Francisco to have a lot of the downsides of being a "big city", without actually being a big city and so not having enough of the upsides (just to take one example, MUNI/BART is a joke compared to London's tube system).
I love Palo Alto and Mountain View though, and would live in either town again in a heartbeat.
However -
I'm in a good part of the mission (near dolores) and every other day there is new graffiti on my building, trash everywhere on the streets and broken glass here and there.
related: my moving to SF post http://paulstamatiou.com/atlanta-to-san-francisco-moving-cro...
Still relatively unknown (Zynga and Digg have figured it out though) more residential and less crime - if you stay on the North side of Potrero Hill (the South side is mostly residential anyway), Dogpatch can be a bit more sketchy. Weather tends to be gorgeous and its actually got fairly easy street parking in most areas.(almost unheard of in SF), and it has a caltrain stop right in the middle of the area.
For those looking for something a little less urban and more affordable then the Mission and SOMA this area is quite a gem.
About
http://www.sfgate.com/neighborhoods/sf/potrerohill/
Map
We'd love people to join us.
One note: I discourage Millbrae. I grew up there and it was on the boring side of things, while still being a tad pricey. My life is (somewhat) more exciting living in northeastern Sunnyvale (near Hacker Dojo), and rent is dirt cheap (as low as $450/person). Also, for the carless, biking is much better in Sunnyvale/Mountain View than Millbrae.
Also agree about Millbrae being boring. I put it there because its kind of a sweet spot due to multiple transit options (both Caltrain and BART). Most startups will be either heads down coding, or heading to meetings. Mainly good if you don't have a car.
Downtown should be relatively cheap.I personally live in the cherry chase area.
When I was there, that was the Marina / Cow Hollow. Funny how quickly things change. When I moved down there in 1999, a friend of a friend told me to avoid SOMA if I "didn't like getting stabbed", but I guess that's mostly been gentrified at this point. It was already starting to improve back then.
Basically, give the soma a chance: there are quite a few gems and great people who hang out here. The area around folsom and 8th (some people call this folsoma) is starting to get more neightborhoody with the addition of many local restaurants, cafes, and bars.
Also, as the OP mentioned, soma is basically ground zero when it comes to startups and startup activity in SF.
There are lots of startups around South Park and down into Potrero, even. There are like 10-20 startups working out of Pier 38 alone.
For me, I'm willing to pay the extra $1k/mo to rent a house in Palo Alto vs. Mountain View or Menlo Park specifically so I can do this. Having fiber directly to your colo, when you're working on big data, moving virtual machines, etc., is amazing. If you live with cofounders and use it as an office, or live with 3-4 other people and split the cost, it really isn't that bad.
Otherwise, I look for Web Pass connected buildings up in SF, or buildings that have IP Networks fiber over PG&E. Those are mainly in SoMA, although some in the east bay around Emeryville/Berkeley/Oakland.
I know 365 Forest (condo building) would have been about $3k to add, since the fiber was in the basement.
There is a utilities guy at city hall who has maps, but I don't have the current ones (I last checked in 2008).
When I move back to SFBA next year, I am either getting a house with fiber in PA, or a condo with IP Networks fiber up in 8th/Folsom area of SoMA. 10GE for the win
It would be an interesting niche to work with landlords to wire up their properties, set up some colo space, and rent out house + cage/racks + fiber on a quarterly basis to startup teams. I'd much prefer a (really nice) house, shared with team, to a bunch of crappy apartments, a daily commute, and an office-building office. Although at that point, fixed wireless becomes an option too..
http://www.cityofpaloalto.org/depts/utl/news/details.asp?New...
When Garry and I moved to SF to start Posterous, we moved to SOMA since apartments are abundant and it's startup central. But I found little value in being near other companies. What I did find was a lack of food and culture.
Posterous first got offices in North Beach. I really LOVE North Beach. There's amazing food and it's a beautiful part of town. Plus Jam Legend is there.
+1 for the Mission. We love our new offices. Much cheaper than anywhere else in the city, most people can walk to bike to work, tons of great food, near Bart. We couldn't ask for much more.
However, one point of disagreement with Garry's map: you can't simply write off everything north of Market. Sometimes it seems like people south of market (SOMA and Mission) don't cross north as much as they should. There's a lot of city up there!
San Francisco is one of the greatest cities in the world. If you decide to base your company here, don't optimize to be close to Twitter. Optimize to be in a vibrant neighborhood with great food and great culture.
Believe me, even north of market, you will have no problem immersing yourself in startup culture and surrounding yourself with more tech entrepreneurs than you can handle.
It seems to have a rep for being pricey, but there are many areas of North Beach/Russian Hill that are no more expensive than the nicer parts of SOMA.
I also really wouldn't recommend to anyone living around Market St between 10th and 6th. Really not a nice area.
- Much cheaper rents
- Services: lots of restaurants, especially Asian, many open very late (you have lots of options even from midnight to 3AM), bookstores, bars.
- If you pick your location properly (close to California or Geary, and near certain stops) you can catch express buses to and from downtown at peak hours. 20-25 min to a BART station or SOMA. Off-peak it's more like 30-40 min.
- Unlike SOMA, my cell phone works here ;)
- Downsides: no techie neighbors, except Archive.org who recently took over the old Christian Science building on Park Presidio & Clement.
Just generally, the place feels like a real neighborhood rather than some sort of Potemkin village constructed for yuppies or hipsters. That's important to me, anyway.
Huge downside: very difficult to get south on the freeways. There's no clear path, so you have to fight your way through city traffic. At rush hour, this can easily add 25 aggravating minutes to your commute (and add in an extra 10-15 minutes to find parking in the inner richmond). Really, it's a lot easier to live in the city and work south from the south-central neighborhoods (sunnyside, glen park, mission terrace, bernal).
Ultimately, I'd say that if you work downtown and only need to go to the valley now and then, the inner richmond is a great pick. But if you're in a daily commute type situation going south, I'd avoid it.
You can also run all the way to the Marina/Chrissy fields if you are feeling for a long and hilly run, or just run to Golden Gate Park for a more flat one. The only downside is the weather. Inner richmond gets some good amount of fog/wind (not as bad as outter richmond, or sunset), but still it is significant.
I moved to mountain view now, and I miss it :(
Either they have an electrical problem or you misused the word "literally".
Foodwise, there are plenty of options though in my estimation there is one great hot pot place "Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot", a shabu-shabu place, what seem to be three(?) izakaya places and several ramen shops, too.
I have never been to California, but I want to check it out someday, possibly give a try as a place to live for a while. I quick googled apartments in Palo Alto because it sounded like the ideal location for me. The cheapest one I saw looked exactly like the place I have now but was > $1000 / month (counter tops, layout, size, etc). I'm currently paying $475 for one of the better 1 br here (Oklahoma). The most expensive I have seen is < $900 here for a 1 br in the newest upscale places with every little bill paid included.
So, unless the pay is significantly higher for the same work that I'm making here, I want to know how people deal with the cost of living in the areas provided in this link? Do you live paycheck to paycheck? Do you save much (I'm saving about 2/3 of my paycheck each month)? I wouldn't want to live in a rundown area with holes in the wall (I have lived in such a place) eating only ramen or the cheapest ground beef on discount from the local grocer. Maybe I just should not be looking at Palo Alto.
I will check these areas when I take some time off to travel out there and I will be doing that someday, hopefully not too far in the future.
I'm grateful to the OP for providing this link. Living out here in OK, having never visited CA/SanFran this provides a better overview of the different parts of the area you often read about on here from people.
But the climate is probably also better (warmer in the winter, cooler in the summer), so being cramped is less of an issue.
There is huge variability in the SF housing market and great deals tend to go quick. I'd put my stuff in storage and stay at a long term hotel for a few weeks and be really careful about this, after all you're talking about spending 12-20K a year.
You can get a decent hotel around the airport for like $60 on hotwire, which is really pretty cheap for SF.
http://www.housingmaps.com/ This is useful.
>despite in-depth emails Too long and you'll get no response just like any other CL ad?
One random note : some places require a social security card.
As for the Social Security card, hopefully that's not commonly a dealbreaker…
Thanks for the advice.
If you don't care about access to public transit then I think its totally reasonable to expand that to places like Nob Hill or North Beach.
It also excludes all of College Terrace in Palo Alto.
Just ignore all the 18 year old fauxbos in upper Haight, theyre harmless.
It would be very cool to get a similar map of HN startup locations, IT giants' original garage (YouTube etc), well known web 2.0 startups locations etc....obviously some of these won't be easily available due to founders not willing to divulge their location...would still be cool all the same.
Live with hacker types, and... me. If you're interested, send me an email and tell me about yourself, what you're looking for in a housing situation, etc.
A cool start-up would get office space in the Outer Richmond so you can hike around Land's End every day before you start working, or maybe up in Nob Hill so you're essentially forcing your employees to use public transit some part of the day, giving them that 15 minutes of zen before work.
