I work in SoMa and think it sucks hard community-wise because despite having so much interest-wise with many of the employees of the companies in my building and most of the buildings within a 5 minute walk, I have few if any meaningful interactions on a daily basis. Yes, there are meetups, but there is relatively no serendipity with special interest groups. I don't want to know only the people within 1 degree of separation on the interest graph. That's essentially an echo chamber. I would like to meet many more people who are maybe 2-3 degrees away, e.g. still in tech, but working on completely different problems and with different technologies than I do. A lot of those people are nearby and there are practically no spaces that foster interactions with those people.
The only time I get those interactions farther than a single degree of separation is when I go out at night with people outside my daytime bubble.
In NYC, in contrast, it wasn't uncommon for me to buy my lunch and sit in a public space where someone might sit down at the same public table that I was sitting at.
I would love a public food-court style space in SoMa organized like a German beer hall, with large communal tables, where a large part of the draw would be sitting down and overhearing interesting conversations and having your conversations heard as well and maybe using that as fodder for meeting someone new.
SoMA strikes me as a place where people know the value of strong ties, but completely discount the value in weak ties [0] and mechanisms that foster weak ties, such as the lack of physical community spaces.
[0] Mark Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties. http://sociology.stanford.edu/people/mgranovetter/documents/...
