Is San Francisco New York?

Is San Francisco New York?

The above citation is to a hilarious article in New York magazine about San Francisco.  Following the article is a veritable slugfest of comments by partisans of each city.

I have spent a number of years in and near New York and San Francisco, and I like to think I have enough experience and distance to see the good and bad in each. Some observations:

San Francisco has a bunch of nutty people. Always has, always will.  Name another American city with a vigorous nudist rights movement -- I dare you.
        A recent demonstration in San Francisco rallied supporters of Venezuela's Bolivarian government. Meanwhile, in Caracas, many thousands were taking to the streets to protest the Venezuelan government.
        There are continuing "guerilla" demonstrations these days against buses sent by Silicon Valley companies to ferry 18,000 San Franciscans from the city to their jobs at Google, Facebook and other tech firms. The demonstrators want the buses not to be allowed to use regular city bus stops.  They also want the tech workers to move out of San Francisco.

New York, on the other hand, has more billionaires.  Some New Yorkers brag about this, which puzzles me. I've only heard of one allegedly nice billionaire, and he lives in Omaha.  The rest of them sound like jerks. Plus more than a few of New York's billionaires seem to be Russian oligarchs; I wouldn't want those people living on my block.

Housing prices in New York and San Franciso are outrageous.  People in Manhattan compete to pay $4,000 a month for one-bedroom apartments.  The average San Francisco home now costs north of $900,000.   Each city maintains a rent-control regime of  more than 100,000 apartments with below-market rates and no means-testing of the renters who benefit.
        In 2012, a scant 126 new apartments were constructed in San Francisco, well fewer than were wanted and further squeezing prices and driving people out of the market.
         Last year, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the city would construct a high-rise building of small apartments with as little as 250 square feet of living space each. ( Bloomberg himself is a billionaire whose 14 homes include  a sumptuous five-story townhouse on the Upper East Side. Hmm.) On the other side of the market, a new batch of condominiums opened that looked out over Central Park from high above 57th Street; prices ranged from $50 million to $70 million each.

New York's prominence as a global financial center has made many people rich, but employment in finance is believed to have dropped by 30 percent since the Great Recession.  Meanwhile, New York attracts ever-more foreign tourists each year.

San Francisco's economy, based largely on tourism for at least the last 40 years, has been strengthened of late by the social networking explosion in its former working-class district south of Market Street. This has made a number of young technical workers quite wealthy, which has made many of the rest of the city's residents angry. In most other cities, residents would welcome a new industry, even if its participants dressed in jeans and hoodies.

Each city has a rich heritage, New York as the first great American metropolis (okay, maybe second after Boston) and San Francisco as the first great metropolis in the American West.  No one living today, however, can claim credit for these things.  The cities are attractive sites for tourists and their economies are flourishing, at least for those with the right skills or connections.

Neither city is attracting jobs for ordinary people, and neither has a public education system that turns out students ready for jobs in its most profitable industries. Middle-class people continue to leave for the suburbs or other states.

Actually, there are some dynamic cities that seem to be doing well these days -- Austin, Nashville, Atlanta, Denver, even Pittsburgh.  These cities are inviting to newcomers and seem to have the potential for economic growth that will improve the lives of their citizens overall.

San Francisco and New York, not so much.