Lonely San Francisco

A city who's wealth is built on network effects refuses to understand them.

You're not a real SF resident until you make friends with people you think will be your confidants for life and then in 10 years all of them have left and then you sit alone at a cafe and whisper to yourself "but the parks are so beautiful"

I went through my list of friends to invite to my just-get-the-community-together birthday last weekend and of all the people I have ever considered close friends I'd like to stay close to fore life? Maybe a third are still here.

This is why I take the NIMBYs and car-brains as a personal offense: Because it personally has screwed over me and millions others. They are often literally collecting rent on other's work.

This was encapsulated by a small scene in that Silicon Valley TV Show where a nosy neighbor, who’s home value had gone up huge amounts because of tech doesn’t want tech around:

I cannot understand the people in cities who think "many young, skilled, educated, and hungry people want to move here, and that is a problem!". By their own revealed preferences, what they want isn’t a city but a retirement community. They should move to them.

What really gets me is the friends that moved out of the city, say they are lonely, and then send me house listings near them. The point of cities is we all decided to live near the largest number of people. *you* defected. You probably didn’t have a choice. You wanted a family and the schools were bad, the houses too expensive, and so on.

It's a bit disheartening to see people constantly moving away from San Francisco, only to complain about the lack of social connections and opportunities in their new surroundings. They seem to overlook the fact that a city's vibrancy is not solely dependent on its physical attributes, but also on the intricate network effects created by a large and diverse population.

These network effects are not always obvious, but they play a crucial role in fostering innovation, economic growth, and a sense of belonging. When people leave, they take a piece of this intricate web with them, weakening the overall system. It's like removing a vital organ from a living organism – the body might still function, but it will never be the same.