On Living in San Francisco
We get asked a lot whether we're leaving. Here's why we're staying.
People ask us, fairly often, whether we’re planning to leave San Francisco. There’s a whole genre of takes about why young families should relocate — cost of living, schools, the general mythology of California-in-decline.
We’re staying. Here’s why.
The fog is one of the things we didn’t expect to love. When we first moved here, it felt like a disappointment — summer days that never quite warmed up, an afternoon chill that sent you reaching for a jacket. Now it feels like a feature. The city has a particular quiet on foggy mornings that we haven’t found anywhere else.
Our neighborhood in the Mission is walkable in a way that has fundamentally changed how we live. We don’t need a car most days. We can walk to the farmers market, to the library, to the park where Noah chases pigeons with unhinged enthusiasm. That kind of access to daily life isn’t something we take for granted.
The parks here are genuinely great. Dolores Park is our second living room — we’ve spent whole Sundays there, Noah running down the hill, Maggie and I splitting a burrito from the place on 18th. Golden Gate Park is enormous in a way that continues to surprise us; there are corners of it we haven’t explored yet after years of living here.
The food is exceptional, and we say this having lived in cities with exceptional food. The combination of produce from the Central Valley, a deep immigrant culinary tradition, and the obsessive culture around sourcing and craft means that even a random taqueria or Vietnamese spot has a strong chance of being extraordinary.
We have friends here — real ones, accumulated over years — which turns out to matter more than we knew when we were deciding where to live.
Yes, it’s expensive. Yes, there are real problems the city is grappling with. We’re clear-eyed about both. But when we stand on the ridge at Twin Peaks on a clear evening and watch the light going golden over the bay, we remember why we chose this place and why we keep choosing it.
San Francisco, for all its complications, is home.