Transferring from LA to San Francisco, right here’s why I did it

Despite being the most expensive rents in the country, with an average home price of $ 1.6 million, people still long to call San Francisco home. How could they not? As the birthplace of two dot-com booms and one of the premier LGBTQ meccas, the appeal of SF is irresistible to some. Even Californians from other promised parts of the state – namely Los Angeles – have been known to pull up and head north.

While many think the plays rightly advocate the move from New York City to the City of Angels, San Francisco will arguably always be considered the conscientiousness of California. Therefore, despite stratospheric monthly sums and rampant economic inequality, one wants to call the Paris of the West, the 415, his hometown.

Here are a few local residents who shared what took them from Los Angeles to San Francisco – and why they stayed.

In addition to relationships or family, most respondents cited an abundance of job opportunities as the main reason for moving from LA to SF. The unemployment rate in San Francisco was 2.3 percent in August, down from 2.4 percent in July and below the 3.1 percent estimate in 2017. A sizable number compared to California’s unadjusted unemployment rate of 4.3 percent.

For example, Nikki Collister, a freelance writer who moved to San Francisco six and a half years ago, moved to Baghdad by the Bay to start her career.

I was pretty tired of LA after five years and was ready for something new. I knew the career path I started in LA wasn’t the one I wanted to go, and while I had no job ideas when I decided to move north, I took the opportunity for a change.

Jason McDaniel, a political science professor at San Francisco State University, had a similar background and mentioned the quirky side of SF as an added bonus.

I knew I was leaving Los Angeles when I accepted the job offer from San Francisco State University. It was a moment of great relief and pride, plus more than a little fear. I had spent most of my adult life in Los Angeles and was deeply involved in the social and political life of my local community. Moving from a place where I was closely integrated into the community to a new city where I had no friends was a daunting prospect. Yet I was also proud to move to SF to become a professor in such a great city that focused on local politics.

But moving to a city for a job – no matter which city – is not uncommon. Let’s talk about the advantages of San Francisco compared to Los Angeles, which, with all due respect for our southern sibling, is abundant.

Rachel Alonso, who moved here four years ago to work as a project manager for the city, names one of the greatest advantages San Francisco has over LA:

It’s easier to live without a car – I walk most places. I won’t miss the long, pedestrian-unfriendly blocks that lack beautiful street scenery. And I won’t fail to take care of parking.

City walkability was cited multiple times by respondents as a valued urban feature that other California cities don’t rank first. Billy R., an attorney for a major tech company, says his commuting changed his life for the better when he moved north.

I remember being overwhelmed when I first moved to SF and lived in North Beach. I worked in the Financial District and walked to work every day. Took me 15 minutes to get there. In LA, I lived six miles from my office, where it took me 45-60 minutes to get to work – one way. Compared to my current SF commute, I have at least one extra hour each day that I never had in LA.

McDaniel repeats the same feeling and says:

My commute now includes either a 15-minute drive to SF State Campus or a 30-minute drive to Muni. I also work from home a lot, especially in the summer. My last job in Los Angeles involved commuting anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour, which luckily was against the flow of traffic, so it was rarely much worse.

And the people you will meet here? Compared to LA they are still stubborn, but wonderfully Californian, just in their very special way. Taylor R., who moved from LA to SF eight years ago, says:

In LA, people always seem to want to know what to do for them, but they tend to go out of their way to get to know someone. In SF people stay with their crews. There’s not much to mingle with new groups to meet someone else.

Collister breaks down the difference between the two Golden Coast populations:

I’m sure this feeling is partly due to having worked in the entertainment industry, but my impression is that people in LA pay a lot more attention to how they look. Cars are status symbols, as are handbags, sunglasses, breeds of dogs, whatever. It felt like I knew so much about one person when they got out of their Bentley with a thoroughbred Pomeranian in their Louis Vuitton bag. And since driving is such a big part of life in LA, the people on the street generally seem angrier / impatient (as you would expect).

In SF, the wealthiest people are probably the hooded ones who dock their Ford GoBikes in front of a SoMa tech office. It’s less about looking beautiful than about “disrupting an industry”. Although there appears to be a lot more workaholics in the Bay Area, people are generally more relaxed, more outdoorsy, and more health conscious.

And while many expats cited traffic across from Los Angeles and San Francisco as a major problem, RH (who asked that we only use their initials), who has lived in the city for 25 years, notes that the weather and the tap are watering South cannot compare to the delicious cold and tasty H20 that you discover after moving to SF.

Things I won’t miss in LA: Getting into a hot car every day during a seemingly endless heatwave. The poor air quality in LA. (Even on spare-the-air days, the onshore currents keep the SF air pretty clean.) Third, LA tap water doesn’t taste good.

But don’t worry, Angelenos – you are still fabulous in our eyes. Well some of our eyes. The unreasonable disdain for SoCal has been a point of contention for some of the transplants we interviewed.

RH sums it up best:

One thing I don’t get is the disdain for LA that has so many SF people even outside of the sporting rivalries. Angelenos love SF, enjoy coming to SF and the Bay Area. When I moved here, I was surprised at how many people (San Franciscan Aboriginal and transplant recipients) told me that they hated LA even though they had spent little to no time there. Are the differences that intimidating?

Hear hear.

Finally, when it comes to civic pride, San Francisco beats LA for better or for worse. Says McDaniel:

One key difference is that people in San Francisco are often very excited about the idea that San Francisco is the best city in the world. In my opinion, this sometimes leads to a kind of defensive bigotry and nostalgia. The people of Los Angeles seem to have a more realistic sense of the pros and cons of living in LA and may make them less resilient to change. On the flip side, there is a stronger sense of San Francisco identity with those who live here than in Los Angeles. The population of Los Angeles is so much larger and more dispersed than in SF that the feeling of an “Angeleno” identity is much more diffuse.