I'm sorry I'm a little late on this "SF is a depressing town/city" business; I'm sure you've all advanced to new topics--or maybe even new cities, if some of you have your way. But, well, I do feel knowledgeable on the subject of the Pursuit of Your Favorite American City, as I have lived significant adult chunks of my life in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Phoenix, Atlanta, Madison WI, Chicago, and now SF. I also know Boston, NYC, and DC fairly well from many visits and friends' modest residences in them.
But let's talk about why I left a fantastic, large one-bedroom in a century-old downtown apartment building with hardwood floors and doors, 12-foot ceilings, free steam heat, and located in walking distance from my day job and night life, all for $335 a month. I don't care if you're All-American straight white male Republican, because EVEN YOU would find yourself gagging in a repressive atmosphere where the Grinch's too-tight shoes are just the beginning of the private=public misery.
You've either been here (and single) too long or came here with the most ridiculous consumer fantasies, if you're finding yourself complaining about women's clothing and the homeless. Oh, do you think you have a homeless problem "here?" Did you know it's WORLDWIDE? I dare say I initially found SF's panhandlers refreshingly mild after the endlessly desperate aggression enacted on many of Cincinnati's streets. Maybe your attendance at the 2001 riot triggered by the latest police violence right under my apartment window would give you some new ideas about depressing. Watch Berkeley Copwatch's "These Streets Are Watching" if you need some visuals. While you're at it, compare the Berkeley interactions with the Cincinnati ones...enlightening.
Or imagine being surrounded by Rampant, Active Racism, if there can be any words that might distinguish levels of racism. The "what's wrong with hispanics(?)" thread here has been almost charming in its innocuous hypotheticals among a tiny minority of logged-on intellectuals. Try living daily next to people, black and white ("there are no other races or cultures in Cincinnati"), who are so racist they can't even hear what comes out of their mouths as being anything but the truth. Imagine you, you in your white or black body, being viewed in person by 50% of the urban public there as THE ENEMY AND CAUSE OF ALL THEIR PERSONAL EVIL. Or just tune into this miasma of dangerous idiocy:
Bars are open a little later though, you'd like that. Cincinnati has so many of the same franchises someone like you might love, just like all the other cities in America...really, if you make the right amount of money, you can live the exact same existence in almost any urban area of America, give or take a lake or sea or something. Do you have any idea in what ways they are all exactly alike, and how they are indeed different?
I'm not talking about rents and places to eat and shop and will Radiohead come to town; I'm talking about daily psychological existence and how a particular mass of people live and interact and influence each other. Try living in a city where seemingly no one reads or thinks beneath the surface (Atlanta), or a place where far too many people THINK they are progressive because they are all white, educated, and middle-class or higher, yet don't actually have deep social/diversity issues to deal with (Madison). Try Chicago--but I'm telling you, most of the people you'll meet there are from tiny cornfields throughout the dreadfully close-minded Midwest, and find the purchase of a dark leather jacket to be the height of cosmopolitan.
And yet would you believe I loved them all for what great, idiosyncratic characteristics they did have? It was between NYC and SF when I decided I had to get out of Cincinnati (my hometown by the way); I'd visited NYC a number of times over the years, with nights spent in Brooklyn, Queens, and lower Manhattan. More of my friends live there than here...but, in the end, it just struck me as a big grid with a lot of very harried people. I'm attracted to power, but not a kingdom of rats.
SF may be little more than a city of gambling radicals (when people say "SF changed since the yuppies got here!" they should read a social history on the city...kids, it's been fortune hunters since day one), and the property problem is worthy of rioting itself, but, God, the air is sweet.