Mark's Musings

San Francisco Bay Area

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San Francisco is one of the few, truly unique cities in the USA (along with NYC, Washington DC, and New Orleans) with world class resources and services. There are great restaurants (more Michelin starred restaurants than NYC). interesting sites to visit, and events to attend. Within a few hours drive in a car are wondrous destinations: the Sierra including Lake Tahoe and Yosemite, rugged ocean coastline and beaches, wine country and gold country. The weather is generally very mild (nearly perfect in the mid-peninsula).

The greater San Francisco Bay Area is a vibrant, multi-cultural area. filled with interesting people who have come from all parts of the world (nearly 40% of adults are foreign born). There is nowhere else on the planet that can match the area for high tech opportunities: a combination of world class universities, a critical mass of high tech companies, a culture of collaboration, and 70% of the world’s VC money.

There is a dark side as well. Work culture has become increasingly been characterized by ambition, which results in people being transactional. People struggle to find authentic community because most folks are too busy, not vulnerable, and are typically looking for ways to get ahead rather than to connect. There is an growing gap between the “haves” and “have nots” which is creating social tensions and driving long term residents out of the area (or into homelessness).

Food

I love good food, and we have a lot of great food around the Bay Area. Thanks to the proximity to the ocean, the Central Valley, wine country, and several coastal areas we have access to fresh produce both in our markets and restaurants which focus on farm to table. The only places I have found that equal (or surpass) the Bay Area in terms of quality and diversity of food is Portland, LA, and Tokyo.

Recommendations from professional foodies

When I have time I will update this page with in my recommendations. Some suggestions from my great meals and MLN page.

Weather

The Bay Area has a number of micro climates. I think the weather between Redwood City and Sunnyvale is the best. It’s normally sunny with comfortable temperatures.  I joke that we don’t have weather, we have climate.  Every few years it will get below freezing in the middle of a winter night.  The temperature crosses 90F only a few times a year.  It rains periodically between Nov-Apr… but the sun will often come out on the same day. Most of the year you can plan outdoor activities without concern that the weather is going to spoil your plans.

On a summer day in Mountain View when it’s in the mid-70s you can go over the hill to the coast between Half Moon Bay and San Francisco and find rain or fog with the temperatures 10-15 degreesF cooler. Likewise you can head down to San Jose/Morgan Hill or over the east bay and experience temperatures than are warmed by 10-20 degressF. If those are what you are looking for, you can go a bit further and bake in the Central Valley, or cool off in the high sierras.

Outdoors

There is a plethora of great outdoor opportunities. Take advantage of them.

Zoos & Animals

Gardens

Parks

Henry Cowell State Park (redwood and path by San Lorenzo River), Muir Woods (great redwoods), Sam MacDonald County Park, Memorial Grove County Park (closest redwoods – off Alpine, near Sam MacDonald), and Natural Bridges State Beach for the butterflies. tidal pools, and the interesting geology.  Of course there many other state parks & beaches which are fun to visit. Alcatraz is always interesting.

Hikes, Runs, Camping

Our favorite hike is in Wunderlich County Park. It’s close by, mostly shaded hiking with food stop at Alice’s Restaurant if you walk around .5 a mile out of the park. There are a lot of good hiking. These days most people use AllTrails, but before AllTrails there was  Bay Area Hiker and Kevin’s Hiking Page. Now there is also Gurmeet.net Hiking.

There are a number of excellent Meetup.com groups and local Sierra Club chapters that sponsor group hikes. Some other resources can be found at Bay Area Backcountry, Ridgetrail, and Midpeninsula Open Space. Check out doing miles if you are looking for longer day hikes.

It can be fun to mix geocaching. into some hikes.

Trail runners should check out the site trailstompers.

The book Camping and Backpacking the San Francisco Bay Area by Matt Heid provides complete list of places you can camp in the Bay Area

See my hiking/packing destinations page for more ideas

Activities

Any given day the question is not if there is an interesting event, but do I have time for one or two.

There are a number of sites which track all sorts of events

Museums

Housing

Housing has been insanely expensive for years. When I moved to the area in 1992 a house 1/2 the size of my home in Columbus Ohio was almost 10x the cost! I almost didn’t purchase but a good friend told me “Buy now if you can. It’s just going up”. So far this has been the case. Even when real estate took big hits (like 2008-9) the Bay Area property mostly retained their values and recovered quickly. In better neighborhoods, real estate has kept pace with the overall stock market in terms of appreciation. Can this continue? I didn’t think so in the 1990s… I was wrong.

For family, one of the biggest considerations is the quality of the public schools. Places with a particularly good reputation:

  • Palo Alto
  • Cupertino (especially the magnet schools)
  • Mission District in Fremont
  • Mountain View and Los Altos metrics aren’t as good at Palo Alto High School, but the kids are a lot less stressed. I think they hit an ideal balance of encouraging kids to excel without weighing them down with too much

See the California School Dashboard for school performance numbers… but remember that these numbers are more an indication of the social-economic status of the kids than the raw quality of the education. The more investment parents make, the better the kids experience. Girl’s Middle School, located in Palo Alto, is an excellent private school.

Transportation

I try to use mass transit when possible, so when I head up to SF I use Caltrain.  I don’t have daily exposure to commute traffic since I walk or bike to work, but I understand traffic is pretty awful these days, especially 85 north in the morning, and 85 south in the afternoon. Google Maps is likely the best way to see how traffic is moving.  The San Jose Airport (SJC) is more convenient than SFO when I can get flights there.  SJC – AirportMonitor lets you watch flights in real-time.  When we fly out of San Francisco Airport (SFO), we often use SkyPark Airport Parking.  Sometimes fares out of Oakland Airport are cheaper than SJC or SFO.  If you mostly use mass transit but need a car periodically check out Zipcars, Getaround, and Turo.

Churches & Service

My recommendations on good churches page. See Volunteer Info Center for links to most of the organizations which operate in the bay area.

Higher Education

Colleges in the area include Stanford (Campus Map), UC Berkeley (UCB Extension Continuing Ed),  Foothill/DeAnza, San Jose State, Santa Clara University, and UC Santa Cruz (UCSC  Extension Continuing Ed)

Government

Bay Area Governments has links to city & county governments and other useful info.

Live in The Bay Area?

The cost of living in the SFbay is very high… mostly because of the high cost of housing. Some people have raised an  alarm over price of homes, suggesting that housing is a bubble which is about to pop. Right now monthly rents are significantly cheaper than what mortgage payments would be for a similar home. My personal belief is that unless someone already owns a home in an expensive market, purchasing a house in the bay area does not make good financial sense at this time… but I could easily be wrong since I still can’t believe how much people are paying today.

Pay in the bay area is a bit higher than other areas, see salary.com, payscale.com, salaryscout.com, or indeed.com for real data, but this doesn’t cover the added cost of housing.  [Unless you are moving into the area from a location with equally high priced housing, you are going to be renting.]  People from small cities or towns complain that buildings are packed to close together, there are too many people, and that house lots are measured in feet, not acres.  People from large cities complain that the area is too spread out without adequate mass transit.  The Bay area is very secularized, with less than 5% of the populate attending religious services each week.  We are hopefully done with rolling blackout and liquification during earthquakes for awhile.

For another take, a survey of people about best things about the bay area.

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