Commentary

San Francisco Is Basically Boston With Better Weather, So Why Do I Stay Here?

Eric Silva for Boston.com

By Charlotte Wilder @TheWilderThings

March 25, 2015

8 minutes to read

San Francisco is a playground. A jungle gym of start-ups, parks, and bars, all packed with attractive people who have really great butts (all those hills). On a recent visit, I marveled at how healthy and content everyone looked as I sat in the sun outside of a shop named something like “Kale Central’’ or “Yoga Pants Boutique for Healthy People.’’

San Francisco is a lot like Boston: We’ve both got tech industries, oceans, quinoa, and lots of electric cars with bumper stickers endorsing Democrats. But in San Francisco, the weather is always perfect and the people look a whole lot less miserable for half the year. This winter in Boston was a doozy, to put it mildly.

Today is my 26th birthday, which I’m celebrating back in Boston. I’m not a kid anymore, and it’s harder to justify not answering life’s big questions (“But seriously, lots of recent graduates are totally clueless. I’m fine!’’), like where I want to live. Because I’m actually an adult, survey says, and I get to—have to?—decide that.

I did a lot of soul-searching out there. I even called my mom, who still lives in the house where I was born and raised in a Boston suburb. “I could totally move here,’’ I said. “Nooooo!’’ she cried, which is a compelling argument. But so was the feeling of the sun on my very, very pale skin.

So why not go live in the seemingly better version of Boston on the other side of the country? Why do I stay?

Birds of a Feather

I held a bottle of juice inside a store that sold only juice. The 14-ounce bottles filled the cooler, all boasting similar sounding names: Green Ginger, Sweet Green, Green Detox. I turned the bottle over and half expected to see the name of a crayon, like “olive green,’’ or “green yellow,’’ beside the list of ingredients.

Instead, I saw $9.75, laughed, and put the bottle back. I’d recently done the same thing at the Fresh Pond Whole Foods in Cambridge. A similarity between the cities: Weird juices that claim to cure all ills aren’t cheap.

Another less trivial similarity: housing isn’t cheap in either city, and both Boston and San Francisco are gentrifying at a rapid rate. I passed countless homeless people sleeping on sidewalks in San Francisco while shiny BMWs (with no sign of road-salt crusted onto their paint) sat beside them by the curb.

In the preppy Marina, a man slumped against the wrought-iron gate of a house as a woman pushing a stroller that looked like a spaceship went inside. Walk through Harvard Square and you see the same thing—people who hold cardboard signs asking for money line the window displays in front of the university bookstore.

And then, of course, there’s the unavoidable specter of tech in each city. Everyone I met out there seemed to work at Google, Facebook, Twitter, a mid-size tech company, or a start-up that such-and-such famous computer person says is the next big thing.

The Boston tech scene is also impressive, but it’s not the main source of employment. And the cities’ relationships with the digital world feel … different. In Boston, tech is a part of life, but in San Francisco, it felt like a lifestyle.

“We have a vibrant ecosystem on the East Coast, lots of IPOs,’’ said Ric Fulop, General Partner at North Bridge Growth Equity Venture Partners. “But they’re typically different from those in San Francisco; out here they’re more engineering rather than consumer related.’’

This trend becomes apparent in how people live their lives in San Francisco; consumers consume mostly through apps. A video of some Bay-area tech bros trying to kick local kids off a soccer field because they booked it using an app went viral last year. Everyone I talked to told me that the dating scene is driven by app-based interactions. And almost every guy I swiped by on Tinder had a bio that read, “I make apps,’’ or “software engineer,’’ or “entrepreneur’’—or my favorite: “tech enthusiast’’—as opposed to Boston, where most guys just quote Will Ferrell.

I don’t find that Bostonians rely on apps as heavily, in general. Yes, we use them for dating, but it seems that most people meet each other the way most other people in the country meet each other: through friends. And we don’t have an app for reserving playing fields, as far as I and a quick Google search (performed on a desktop, that’s how backwards we are here) know.

San Francisco and Boston can both be parodies of themselves. Where it has its tech moguls, we have our bankers. It has its juice shops, we have our lobster roll shacks (and also our juice shops). It has a new app or a new fancy way to get to work every day, we have our newspapers and our rotaries.

No pain, no gain

“I forget what month it is,’’ someone said as we sat at Green’s Sports Bar watching a Duke NCAA basketball game. It was a beautiful day around 5 p.m., and, as everyone stared at the screens of the televisions, I stared outside at the blue sky.

When people at the bar found out I was from Boston, they said things like, “Oh, wow. Sorry about that winter. Are you OK?’’

Part of me wasn’t. But that’s part of living in Boston, right? The winters are what makes New England summers so precious. We slogged through the snow wearing more layers than a crepe cake, we shoveled out our cars after each storm (and then shoveled them out again once the plow went by), and we broke the snow record. We’ve earned the warm days that follow (knock on wood) and the blissful fall that follows them. We don’t take those times for granted.

“The seasons all run together. It’s just always like this’’—65 and sunny, or slightly overcast—“so you can always bike, you can always run, always go for a hike,’’ someone said.

And, to be honest, that sounds pretty great. I’ve already referenced my snowed-in, dark moments of weakness, and its not implausible that someday I’ll venture across the country, buy a few extra pairs of yoga pants, and settle on in. But the cycles of our seasons mark time, and I don’t know that I could do without them. Would I come to resent the perfect weather? Would I ever not feel like I had to take advantage of every single nice day, even when they’re a dime a dozen? There’s something rewarding about extremes.

And there’s an urgency to Boston, a hard-working, East-Coast mentality. Maybe it’s the weather, maybe its the Puritanical, no-fun roots from which the city (and aparently I, myself) has sprung. Everyone seemed so happy all the time in San Francisco. I think a part of me would miss the occasional East Coast sadness that settles in with the darkness sometime after the holidays.

There’s no start-up that adds history

As I walked down Webster in Pacific Heights, my friend pointed to a tall and narrow Victorian building.

“That’s one of the oldest houses in San Francisco,’’ he said. “It was built around 1860 or so.’’

It was beautiful; bougainvillea climbed the ornate columns and bright pink flowers popped against the cloudless sky reflected in the windows. The door’s dark wood gave the house a sense of weight, of importance, of venerability.

But 1860 isn’t that old. Not to me, who went on field trips to Plymouth Plantation and Old Sturbridge Village, who battles perennially messed up traffic because these cobblestone streets weren’t built for SUVs, but for Paul Revere on his horse.

All that history gives Boston a soul. It’s hard to put into words, but let me see if I can put this into San Francisco terms: It feels like the city suffers from a lack of data points.

Boston isn’t reliant on tech the way San Francisco is. We’re more defined by our tangible documents and our academic tomes than our devices. Record shops line Mass Ave., and the Boston Public Library is one of the largest in the U.S., second only to the Library of Congress. America started here, as the monuments on the Common proudly proclaim. Bars and restaurants pay homage to our history: Puritan & Co., Townsman, Commonwealth. We’re steeped in it.

It turns out that history plays a psychological role for Bostonians, too. A study from 2012 comes close to putting numbers to these intangibles; Bostonians listed financial status, educational attainment, family support, work, and the feeling of contributing to the community as essential to being satisfied with their lives. People in San Francisco (San Franciscans? San Franciscites?) listed only work as the main factor in their levels of satisfaction.

“What we found is that common stereotypes—such as Boston is old, established, and traditional, and that San Francisco is new, innovative, and free-spirited—actually reflect something much deeper,’’ study leader Victoria Plaut, a social and cultural psychologist at UC Berkeley School of Law, told Boston.com when the study was published.

So as I sit here in Boston, writing this on a birthday which a coworker described as “the beginning of the dark side of your 20s,’’ it’s become clear that to me that these roots are hard to pull up. Would I be happier across the country? Maybe. But my family wouldn’t be there, and neither would my summers.

I stay here because of roots, history, and soul. San Francisco is a city hurtling towards a digital future. While Boston is a town on the cutting edge of digital innovation, too, we haven’t forgotten our analog past.

I know that if I moved, the leaves and snow would fall across the country and I’d be missing a piece of myself—the stubborn, hard-working piece that wore three pairs of socks at once this winter. Our history is my history. Maybe someday I’ll be able to let that piece go and see what else can fill the space it leaves. For now, I‘m sticking around.