Wow, I had no idea. I was there a week a month for a year and a half and assumed San Jose was a tiny suburb of San Francisco.
The Honolulu one sounds right. Was there last year and while it was great for tourists like me, the tour guides would show us how nasty prices were for normal goods. I mean, a lot of it comes from everything needing to be shipped in, but still a lot more expensive than back home.
… like Oakland, it suffers from the exaggerated expectations engendered by being near San Francisco, which is a city so fabulous it makes other cities hate themselves
Probably there is a similar explanation for how everybody talks about New Jersey
Really there’s nothing wrong with San Jose, or Oakland, or Sacramento … except that they’re all too expensive 
I’m not so sure. Oakland and Sacramento have plenty of room for improvement but they do have urban centers that feel like actual destinations with an authentic sense of place, like Lake Merritt or Old Town Sacramento. San Jose feels more like a city built by algorithm to accommodate the maximum number of techbros. Barely a single postcard-worthy view in the whole city.
… if people want postcard vistas, they have to go up into the hills, and of course San Jose is being triangulated by S.F. and Santa Cruz — there is a lot of competition for Prettiest Postcard in California 
Bon Qui Qui has entered the chat:
(For those who don’t get the joke, Anjela Johnson Reyes is from San Jo.)
Yeah, the original report shows Toronto quite clearly as #11.
I originate from the MW. I mean used to regularly drive 3-5 hours every weekend to go see friends or to do things (sports/music/museums/restaurants/clubs whatever). No worthwhile mass transit sadly so slave to the car but I could hit Chicago/Detroit/Cleveland/Cincinnati/Columbus/Indianapolis/Louisville/Pittsburgh and a shit ton more “smaller mid size cities”. So when I visited Northern California the entire Bay Area SF/SJ/Oakland etc just felt like one metropolitan area to me but I typically had access to a car plus whateve transit systems.
Many of those cities I listed are all on that affordable list. Individually no they don’t compare to NYC, SF or LA for art/cultural but taken collectively? There is an argument to be made. I dunno if I can stomach that much driving anymore and the older I get sleeping on a different friend’s couch every weekend is less appealing. Still I wonder if there will ever be a reverse migration back to “fly over country”.
I used to want to live in SF. Not anymore. Briefly thought Santa Rosa would be cool then it burned down =(.
I agree, Vancouver is delightful - but it’s one of the few places that makes Reykjavík and Oslo look affordable.
The Winchester House is pretty neat. But those stairways to nowhere and doorways that drop you into an open void are probably good metaphors for the city.
I moved to the Bay Area nearly 40 years ago to work in the computer industry. I’ve lived in San Francisco, San Jose, Mountain View, and Sausalito. I lived a few years in each of those places, except for SF, where I lasted exactly 2 months. I had an apartment in a “nice” neighborhood (Pacific Heights), but while some parts of SF are very pretty, I couldn’t figure out why anyone actually wanted live in what seemed to me to be a hellishly pretentious place. When the time came to settle down and have a family, I insisted that we buy a (then relatively cheap) house in a diverse neighborhood in Oakland, despite all of my friends insisting it was far too dangerous at the time (mid 90s). Oakland ended up being the home I hadn’t had since childhood. The rest of the Bay Area I could do without. But, I’m black, that might have had something to do with it.
I’m one of the lucky ones that have ridden the Greater Vancouver real estate market since 1990. We have no mortgage and our lovely downtown apartment condo is apparently worth at least $960/sq.ft. Almost the only people I see buying homes are past middle age and downsizing.
I don’t want to see all the people owning real estate being in my age bracket and would love to see a slide in prices down by 20-30%. There is a significant chunk of residential real estate held by commercial investors that are waiting for prices to increase further before they cash in by putting the places on the market. They need to take their obscene profits now and let people have homes.
I lived literally across the road from his bunker during that period and had absolutely no idea that had been happening. I recall one day seeing the police tape going up surrounding the area but it was months before I realised the back story.
We are planning in October to move back from Tokyo - a surprisingly affordable city to live in despite what a lot of these surveys say - to Sydney.
Despite a good salary and a healthy bank balance, sorting out housing in Sydney is our number one stress.
A few American friends have said that if you like New York and also like having money, Chicago is a good place to live.
Yeah, Oakland and Sacramento are real cities with a sense of place. San Jose could be mistaken for one of the more nondescript, uninteresting bits of sprawl of the LA metro area, maybe.
… well, the problem is they don’t need to do anything — they’re not accountable to us 
raises hand with question
Rochester–
NY or MN?
Shout out @Melizmatic for Bon Qui Qui clip! 
Is Lancashire, (or is Lancanshire, some wired place spelt close enough that it auto corrects Lancashire, but is in fact not in the uk?) being listed as its own location as its a region or that Blackpool is in Lancashire (for the record it is in Lancashire so why not just list Lancashire), but they are not saying Glasgow, Lanarkshire to point out which region Glasgow is in, the fact is says all tied makes me think they mean all 3, V saying they are both tied?
