San Jose is hell on earth

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/cesspool.html

by henning • 18 years ago

43 91 18 years ago

I'm glad to know I am not the only one who felt this way. I felt like I was in one huge shopping mall. Malls give me head aches.

Human brain has an upper limit on the fakeness it can take before it makes you throw up, I think. (I seldom complain and I don't drink 'orange mocha frappuccino')

[edit] deleted --> "SJC is the most depressing airport I've been to."

tptacek2• 18 years ago

SJC is a much better airport than SFO, but OAK is the one the cheap flights go to, and is inexpensive to get to SF from.

bmj• 18 years ago

Having never been to SFO or OAK, I find this shocking, since SJC seems kinda slummy, especially when flying via NWA.

ajmoir• 18 years ago

SFO International is pretty cool. Very open and light with decent A/C.

gibsonf1• 18 years ago

SFO is one of my favorite airports because they designed it for convenience. There is a parking garage at the core of the airport, so you can drive into this garage and drive in a circle and park adjacent to your terminal, and walk out on the axis directly to your flights. The new very large international terminal links directly to BART, which is quite a good idea as well. I've always had a very low opinion of SJC.

menloparkbum4• 18 years ago

I'm confused as to how SJC could be considered a much better airport than SFO. Many cheap flights do go to OAK but Virgin and JetBlue also fly out of SFO. I've never had a problem finding a cheap flight that goes out of SFO, if I have time to plan ahead.

sabat3• 18 years ago

I used to think that. I think it less now. SJ definitely does not have the taste and cosmopolitan charm of SF, but as places to live go, it's really pretty good. Access to the ocean and amazing open spaces, etc.

mkull• 18 years ago

Hows San Diego?

henning2• 18 years ago

It has a similar sprawling ticky-tack faux automobile-metropolis feel, and the food except in places like downtown generally sucks.

sabat3• 18 years ago

On the other hand, San Diego's weather is probably the best in the whole US, the people (except maybe for the far-righters and far-lefters) are pretty cool, there's nice history, beach access, culture ... sigh. Wish I was there.

ericb2• 18 years ago

How is San Diego for tech jobs and startups? I generally like to work at startups and would look at rails type jobs (if my startup does not work out for some reason). If it does work out, I'd be interested in whether there is a decent population of high tech folks in San Diego as a talent-pool.

Edit: I'm in Boston, now, for comparison.

soundsop• 18 years ago

I moved from Toronto to South Bay for work a couple of years ago. I couldn't face the commute from San Francisco to San Jose, so I decided to live close to work in San Jose. I almost cried when I first visited San Jose's "downtown".

The descriptions of the link are pretty much bang on, although I don't find the smog in San Jose so bad. And San Jose does have one attribute that's better than San Francisco: the weather. It's sunny and warm in San Jose with cool nights. Whenever I go to San Francisco, it is cold, windy and foggy. The San Francisco Zoo is situated close to the ocean in a part of the city that is seemingly permanently overcast and cold. I feel sorry for the animals.

Other than the weather, the best thing that can be said about San Jose is that it is close to a lot of interesting events and places that are not in San Jose.

davidw• 18 years ago

Agreed about the "downtown". To me it feels little larger than the downtown/college area in my home town, Eugene, which is only about 130K people, instead of a million.

In terms of a 'real' downtown, such as that found in a European town like Padova, Italy, the European one is "fractally better" - on every level and scale it's nicer, from the interesting bits of frescoes in Piazza San Nicolo to the Basilica di Sant'Antonio, to the overall layout of human-scale streets.

The depressing thing about all this is that you'd like to take bits and pieces from all over and utilize them to create the perfect place, which is very easy to envision, but impossible to realize.

idea• 18 years ago

> I feel sorry for the animals.

I have that with any zoo. They may be treated well, but wild animals shouldn't be locked up for entertainment and profit.

modoc• 18 years ago

What if they're locked up for a safe breeding of more of a threatened or endangered species, or for the purpose of education and awareness of the threats facing wildlife around the world?

I've been to some zoos that just make you want to cry, and I've been to other ones where the animals seems happy, well taken-care-of, and had enough activities/entertainment to keep them from getting bored, and where there was a huge amount of focus on education around what species are threatened, why, and what you can do about it. How to co-exist with wild animals locally, and how to support efforts around the world.

It's a lot easier to feel sympathy/empathy and DO something when you see a real live cute endangered animal, than if you read a paragraph in your paper.

It's definitely a mixed bag, but overall, I'm pro good-zoos.

annoyed• 18 years ago

sj is nowhere near on-par with sf, but it's not dead. changes are coming, but that takes time. i live in the downtown area and enjoy one of the safest environment in a big city. last time i was in the city, a walk in broad daylight through some parts was scary.

steveplace• 18 years ago

Heh. You haven't seen pre-fab until you've been to Orlando.

SwellJoe4• 18 years ago

When I came out for StartupSchool three years back, I went back to Austin with the impression that the bay area was perhaps the most awful thing I had ever seen--strip malls, Starbucks, and on the "good" streets there would be a Restoration Hardware. Everywhere I looked, my first thought was "Do not want!" I would never live in a place like that.

Then we got into YC, and I had another look around, and it turns out there are little pockets of nice living on the peninsula. The downtown Mountain View area is great, as long as piece and quiet are positive attributes for you. It lacks the suburban sprawl and mini-malls of Sunnyvale and Santa Clara (the Rengstorff/Showers area excepted), and actually has a very walkable central core. And, I guess in 12 years a lot of good restaurants can happen, as there are at least a dozen good places on Castro and a few good ones sprinkled about in the rest of town (Amber India, for example). The library is awe-inspiring, the parks are numerous and just crowded enough to be interesting, and there are two little Asian markets within walking distance. I always see dozens of people walking when I'm out. There is a patch of soulless hell at the distant end of Castro, where the Starbucks and other polished up corporate turds reside, but one can avoid it easily (just stop and turn around at City Hall).

menloparkbum4• 18 years ago

San Jose is not a nice looking place. However, the locals are pretty cool. There are nicer places on the peninsula and in the south bay, if you are looking for suburbs. Menlo Park, San Mateo, Mtn. View, Palo Alto etc.

ardit335• 18 years ago

While nice people, I would say the locals in SJ are "provincial" people, mostly boring.

Anybody that is interesting and that has traveled a bit, will avoid that hellhole at any cost.

And let's not mention the fakery of places like Santana Row. It is almost comical.

Addition: Call me crazy, but I think that living in a boring enviroment, might make one boring, over time. Just as boring jobs affect a person's brain, there is a chance that living in a place where there is little human interaction, (car driving everywhere), might affect a person in the long run. No matter how strong a individual is, the enviroment around affects us a great deal.

Live in a interesting place, where there is a lot going on, might affect creativity in the good way.

abstractwater• 18 years ago

I agree, San Jose is too spread out for my taste: it's like a giant suburb. I lived in San Jose for about a year (Glenview neighborhood) and for pretty much everything I had to take the car.

I find the East Bay much more livable, in particular the nice parts of Oakland and Berkeley. Streets seem to be designed for pedestrians (or bicyclists) instead of cars. Plus the weather rarely gets in the 90s, which is invaluable for me.

jsjenkins168• 18 years ago

After living in the SV area for a while, how would you now compare it to Austin? I'm considering the exact move soon myself. I love Austin, but dont think the atmosphere is as conducive for young hackers trying to start a business. Its a bit hard to stay motivated when people around you dont take what you are doing very seriously.

SwellJoe4• 18 years ago

The downtown Mountain View area feels like a much smaller, much less cool, version of the downtown Austin area...The houses were built around the same time as those found just past the river on South Congress, I think (though there are some Hyde Park/Travis Heights era houses around as well, the 50's and 60's is when Mountain View boomed and most houses in the downtown area were built). The restaurants and shops on Castro street are, as on Congress and 4th-6th streets in Austin, independently owned and of uniformly high quality. Not as quirky or as diverse, but perfectly acceptable, unless you want a decent dive bar or rock and roll club (of which Austin is the capital of the world), as neither is well-represented in Mountain View.

There is nothing like the river and Lake Travis, and the parks that surround it, in Mountain View proper...but one is compensated by being less than two hours from some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. Big Sur is an easy weekend road trip away.

There is no music scene, of course, though San Francisco has a pretty good one and it's only 45 minutes away by car or train.

Mountain View is not nearly as dog-friendly as Austin, though I've been told it is more dog-friendly than most places in the region, and folks are shocked when I seem put out by the unfriendliness of the city to my dog. Finding a place to live if you have a dog (I mean a proper dog...one that gets into the jeep or the boat under its own power rather than being lifted or by riding around in a handbag) can be a challenge. Even if an apartment allows dogs, there's usually a 25-35 pound limit.

I was also disappointed to find that dogs are banned from downtown during any of the many street festivals. Not only does this make the festival less enjoyable (dogs are funny and a great ice breaker), it also means I can't have a proper walk with my dog on the weekends when they have the festivals. Folks don't often understand the meaning of "dog-friendly" until they've spent some time in Austin.

It's more expensive to live here--housing in modest areas is about 50% more expensive than the best areas of Austin. And there is no HEB or Central Market. Whole Foods has made it out, though, and there is an amazingly great little produce and cheese market called the Milk Pail.

Overall, I enjoy living here. I miss some things about Austin, and will probably retire there. But, living in the valley has been good for our business in dramatic ways.

tx• 18 years ago

Last time I've been to Silicon Valley it was 2003 and I hated it: the place had no soul compared to our beloved Austin. Then I got hired by a kick-ass Austin startup staffed by some ex-SV (and ex-Seattle) residents who acted like moving to Austin was the best move they ever did.

Fast forward to 08 and I have started to think about moving to SV again due to supposedly better "startup climate" and my recent trip to the startup school cured me again: no way in hell I'll ever live there, despite their 200+ VCs and "energy" that PS was writing about: that's not enough to compensate for the overall dullness. Silicon Valley simply isn't inspiring: one of the reasons I want to work for myself is because I despise the corporate environment (walls of cubicles). Guess what - the entire SV feels like a wall of cubicles, even when you're not at work.

pg• 18 years ago

Pockets of nice is exactly the way to put it. There are a lot of nice bits of Palo Alto. It was a college town before it was engulfed in the wave of suburbia spreading down the peninsula in the 1950s and 60s. There are some nice bits of Mountain View too.

strlen• 18 years ago

Seconded. Moving from San Jose to Mountain View had been an enormous increase in quality of life. I'd leave Castro Street second only to Shattuck Avenue (in Berkeley) in terms of affordable, excellent ethnic cuisine. There's even a used book store on Castro (though it pales in comparison to Moe's on telegraph).

rantfoil• 18 years ago

Wow, I don't know what it was like when jwz wrote this (12 years ago?) but these days Palo Alto is the epicenter of mediocre expensive food. Mountain View, however, has some really great ethnic food for cheap, especially on Castro Street.

The other thing that people don't really know until they've lived here is that you typically don't have to live in suburban hell so long as you know where the "main drags" are. The peninsula / south bay used to be all orchards with "main streets". Today there's a "main street" in nearly every city that is worth living near -- walking distance, and only a slight premium (University Ave excluded, thanks to Facebook). Santa Cruz Ave in Menlo Park, Castro St in Mountain View, 4th St in San Mateo, and California St in Palo Alto come to mind.

axod• 18 years ago

Palo Alto has taxis, cpk, cheesecake factory, that wraps place. All nice enough. Not to mention the creamery. Also it has a borders and Apple store.

Out of all the towns in the area I'd choose Palo Alto every time.

comatose_kid4• 18 years ago

Palo Alto is nice. Los Gatos is a little nicer to me - I like the hills.

Downtown Campbell is also nice (with a great farmers market).

mlinsey• 18 years ago

Agreed in spirit though I disagree completely with your actual list. What's with all the mediocre mega-chains? How about Paxti's, gyros gyros, Homma's Brown Rice Sushi, the Counter, Vino Locale? A bit of a walk north will take you to Cafe Borrone and Jan's Deli, the latter of which happens to have one of the greatest turkey sandwiches ever. If you have a car and you venture away from trendy downtown PA you can find some pretty good authentic taquerias as well as any variety of Asian you would want....

...Damn, I need to move back to the Bay Area.

ericb2• 18 years ago

Hold up. Living in Boston, I can say that winter is just not that fun. I can't say, go for an enjoyable jog, for at least 4.5 months of the year. I basically hibernate for 5 months of the year. This is true for large swaths of the northern US. Is it really so bad in CA, or is the grass always greener?

sabat3• 18 years ago

The grass is always greener. In CA (for the most part) the climate is mild and you could jog all year without much trouble.

Funny aside: CA is also one of the most varied states in climate. There are places that are under snow for 4-7 months of the year; you'd think you were in WI or MN except there are mountains.

menloparkbum4• 18 years ago

I've lived in Boston (Allston and Cambridge). Weather in San Jose trumps Boston winters for sure. However, Boston proper in the summer is better than San Jose in the summer. If you grew up elsewhere, one thing you may miss is hot, steamy summers. The weather in the Bay area is almost always a little bit chilly. In San Francisco, the weather in the summer is actually colder than it is during the rest of the year.

breck• 18 years ago

You can't beat summers in Boston. But ericb is right, winter's in Boston are terrible. Not going outside for more than an hour for 5 months is no fun.

tokipin• 18 years ago

i love san jose, and the whole bay area. i feel so deprived not being in cali right now. i would state reasons but i don't really know them. my best guess is the mesh of civilization and nature. the hills are so beautiful, the trees are lush, starbucks is on every corner yay!

mynameishere• 18 years ago

http://www.morganquitno.com/cit07pop.htm#25

Safest city >500,000 population.

run4yourlives4• 18 years ago

Safest City in US < Most violent anywhere else.

Point being it's all relative, hence next to meaningless. :-)

hugh3• 18 years ago

Safest City in US < Most violent anywhere else.

Johannesburg? Rio? Manila? Bogota? London? Honiara?

mattmaroon8• 18 years ago

After living near SJ, I'm not surprised at that. It's incredibly wealthy for a city that large.

mjterave• 18 years ago

What's with all the hate for the South Bay?

Seriously, I see posts like this from people in San Francisco all the time. I understand that they like where they live, but why the seething hatred for San Jose? Nobody's making them go there. :)

Does this sort of whining happen in other metro areas too?

p_alexander3• 18 years ago

Definitely. The North Side/South Side fighting in Chicago was pretty crazy to see after coming from California, especially as the borders seem to be drawn on socio-economical/racial lines.

mhartl2• 18 years ago

Indeed. The phrase "hater in the house!" kept running through my head. If you live in a place you hate, shut up and move. If you don't, just shut up.

sah• 18 years ago

If everyone shuts up, how are people supposed to figure out where to move to? I hate the idea that no one should ever be critical of anything.

cstejerean• 18 years ago

bashing on the alternatives allows people to feel better about the choices they've made.

ardit335• 18 years ago

or perhaps bashing in a very wasteful lifestyle, narrowminded way of thinking, and unsutainable in the long run, when your choices to build strip malls, and drive everywhere with big trucks, contribute to global warming, geopolitical instability for the securing of oil, which affects people in the city as well.

Ah, and let's not mention all the money wasted in health care b/c of people in the suburbs, that move only by car, are more likeley to be living a sedentary life style, *being fat, and all the health problems that come with it.

Remember, Europeans live mostly in nice cities, they spend half of the gas, and create about 1/3rd of the trash of americans do, but yet they have pretty good lifestyles (and if measured by longivity, or healthiness, probably better lifestyles).

comatose_kid4• 18 years ago

I live near San Jose, and I agree with jwz - the South Bay isn't exactly a shining testament to beauty. There are pockets of habitability (I'd like to think I live in one, but of course I'm biased), but that's about it.

p_alexander3• 18 years ago

San Jose, like any major US city, has its awesome points and its disgusting monstrosities (Santana Row, I'm talking to you). And come on, San Francisco has its share of fake and cliche (North Beach? Haight? The area around PacBell Park?).

Since the link focused on the negatives, I'll throw some positives out there (coming from a San Jose native who has lived in SF, LA, Chicago, and now Morgan Hill - mushroom capital of the world).

1. There are some cool little neighborhoods in the San Jose metropolitan area: Willow Glen, Rose Garden/Burbank, Campbell, Saratoga, Almaden Valley.

2. Good ethnic food, especially from Latin America, Vietnam, India, and China. Even some good fine dining opportunities (La Foret in New Almaden comes to mind).

3. A great Latino/Chicano cultural scene.

4. Decent transit that's been getting better (much, much better than LA, lagging a little behind SF and WAY behind Chicago/New York).

5. Retail tech stores all over (even SF lacks this).- Central Computer, any number of Fry's.

6. A developing downtown. If you'd been here ten years ago, this place was dead. If you'd been here 20 years ago...well, you wouldn't have been downtown. The fact that you can go there at night at all now is AMAZING considering what this place was like when I was a kid. It's fairly jumping now, with a decent selection of restaurants and good parking.

7. Cheaper than SF by a bunch.

San Jose is great, especially if you aren't into the trendy hipster scene and don't mind heading into "scary" (aka non-Anglo) parts of town like East San Jose, Little Saigon, etc.

mattmaroon8• 18 years ago

Lot of Santana Row hating here. I liked the place. Some people just like nice things and convenience, and Santana Row has plenty of both. It doesn't necessarily make you "fake" or materialistic.

I personally enjoyed having a Brooks Brothers, a Diesel, a Cole Haan, and a Tommy Bahama store all next to each other. Mix in some decent (though overpriced) restaurants, and it's altogether a nice place. I did have to be sure to route my wife around the Donald J. Pliner shop though.

I guess maybe it's just due to the inordinate amount of time I spent in Las Vegas, but I find it fairly easy to coexist peacefully with the materialist mindset, and simply take advantage of the perks while opting out of the pseudo-religion. You can like nice stuff without that defining you.

ardit335• 18 years ago

Santana row is a cheap immitation of a city street. The immitation of italian architecture is really gawdy and cheesy and very aethestic displeasing. The people that go there are also have a certain attitude, that is far from simple and humble, but more of a show off type.

Santana row is a clear manifestation on what's wrong with modern american architecture.

Please travel to other countries, to see real town centers with real people (that are not trying to show off).

p_alexander3• 18 years ago

I agree, in terms of convenience for higher-end shopping it's nice. I'm more concerned about the erosion of true public space (as in a public plaza, square, city streets, etc) and the conflation of such space with purely commercial zones. I know of at least one dense "new urban" development (University Villages in Marina, CA) that includes a plaza owned by the developer, which allows them to outright ban people, demonstrations, gatherings, or at the very least make it prohibitively restrictive when trying to plan or hold such events.

As a shopping mall, it's great. As a neighborhood, which it certainly aspires to, it sucks.

neilk• 18 years ago

San Jose does indeed look like the most godforsaken sprawl. This town is more populous than San Francisco and yet people still refer to SF as "the city".

However, if you live here, you'll find that it's not quite that simple. There are creative and life-affirming things here, but the only architecture that's available is the strip-mall, so that's what people use. For my money, the best coffeehouse in the entire area (including places like Ritual in San Francisco) is located in an unassuming strip mall in Santa Clara, next to a big-box TV retailer. (http://barefootcoffeeroasters.com/).

And there are vibrant immigrant populations here, particularly Vietnamese, and they bring their cuisine with them. San Francisco itself is so expensive that it's getting older, richer, and more ethnically homogenous all the time. Pretty soon it's going to be just twentysomething white trustafarians and fortysomething white management consultants.

But that just barely modifies jwz's critique. For now, if you want to feel like your soul is enriched just by walking down the street, you have to live in SF. If you want a place to put your bed and TV, live in San Jose.

mattmaroon8• 18 years ago

I mostly feel my soul endangered, rather than enriched, when I walk down the street there. Someone assaulted my wife the first time we visited (long before I joined YC). I wasn't around, but thankfully a passerby helped out.

That's undoubtedly atypical though. I think it's relatively safe for a city its size.

dgentry• 18 years ago

If thats what he thought in 1996, I wonder what the 2008 version would say?

sealedidentity• 18 years ago

San Jose is heaven compared to anywhere in NJ. That place reeks, ancient infrastructure, tolls everywhere, dirt everywhere and not to mention awful weather for the better part of the year. I'd rather live in the Bay Area with more expenses on the same pay than anywhere else in the east coast. Although, I concur Austin, Vegas and Phoenix are fantastic places to live.

natrius2• 18 years ago

Tolls are a bad thing? God forbid people pay for the roads they drive on. Free highways are a huge cause of the Bay Area's sprawl.

natrius2• 18 years ago

Hm... I thought we only downmodded comments that didn't add to the discussion here, but it looks like people just disagree with me. Care to explain why instead of just downmodding?

iamtooch• 18 years ago

Places that grow really fast are going to have trouble building a gracious old downtown with lots of character. I moved here from New York State 25 years ago, having grown up and gone to school in little towns and small cities with tons of character and no jobs. When I got here, it was obvious that outside of SF and legacy downtowns, most of the rest of the peninsula and south bay had been built in a continuous pour from about 1950 to today.

Relax. LA looks like that. Phoenix looks like that in spades. Suburban Seattle looks like that. Kansas City. Atlanta. Urban Texas. It's what places look like when people are moving there as fast as they can to get jobs and raise families (and spend money and pay taxes, I might add). It's an uptown problem. As the south bay ages, and infill and redesign happen here and there, the area will develop [more] character and idiosyncracies. But for now it's pretty sweet living in one of the most dynamic places in human history.

By the way, there are very nearby places where you can live in the country or in the city, and still commute fairly easily to your job, but I'm not going to spoil them. Look around.

talleyrand• 18 years ago

You all ought to move to New Orleans. No strip malls, the best food in the world, and plenty of fun. It's just as good as anywhere for coding....

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

Atlanta has some very nice places. Little Five Points, Virginia Highlands, and West End all have lots of character. I had a friend who was a trapeze hobbyist stay at a cheap and huge repurposed warehouse (I wouldn't quite say "refurbished") on the west side. She had her trapeze rope strung up in a cavernous main room with brick walls decorated with her friends' art. She had bitchin' parties at which she would get a little drunk and perform (not the smartest idea, but entertaining).

Sure, you have to drive places in Atlanta. We just had more people crash at our place after going out, or we would crash at theirs. The music scene is healthy, if you care about that sort of thing. People are friendly. And I paid $340/month in rent in 2005 (that is not a typo).

The food is great. I have yet to experience anything quite like it outside of New York, and NY can't match the prices. The Vortex serves the best burgers this side of the grave, and Highland Bakery has a shrimp and grits with a spicy cheddar sauce that cannot be described in any earthly tongue.

Add in a very international flavor, 2 of the 10 gayest counties in America (Sorry to stereotype, but any city without a gay population probably sucks. They sense backwards boring closed-minded people and stay away.), and you have one cool city.

I can't speak for Atlanta's start-up scene, but gawd, what a city. I hear Austin is better, but Atlanta is like a mini-Austin from what I can tell.

rtf• 18 years ago

Last Sunday I walked through San Jose, about five or six miles.

I got sunburned.

motoko• 18 years ago

"New" Mountain View on Castro Street is OK. It's not SF, but there are now decent restaurants, two bookstores (the used bookstore is fantastic), and acceptable (not good) independent cafes. It's also near the train station.

mattmaroon8• 18 years ago

Wow is he wrong about Sushi. It's quite easy to screw it up, and I have a few friends with hospital trips to prove it.

berecruited• 18 years ago

Very funny read - mostly because of the hyperbole and awesome formatting (including dead links). That said, I don't exactly agree with any of it!

pl0nk• 18 years ago

You are surprised that a webpage from 1996 has dead links? I am more surprised that any of the off-site ones work.

San Jose is hell on earth

Related Stories