Are you going to San Francisco.....

...be sure to stick some flowers up your nose, as apparently it stinks - sez Gawker, quoting Twitter staffer Alex Payne' blog post on said subject:

After giving the city credit for its weather, food, cocktails, coffee and tech scene, Payne moves on to the reasons he desperately wants to ditch San Francisco for the uber-trendy hipster haven of Portland, Oregon "once I'm able to work remotely with confidence:"

- an annoying surplus of superifical and narcissistic well-to-do white nerds;
- crime;
- human waste and other filth in the streets;
- streets choked with homeless people;
- terrible mass transit;
- "mediocre" cultural offerings;
- hollowed out neighborhoods with weak architecture.

And then there are the ones that hit [Mayor] Newsom where it hurts. Though the mayor was first elected in 2003 on a promise to improve the homeless situation, Payne complains that

- "the city government seem[s] to accept these circumstances..."
- and about "Generally poor urban/civic planning"

And I just thought SF had a city byelaw to put a wino on every street corner

Now the reason this interests me is not because of this post per se, but because I recall reading a few years ago that for cities to attract the new intelligentsia/wealthy/nice people etc, they had to have a number of things going for them - Richard Florida's book "Cities and the Creative Class"was a manifesto for the movement, citing the key drivers being the "3 T's" - tolerance, talent, and technology:

San Francisco seemed to have all that, and yet - for example I quote Paul Graham's post on this topic:

At the moment, San Francisco's message seems to be the same as Berkeley's: you should live better. But this will change if enough startups choose SF over the Valley. During the Bubble that was a predictor of failure—a self-indulgent choice, like buying expensive office furniture. Even now I'm suspicious when startups choose SF. But if enough good ones do, it stops being a self-indulgent choice, because the center of gravity of Silicon Valley will shift there.

Now to be fair, this zeitgeist has come under increasing attack over the last few years, and post crunch things have moved on - but we are seeing the backlash here in the UK too. People are all for talent, tolerance and technology - but they are far more against the "3 C's" it would seem - crap, crime and commuting hell, and "creative cities" neglect those basics at their peril.