"an expensive, grubby place wth bad weather"

[randomness]

From Cities and Ambition:

Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.

The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.

What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to.

I'd always imagined Berkeley would be the ideal place—that it would basically be Cambridge with good weather. But when I finally tried living there a couple years ago, it turned out not to be. The message Berkeley sends is: you should live better. Life in Berkeley is very civilized. It's probably the place in America where someone from Northern Europe would feel most at home. But it's not humming with ambition.

In retrospect it shouldn't have been surprising that a place so pleasant would attract people interested above all in quality of life. Cambridge with good weather, it turns out, is not Cambridge. The people you find in Cambridge are not there by accident. You have to make sacrifices to live there. It's expensive and somewhat grubby, and the weather's often bad. So the kind of people you find in Cambridge are the kind of people who want to live where the smartest people are, even if that means living in an expensive, grubby place with bad weather.

And from footnote [3]: How many times have you read about startup founders who continued to live inexpensively as their companies took off? Who continued to dress in jeans and t-shirts, to drive the old car they had in grad school, and so on? If you did that in New York, people would treat you like shit. If you walk into a fancy restaurant in San Francisco wearing a jeans and a t-shirt, they're nice to you; who knows who you might be? Not in New York.

One sign of a city's potential as a technology center is the number of restaurants that still require jackets for men. According to Zagat's there are none in San Francisco, LA, Boston, or Seattle, 4 in DC, 6 in Chicago, 8 in London, 13 in New York, and 20 in Paris.

(Also, the comments are amusing, particularly for the one-line descriptions of places.)

Comments

[contrariety.livejournal.com]

This was interesting, actually, but then at the end I got rubbed all the wrong way be his comments on Berkeley. I mean, the thing I've decided about Berkeley is that it isn't really a city. It's two cities, Oakland and the Berkeley Hills, and in between them is a college campus with a largely self-contained community. I'm not sure which he's talking about; I think it's the hills. Berkeley the entity is therefore a little schizophrenic (joke totally intended.) It's like you smushed Scarsdale and New Haven together, and then Scarsdale sort of tried to respect New Haven and listen to its values, with limited success. I think what I'm trying to say here is that his summary is too simplistic.

Also, he describes Cambridge as expensive, grubby, and with bad weather, but only one of those things is different from Berkeley. I think he overestimates the ease of living in Berkeley and underestimates the ease of living in Cambridge. Sure, we have nice weather here, but we also have insane people regularly accosting you on the street and violent crime a block from campus. I mean, I like Berkeley, but it's not *that* easy. And I like Cambridge, but if you have the money to live in Cambridge in the first place (unless you're doing it in the rough parts), acting like living in Cambridge is some sort of character-forming hardship is a little... near-sighted.

[awfief.livejournal.com]

Sure, we have nice weather here, but we also have insane people regularly accosting you on the street and violent crime a block from campus.

This isn't different from Cambridge, other than the "nice weather" bit.

[contrariety.livejournal.com]

Sure; my point was not that Berkeley is, liek, totally worse dude, but that the two cities are much more comparable in terms of ease-of-living than the author was suggesting. We're not some hippy paradise where everything is peaceful and, as the author puts it "civilized."

That said, I will say that after living in both places, the violent crime risk around here strikes me as comparable but the "crazy people accosting you on the street" factor is meaningfully worse.

[bwilder.livejournal.com]

A symptom of the better weather, no doubt. :)

[contrariety.livejournal.com]

Heh. Yeah, Berkeley is almost certainly a more homeless-person-friendly place from a weather point of view. But it's also that Berkeley has an unusually permissive attitude toward people that many cities make an active effort to keep out of sight and away from people. I don't actually disapprove of this from a policy standpoint, but it is annoying and occasionally frightening from a living experience standpoint.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I mean, there's Camberville the place where we all lived, and then there's all the rest of it: Sullivan Square, that nasty bit of Cambridge (Area 4?), and that industrial bit along the McGrath. None of it is what he's talking about.

Similarly--and I think you make reference to it--South Berkeley, down past Ashby BART, starts to look a lot like Oakland. (For that matter, the bits of Oakland up in the hills start to look like the Berkeley Hills.)

I think in both cases he's talking about the people and places the ambitious professionals might live in, so I suspect he's comparing Camberville with the Berkeley Hills.