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Originally Posted by bugs
The Castro business district may be somewhat small, but it is really dense, much more than Philly. It is also right next to the Mission, and you can walk down Market St towards downtown if you want more businesses. I don't really see what you're talking about.
I agree SF can have an annoying smugness factor, but the fact is that most people, black or white, cannot afford to live anywhere near the Castro. However, there are a lot of black people in a lot of neighborhoods in San Francisco. They are not all in Oakland. The western addition is a very diverse mix of black and white. The Mission is a diverse mix of latino and everything else. The Sunset and Richmond are a diverse mix of white and asian.
I'm not gay, nor have I been to Seattle, but I have spent a lot of time in the Castro, and it is definitely the gayest place I've ever seen.
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Right next to the Mission?
I have a friend (ex-West Chesterite who I met when he was a grad student at Penn and I was working there; we've been friends ever since he lost all the ones he had when he was diagnosed with HIV and I stayed in touch with him) who lives near 18th and Valencia. It's not that long a walk to the Castro from there -- about 10 minutes or so to the west -- but it's another 10 minutes to the east from there to Mission Street, and from Mission to Castro, it's uphill. Walking distances in San Francisco have a vertical dimension to them as well, and what might be a short walk here becomes a trek there, at least in one direction.
I rode the F-Market streetcar its entire length. Yeah, there is some gay presence along that street between Castro and Church (the next stop down on the MUNI Metro, about 8 blocks away), but it didn't look like I was in the gay district along that stretch. Are San Franciscans that indefatigable as walkers? Downtown is at least 3 miles from the Castro. (The entire city is roughly a 7-mile square; its total land area is 49 square miles.)
Hate to break this to you, but blacks make up only 6 percent of San Francisco's population -- down from 13 percent in 2000. There was a front-page story in the
Chronicle the Monday I spent gallivanting around town that contained this statistic and talked about how worried city officials were trying to stem this tide. Stranger still is this: the blacks who are leaving are the ones with the money.
Everything about San Francisco is more dense than comparable areas of Philadelphia. It is a very compact city. It's also got a spectacular location -- I can't think of any other city so gorgeously situated.
One other big difference: In San Fran, you're still more likely to run into people who moved there from elsewhere than you are in Philadelphia, even with the influx of outsiders to Center City and its immediate environs. Transplants -- especially those who move to a city by choice -- tend to be more outgoing and enthusiastic about their adopted homes than the natives are (though this is far from universal).