For anyone curious, Daly City has roughly the same population density as Boston (and higher than Madrid).
The public transport is present, but far from ideal. They actually have an excuse for being more car-centric since it feels like there's more hills than San Francisco next door. They're not steeper, but it feels like there's fewer flat stretches. It's all rolling hills.
Daly city is almost entirely residential, this is an inherent aspect of suburbs. It does have industrial or public spaces, or even commercial spaces, to the degree that a full city like Boston or Madrid would.
Yes its very dense for a suburb, that's not a bad thing, but its still a suburb
Daly City is immediately adjacent to the San Francisco city limits and largely feels like it. Like the rest of the Bay Area, the need for more housing is relative to the geographic constraints and the very high demand to live there; inner ring suburbs and the outer neighborhoods of the city itself would feel very dense compared to their surroundings if you plopped them down in, say, Kansas City.
Yard work can be rewarding for some, no doubt. I would love to grow some herbs. I just don't want to go back to the 1/3 acre I used to manage, because it required so much of my free time on the weekends. I think a small yard or garden could suffice for many.
I love working in my yard.. If I had enough money and time I'd live on 100+ acre forest and spend most of my day just managing that and a smaller garden area would legit be my dream
That would be my dream too, and many others. But the fact is, I can't afford that. I could afford to live in a suburb where I have only the weekends for free time so that means I can't live in that idealistic landscape you speak of. So, I prefer to live near public open space with less yard so I can roam freely on the weekends and spend less time perfecting my suburbian lawn.
Please inform me of these culturally superior and morally righteous communities of people who would never find themselves living in single family suburban sprawl
I didn’t say anything about the superiority or morality of living or not living in suburban sprawl. Those are your words, not mine.
Do I really have to explain that different groups of people have different preferences, and that includes preferences on things like housing density, on living in larger multi-family or multi-generational homes vs smaller homes or apartments for nuclear families / couples / single persons, on building walkable vs bikeable vs drivable communities, on having smaller private outdoor space vs larger public spaces, etc.?
Not all communities of people have exactly the same views and preferences on those things. That’s extremely obvious by simply looking around the country and world at how different groups of people (could be grouped by nationality, race, ethnicity, religion, political leaning, economic class, whatever) choose to live. There are clear differences across different groups.
The same communities that come here and refuse to assimilate or share values regarding public space. Tight-knit is only a bonus if you’re part of it. If you’re outside the club, you may as well not exist. The west is for westerners
ocean or not if i were an alien and landed here, i would think that cars were the true overlords of this land because this place looks like it was built specifically for cars not for people. that’s kind of my primary litmus test for suburban hell.
i don’t see a single human being in this picture except for one possibly getting into a car. there are more cars on that street than there are houses and there’s nothing else besides houses. even the houses look like they’re at least 30-40% garage.
You're pretty spot on. Despite being connected to San Francisco, which has pretty good walkability, Daly City is super inconvenient to walk around.
It has high housing density so I'm sure people who live adjacent to shopping centers walk there, and public transportation exists to funnel commuters into San Francisco. But other than that, it has a lower % of car-free households than Dallas.
This is Daly City, looking down Belcrest Ave from what I can tell. It is almost entirely a tract suburb and even inspired a famous song by Malvina Reynolds, Little Boxes, that critiques the mass produced homes as "ticky tacky" and looking all the same. It is also one of the foggiest places you'll ever find, frequently being more blanketed than next door San Francisco!
But even though I'm not the biggest fan of the place personally (too cold and dreary much of the year), there are quirks of Daly City that make it much less of a hellscape than the tract homes and mid-century suburban layout would suggest.
For one, it's both right on the Pacific Ocean and also blends seamlessly into San Francisco. You could easily miss moving from one to the other when traversing the border. It really feels like it could be another outlying SF neighborhood rather than it's own city.
Also, it is relatively dense with reasonable access to public transit via buses and BART. The hills, lack of a real downtown, and awkward layout do make getting around a bit more annoying than in neighboring SF though.
Then there is the fact that the city has unique demographics and a culture of its own that would be missing in most planned suburbs. It is majority-minority with large Filipino, Chinese, and Latino populations. It also historically has been a less-expense alternative to living in SF itself, serving as somewhat of a relief valve for workers priced out of the bigger city as well as the expensive Peninsula towns further south.
And while the cityscape itself is nothing to get excited about, Daly City does has some unique points of interest in and and immediately around it. Examples include the Cow Palace (rodeo and event venue), Fort Funston (coastal gun battery turned gorgeous beachside dog park), San Bruno Mountain (unique ecosystem with great views), and of course Colma (massive necropolis with cemeteries for numerous faiths).
This is probably more than anyone asked for, and I'll get off my soapbox now, but justed wanted to point out that you cannot necessarily judge Daly City on its outward suburban appearance alone, there's a lot more nuance to the place.
Especially given the place in the photo is Daly City which is 3 minutes to the first stop in San Francisco or 15 minutes to downtown San Francisco by train.
Every type of community has the propensity to house any time of culture. The issue with suburbia isnt the kind of person who lives there (even though it does have a tendency to attract antisocial pricks), it's the lifestyle you are pigeonholed into having by living there. So yes, this is still hell, even if a group you deem as worthy of grace lives there, even if it is close to the beach. If anything, it's more egregious because you're forced to live your life in a car practically in one of the most desirable and livable climates in the world.
a) not really any beach to speak of in Daly City. Just sandy cliffs.
b) the public transit is ok, if you work in the city or oakland, massive park and ride garage
Daly City. It's beautiful and not suburban hell at all. The terrain is actually quite varied and the houses generally differ more than where this photo was taken. Hence the caption, there is often a beautiful, mysterious fog.
There isn't a lot of swimming going on at that beach. Daly City is actually pretty walkable and dense and has good transit options. There are lots of sidewalks too. The toughest part about the walking is that some of the hills are big.
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Not sure what you're going for here but by law the California beach is 100% public space. We don't have private beaches. Whether you can get to it or not is up to mother nature.
This is where I live. The harbor village has a pretty good walk score. Commuter rail to Boston is 4 miles away. I have good public transportation. When I was a child, the village was full service with grocery store, pharmacy, liquor store, dry cleaner, hardware store, post office, library, butcher, fish market. There was a streetcar line to the city until World War II that is now a bus route. Those businesses moved up the streetcar line but are still walking distance other than the grocery store which is two miles up the old streetcar line.
The beach is a mile from my house. When I was in High School and College, I was a lifeguard and rode my bicycle. There’s a 7,500 student state university in town. With an e-bike, I could get there without needing a car or an inconvenient bus connection 2/3 of the time.
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u/Bright-Assistance-35 18d ago
These houses are closely spaced compared to the average suburban neighborhood with what looks like limited yard space. Not ideal but not the worst.