Statistics tell us that the great majority of Americans, over 80 %, now live in the city, in urban areas as opposed to living in the country, in rural areas….What does it mean to live in a city today, especially a hustling, bustling cool hip metropolis of a city like San Francisco? Personally, I love it…Because basically, whatever you are looking for, you can find it here…

San Francisco is rightfully famous for it’s rich tradition of musical creativity and virtuosity….Besides being the birthplace of the San Francisco hippie rock revolution during the Summer of Love back in 1967, there are still hundreds of clubs that present an array of eclectic music every night…

The original Fillmore Auditorium from that era is still thriving, and other blues and jazz club venues like “Slims,” run by Boz Scaggs, the former rhythm guitar player for the old Steve Miller Blues Band, “The Great American Music Hall,” “Bimbos’ 365,” and “The Bottom of The Hill” are clubs that spring immediately to my mind, not to mention the world class Davies Symphony Hall for the more classically oriented music lovers….

And the restaurants are world class, the diversity and ingenuity and food trends that start here are soon mirrored all over the country, like: “Alice Waters, chef, author, and the proprietor of originally Berkeley based Chez Panisse, is an American pioneer of a culinary philosophy that maintains that cooking should be based on the finest and freshest seasonal ingredients that are produced sustainably and locally.” Her revolutionary at the time concepts have been embraced all over the country by now, but she is a true innovator…….

There is a restaurant in San Francisco for every 376 people, the highest ratio in the country…..Classic restaurants like the Tadich Grill, Swans Oyster Depot, the Tonga room, all still exist…Not to mention the hundreds of exotic restaurants scattered throughout the city featuring Chinese, Thai, Japanese, Mexican, Filipino and many other ethnic foods that all abound in the at least 36 different neighborhoods that comprise the city …

San Francisco is also internationally known as a place that is extremely tolerant of different life styles, like gays and lesbians and transgender people, to each his own, we say…The Gay Freedom Parade, the Gay Film Festival, the Folsom Street Fair, the Carnaval Festival, the Castro Street Fair and all of the many storied bars and life styles in the Castro District makes San Francisco a world wide well known gay mecca familiar to all…

And to stress the point again, San Franciscan’s generally believe in live and let live, it is just that kind of a city….We currently have a population of approximately 825,000 and we all mostly live by that philosophy…..

In fact, one of the first thing I notice when I walk out my door every day is the incredible diversity in the people you see on the streets outside every day…We have all kinds of different people living here, different races, different ethnic groups, different life styles etc…

According to my Google sources, in 2012 the largest ethnic group was still whites, at 45% followed very closely by Asians at 36% and Hispanics at 16%….African Americans account for only 5.6% of the population of San Francisco….Again, these figures are a few years old and I am sure that the Asian and Hispanic communities have grown since this survey was taken…

For example, I live in the Sunset District in San Francisco, and just from personal observation I would say that the neighborhood I live in is predominantly Asian….I grew up in Chicago, and back then in the 1950’s and 1960’s the ethnic composition of Chicago was predominantly white, but with a very strong African American population as well…These were basically the only two ethnic groups extant back then, back there, back when…I saw Hispanic people, but not that many and I personally never even SAW an Asian person except on TV until I was 16!

The Hispanic population is growing rapidly too, although more Hispanics live in the southern part of the state, either in Los Angeles or the Central Valley, although many do live in San Francisco as well…. According to a report issued by the US census, as of July 2015 Hispanics have become the majority in the state, the single largest ethnic group in the state of California, at a projected 39%, with whites a close second at 38.5%, Asians at 13% and African Americans at 5.7%..

San Francisco is a city know for it’s tolerance, and I can’t speak about what is going on in the rest of California, but I LOVE living here….Everybody gets along quite well in my mostly Asian, mostly quiet neighborhood, and there are very few incidents of street violence or crime…In fact my neighborhood was ranked among the safest in all of San Francisco by a recent police breakdown of crimes committed by district in the city….

It’s true, this is basically a residential neighborhood, with a high preponderance of owner occupied homes, and the prices for rental units are scandalously high, because of the geographic limitations of the city….We occupy only 49 square miles, and the supply of affordable housing and apartments is among the countries highest!

One bedroom apartments in San Francisco rent for $3002 a month on average and two bedroom apartment rents average $4040 according to a recent renter survey…It is the old law of supply and demand…

In my neighborhood in the Sunset District we are all kind of tucked away in the far western corner of the city, close to the beach and so we all live on the edge of the Western world…If you peer out across the ocean you can imagine the teeming countries of Japan and China far across the beautiful blue waves of the Pacific ocean…San Francisco is a visually stunning, vibrant community of all kinds of people, and most of us realize how lucky we are to have the moderate weather patterns that we do.

We are not plagued with the vicious snowstorms and blizzards of the East coast winters, nor are we tortured and made miserable by the searing summer heat of most of the rest of the country…In fact, in San Francisco, there are really only two seasons, not the traditional four seasons of spring, summer, winter and fall…

We just have the dry season, which is like 9 months out of the year, where the temperatures are generally in the 60’s all day long and the 50’s at night, or the wet season, the winter, where the temperature is more like in the 50’s in the day and 40’s at night…The current California drought and the universal global warming trends are skewing these figures lately, but all in all we have nothing to complain about as far as the weather goes…

In fact, the moderate weather was the main reason I left my birthplace of Chicago, because I know first hand growing up there how the weather affects your mood, your attitude, your thoughts, your choices of things to do, your relationships, just about everything is dominated by the weather….Here in San Francisco, the weather is mainly an afterthought, and you know what? I LIKE it like that, and so do all of my fellow San Franciscans!

I think a quote from the Urban Dictionary sums it all up best:

“San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality!”