Why I dislike Berkeley
(Disclaimer: This is largely based on the personal experiences of me and my friends. Your mileage may vary.)
A lot of my friends live in Berkeley, California. Berkeley is a pretty nice place in some ways, and I’m not trying to knock them. But I wouldn’t want to live there. (If I moved to the Bay Area, I’d probably prefer San Francisco itself, or Silicon Valley further south.)
I think the main reason is, fundamentally, that Berkeley is not a free country . And not just in some abstract sense; it’s unfree in ways that are bloody annoying to live with every day.
Starting at the beginning, suppose you wanted to move to Berkeley. You’ll have to get a house or apartment. But what you’ll find is that there are so many regulations — no new construction, no raising prices, no kicking people out if they’ve already rented, no this, no that — that this becomes an exercise in frustration. Not many people want to rent, and those that are often aren’t allowed to. When I interned for Google, I kept applying for apartments during the whole length of my internship (three and a half months), but could never get one, and had to crash on people’s couches the whole summer. I had plenty of money — Google paid me a lot — but whenever I applied, there were always twenty other people applying too. Other friends have succeeded in getting Berkeley places, but only after months of headaches and searching.
What kind of apartment will you get? Berkeley has little high-density housing, because building new many-story apartment blocks isn’t allowed. This means that everything gets spread out, and most people live in suburban-style houses. No, there is (most likely) no grocery store within easy walking distance. That wouldn’t be allowed by zoning laws. So, you’ll probably need a car to get around. That’s annoying, but I’d roll with it; a lot of the US is like that.
… except that driving in Berkeley is, by regulation, inconvenient. Berkeley has modified its road grid by putting up barriers everywhere, a lot of which aren’t shown on maps. There’s actually an entire section of the Berkeley city website dedicated to finding new ways of blocking or slowing cars, and such blockages are everywhere. Berkeley, despite having more than a hundred thousand people (its BART stop is the sixth-busiest in the entire Bay Area), has no real highways. The downtown area is a good two and a half miles from the nearest interstate.
What about public transportation? You won’t find that either. The BART system is pretty fast, but it only makes three stops in Berkeley, and the stops are more than a mile apart; it’s effectively a commuter rail line to Oakland and SF. The buses often follow crazy routes, and are only about twice as fast as walking. Assuming, of course, that you happen to get there right when the bus shows up, and aren’t waiting for half an hour. And that the bus hasn’t stopped running because it’s after 8 PM.
All of this is supposedly done to encourage bicycling, but I’ve rarely seen actual bicyclists on the streets. Berkeley has special bicycle highways , but they are usually deserted except for a few joggers, at least when I’ve been there. The climate is actually pretty nice, so I’m not entirely sure why, but empirically it doesn’t seem to have worked.
If you manage to get to them, Berkeley really does have lots of nice restaurants… which almost all close early, by regulation. They’re also often in odd places (more zoning rules) — I have heard rumors, though I can’t confirm them, that the city blocked most new businesses to encourage people to use the “special shopping district” where well-connected people owned the real estate.
And it just goes on and on and on. Downtown is full of annoying homeless people, because of regulations that prevent them from being removed. Parking is annoying (to be fair, many cities have this problem) because of all the parking regulations. About the only regulations that aren’t enforced are the rules against pot — just walking around outdoors, I’ve often smelled weed drifting through the air. I’m all in favor of ending the War on Drugs, but cities have anti-smoking regulations for a reason, and I don’t see why those rules shouldn’t be enforced against weed too.
To sum up, to quote The Lord of the Rings : “If I hear not allowed much oftener,” said Sam, “I’m going to get angry.”