San Francisco vs. New York

People like to compare NY and SF and having lived in both, I actually think they are more similar than most people give them credit. It's just that New York is the larger of the two and so gets pulled up to the ranks of London, Paris, Tokyo and Los Angeles.

Three years ago, there was an excellent post that compared New York neighborhoods to San Francisco ones. While some of the equivalencies felt a little forced, I thought many of them were spot on, e.g. Park Slope = Noe Valley. I would compare the gay Polk Street corridor to the West Village, especially Christopher Street but that's all I would really change.

There was quite a bit of disdain for this exercise, with many exclamations that no where in New York could possibly be compared to rinky-dink San Francisco because it's soooo much bigger. This supposition is not quite true.

People tend to forget that MANHATTAN is relatively small in terms of RESIDENT population – only about 1.5 million people live there. The parts that most people refer to – south of 125th – would be more comparable to San Francisco. People perceive Manhattan to be larger than it is because every day over 8 MILLION people commute into the enormous midtown and downtown business districts from all over the metro area. If Manhattan were set up solely for its' resident population, the scale of the city would be smaller than it is. San Francisco’s workday population merely doubles the city’s size and it’s concentrated in the Financial District and SoMa.

Another thing is both Brooklyn and Queens dwarf Manhattan in terms of population. They each top out at over 2 million with Brooklyn being the largest of the two at 2.5 million. With that in mind, Brooklyn is more comparable to the entire urban East Bay shoreline before the tunnels vs. just Oakland.