San Francisco, CA
I’ve lived in San Francisco and Austin, and I want to move back to California. Here’s what Texas is missing.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Pavi Theva, 31, a career coach who lives in Austin. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
The first time I visited San Francisco, I fell in love with it.
A year later, around June 2018, I went back for a work trip. From the Golden Gate Bridge to the coastal views, the city was stunning, and the hustle and bustle in the air made me feel like I’d never get bored there.
I started planning how I could work there one day. In October 2018, I left Dallas, where I was working at EY, to start an analytics role at a startup in San Francisco. Since then, life has taken me to Seattle and Austin, where I’ve been since August 2023.
I found Seattle underwhelming, but enjoyed the slower pace in Austin. Lately, I’ve been missing the ambitious, entrepreneurial spark you can only find in the Bay Area, and over five years after first moving away, I want to go back.
San Francisco was the complete package
When I moved to San Francisco, my rent rose drastically compared to $600 for a room in Dallas. I also noticed how the most common words I heard around San Francisco were the tech buzzwords “API” and “cloud,” whereas no one in Dallas really spoke about work after work. The pressure to stay on top of the latest technology and add to conversations at networking events meant I struggled with imposter syndrome.
But San Francisco felt like the complete package. It had nature, nightlife, a range of cuisines, and a strong focus on career growth.
There was also a large immigrant population, and it felt like everyone was from somewhere else, such as the Middle East or Asia. Growing up in India, I knew about the American dream and how diverse the US was, but San Francisco was the first place I felt like I was in the America I’d heard about.
In Austin, I could know someone for weeks and not know their profession
I didn’t want to leave California, but when I was offered a program manager role at Amazon in Seattle in 2019, I took it because the role aligned with my career goals, including working at a FAANG company.
Courtesy of Pavi Theva
My boyfriend and I shared an apartment that cost $1,990 a month, excluding utilities, which was cheaper than what I remember paying in San Francisco. But I found Seattle underwhelming and struggled with the gloomy weather and it getting dark by 4 o’clock. It’s hard to make friends in bad weather, when people don’t go out so much, and the 2020 pandemic made socializing even harder.
In 2022, after I kept bugging my partner, whom I met in San Francisco, to leave Seattle with me, we bought a property in Austin and moved in 2023, drawn to the lower cost of living and good weather.
We found a lot of young couples and a strong sense of community in Austin. It was easy to meet people because many residents had also moved from other cities.
For the first time, my environment wasn’t all about tech. I met small business owners who didn’t run startups, like people in the Indian community with jewellery and saree businesses. There was a lot of creative energy.
Courtesy of Pavi Theva
In the Bay Area and Seattle, the first or second question you asked in conversation was “What do you do?” but in Austin, I could know people for weeks without finding out their profession. People would talk about their hobbies and other aspects of life, which was a big culture shock.
I’d started a side hustle, creating social media content about career betterment, which was the beginning of my coaching business. Austin felt like a good place for me to create and grow the business. Compared to the Bay Area, where there’s so much competition, it was easier to become visible in Austin. I felt like a big fish in a small pond.
Austin is definitely in its acceleration phase, but I don’t think it’s the next Silicon Valley, like some are saying.
Some costs, like entertainment and food, feel comparable to Silicon Valley, but overall, Austin seems cheaper than San Francisco or Seattle did. Like Seattle, there’s no state income tax in Austin, so I’m saving more from my paycheck than I was in Silicon Valley, but as homeowners in Austin, we do have to pay quite high property taxes.
Austin’s missing a certain spark, and I want to go back to California
To me, the Bay Area, where there’s a deep engineering culture, is still the hub for entrepreneurship. Yes, companies like Tesla, Oracle, Apple, and Amazon have moved into or expanded in Austin, but I still don’t see as many people talking about technology, or as many tech conferences, as in Silicon Valley. It doesn’t feel like the city is ahead of the curve.
Courtesy of Pavi Theva
In November 2025, I went to a creator meet-up in the Bay Area, where I had lots of insightful conversations about business. I realized this was something I was missing out on, and it’s made me want to move back to San Francisco, ideally by 2027. I plan to continue career coaching, expand into corporate consulting, and take advantage of the opportunities in San Francisco.
I picked Austin because I was in a season of life when I wanted to slow down, but now, with my business in a more mature phase, I want to be surrounded by ambitious, driven people again to keep me accountable and inspired.
If you really want to grow, be challenged, and push yourself to be the smartest, that’s the energy of California — nothing can beat it.
Do you have a story to share about leaving Texas or California? Contact this reporter at ccheong@businessinsider.com
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — A recent Civil Grand Jury report has identified wildfire risks in San Francisco’s Glen Canyon, warning that vegetation management is needed to reduce the potential for a fire in an area not typically associated with wildfire danger.
The report focuses on the canyon’s large population of Blue Gum eucalyptus trees, an invasive species originally imported from Australia.
Historical photographs show Glen Canyon was largely treeless in the late 1800s, when the land was used primarily as a dairy farm.
The eucalyptus trees were planted after investors believed the fast-growing species could be harvested for timber.
“And these people were so stupid, they didn’t realize they were going to build railroad ties and use the wood for building, and it’s worthless. It warps, it splits. it has no commercial value,” said Rick Carell, a member of the Civil Grand Jury.
While the timber venture failed, the trees remained.
Today, their flammability is a concern for fire safety officials and grand jury members.
MORE: 600 goats graze Poplar Beach in Halfmoon Bay to reduce wildfire risk
“The leaves have a lot of oil in them, and so actually, if it’s very hot, and it’s been very, very dry, they actually explode, because it’s highly flammable. And so, you can see here, look at all the debris right next to this road. So somebody throws a cigarette out into there, and you have a potential fire,” Carell said.
Carell said assessments of the trees have raised additional concerns.
“They evaluated something like 427 eucalyptus trees and 80% of them, back in 2012, were in bad shape,” he said.
Although CAL FIRE has repeatedly rated San Francisco’s wildfire risk as low because of the city’s cool, foggy climate, the grand jury report points to the 2025 Pacific Palisades fire in Los Angeles as an example of how fires can occur in urban areas where vegetation management is inadequate.
The report notes that Glen Canyon has only two fire hydrants, one near the Glen Park Recreation Center and another near a day camp building.
However, San Francisco’s Emergency Firefighting Water System provides additional resources through reservoirs, high-pressure hydrants and underground cisterns.
One nearby cistern at Chenery and Surrey streets can supply 75,000 gallons of water. Based on a fire engine’s typical pumping rate of 1,500 gallons per minute, that amount of water would be exhausted in about 50 minutes. Additional cisterns are located in surrounding neighborhoods.
MORE: CAL FIRE urging Bay Area residents to create defensible space as wildfire season begins
Despite the concerns, the report concluded that removing all eucalyptus trees is not a practical solution because of the canyon’s steep terrain. Large-scale removal could increase the risk of landslides. Instead, the report recommends managing vegetation by clearing brush and fallen debris and removing diseased trees.
“To remove any brush that might be a fire hazard, if something could really ignite quickly. We’re going to raise up the branches, the lower branches of the tree because that’s where a lot of the problem is for the spread of the fire, and if there are any dead trees that are really hazardous or branches that may hang over the roadway, that we can take them out as well,” said Rachel Gordon of the San Francisco Department of Public Works.
Public Works officials are expected to coordinate closely with CAL FIRE on vegetation management efforts.
“CAL FIRE guys, they train in the type of environment, and so what they do, they get their chainsaws out, they eliminate. They limb the trees, they bring out the debris and that sort of stuff so this is an ideal training site for them,” Carell said.
The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which manages a small portion of the canyon, has already removed trees on its property to prevent them from falling across O’Shaughnessy Avenue, a potential emergency evacuation route.
The agency has also hired habitat experts to remove non-native vegetation and replace it with fire-resistant native species, including coast live oaks.
“That has all these tannins in the foliage that resist fire. You can put a lighter right under that thing in the middle of the hottest day of the year, and it will not burn like these willows. They will not burn, and so that’s what we want to load our parks with instead of having things like the eucalyptus and the pine — which, as we all know, they just burn like a crazy Christmas tree fire,” said Habitat Specialist Josiah Clark.
The majority of the 66-acre canyon is managed by the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department, which agrees that improved coordination among city agencies is essential to maintaining fire safety in the area.
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Presidio Heights is proving to be a center of gravity as luxury housing supply in San Francisco vanishes and the city’s well-to-do scramble to claim their slice of the artificial intelligence industry’s nerve center.
On the same day last week, the city recorded two home sales in the wealthy neighborhood for $9.2 million and $10 million.
The first reflected the fortunes being created by the AI industry. Venture capitalist Kenneth Wallace and his wife, Moriah Lewis, sold their five-bed, 4,755-square-foot home at 3875 Clay Street for $9.2 million. Josh McAdam of Sotheby’s International Realty represented the seller. The property last sold for $6.8 million in 2021.
The buyer initially kept their name hidden behind a Delaware-incorporated LLC named after the property’s address. However, according to public loan documents, the LLC is managed by Daniel Berrios and Kimberly Tan, a couple in their early 30s who graduated from Stanford into the San Francisco tech sector. Berrios works on special projects at OpenAI, and Tan is an investing partner with blue chip venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Wells Fargo Bank provided a $5.4 million loan for the purchase.
Ten blocks east, sellers Herbert and Shwu-Ling Wei sold their six-bed, 5,000 square-foot home at 2881 Jackson Street for $10 million. Kyle Vineyard, a CPA with Realize Tax Advisors, is the trustee of the buyer, RKLA Trust. It is unclear whether Vineyard’s involvement is purely professional or if he’s connected to the trust.
The home last sold in 2014 for $6.8 million.
Presidio Heights, the neighborhood that runs along Presidio Park at San Francisco’s north end, has experienced a hot streak during the first half of 2026. Earlier this month, two mansions in the area sold for a combined $32 million, marking the fourth and fifth sales this year to eclipse $10 million. There were seven sales above that benchmark in Presidio Heights in all of 2025, according to Zillow data.
San Francisco, where the median home sale fetches $2.2 million, is dealing with its own version of champagne problems: a mansion shortage. The AI boom has attracted a wave of high-paid employees, apparently leaving the city with more millionaires than mansions. Steep capital gains taxes have made some mansion owners hesitant to let go of their property. Others are holding out for the expected spike in luxury home demand following Anthropic and OpenAI’s initial public offerings of stock, which are expected to come later this year.
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Staying safe at San Francisco’s Pride festivities
The SFPD has announced that officers from all districts, stations and specialized agencies will be positioned along the route for the Pride Parade to ensure the event is safe for attendees. The annual parade will be held this Sunday and is expected to attract hundreds of thousands of people from around the world.
San Francisco – San Francisco city and police officials said Wednesday that they want people to enjoy Pride festivities this weekend — including the popular parade on Sunday — and that they will be on the lookout for criminal activity.
“All of the leaders up here know how important this weekend is, and we are ready,” Mayor Daniel Lurie said while flanked by a host of officials at a news conference at San Francisco police headquarters.
Lurie said his message is simple: “Look out for one another. Report anything concerning and know that every first responder, city worker and volunteer has one goal: to help everyone celebrate safely.”
Hundreds of thousands expected at SF Pride Parade
What we know:
The annual Pride festivities and parade on Sunday are expected to draw hundreds of thousands of people from around the world to San Francisco. Police say they’re working with state and federal partners to monitor any potential threats while making sure people enjoy themselves.
“You’ll see many of our officers – including me – wearing Pride patches,” said Police Chief Derrick Lew, gesturing to a multicolored patch on his shoulder. “As always, we’re excited to showcase San Francisco, and our longstanding status as a safe haven for members of the LGBTQ+ community.”
No tolerance for hate, DA says
What they’re saying:
District Attorney Brooke Jenkins says she and other city leaders will have no tolerance for hate.
Just last week, she charged a man with a hate crime for allegedly spray-painting a homophobic message outside a Castro District flower shop and punching a witness.
“There will be accountability if anything like that happens here, and so as much as we want to be joyous, we also have to take this occasion very seriously,” Jenkins said.
Suzanne Ford, executive director of SF Pride agreed, saying, “I think we all have the responsibility of demonstrating that we can work together to make sure that the LGBTQ community is centered for this weekend.”
Sheriff Paul Miyamoto said those who don’t behave will go straight to jail.
“The one mode of transportation we want to make sure all of you avoid this weekend is the party buses that the sheriff’s department will have out there,” Miyamoto said.
City officials are urging everyone to celebrate responsibly, don’t drink and drive or accept drinks from strangers and to report any suspicious activity.
Henry Lee is a KTVU crime reporter. E-mail Henry at Henry.Lee@fox.com and follow him on X @henrykleeKTVU and www.facebook.com/henrykleefan
The Source: KTVU reporting, San Francisco police and sheriff, district attorney’s office
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