The drug use and homelessness are still pretty visible in downtown San Jose, or were when I lived there 2 years ago. Your personal tolerance level for it may be different from mine - I just treat it as a reality of city life, but my sister complained about it any time she visited because it made her feel actively unsafe.
Zoned for single-family housing or 1-2 story apartments mostly. There may be sidewalks (stroads) but almost everyone drives due to pedestrian accessibility issues.
Imagine New York vs Dallas for example. I think it is fair to say that some cities are more spread out and low density, making them feel like a suburban sprawl.
I disagree. There are cities that are dense and cities that are spread out much more. See LA vs London, both count as cities, even though they are extremely different layout-wise.
I don't have time to watch your youtube, however it's not really a myth, just no longer true. There was definitely a long period of time when it was kind of true. I say kind of because it's specifically a diocesan cathedral.
While it's hard to make definitive statements about when a lot of cities originally became cities, it was first formalised in the 16th century, and at that time all the cities were cathedral towns (or more accurately, they were diocesan cathedrals meaning that churches in other towns in that diocese were administered by that cathedral), and significantly in many cases these cities were smaller than other towns in the diocese. The important part was that these particular towns with cathedrals that had always been called cities for as long as anyone remembered were recognised as cities by the Crown, and other towns were not allowed that status. Later on, Henry VIII created new dioceses and granted those towns (and they also all happened to have cathedrals) city status as well. So, at that time at least, there was a strong precedent that city status and being a diocesan cathedral town were linked, and in fact people were told that cities were cities because of this, even though technically towns became cities only by Royal decree and dioceses were only created by separate Royal decree, but historically both were done at the same time.
This understanding was only really challenged in the early 19th century, when some more towns with cathedrals became new dioceses and their local governments assumed they were now cities and renamed themselves as such. Clearly, the Crown wasn't too worried about this as it took nearly two decades for this to be noticed (and only happened in the context of a Royal visit to one of the cities), at which point there was an act of parliament specifically to confer city status on these new large towns that were already calling themselves cities, again reinforcing the people's understanding that towns with diocesan cathedrals should be called cities.
The interesting stuff happened at the end of the 19th century, when some of the other new diocesan towns that were quite small decided the also wanted the prestige of being a city, but were told they were too small to justify it and rightly complained that other cities were even smaller, but they weren't going to be downgraded to towns because they had always been called cities as long as anyone knew. And then Birmingham, the third largest town/city in the country petitioned to be a city on the basis of its important, and was recognised, at which point the link between city and cathedral was broken down. After that, a few more large towns also successfully petitioned for city status based on size or historical importance.
It can be said that the link between city status and cathedrals was firmly broken in 1974, when all existing cities lost their city status, and towns had to apply for city status along with justifications. This was re-granted to all the existing cities (actually, I've got a vague recollection that at least one didn't bother and lost its city status), and at the same time city boundaries were redefined to include the metropolitan areas that would previously have been considered towns or villages in their own right.
So, in one sense the assertion that towns with cathedrals are cities isn't quite true, and is definitely wrong now, but about hundreds of years this was actually the case. Arguably, correlation doesn't imply causation, but the Crown seemingly made an effort for a long time to ensure that the correlation held to ensure the set of cities was exactly identical to the set of diocesan cathedral towns. So, it's also not a myth.
> the video I've posted goes into great detail, but you'd know that if you had watched it.
Firstly, I'm sure you could have worked out that "your youtube" was shorthand for "the youtube video that you linked to". Had you even mentioned that it was a Map Men video, I might even have decided to watch it even though I was short on time at the time, but as it was, I just had 5-10 minutes spare before I had something else I needed to do so I didn't even click on it. But even if I had clicked on it, I wouldn't have had time to watch it at the time.
Anyway, I finally found the time to watch it (somehow I missed it even though I've been subscribed to the channel a long time), and it basically agrees with all the points I made, but in a much more interesting way and with additional information. I'm not sure that the tone "you'd know that if you had watched it" was really required, given that nothing that I'd written was contradicted by it, and I didn't really learn anything significant from it that I would have added to my post.
So really, the only thing you're arguing about is the definition of myth. And to me something that used to be true but now isn't doesn't qualify it as a myth [1] [2]. I said exactly that in my post. You'll notice if you re-watched the video you posted, that they also don't ever call it a myth, they say that it is wrong, and later clarify that it used to be true: "So why then do so many people think it's about cathedrals? Because it used to be."
> It is a myth that the former definition of what counts as a "city" still applies to this day, yes.
So no, it's still not a myth, it's just incorrect.
[1] For example "carrots make you see better in the dark" is a myth because it is wildly held, is wrong and has never been correct. Likewise, "the moon is made of cheese". However, "Trump is the president of the USA" is not a myth - it was once correct, but now isn't as he's now just "a president of the USA". Someone in 1920 who'd missed the recent news and said "Women are not allowed to vote in the UK" wouldn't have been repeating a myth, just saying something that was factually incorrect.
[2] I checked a number of dictionaries to make sure before writing this, and while most support a meaning like "a widely held but false belief or idea" when you delve into that in more detail, most dictionaries seem to have the view that a myth has no actual basis in fact, so something having previously been true and now no longer true doesn't seem to fall into the myth category.
It was a bit of an imitation of NYC at the peak of the pre-COVID boom, but I travel to both regularly, NYC has 100x more energy than SF. SF is akin to cities like Austin or Denver, we’re talking a city with only an 800k population.
Aside from how you define “pleasant” there is a considerable vibe difference, SF feels more cosmopolitan and SJ more metropolitan. No judgement either way, pros and cons to both.
> They say San José is going to become another Los Angeles. Believe me, I'm going to do everything in my power to make that come true. [0]
In SJ, you usually have a car door separating the homeless from you. Seems like SJ is more car-oriented in design; driving in SF is really awful and if I lived there I'd avoid it
If I had to summarize: SJ -> boring, lots of jobs with great variety, easier to avoid riffraff; SF -> cooler (in character and temperature), grittier, more loud politically
Personally, if I could get a cushy corporate job in SF I'd just live there. But it seems like that's becoming harder
After I moved to Beijing, my first job was at a company opening a network of village banks. The villages had a population of around 1 million. SF has 850k people.
There's a theoretical limit of 1400 villages in the entire country at that size, and that's assuming zero population in cities. I don't see how it can be true.
If a village has 1 mil, then China is probably entirely made up of something like 40 cities and 500 villages, plus some smaller stuff.
From the perspective, I would think a city of 800k is definitely midsized if you compare with China.
I'm from Brazil, and we would definitely say 1 million people is a midsized city there (I don't live there anymore). For example, have you ever heard of Campinas? Well, it has a population of over 1.2 million people, and everyone I know around the area call it a midsized city.
But no, no one in their right mind would say a 1 million people city is a village :D.
China has over 100 cities with > 1 million population. (113 to be precise).
The 100th-ranked US city (Huntsville, AL) has a population of 225k. (The 113th, Fayetville, NC, has just under 210k.)
San Francisco, with 808k population, would rank 126th in China. Not "small rural", but definitely a 2nd or 3rd tier city at best. (The comparable Chinese city, Anqing, is a prefecture-level city in the southwest of Anhi Province, and has, to boot, 631 years on SF.)
Consider that Wuhan, a city in China you'd likely never have heard of prior to early 2020, has a population of 11 million, more than any US city, and ranks 9th overall in population within China.
The city of San Jose is spread over a huge area (a good fraction of Santa Clara Valley aka Silicon Valley). The downtown area of San Jose which you might think of as a city is rather small.
The convex hull of San Jose also encloses a ton of junk that is not San Jose because of their unincorporated enclaves and incorporated exclaves. San Jose badly fails my test of whether a city is good or bad based on the geometric complexity of their boundary.
yeah, SF is only 800k people, it is pretty small, and the sunset, richmond, parkside, excelcior, and visitation valley neighborhoods are basically single-family subrubs.
Realistically, SF is only a city in it's north-east quadrant. the rest are cute, sleepy suburbs. And I say that as someone who lives in one of those neighborhoods.
