>>2800116 (OP)I lived in San Francisco for much of my adult life, where the local custom is, or certainly used to be, to hate LA and regard it as inferior to the Bay Area. During my decades in SF, I went to LA a number of times, and started off hating it by default. But I came to appreciate the place a great deal over the years, despite my initial prejudice.
Some things about it do suck by any sane standards. It is less a city than a very large, sprawling, suburban region, dominated by and catering to cars, and it’s got the traffic to prove it. But there are hundreds if not thousands of really cool things—food, entertainment, art, interesting architecture, parks and green spaces—scattered throughout the sprawling wasteland. While it lacks San Francisco’s ‘real city’ density and can be defensibly regarded as its architectural/infrastructural/physical plant inferior, LA is so much larger that it still has a lot more going on, and more to offer. It just might take two hours on a freeway to get to the nice bits.
At one point I might have argued that SF was cooler and LA more superficial and shallow, but both of those stereotypes are out of date and exaggerated. Rising tech monoculture and even faster-rising housing prices have been driving the coolest, most creative, and most interesting people out of SF for literal decades, while squeezing the non-tech underclasses and anyone who can’t afford to move harder and harder, leaving the city both more sterile and more seedy year over year. LA remains cheaper and has never really been completely dominated by a single economic sector (it’s a global media and entertainment epicenter, but that’s never been the only game in town), so its creative and artistic underbelly is more vital.
And the weather is arguably nicer down south, at least if you like warmth, although I personally like San Francisco’s cool and foggy climate a lot.
>tl;dr—LA is better than its reputation but its reputation isn’t fiction.
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