San Francisco is a solid town, I enjoyed living there. I'd say the surrounding nature/landscape is beautiful. The metro area itself is kind of a shithole though. I lived in the Laurel Heights/Jordan Park area & then North Beach.

Not sure why people outside of NorCal have this Utopian vision of SF. It's a small city that's pretty pricey (but they treat their citizens well in return), solid arts/music community for a city of it's modest size, absurdly polluted, relatively shitty restaurants, and the locals are disconnected, aloof, and an overall eerie bunch. That about sums up SF.

White European culture in general doesn't really have much footing west of the Sierra Nevada.