The Painted Ladies serve as a foreground to the San Francisco skyline, a view of the city that never gets old.

Rents in Berkeley are cheaper, and the city is funkier than San Francisco.

Five years ago and a few weeks before I started at the Chronicle, I took a cab from SFO to a new acquaintance’s apartment in Potrero Hill, impulsively taking up her offer to house-sit while I looked for a place of my own. As we drove, the darkness of that evening, set against the almost cliff-like drop from the top of the hill, made the city’s skyline — the Italian dressing-bottle of the Transamerica building, the phallic Salesforce Tower, the crawling Christmas lights of the cars making their way in from the Bay Bridge — look as if it all appeared spontaneously out of some black void.

I never got tired of that view and the feeling it imparted, no matter where I was in the city. When I lived at the base of the famously crooked section of Lombard Street, I often queued up with the tourists to drive or walk down that incline, San Francisco’s downtown hovering on the horizon. When I moved to Twin Peaks, the frequently fog-obscured skyline looked almost cute at times, like a shy child’s feet peeking out from beneath a curtain.........

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