One of the more amazing facts about Bay Area Craigslist is its complete ubiquity. It is almost to the point where you can't live your life with it. How do people find rentals? Craiglist. How do people shop for goods? Craigslist. In other words, we have it pretty gosh-darn nice here. We don't need to search multiple web sites to find apartments, nor do we need to look at newspaper classifieds to find used bicycles. Instead we have a single omnipresent source (with a nice search engine to boot!) which does all of this for us.
The rest of the world is not so lucky. Let's say that, for some crazy, crazy reason, you are looking for housing in Los Angeles. Despite the fact that LA has many times the population of San Francisco, it only has half the housing listings that the Bay Area does. Or, hypothetically speaking, lets say we wanted to find a pick-up soccer game in San Diego. Ugh. There are a third as many community listings in San Diego as there are in the Bay Area, despite the fact that they have roughly the same population. Or say you want to do anything in Pittsburgh, PA, St. Louis, MO or Tampa, FL? Well, you are out of luck finding it on Craigslist.
To put this in perspective, only one of the top 10 city areas in the country (New York) has more listings than the Bay Area. Wow.
