Goodbye, San Francisco
yolken.netDowntown SF (and especially OP's neighborhood of 7th/8th Mission Street) is not the place to be. It's a bit like complaining about LA and living right near downtown.
Upper Market, North Beach, Hayes Valley, Valencia St, Mission Dolores, Polk Street, Upper Nob Hill, Haight Ashbury -- all fun locations.
I've lived near Dolores Park for the past 15 months now and have had a great experience. I've found community, made new friends, and have never felt unsafe whilst walking around at night.
We don't have highrise buildings or a thriving "downtown" like other urban cities, but we do have plenty of lively, energetic neighborhoods around the city and the best food & weather in the country.
I agree with the author that changes need to be made and that the homelessness problem is bad. But I think you can still have an overwhelmingly positive experience in the city if you pick one of the neighborhoods I mentioned above to live in.
Yeah he picked probably among the worst neighborhoods to live in. I have noticed this is a recurring pattern among single male tech friends I have to move to Soma due to office proximity and then end up hating the city.
Alot of this is due to the policy decisions of Ed Lee(ex SF mayor). He authorized tax breaks for a bevy of tech companies to operate in the tenderloin tax free(for a few years). The reason for this was to revitalize a blighted neighborhood with an infusion of highly paid tech workers. This is turn lead to a huge amount of tech employees moving to one of the worst areas in SF. Sf for sure is falling apart but I did spend some time recently in the sunset and things seemed pretty normal over there - at least in broad daylight, but everywhere else I visited was not great at all.
Zoning laws basically make this the reality in every major city's downtown area. They aren't allowing offices or building new multistory buildings in the safe NIMBY areas of cities.
It might sound like an overt policy but in reality it's just the easiest one without doing any real reform or dealing with any of the problems. Like all municipal housing/development policy in the last two decades.
Zoning rarely changes, what's does always change a) the natural expansion of economically productive downtown areas and b) the degree to how bad it is in those very high traffic areas while everyone pretends you can just easily not visit those areas and be fine (despite there being few options to work or build elsewhere).
Bad zoning policy is probably the largest driver of most things that are killing cities -- it encourages wealth disparity, bad land use, increased emissions, and concentration of crime. Unfortunately, wealth is a driver of bad zoning policy, so it's a bit hard to get out from under it -- and some of the examples of "fixing" zoning are equally terrible, e.g. Houston's complete lack of zoning and incredible sprawl.
Two other related points:
- And the flagship company to take Ed Lee up on the offer was Twitter - a social media company
- Additionally adding to things is that Union Square butts up against the Tenderloin - making the misery very visible for tourists.
People move to SOMA because the apartments are both close to their office and easily accessible online. Finding apartments in the rest of the city can be something of an adventure.
But then, as you note, SOMA is kinda bad to live in. Lots of homelessness, not a whole lot of services, everything shuts down outside of business hours.
it's probably a pattern because the city government allowed more housing construction there than anywhere else.
If you feel uncomfortable around homeless people, there are plenty of other areas that the city allows housing construction, like the Dogpatch area without large homeless populations. I would not necessarily recommend that area either, but it is a tradeoff.
> the best food & weather in the country
Imagine believing SF proper has the best weather in the country
Your year-round weather isn't even as good as neighboring counties.
- someone who lived on the SF peninsula for years, and often regretted trading idyllic weather for a cold, damp dinner night in SF.
You're trading off some pretty hot days for some cold, damp days. I'd probably choose SF in general for the weather and certainly on the scale of the country as a whole, SF is pretty good.
I like SF weather overall, but the Bay Area as a whole generally has fantastic weather. Despite being an SF resident, personally I'd say the peninsula (south of SF) and the most of the East Bay have better weather than SF.
The South Bay and the far East Bay can get a little too hot for my taste, but plenty of people prefer that to year round fog/wind in much of SF.
I've definitely been in SF when "the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco" applied. That said, I'm generally not a fan of heat.
On the scale of the whole country the entire west coast is "pretty good".
SF is definitely not the best out of the entire coast, and if you consider its cost of living, the weather is trash for the cost. It's notoriously cold and wet for a substantial part of the year.
Yeah it's way nicer to live up the hill a little, basically anywhere up a hill. The low-lying areas have "gravity" that attract bad things.
I made the same mistake moving to SF in 2002, until 2004. It was bad then -- and surprise, surprise, the places with the most availability are the least desirable.
The meme is that tech people are taking over SF. But it's also true that the city is crowded with old money, and new housing / new people starting in 2010 took some of the least desirable spots, including that part of 7th-8th and Mission.
I also biked, and a related thing I learned is you just have to get used to biking up and down hills. It helped my fitness a lot. If you bike in the low-lying areas, it's kind of a shitty experience too.
The only city where I haven’t found the “hill effect” to be true is Pittsburgh. It seems every hilltop area there is quite bad.
In many US cities, low lying areas near water (rivers, large lakes, oceans) were often used as cargo ports. Factories and other industrial facilities were then built nearby which made it easier to obtain raw materials and ship out finished products. And naturally low wage, blue collar workers tended to live near those jobs. Such areas were also at greater risk of flooding, and suffered more from air, water, and noise pollution. So, affluent people tended to build homes on higher ground away from the dirty waterfronts.
Now that trend has somewhat flipped. The US has deindustrialized and offshored most heavy industries. Stricter environmental laws have reduced pollution. And civil engineering measures have somewhat reduced flood risk. So, now waterfront residential areas have become expensive and fashionable.
This is just a general trend. We will still see exceptions in SF and other cities.
Two good examples of the flip are the Ferry Building in SF and Chelsea Market in Manhattan. Those used to be big industrial / shipping / cargo buildings but now sell upscale food :)
It's kind of funny how you see the same economic patterns play out in different cities over hundreds of years
Another pattern is that train stations and big US post offices are often in the oldest parts of town, and I think they have started to move over the years. That real estate is often extremely valuable, so the govt or business finds something else to do with it
In Brazil, the favelas are up on the hills. Unclear why it's this way in some places, but the opposite in others
> Upper Market, North Beach, Hayes Valley, Valencia St, Mission Dolores, Polk Street, Upper Nob Hill, Haight Ashbury -- all fun locations.
This is like 2 sq miles of the city, maybe... If you add in Golden Gate Park and Presidio - you're still only at 1/8th of the city being nice. That's not a great ratio.
Especially when the nice parts aren't all connected and you can't venture more than a few blocks until you're out of a nice area (unless you're in one of 2 parks).
The Mission District alone is almost 2 square miles. Add in a couple more decent neighborhoods (particularly the Sunset and the Richmond), and you're probably at half of SF's 49 square miles.
Are we claiming the Mission is nice? Because it's really not, even the nicer parts worsened pre, during, post pandemic.
At some point, nice is subjective. And Mission definitely has some sketch spots. But Castro, Eureka, Noe border it and are even nicer; then there's Hayes and the Haight and Alamo Square; head west on Haight and you get to Cole Valley and the Inner Sunset; north of Haight you'd hit a few patchy blocks on Fillmore but then come to Japantown, Pac Heights, the Marina. And that list is not even close to exhaustive: the point is that there are large contiguous areas that are nice, walkable, and safe.
But all of those places have a lot of bums accosting people and shouting, tents right along main walkways, poop in the streets, etc.
It's much nicer than soma in my opinion and there are basically only two drug dealing/prostitution corridors along shotwell area and capp.
The Norteńo and Sureńo gangs had running machine gun battles in the Outer and South Mission just a decade ago, until the Feds took them down using the gang enhancements so decried by progressives like Chesa Boudin.
Can confirm that particular stretch of Mission has been like that for at least forty years I’ve been around to witness it.
If you show up to the city during a boom, you’re probably too focused on living your best life to see the reality of it.
It used to be the place of low-innovation. But Covid destroyed the South Park soma tech scene, with this moving remote. However the high-tech work remains vibrant in Silicon Valley, because well moving a r&d lab isn’t trivial or work easily doable which can be done at home.
Yea, don't let the door hit on the way out...
Now, if only 10 or 20 million more people would get out of California, then maybe the population would be back to a reasonable level...
Everyone who can't tell the difference between CA and TX should really just move to TX...
What a city where you need to be careful about which neighbourhood to live in.
Don’t all big cities have bad neighborhoods?
Absolutely not. All cities have rougher areas, because cities need workers that are only paid enough to live in affordable hosing and affordable housing inevitably clumps together.
But it doesn't automatically follow that a rough area is "bad" in the way it is in San Francisco. Plenty of cities in Australia, for example, have their share of upmarket and downmarket suburbs. But the lesser suburbs are rarely dangerous and their poor reputation is largely socio-economic, relativistic and/or historical prejudice.
SF is weird in that one block can be pretty nice, and a walk a few minutes in the wrong direction can put you in the middle of skid row. It is a rapid and jarring transition.
A night out for the unaware can start with an early dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Hayes. You enjoy a performance of La Boheme at the opera, and afterwards walk across the street to look at the beautiful neoclassical architecture of City Hall lit up at night with colors of pride. You walk one more block looking for a nightcap and... What the fuck, why am I surrounded by tents, drug dealers, and someone seizing on the sidewalk from a fentanyl overdose?
I wonder what the net productivity loss is due to the dysfunction of SF? You've got companies paying huge money to smart employees who then have to worry about problems that are generally reserved for developing nations on a daily basis. That stress has to impact work performance
I work remote and it's wild how SF people don't realize how insane they sound to others when they talk about what they deal with and try to downplay it as normal or not that bad.
There's just something wrong to me about the entire population of a city having to adjust what they do to cater to the small criminal population, like not being able to leave stuff in your car or your windows will be smashed and your stuff stolen.
It's some form of Stockholm Syndrome but for people who live in dysfunctional places.
I lived at the 7th and 8th / Mission block before OP did and it was pretty bad then. What's weird is that there's been a lot of development and modernization in that area (completion of Trinity Place and a nice Whole Foods) yet in 2023 it's still extremely unsafe around there. And the Whole Foods is now leaving.
I think it's a lot better than it used to be. From 2001-2005 I walked from work at 2nd St to home at Guerrero and there were only a few blocks on that walk when I wasn't braced for action. With all the new buildings and the BRT on Van Ness and other changes it seems way better now.
My personal (European) view of what places are of the USA are considered "cool" has completely changed in the last 10 years or so. Before this year I had only been once to the USA, which was as a teenager in Detroit's suburbs many years ago. This year I decided to travel the USA with my wife and kids, but places like San Francisco and New York, which I would have sacrificed a leg to visit not too many years ago, were quite at the bottom on our ranking of places to see. We instead decided to go to Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia, which friends of us described as "boring", which we decided may actually be what we want in these turbulent times. So we went there, had a great time, met wonderful people, and certainly did not regret not going to the "progressive" parts of the USA.
My personal (American) view is that you made a great decision visiting the South. It's super underrated. I grew up in my little corner of America (New England) and it wasn't until my twenties that I realized just how many amazing places to visit there are in this country with deceivingly friendly people and interesting culture. Americans certainly do not present themselves that way to the rest of the world, but people are usually amazed at how welcoming they can be face-to-face. I think you would have had a good time in NY or SF as well, but it would certainly be different, and probably less memorable, than being pleasantly surprised by "simpler" places in America.
It sounds like you are aging & also perhaps leaning a bit too heavily on the media in deciding where to go.
That said, many areas of the South are among the most underrated parts of the country so I agree with you there.
The age factor certainly played a role, but I do not think the media influenced in my decision a lot. Judging from European mainstream media the southern red states are full of retards, which I cannot confirm from our visit. Quite the opposite, Huntsville seems to be packed with bright engineers, Savannah is full of "weird" (in a very positive way) people, and Nashville is not just the capital of corny country music, but a concentration of musical talent that you will not find anywhere else in the world. I think the main influence was anecdotes from friends. One friend said that New York has lost a lot of its appeal while still being outrageously expensive, another claimed that you cannot stay in lower priced hotels in California anymore unless you are fine with seeing drug addicts in the lobby and bulled proof glass in front of the reception desk. Not sure if all this is true, but I did not feel like finding out.
> Not sure if all this is true, but I did not feel like finding out.
It is most definitely not true
Oh yes, Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia are great as long as you don't need to get an abortion, aren't religious, gay, or non-white.
I'm curious have you been to many of these areas or are you just repeating the things you've read on reddit?
I lived in Vicksburg MS for four years. Mississippi is as bad as everyone says it is, at least. No idea about the other states.
I'd wager that most rural places about the size of Vicksburg (~20k population) are "bad" in that same way. I'm sure there are a few exceptions, but none come to the top of my head.
I really wouldn't call Vicksburg rural, it is actually small town urban serving a county with around 50k people (outside of Vicksburg like in Bovina is rural, however). Also, Vicksburg is fairly close to Jackson (40 minute drive?), but we all know things are much better over there.
I live in one of those states and am visibly nonwhite and haven't stepped inside a church in a long while. Life is great here.
I lived in San Fran back in 2012 for 6 months. I personally didn't feel unsafe; I'm a big guy and have a physical presence so I understand why others may feel unsafe.
So why did I leave?
There were a few events that really upset me. 1) I almost stepped on a shit snake some human left outside my building. 2) A homeless person stopped in front of a mother and child to urinate. 3) The weather sucked; cold and hot.
I went there for the tech scene, but it was just too dirty for me to want to live there.
No matter your size, all of those things violate safety. It's not always about being attacked, but general welfare being violated.
The only welfare being violated was the bottom of my shoes.
Surely the "general welfare" is still being violated by the shit on the street and homeless people urinating in public, whether or not the shit or the piss actually got on your person.
They moved to Mission between 7th and 8th and realized that it was full of people with substance and mental issues. It's kinda like moving into a block with a lot of bars or nightclubs and then complaining about the noise at night. Just because some real estate developers have built some nice-ish condos on that block does not mean that the zombies which hang out in the neighborhood are going to go away. UN Plaza in civic center and the first block of 7th have been a bit of a hell hole for many years.
The only way buildings like Mission at Trinity or Soma Grande make any sense is if you drive in and out of your garage for the most part. For me the walk score of those places is close to zero since you are guaranteed to deal with shit (human feces and/or altercations) if you walk a block or two in any direction from those locations.
I've lived in SF for 29+ years all in lower Nob Hill. When I moved into my place the neighborhood was a little rougher. Over that time it's gotten more and more gentrified, but the Tenderloin/Civic Center area has been getting worse. From 2012 to 2021 I worked in Potrero Hill and commuted back and forth. It was a little too far to walk so I almost never did, but it was also a completely shitty walk since there was no good path that didn't go through the Tenderloin/Civic Center. There's no way I would consider living in that area.
The area thrives on misery. Many of the city's SROs and other services for the homeless are concentrated in the area. All the "non"-profits which benefit from homeless clients are based there. And Civic Center BART seems to be a great place to score drugs and for drug dealers to commute into the city for work.
SF either needs to go all in on a universal basic income, building housing, mental health services and decriminalization of drugs, OR they need to make it clear that shooting up, breaking into cars and shitting on the streets is not ok. Instead we have this half-assed in between approach where we give $1.6 Billion to over 700 different "community based organizations" to try to make the situation better, but instead it's just a big uncoordinated mess.
https://sfgov.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=11635453&GUID=55...
From a European perspective (from Spain) it is so weird to read this kind of texts...
Quite often here, the US and silicon valley are presented as the paradise for tech people, but now it seems to me that it is a paradise only if you can afford a really wealthy area.
Here in Spain salaries can be terrible compared to the US, but even the more "dangerous" cities (like Barcelona or Madrid) are way safer than the SF described by the OP.
And the experience of the OP is actually mild at that. I lived 2 blocks from Union Square, on Geary st, back in 2011/2012. I witnessed Sin City. Dead bodies, naked and drugged prostitute offering services, homeless woman blowing a homeless man for hit of his crack pipe, pimps beating a prostitute. Gangs shooting at each others a killing a tourist...
At the time I couldn't afford to live in the nice neighborhood. But even then, it's insane that all of that happens 400m away from Macy's, jewelery stores, expensive and fancy restaurants etc.
> the US and silicon valley are presented as the paradise for tech people,
The value comes from colocation - there is a LOT of tech value here - and that makes the location expensive
it’s a bet that doesn’t pay off for everyone
Also, the conflicted areas of SF are not the whole Bay Area by a long shot
Mission between 7th and 8th is one of the worst parts of town, and no one lives there for the community.
I’m guessing this person moved there for professional reasons if they didn’t even consider moving to any of the other dense parts of San Francisco.
The neighborhoods of San Francisco are: 1. Much more alive than downtown, 2. Safer, 3. Even more “dense” in certain areas given the decline in downtown foot traffic.
Drugs and Homelessness are political problems now. It's been a while since they are treated as health issues, that's why nobody can do anything, it's because like anything in politics it has become a pissing contest between people that are far too removed from the actual problem.
Spot on. In most previous decades, the city government (no matter the party) would have been able to take whatever action (probably more $$ for police and more enforcement) seemed appropriate to the problem, and that would be a non-partisan issue. Now even admitting that there is an actual issue seems to be a partisan stance.
If enforcement and police were an actual solutions, the United States would be the cleanest, safest country on Earth. But we aren't because it isn't.
The real crux of the issue is that the major west coast cities are being tasked with dealing with a nationwide drug and mental health crisis and there just isn't the money to humanely handle the problem. So you end up with people who correctly say that locking people up in prisons for personal drug use is inhumane and doesn't address their problem, while at the same time other folks correctly point out that people should have access to a clean and safe city and not need to watch for needles and human shit.
The federal government needs to provide funding for the west coast states to build more drug treatment centers, funding to train treatment providers, and more funding for mental health services. There are anti-social people who don't belong in jail but can't be on the street, right now there is nowhere for them to go.
The US is actually under-policed compared to Europe, probably because police officers are so handsomely paid cities can't afford many of them.
On a non federal level, imprisoning people and hence goading them elsewhere is the only solution. No city/county/state has the resources to be able to offer healthcare or housing. Freedom of movement across the country means net benefit recipients would move in, and net payers into the system would move out.
> No city/county/state has the resources to be able to offer healthcare or housing.
This is the lie told everywhere that the only real solution to affordable housing is gov spending billions on a small set of tenement buildings, that take a decade to build, and are 3x over budget. Instead of reforming municipal policies to reduce rampant NIMBYist roadblocks, rethinking zoning from the ground up, streamlining regulations to make it easier to follow and enforce the rules safely, etc etc.
None of those things require billions of dollars to be committed. Just heart, communication skills, and charisma. There's a mountain of capital and regular people ready to build new housing, lack of capital, or will, or lack of demand to build has never been the problem. To discover the root problem requires asking why it's so rare/expensive despite that reality and why it's so harder today than it was 100yrs ago.
I was addressing free housing (and/or mental healthcare/drug addiction treatment), not affordable housing.
Increasing supply of housing and bringing prices down is also a needed solution to prevent some people from getting to the destitute stage, and yes, that is under local control.
I personally don't see a distinction. It's infintiely more complicated to build public housing when people making $200k+ struggle to find a proper apartment to rent, let alone buy an actual house/condo.
Homelessness doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's not the homeless in one bucket then everyone else living in the real world, where the only dichotomy we have to accept when living in a city is public housing vs paying $3k/month for rent.
Well... OP does mention that SF has an operating budget of 14 billion dollars per year...
I am pretty sure that _something_ could be done with even a small portion of that _yearly_ ingress of capital.
It is easy to write that, but I invite anyone to pencil it out. Same situation with healthcare. "Billions" seem like a big number, until you dig into the cost of emergency heart surgery, NICU babies, cancer treatments, etc.
Note the problems you will be up against.
Homeless populations are likelier to have more mentally ill, drug addicted, and people with criminal history among them. Any people around proposed sites would be obviously opposed to any new facilities being built near them. That is why the west coast states pay $200k+ per key to buy hotels and motels and convert them to homeless shelters, because locals cannot fight it since it is already zoned for multi tenant housing.
And then you have induced demand. Taxpayers in any other place would have no problem keeping their taxes lower by paying for flights and buses to anyone who needs them to get to SF.
Imprisonment is far more expensive than housing. SLC ran a pilot program years ago proving the concept.
Of course, if one is the retributive sort, nothing grinds one’s spleen more than someone worse off getting something “they don’t deserve”.
I personally don’t understand why the some exceptionally wealthy billionaire in California doesn’t solve the homelessness problem themselves, expending some mere fraction of their net worth (i.e., the value of a couple bucks to the rest of us).
I personally don’t understand why the some exceptionally wealthy billionaire in California doesn’t solve the homelessness problem themselves
If you were an exceptionally wealthy billionaire, how would you solve it? Especially considering that the obvious approach of "build housing" is largely illegal.
Due to the SB-8 Housing Crisis Act of 2019, it is now largely legal to build housing. Sometimes property developers have had to sue local governments in order to enforce their rights but now most cities are complying. Obtaining the necessary land and building permits is still extremely expensive. A billion dollars worth of new housing would be great, but it would barely begin to address the shortage.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
The Builder's Remedy doesn't apply to SF yet because of its sham "Housing Element" plan it filed with the State government, that has realistically zero chances of ever happening, but bought them an 8 year reprieve.
> Sometimes property developers have had to sue local governments in order to enforce their rights
I'm glad that the state government has taken a step in the right direction, but the situation on the ground as you describe it still doesn't sound very friendly. There's enough risks in investment and business (that is, property development) as it is without needing to fight City Hall on top of it.
> Obtaining the necessary land and building permits is still extremely expensive.
Land I understand, since it's of a fixed supply in a highly desired area, but there's no reason why permitting should be so burdensome if policy intent is to foster more building.
Billionaires don’t seem to have trouble doing illegal things when it comes to tax evasion, securities fraud, and the like. Some random municipal zoning board would be child’s play with their resources.
The proof of this is that the rich regularly manipulate zoning laws. Look at what Google and Apple did to Palo Alto.
Violating a random municipal zoning board’s orders by building something without the necessary permits is a clear cut violation that is easy to spot that you cannot use plausible deniability for.
The US is not that corrupt yet. The billionaire might be able to bribe the zoning board members, but it would be pretty sacrificial of one’s self to risk a felony just to watch the building’s freshly laid foundation get destroyed, because that is only how far one might get without the cops getting involved.
Imprisonment is to keep people moving along, or deter them from coming.
Housing is more expensive because of the opposite, it incentives everyone to come get it.
On a federal level, housing and healthcare might be cheaper than imprisonment. But what is even cheaper (in the short run) is ignoring it altogether.
>I personally don’t understand why the some exceptionally wealthy billionaire in California doesn’t solve the homelessness problem themselves, expending some mere fraction of their net worth (i.e., the value of a couple bucks to the rest of us).
Because the problem is far more expensive than any single billionaire or even group of billionaires entire net worth. Even if they could handle just California's population. there are 290M people in the rest of the country, and a significant portion who would not mind coming to California for free housing.
Here is SLC’s program, including all the community work they have to do to mollify the NIMBYs:
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/06/1134230388/village-salt-lake-...
Median rent in SLC: 1.8k/mo, 21.6k/yr
Federal prison: ~39k/yr
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/09/01/2021-18...
Median rent in CA: 2.9k/mo, 34.8k/yr (according to Zillow)
CA prison: 106k/yr (!)
https://lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost
Incarcerating the homeless is not an economic decision, it’s an emotional one. Society doesn’t mind wasting endless amounts of money doing it, because the cruelty is the point.
I feel like the induced demand portion of my argument is being ignored.
CA prison might be 3x expensive per year, but would CA be looking to house 3x or more people if they offered free housing?
All law enforcement is not economical in this approach, when you are pricing only immediate costs. E.g. prosecuting a murderer is a complete loss of hundreds of thousands dollars if not millions. And we are not even getting the victim back for all these money spent.
Murderers aren’t really representative of the homeless.
Bear in mind mere homelessness is not unequivocally a crime in the states, see Martin v. Boise (2020 or so).
>Murderers aren’t really representative of the homeless.
Nobody is arguing they are.
>Bear in mind mere homelessness is not unequivocally a crime in the states
Nobody is for prosecuting homelessness. Vagrancy, loitering, public consumption of drugs and alcohol, obstruction of public right of way, public nuisance, public defecation, trespassing etc, etc, are crimes though and we should be going after their perpetrators regardless of their having a home.
Funds to combat in one local area just encourages the homeless and drug users from other areas to migrate over. The only move is hostility to shift the homeless elsewhere. Which only worsens the situation.
It is a tragedy of commons that requires federal action but they are too scared,
Unbelievable how embedded this meme is in our community. The article has to call it out explicitly right at the top, admit it's a fallacy, and then just... plows ahead anyway:
> My biggest problem with SF was simply not feeling physically safe [...] SF has a pretty low violent crime rate [...] Instead, the problem was that SF [has] thousands of people wandering around who are suffering from untreated substance abuse and/or severe mental illness
So... I guess the idea is that this is leaning extremely hard on "feeling". Author admits they're not unsafe. Author admits that their real issue is that they don't like being near people with drug habits or mental illness. But they still express it in the lede as "physical safety" anyway! Because that's how they "feel"?
Come on folks. Aren't techies like us supposed to be rationalists? Why are we lying to ourselves (and, in this blog post, others) about what we really want?
You're just arguing semantics at this point.
Sure, the author admits that violent crime rate is under control. But, implicit in his post, is the fact that this is only the case because residents adopt behavioral patterns that remove them from violent crime scenes.
Imagine you live in a neighborhood where walking on the right side of the street results in immediate decapitation. While it's true that you can simply always walk on the left side of the street and be 100% safe, most people would not call that a safe neighborhood.
> But, implicit in his post, is the fact that this is only the case because residents adopt behavioral patterns that remove them from violent crime scenes.
But the same is true everywhere though. You think that Houston or St. Louis or wherever don't "adopt behavioral patterns" to make themselves feel safer too? Only SF residents are smart enough to make life in the wasteland possible?
No, that's silly. SF isn't unsafe, period. SF residents (specifically ones right here[1]) "feel" unsafe because of an out of control meme. And now it's leading this formerly rationalist and clear-thinking demographic into these ridiculous rhetorical holes.
Cities are cities. They've always been like this. If you don't like it that's fine, but please stop pretending that anything happening in SF is new, or unique, or special in any way. It's just what your microcommunity has decided to yell about this year.
[1] Which doesn't include me. I'm in Portland, having lived in SF previously and grown up in the urban northeast. Cities, again, are cities.
I don't think Houston residents spend much if any time thinking about how to walk home from work to avoid a homeless encampment.
Cities don't have to be like this: by any standard, US cities are much less safe than those in the rest of the developed world. Where it comes to a head in San Francisco in particular is that everything is very heavily mixed together in close proximity, so commuting from a $2M townhouse to work a $300kpa job means you also pass through areas where people are literally dying in the street.
> You think that Houston or St. Louis or wherever don't "adopt behavioral patterns" to make themselves feel safer too?
No, not nearly to the same extent.
Whether that's the case or not is actually besides my point.
My point is that OP isn't simply claiming that he "feels unsafe". He's likely claiming that he IS unsafe. And, the only reason his unsafe environment hasn't resulted in physical harm is due to his altered behavior.
That line of reasoning is cogent and rational, and therefore, your claims of emotionalism are largely uncalled for.
Also, in my learning 'street smarts' as an adult , one lesson tougher people including my wife have taught me , is to trust your gut instincts if you are in a neighborhood or situation and you feel unsafe.
Don’t have such high expectations from someone who stayed in SF for so long
Hook up a heart rate monitor to someone walking down the street on University Ave. in Palo Alto, then hook it up walking down Market Street. Those feelings are real.
But they're not about safety! And the author (and presumably you too?) admit as much. Again, aren't we supposed to be better than arguing about policy issues via reference to our personal emotions? Isn't that what the woke hippies on the school board are doing?
That's a pretty big stretch to claim that everything related to emotion is equally suspect. Safety is something which naturally has a very strong perception element to it. A lack of a feeling of safety causes people to change their behavior in ways which tend to destroy a community (by moving away, avoiding public spaces, not shopping in certain areas, etc). Those harms to the community are tangible. Dismissing them because they don't show up in violent crime statistics is choosing to ignore reality.
> That's a pretty big stretch to claim that everything related to emotion is equally suspect.
The context is an emotional argument that is directly and explicitly contradicted by data. Yeah, I'd say that's suspect. Do you really disagree? "Facts don't care about your feelings", as it were.
Instead, what we're seeing in this subthread is a bunch of pontification about how the data is measuring the wrong thing or how feelings are important all by themselves. Which is fine. But none of that makes living in SF dangerous when it isn't, so an argument about SF based on safety problems is... just plain wrong.
"dense, central area and not in a single family house that’s 4 miles from downtown."
This is kind of funny to me considering I'd guess for the majority of America, 4 miles is remarkably close.
It's remarkably close by car, and though it was common for me when I lived in SF, I do not know many people who enjoy 2.25ish hour (round trip) walks. And doing $25 a day in ubers adds up fast too.
Those $25 Uber trips aren't necessary if you get a bike.
And you don't even need to be in shape anymore with e-bikes...
Except that in SF you must bring your bicycle inside with you, which basically was only feasible for your office/workplace. Cannot do with a grocery store, theater, gym etc.
Edit: An idea that came to mind, someone run with this. Bike lockers would be an amazing feature that likely could curb a lot of the issues. Something with a secure lock built in (like biometric or complex pin), 360degree cameras, and an insurance policy. I'd have paid hourly for that service if I still lived in the city.
If only there were a single other way to navigate a modern city without walking, driving, or purchasing a bike...
hopefully you're not sarcastically referring to SF public transit as being anything resembling a desirable means of transportation?
except that the comment i was responding to was specifically about bicycles?
We can talk specifically about bicycles. You don't need to buy one and lock it outside. You can get a Lyft Bike membership which would probably come out to about $5 per daily 4-mile commute on an e-bike, and much less if you qualify for their low-income program. And you're constantly within a couple blocks at most of one of those bikes.
There's also Revel scooters if you need more power and space for groceries, Lime scooters if you like getting injured, and there are plenty of tiny electric vehicles now that you can buy, wouldn't call a bicycle but can easily be brought into grocery stores etc. They're all over SF. I don't think it's exactly out of place to call out alternatives when discussing whether biking is a viable commuting option.
How safe is your bike, even chained up, in downtown SF?
Not very, although there is a system of cages that you can use that are somewhat convenient.
He says he rides a bike, takes public transit, etc. Just don't think I'd write off a location based on a 4 mile commute but I realize its drastically different realities here.
The Muni is effectively a donation based system and can take you much further and faster if you live in the right neighborhoods.
Super agree that living within a 5 minute walk of 9th and market, Civic Center, Powell, Montgomery, or embarcadero stations is peak public transit experience from a distance perspective. I loved being able to get on the train at SFO and then hop off essentially at my home.
But of course those spots also mean avoiding poops, drug deals, a homeless person in the 1% group that assaults people, and other general shadiness. Generally fine for a huge man, much worse for a dainty woman.
I live in lower haight, less than a two minute walk from the muni and thus less than 15 mons from downtown and I dont really encounter any of these things, except dog poops
Nice! Yeah there are definitely lower poop/riff raff density if you're willing to walk 15 mins each way. In my experience Muni+Bart is required to have good coverage of places I wanted to go (including Oakland and berkeley).
Edit: and I'm a 0 transfer kind of person. Albeit I tolerated switching from Muni to Bart in same station on market street. And because my own personal tolerance for walking was higher than average, I'd often just look for the route that allowed me to ride one ride even if I had to walk 60 minutes across the round trip.
yeah, if you're 0 transfer it's going to be difficult, but the Muni - Bart transfers are among the least painful (Bart-Bart transfers where they line up the trains are also pretty convenient).
> Thankfully, I escaped with only scrapes and bruises, but that was really upsetting for me, and I felt that it was only a matter of time before something worse happened.
Lately, with my observation that much of American life is getting much much worse. I often think about leaving America entirely, attempting to hold my breath a little longer to get what America most has to offer these days -- superior compensation/salary.
That being said I also have had a very minimal slice of living in America, for all I know there is some amazing pocket somewhere that I can have it all. But I have yet to find it in California or Texas.
If you don't need diversity, year-round hot weather, and sky-rocking housing prices - there's tons of nice affordable places near The Great Lakes.
Also, Philadelphia has some quite nice areas that are pretty affordable. And it's an easy train ride away from NYC.
The great lakes region doesn't have a great tech scene. Maybe Chicago, but otherwise you would be eeking out opportunities in college towns.
You might have better luck in SLC or Denver.
Google, Amazon, & Microsoft are all in Detroit. I'm pretty sure Facebook is, too. Plus it has a decent startup ecosystem.
IBM has tons of jobs in upstate NY - offices in Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse (not exactly a dream employer).
And remote jobs are always an option...
The nice parts of Denver are quite expensive. Detroit has much more to offer in terms of jobs than SLC.
SLC has a strong startup ecosystem, and around Provo these days also; it also gives you easy access to outdoor activity if you are into hiking and skiing (typical of west coast and mountain towns). The density of tech jobs is surely higher than Detroit, if not absolute numbers. Detroit has presences but they all seem to be tiny (~100 people each?), is it really considered a hot place for tech these days?
I will say, without knowing the ins/outs of it, that bellevue looked appealing for the variety of roles I could hold and live there.
> for all I know there is some amazing pocket somewhere that I can have it all
IME there is a pretty large middle band between the extremes of urban and the boondocks where you can come really close to having it all. It's easiest to find if instead of shooting for "all" you make the concession of having to own and use a car a lot - it's an unfortunate tradeoff, but once you accept it, it becomes relatively easy to find places that check the other boxes: decent cost of living, lots of culture/arts opportunities, great food, lots of outdoor activities, good weather, good schools, good safety, good job market, real feeling of community, etc.
The following won't guarantee success and isn't the only method, but it yields lots of good results: take a list of the 50 largest U.S. cities. Cross off the top 15. Cross off any in FL or CA. Randomly pick a remaining city. On a map, find neighboring cities/towns that are 35-45 miles away from that city. For each that looks interesting, go look at their city website. How big is their public library? How many parks do they have? Do they have any sort of annual city history celebration or other big community event? What community service organizations seem most active? (the idea here is to eliminate any that are a soulless suburban sprawl) If you're able, go visit one and even get an airbnb for a couple of weeks and just live there to try it out.
Germany's new citizenship law looks extremely compelling. Moreover, they have a relatively easy visa system to navigate with straightforward immigration rules. There's a very useful subreddit with a very dedicated moderator. [1]
[1]: reddit.com/r/germancitizenship
Thinking of Singapore?
I'd be open to it if it weren't for an aging parent. I've only heard amazing things from Singapore :)
I've lived in a few different countries and settled in the US. You're right about the pay in America, and it's at a scale beyond what most people (whether inside or outside of America) realize; take for example the state of Mississippi, who many Americans deride as being a "literal third world country", which actually turns out to have a comparable median disposable household income to an economic powerhouse like Germany.
> much of American life is getting much much worse
This sentiment is real and shared by many people, but keep in mind that many of the things that may be getting worse off in this country are becoming even worse in other countries. In fact, the easiest way to feel better about life here may be just to stop reading the news, in the same way that you're not plugged into the news cycle of, say, Denmark.
There's a lot to see in California and Texas outside of whichever cities you may have lived in, and a lot more to see in the rest of the US outside of those states. I invite you to explore more of it before writing it off.
> First, the city is incredibly wealthy and has a massive budget ...
This is true at a surface level, but looking deeper at City services and obligations the situation is more complex than simply declaring numbers large. San Francisco also has a much larger population of immigrants from all over including other states.
> Second, and even worse, the people in charge including the mayor, the police leadership, and a majority of the Board of Supervisors (the legislative body for SF), really just don’t seem to care one bit about what’s happening. Sure, they will occasionally rant in public and promise to fix things ...
Don't seem to care apart from occasionally promising to fix things. This is classic San Francisco attitude. Difficult longstanding problems are clearly incompetence, disinterest, a conspiracy of corruption, or perhaps all of these. Records and meetings are typically fully public, but actually attending any of that is too much for a member of the public to bear. Maybe so, but then you also are skipping out on your responsibilities and potential to contribute to some kind of positive solution.
People should consider moving to a different neighborhood first, pretty much none of these problems apply to me where I am in lower haight
SF also has way fewer drug murders than cities I have lived in on the east coast
That is addressed at the end of the article.
> Why didn’t you just move to a different part of SF?
> I wanted to live in a dense, central area and not in a single family house that’s 4 miles from downtown. Also, my neighborhood was perfectly nice when I moved in, and then got bad. What’s to prevent that from happening to other places in the city as well?
Lower haight is dense and fewer than 2 miles from downtown. I dont perceive the area OP is describing as one I would expect to be free from drug crime even four years ago, whereas I do have that expectation for this region of SF.
The area the OP is discussing is basically a couple blocks from the Civic Center. That's been a pretty sketchy area for pretty much as long as I can remember.
Obviously OP lived there (by choice) but one of the reasons many business visitors get a bad impression of SF is that they're probably staying and attending an event in, shall we say, not the greatest part of town.
> Lower haight is dense and fewer than 2 miles from downtown. I dont perceive the area OP is describing as one I would expect to be free from drug crime even four years ago, whereas I do have that expectation for this region of SF.
The history of Detroit suggests that that can change very quickly.
Agreed, I had lived in that same neighborhood from about 6 years ago to 1 year ago, and while it took a turn for the worse on March 2020, it has always had a significant drug, homeless and fecees problem.
TL;DR - SF proper was a dumpster fire 10 years ago - I have no idea why its taken people so long to catch on to the fact. OP's story tracks 100%.
My experience is now 10 years old so factor that in. Even then the Lower Haight was still very bad, its just that it wasn't quite as bad as so many other areas. I lived there, trust me. If automatic gunfire, seeing women beaten on the sidewalk by guys jumping out of cars to steal their phones/purses, people pissing everywhere in clear view and vagrants yelling at you trying to start shit sound "normal" to you then you will love the place.
Hayes Valley turned to poo in the time I was there or so it appeared to my eyes. I've been chased by drug addicts who looked like they had leprosy in Columbus area (curiously they operated as a pack with one of them running distraction while the others tried to come up from behind - organized such that we had to literally run from the bunch of them). Even then I didn't like SOMA in general and doubly so for Market street. Walking around in the mornings seeing the cars that had been broken into on the daily. Stepping over people on the sidewalks on my way home at night. Kicking a vagrant out of my girlfriends parking garage (Bay Street - Marina area - the Nice Part).
Want to sit at some out door place with a coffee and be left alone? Forget about that. There were people coming into coffee shops and beating people out of their laptops even. At the time I was a 220 lb male who spent much time in the gym and it was obvious. That didn't stop multiple lunatics from trying to start trouble with me. The BART? Forget about the BART. One lunatic accosted my girlfriend right in front of me and his day ended poorly (this didn't happen just once either).
Want a nice walk through Golden Gate Park - HA!!! Surrounded by the roughest looking bunch of vagrants you've ever seen such that there's no way in hell I'm walking in there. Try walking out of the Safeway grocery market at 2020 Market St sometime with a decent haul of supplies (they're waiting for you).
I suppose if you wanted to live in Cow Hollow/The Marina area and literally never leave it you might have a minimally invasive experience. Not "nothing" mind you, just less than other areas nearby.
A friend invited me to join her on a trip to The City in August and I gave it a hard pass.
I'm sure someone here will pipe up and say Im hyperbolizing here but this was my experience - no - this was a fraction of my experience. 10 years ago it was every bit as bad as this and I have every reason to believe it kept on getting worse after I threw in the towel. Im shocked the pain tolerance of the city has been so high that its just getting attention in the past few years.
I have to say the experience of reading the comments here (and all similar stories) gives a lot of Stockholm syndrome vibes.
"The city's actually really safe if you completely ignore this whole area that sits in the middle of it otherwise all bets are off" isn't exactly an endorsement.
SF is unique in that the bad areas are smack dab in the downtown of the city, but for almost everyone I know "ignoring this whole area that sits in the middle" is actually way easier than it sounds because it's actually not really in the middle.
Lower Haight is a lot nicer than it used to be. I don't see any of the things you're describing except for two:
1. shoplifting at that Safeway you mentioned.
2. There are still occasional grab & runs (ie. of laptops from cafes), this is one block from me and they pull a gun in a crowded cafe [0]
Obviously more still needs to be done but I don't find this impacts my day to day that much.
[0]: https://sfstandard.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/SFS_Robber...
People should have a right to feel safe and secure in their home and possessions and not have to move because the state refuses to fulfill it's function.
Sorry but I am anti- rights predicated on feeling. I can't even control my own feelings, not sure why you expect the state to be able to do so.
Every area of sufficient size, at least in the US, has rough neighborhoods
And yet not ever area in the US has literal piles of human sh* laying all over the sidewalk.
There's no way "feeling safe" is a legal right
If you listen carefully, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland are whispering messages to you about local politics and policies.
Those who caused this (voters) will simply leave and blame everyone else but their own political views.
I am sincerely curious:
Where is the OP moving to? What criteria will be (was) used to make the selection?
I wish there was a single source of truth website that was like a status page for this whole issue.
A dashboard of the stats and what is being done about it.
From the outside it seems blatantly obvious that it's simply a lack of policing.
I really don't get the animosity of the left-wingers about police, and the way everyone has to pussy-foot around these issues. No one is having issues with police if they aren't breaking the law. This view of the police is so distorted.
The unwavering KPI of every city should be: citizen safety. This is the basic human need, and it should override every other concern.
Here is the solution:
1. You are not allowed to setup a tent on the street. You must stay in housing provided by the government outside of the city in a cheap area. You will be given free transporation there.
2. If you are a repeat offender found to be sleeping on the street, then you will be arrested, and imprisoned.
3. A mental health disorder is not an excuse. If necessary, build a jail that is a mental health treatment center.
I don't get what is so hard about this.
Just make it clear: it's illegal to sleep on the street, loiter, do drugs on the street.
What is the worst thing that happens from this policy implemented fully?
> No one is having issues with police if they aren't breaking the law
yes, they are. that's why there's "animosity of the left-wingers about police."
> 1. You are not allowed to setup a tent on the street. You must stay in housing provided by the government outside of the city in a cheap area. You will be given free transporation there.
and what about the residents that already live in that "cheap area"? who pays for the construction of the housing - the people within the city limits or the people living in the cheaper area?
> 2. If you are a repeat offender found to be sleeping on the street, then you will be arrested, and imprisoned.
what if it's a family who lost their home? do you separate the children from their parents for the crime of being too poor?
> 3. A mental health disorder is not an excuse. If necessary, build a jail that is a mental health treatment center.
great - how long are you imprisoned if you have a mental health crisis?
> What is the worst thing that happens from this policy implemented fully?
abuse by law enforcement; imprisoning people who need mental health services, not to be locked up with actual criminals; the separation of families who have fallen on hard times; criminalization of poverty; short-sighted solutions which don't actually address the core issues.
I am interested to hear from any HN readers who live in SF, as to whether or not this sounds factually accurate.
I’ve lived in SF since 2007. OP is likely factually accurate about where he lives, which is one of the worst blocks in SF. I’ll add that this was the case in 2007 as well, I wouldn’t say that 7th and Mission has gotten significantly better or worse over the years. It was likely slightly nicer when OP moved in, but that was the exception, not the historical norm.
The main thing is that OP then uses that to generalize about the state of the entire city. This makes it difficult to actually have a reasonable conversation about what is working and what isn’t in SF because everything reverts to the binary “sf is/isn’t a shithole” argument. In OPs case, it actually exposes the reality behind a lot of these “random tech blogger leaving SF” stories where they don’t actually know much about the city or appear to have much of a social life outside of tech that would expose them to other parts of the city. In SF there are tons of places to live that aren’t “single family homes 4 miles from downtown” - the city is 7x7 square miles.
> the city is 7 square miles.
49 square miles, in a 7 by 7 square, roughly. (Your point stands, of course)
lol fixed. thanks
Factually, there aren't any glaring errors.
The way it frames things is weird, though. Not to say SoMa and downtown aren't shitholes that will make you feel unsafe multiple times per day; they are. But most other neighborhoods have a much safer vibe, and many of them are literally a 10 minute bus ride to downtown. His pooh-poohing the idea of moving to a different neighborhood is just weird. (If he were complaining about the school system or something being disfunctional or cost of living being too high, then his critique of SF as a whole would make a lot more sense.)
He can't really take his experiences living a block from 6th Street and apply them to the whole of SF, and he must be aware of that, or be particularly clueless.
> many of them are literally a 10 minute bus ride to downtown
Is that 10-minute bus ride a pleasant experience on a daily basis? If you live in a quiet part of the city but must commute back and forth to downtown during which you run a non-negligible risk of a particular unpleasant encounter, then you don't gain a whole lot by being in that quiet part.
Depends on the particular bus line. Yes, they can be unpleasant.
However, you do gain a whole lot living in a quiet area compared to living in the middle of the shitshow, and it's not close to comparable.
I've never lived in SF, but I've worked and spent a lot of time in the area around the OP's home; it sounds like a pretty accurate description of one of the worst neighborhoods in the entire city.
He could walk four blocks in any direction and have a dramatically safer and more enjoyable experience.
It is somewhat true for the few blocks around where the author lived. But it's confusing to me when people say it's worse now than it was in 2016/2017, say. The pandemic made everything worse for a couple years, but I think we're just back to the same level of misery that had me avoiding many blocks in that area back in 2016. That part of the city was clearly already gone and neglected then.
Yea, don't let the door hit on the way out...
Now, if only 10 or 20 million more people would get out of California, then maybe the population would be back to a reasonable level...
Everyone who can't tell the difference between CA and TX should really just move to TX...
your article doesn’t include the term “doom loop”, you may want to edit it to add that in
How many "doom loops" equal one "death spiral"?
Everyone: leaves
OP: stays , writes whole essay about obvious things everyone left for 4 years ago, leaves
The local crime statistics are saying that San Francisco is a safe city with crime trending downwards.
The article says as such:
> My biggest problem with SF was simply not feeling physically safe while walking down the street or sitting in a train. SF has a pretty low violent crime rate, at least by US standards, so I wasn’t worried about getting shot or robbed or anything like that.
> Instead, the problem was that SF had (and still has today), thousands of people wandering around who are suffering from untreated substance abuse and/or severe mental illness. The vast majority of these folks were completely harmless, but a small percentage were hostile, threatening, and, in some cases, violent.
> In multiple cases over the last few years, I was followed, screamed at, and threatened in broad daylight. Thankfully, nothing physically happened to me, but it’s a really jarring experience to have this happen. Each time I reported these incidents to the police, they never responded. I got the sense that as long as no one was physically harmed, they didn’t really care. Thus, there were no mechanisms in place to control, contain, or treat this behavior.
The reality is that crime is a statistic and fully depends on your definition of crime and how well it is reported.
Take the <$950 theft being classified as misdemeanor, not crime plus general overload of the system means cops don't even bother.
So now you have a theft that isn't reported.
Crime goes down.
That’s not a location specific effect to it doesn’t really affect the relative statistics much. Comparing SF to actually dangerous US cities shows stark differences.
What hurts SF is a perfect environment for people to be homeless, and thus all the associated problems from homelessness. Rather than murder, rape, home invasion, etc it’s a host of lesser but still unpleasant things.
Simplest way to reduce crime statistics is to stop reporting or responding to crimes...
The pocket which OP lives in is pretty much an encampment. I don't particularly understand OP's attachment to that area; I've also lived in SF for 10 years, and downtown SF is easily the most uninteresting part of SF to me; but I can understand feeling unsafe in that area even if it is statistically safe.
Seriously. his aversion to moving to other neighborhoods is ridiculous, he is practically living in the tenderloin
I agree; He needs to just accept that he will be assaulted in some neighborhoods and avoid those. /s
have you ever lived in a major city that didn't have dangerous neighborhoods? at any time in the history of the united states? i'm a minority who has been harassed and assaulted in certain parts of the united states (hint: in rural areas). what's your advice for me and what prescriptions do you have to quell rural violence?
Yes. I lived in Warsaw for 20 years. Warsaw has zero dangerous neighborhoods and has a population of 1.86 million.
My recommendation for you to stay safe as a minority in America who feels threatened is to obtain a concealed carry permit, a Glock 43 with holster, and a cell phone you can use to call 911. When shit hits the fan try to run away and call 911 but if you can't run away you can leave the phone off the hook with the 911 operator on the other end. If you can't talk your encounter is recorded even if you aren't able to engage with the operator immediately. The 911 recording can clear up any self-defense issues.
the people who were doing the harassing and assaulting included law enforcement. Philando Castile was famously killed when he revealed to the officer that he had a (legally) concealed weapon. do you have any other suggestions?
my point here is that there are places in the US that are not safe for various subgroups. in major cities, this is (unfortunately) a common issue but that doesn't mean that it's magically going to go away - the alternative is to be prepared when moving to literally the most dangerous part of the city.
I completely believe you. There are many cases of utterly unwarranted terrible atrocities committed against non-whites. I assume that is what you mean. Are whites a minority in America yet? Here is one example that immediately comes to mind: Bodycam Footage Of Virginia Cops Drawing Guns And Spraying Army Lieutenant During Traffic Stop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf5KZSADDhg
If we use detailed violent crime information from Chicago sourced from https://heyjackass.com/ it is clear that the greatest threat to non-whites is other non-whites. 96% of victims and assailants are non-white and 92% of the time injury and death occurs from being shot. I find it hard to believe that city police are killing non-whites at a similar rate and manner. According the same website mentioned above there were 3 people killed by police in 2023 and 3 people were wounded by police in 2023. If we speculatively assume all six victims of police involved shootings were black only and we consider the other 237 black victims of violent crime (93% of which are shootings, so 220 blacks shot, then this gives us the ratio of 6/(220+6) or about 3% of black victims were victims of police involved shootings in Chicago. You have a 97% chance of being shot by non-cop if you are black when a violent/deadly encounter is in the cards.
If you are non-white and live in a city you should absolutely conceal carry to protect yourself. Use 911 to your advantage as a recording system too. I still recommend a good pair of running shoes first and foremost. Sometimes 911 puts people on hold. If you live in a city where this happens (it happened to me before in the US nation's capital) maybe its for the best to wear a body cam when going out and about.
> I agree; He needs to just accept that he will be assaulted in some neighborhoods and avoid those. /s
so i should buy a gun, use 911 as a recording system, buy a pair of good running shoes, and wear a body cam? but this guy who moved to the tenderloin shouldn't have to accept that he lives in a bad neighborhood?
Could you post some citations? ADT's crime statistics seem pretty damning with 10x the national crime rate in some areas of downtown San Francisco. Even if the statistics indicate a decreasing crime rate, they would seem defiant of the most common kind of testimonials of the quarter-million-plus people who have left the area.
Traditionally, SF has bad property crime (lots of rich people to steal from) and low violent crime (too busy stealing things from rich people to shoot/hurt people).
> they would seem defiant of the most common kind of testimonials of the quarter-million-plus people who have left the area.
Most people leave because it is too full/expensive. The city (and Bay Area) cycles in and out people, it always has. But an equilibrium is always reached where it is still expensive but not expensive enough to lose population.
The statistics are the result of the DAs refusing to prosecute crime. At the beginning of the BLM era everyone said that what is going to happen is police officers are no longer going to do arrests because they fear becoming the next major incident, at the same time the DAs started refusing to prosecute people, so they'd end up back on the street.
The result was no one was investigating or prosecuting crimes anymore. Everyone predicted what would happen next is that the pundits, the news media, and the politicians would point to "see crime is actually trending downwards the numbers are going down." when in reality police were no longer as responsive, at the same time people would stop calling the police because the wait times would be too long and they know nothing would happen.
This is what's happening, and I will not be convinced otherwise. 2+2=4
Having your own little private universe of beliefs that can't be falsified is pretty dumb. There is a city dashboard that shows the disposition of cases presented to the SF DA and the rates of various outcomes have been basically flat for decades. The thing that has changed is the cops have figured out they will still get paid even if they do nothing, or don't even show up. In the decade from 2012 to 2022 the number of cases the SFPD presented fell by half. This has nothing to do with the rate at which the DA brought charges. https://www.sfdistrictattorney.org/policy/data-dashboards/
Why would you show up to or do a job where one small mistake under stress could have you convicted of murder of a special protected class which virtually guarantees you will be thrown under the bus by the politicians and harassed endlessly by the angry mob? You have to be insane to take the job in that kind of work environment.
The people downvoting you are the ones also likely voting for these politicians. There’s a real problem in this country and the trend needs to be reversed or our problems will grow exponentially.
There is no meaningful political opposition. The republicans party is a joke and the democrat party is a massive operation which touches nearly all civil servants and owners of major businesses. You stand no chance of being elected unless you are affiliated with realistically the bigger one of the two mobs. And as a prospective political candidate, if you don't pledge allegiance to Israel in writing you will be privately blacklisted by political campaign donors, nobody will invite you to social events anymore, and any support you had will dry up. We are subjects of a one party totalitarian government where we get to pick among puppets which all pledge to execute the will of the broader party. If you research any of your candidates in your local elections you will see that the only people that win are those affiliated with the broader party and their agenda. The broader party has a basket of initiatives that each lemming chooses to identify with to create the illusion of choice. Over time the broader agenda is always fulfilled. This is the way that the powers that be have managed to solidify their rule despite giving the people the right to vote.
it's only a national problem insofar as these people are going to leave the charred remains of their city, destroyed by the people they elected, move somewhere else, and continue their exact same election habits there instead, expecting a different result somehow—if you don't live somewhere that's likely to receive an influx of CA expats, then it's not really a concern.
Also “ Then, a few years ago, the city made a conscious decision to stop nearly all traffic enforcement. As a result, the behavior of some drivers got terrible, to the point of being dangerous. “
Yes, but that's more indicative of data problems (missing data).
It's not data problems per se. It's the lack of willingness of authorities to take reports. They will do anything possible to throw the crime reports out on a technicality. And even if the crime is crystal clear, the DA won't prosecute. All charges dropped, all the time. Maybe it's their idea of reparations. I think its blockbusting being done on a massive scale.
As a thought experiment what would be the best way to seize the assets of downtown building owners or at least buy them in a metaphorical fire sale? Blockbusting! The background and history of the term is left as an exercise to the reader.
“ Each time I reported these incidents to the police, they never responded. I got the sense that as long as no one was physically harmed, they didn’t really care. “
You can also expect this treatment in Washington D.C. and Houston. I speculate it is true of most cities in America these days.
They mention in this the rebuttal "Other cities in the US are just as bad. Why are you picking on SF?" which matches my experience. The west coast cities are much much worse with regards to random violence than any of the cities in east coast or midwest I've been to in the last 5 years. Detroit, Chicago, Philly, NYC, Baltimore, sure they have violence and homeless people. But they feel much safer and back to normal than SF or Portland.
I don't know how accurate this list is, but it sure seems like most of the high crime cities in the US are NOT in the west:
https://www.safehome.org/resources/crime-statistics-by-state...
This article cites an LA Times article as justification that “New York is one of the most violent cities in America,” but that cited LA Times article states that NYC is safer than the next six most populous cities and that the situation is far worse in other cities - and therefore, by their own logic, NYC isn’t one of the most violent cities in America. I wouldn’t put too much stock in it.
The common explanation I've heard is that on the east coast the poverty and violence is more condensed into ghetto areas whereas on the west coast the misery is spread around by having poor areas interleaved with rich ones. You might consider that more fair, but it also makes it much less predictable. Personally I like being able to choose to stay way the hell away from it.