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The Loneliness of Being Black in San Francisco
- spraak 10y agoWhile the articles that I've been seeing on HN lately aren't specifically uplifting, I /am/ glad to be (seemingly) seeing more related to the black experience.
- elgabogringo 10y agoI live in the neighborhood that is profiled in the article. I am not surprised that blacks are leaving. I want to leave myself.
- Kinnard 10y agoWhat makes you want to leave?
- elgabogringo 10y agoExcessive human feces on sidewalks. Mentally ill on every block. People selling drugs up and down the street. Loud music played on the sidewalk into the evening. Very run-down grocery and convenience stores in the area. Drunks on the corners at night. And that's just the neighborhood. You still have the generally crappy things about SF like how awful June/July are (cloudy, windy, and cold), how expensive it is, the fog.
- elgabogringo 10y agoOh, I forgot to mention how drugs are sold all day long ("The Wire", corner-boy style) just catty-corner to the police station next to the McDonalds. Two people were shot there in January on the same day. Cars parked in the street are constantly broken into. Despite all the crime, I never see cops.
- Kinnard 10y agoWhoa. What neighborhood do you live in? The article mentions a couple. That doesn't sound like San Francisco.
- ng12 10y agoIt sounds every bit like San Francisco to me. Even nice neighborhoods have problems with car break-ins.
- chrischen 10y agoI've been here over 5 years and can concur the Mission is a hotspot for broken car windows, stolen bikes, and muggings.
- peterwwillis 10y agoClearly you haven't walked around SF very much... I've only been twice and I see it everywhere. The Tenderloin is probably the most concentrated.
- Kinnard 10y agoI'm actually quite a walker and there are only a few neighborhoods that seem bad, the Tenderloin is one of them. Maybe it's cuz I'm from Detroit.
- Kalium 10y agoReally? Reading that description, I know it's the Fillmore.
- ng12 10y agoI take it you live towards the Western Addition? That's something that's always seemed weird about SF to me -- there are all these little pockets where it's night and day difference a block or two apart.
- Kinnard 10y agoIt's like that in Detroit too. Robber Baron mansions surrounded by open fields and burnt-out shells of houses with bodies in them.
- elgabogringo 10y agoNow, yes. I live in Western Addition. Before I lived in the nice part of Soma by the Ballpark. There we still had the mentally ill and feces to some degree, but not the rest.
- bpchaps 10y agoI went out to SF for a vacation and to check out if it made sense to move out there for job prospects, but the homelessness absolutely ruined it for me. Nobody ever seems to talk about it on HN for some reason, but it was the absolute most glaring part about SF. Within walking distance of some pretty big named companies, I felt less safe than I do walking in Chicago. To make things even odder, it was in an area with fancy restaurants and folks in suits/dresses walking around. It was truly surreal. How can people have such strong blinders to those things?
- chrischen 10y agoIt's hard to talk abot homelessness wihtout getting lampooned. Most people choose to ignore it, thinking it's doing the homeless a favor. In reality SF is actually very generous to the homeless, which is why they are here. Many, if not most, beg for money and can make quite a bit which is used to buy drugs (food is not hard to find in SF, for free). I walk down a part of the civic center area almost daily and the drug dealer on one of the streets (who is there every day, same guy) is always doing business with the local homeless.
- wahern 10y agoThe vast majority of residents in SF want something done about the homeless situation, and they don't mind if the gloves come off. A couple of months ago _all_ the city's major newspapers coordinated a campaign to discuss and highlight the issue because they felt city officials weren't putting enough effort into devising solutions. The root of the problem is IMO 1) a small minority of people who actively try to defend the homeless' "right" to live on the streets, and 2) who have concocted a ridiculous narrative about the homeless problem being caused by the so-called housing crisis. Because of #2, any effort by moderate politicians to enforce laws related to vagrancy and generally force homeless off the street and into assistance programs is cast by critics as being anti-housing. If you want things to change, don't vote for politicians like Jane Kim, Aaron Peskin, and other figures who [usually opportunistically] perpetuate this braindead narrative. Donate as much money as you can to more moderate candidates. For example, when Mayor Ed Lee wanted to break up an enormous homeless encampment, Jane Kim claimed the mayor was rousting homeless children, with the implication that their families had been kicked out of their apartments and rather than trying to re-house them the mayor was punishing them. It was totally opportunistic--Kim was just trying to get free airtime to improve her name recognition for her Senate bid. It was also 100% BS.
- Kalium 10y agoThe Fillmore has a long history of changing ethnic hands. Once upon a time it was a Japanese neighborhood. Once upon a time it was a Jewish neighborhood. When people discuss the Fillmore and its history, that discussion tends to start at roughly 1945-1950 when there's just suddenly a black neighborhood. Like maybe it materialized out of the aether as a jazz center or something.
- BurningFrog 10y agoAre you saying that was a result of the Japanese internment camps?
- Kalium 10y agoThe Fillmore became a black neighborhood directly after the Japanese population was interned. I think it's reasonable to think there's a link there.
- Kinnard 10y agoAs a black San Franciscan I can say it's palpable. Remarkable article revealing that there was once Black History in San Francisco, which you'd never know walking around.
- eevilspock 10y agoIt's remarkable that there was once Native American history in this country, which you'd never know traveling around. Gentrification is not integration... Integration would have bi-directional flows of color between neighborhoods. This is far more akin to colonization.
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- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Kinnard 10y agoI'm surprised there wasn't an influx after the Civil War. The article sort of glosses over that period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodusters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodusters
- peterwwillis 10y agoMost blacks who migrated to cities from the south after the war were met with at the very least skepticism, though usually outright racism and violence. Between the beginning of this general 'migration' to urban areas and the MLK riots, white people became increasingly 'motivated' to move to the suburbs, which led over time to the urban centers deteriorating until they were completely unstable, usually necessitating rescue by the state [affordable housing, food stamps, etc]. Eventually a trickle of white development/business starts the reverse process of gentrification. I am not aware of a single case of increase in urban development having a net benefit to the black community, mainly because they are almost never the target demographic for that development. When people complain about shitty urban areas full of blight, homeless, mentally unstable, crime, etc, they're basically complaining about the state of the urban center which white people created when they moved out decades ago.
- lwhalen 10y agoWait, explain to me slowly how it's white-people's fault that an area deteriorates after they move out. Generally the absence of a person means they relinquish responsibility for what goes on in a place that they aren't occupying, at least in my fragile, tiny mind.
- Kinnard 10y agoThere's a lot more going on than that. If that's not obvious then I'd expect its because you haven't investigated the issues. Black communities and neighborhoods are specifically targeted for destruction and/or acquisition. Black families and communities have born the brunt of the War on Drugs. A community is not going to do well when a large swath of its fathers are rounded up, caged, and permanently barred from living a life of dignity.
- Snargorf 10y agoWait wait. So: 1. White people commit racism and violence against blacks causes 2. White people flee to the suburbs causes 3. Urban centers to deteriorate. Let's examine: 1->2 So white people were fleeing... their own violence against blacks? 2->3 So when those violent people left, this cause the areas to get... worse? Apparently you believe white people being present is a problem, and white people leaving is a problem. Their presence hurts blacks, and when they leave it hurts blacks too. So literally everything is the fault of white people, whether they're coming or going, here or there. Even more surreal - these blacks voluntarily moved towards the whites. Then the whites moved to escape the blacks. And the bad guys here are... the whites! The ones who blacks want to live around, and who are trying to flee them. It really is remarkable the rationalizations a mind is capable of.
- lwhalen 10y agoI think your post and mine must have waved to each other when they passed in The Tubes :-)
- Kinnard 10y agoDo you think any of this has to do with the fact that it was illegal to teach Blacks to read and write. Do you think any of this has to do with the mental trauma of enslavement. Do you think the Emancipation Proclamation or the 13th Amendment make all the bad things go away. Ubiquitous discrimination grinds on the soul. Do you blame the oppressed for being ground down?
- douche 10y agoWe're at least two or three generations away from any of this. Hell, slavery's been abolished for five generations. Five generations ago, my family was poor-as-a-churchmouse country bumpkins (still are, by and large). They didn't have any education, and they got drafted to fight in a war they didn't give a tinker's damn about to fight and die on Little Round Top and a dozen other places in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania, and many of them died.
- 10y ago
- davidf18 10y agoThis is not a black-white or other racist issue. The issue is unaffordable housing and it is a problem in many cities such as NYC where I live, not just SF. The cause of the unaffordable housing is zoning restrictions that limit housing density and overuse of historic landmark status through politically induced scarcity. Using politics to induce scarcity creates an additional "economic rent" or profits above for landowners (housing and apartment owners) above what they could get in an efficient market. This is a basic concept of microeconomics: the use of politics to induce scarcity for receiving profits above what one would get in an efficient, competitive market. This "rent seeking" makes landowners like Donald Trump much wealthier than they otherwise would be in an efficient market. Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser has written extensively about this. NYTimes columnist and Economics Nobelist Paul Krugmann has written about this in his columns, and Financial Times columnist (with a masters in Economics Tim Harford) has also written about this. Another example of gaining "economic rent" or "rent-seeking" is in NYC there had been a political limit of the number of taxi medallions to 13,000. The result was a medallion market value of $1.2 million per medallion. Taxi drivers that leased cabs had to pay for use of the medallion as well as the cab, and gasoline. The result is much higher fares approved by the NYC Taxi and Licensing Commission. Then Uber/Lyft came along and the price of the medallions dropped from the $1.2 million to less than $700,000. The rent-seeking is very harmful to the economy and of course adds to the income inequalities. It is in invisible "tax" that transfers wealth from the less wealthy to the wealthy. Money that one could be spending on goods and services in an efficient housing market is instead going towards paying additional housing costs with that money ending up in the pockets of the wealthy. The race issue headline undoubtedly gets more page clicks than an article that would state that billionaires such as Donald Trump owe much of their wealth to inefficient markets resulting from the use of politics to create artificial scarcity. The solution is a simple one which is to get rid of the destructive laws that create the artificial scarcity in land use. It is upsetting to me that the NYTimes reporters appear not to understand basic economics. For more information see: Edward Glaeser: Build Big Bill (Mayor of NYC) http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1.1913739 http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1.... An on-line article about "rent seeking" and the damage to the economy (includes land use restrictions) http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-rent-seeking-is-too-damn-high/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-rent-seeking-is-too-... This book is a very fun read: Tim Harford: The Undercover Economist https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199926514 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199926514