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As a former SF resident now living in Manhattan I can definitely say I generally feel much safer in NYC than I did in SF. I’m guessing it’s a combination of the

As a former SF resident now living in Manhattan I can definitely say I generally feel much safer in NYC than I did in SF. I’m guessing it’s a combination of the fact that most of Manhattan is so gentrified that there are few pockets of poorer communities where gang-related activity can thrive and the number/visibility of police is comparably much higher. Taxes and CoL are comparable, so I definitely feel like I’m getting more for my $$ as far as security and safety goes.

Gatsky 9y ago
All this talk about personal safety... there were so many homeless people in SF that clearly had an untreated psychiatric condition. How safe do you think it is for them? Everyone goes on about shit on the streets like it's a normal 'poor person' thing to do. It isn't.
- hueving 9y ago
  What are we supposed to do? People seem to be against institutionalization because it denies them their freedom and they refuse to use the many public and private homeless assistance programs available to them.
  - akvadrako 9y ago
    It's not like this is a unique local issue, but SF seems to handle it worse than almost any other city in the developed world. All you need is the political will and to copy how other places do it.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Do they refuse, or are the facilities full or inadequate? What about the process by which people get into this state in the first place?
  - DavidSJ 9y ago
    The high cost of housing no doubt plays a large role in the Bay Area's homelessness situation. That in turn has a demand side cause -- the continued influx of highly paid tech workers -- and a supply side cause -- the economically illiterate politics which paints housing development as some sort of handout to developers. The supply side of this problem could be fixed through political means, at no real cost to anyone. New York has 6x the population density of San Francisco yet lower housing prices, because it has the capacity to meet the demand.
forapurpose 9y ago
> poorer communities where gang-related activity can thrive I know the parent comment only said this in passing, but let's be careful about assuming poor communities are gang-infested or dangerous. AFAIK, gangs are not a problem in most American cities.
- dawhizkid 9y ago
  Not trying to overgeneralize but there’s definitely a correlation between poverty and gang activity. I’m also not necessarily suggesting gentrification is a net positive, just a big factor in declining crime rates in NYC. In Manhattan, I think the last pockets of seediness were in Alphabet City but that has quickly gentrified as well. As far as I know gang-related activity near NYC is now concentrated in parts of Brooklyn and Long Island (I.e MS-13)
  - nerdponx 9y ago
    There was a major gang bust at the houses on Amsterdam Ave in Harlem a couple years ago. Plenty of bad shit still happens uptown. But it definitely is concentrated in pockets now, and it's definitely less bad than it was even a few years ago.
  - forapurpose 9y ago
    > there’s definitely a correlation between poverty and gang activity Broadly, I agree. To refine my point: Most street gangs are in poor areas but most poor areas don't have street gangs. > gang-related activity near NYC is now concentrated in parts of Brooklyn and Long Island (I.e MS-13) Does anyone know any hard data on MS-13 activity? Government has made it a talking point recently but I haven't seen data on how common it really is. > I’m also not necessarily suggesting gentrification is a net positive, just a big factor in declining crime rates in NYC. That seems true to me and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. I guess my general point, which was not a criticism of yours (yours just made me think about it), was: Let's be careful about broad stereotypes which can and do result in criminalizing poor people. I will add an observation by the esteemed Woodrow Wilson Guthrie: "Some will rob you with a six-gun, / And some with a fountain pen." I would guess that the latter cause far more harm each year than the former, and in NYC especially.
zghst 9y ago
Where in SF did you feel unsafe? I walk around all parts of the city considered “dangerous” (Bayview, Mission, Ocean View/Ingleside) and nothing has happened to me. Really the only “bad” area SF has is the Tenderloin and it’s common sense not to be out there wandering around even during the day.
- pfarnsworth 9y ago
  Thanks for your anecdote. I have had friends beaten up and robbed in the Mission. I have a friend who lives in Bayview who had his windows shot out. My friend's friend was mugged in Glen Park BART station, she was punched in the face and the mugger grabbed her bag, no one did anything. My wife's friends had their phones stolen off their table at a Starbucks in Noe.
  - santaclaus 9y ago
    Sure, and the same anecdotes hold in Manhattan. I've had friends robbed at knifepoint in the Upper West Side, I've seen phone jackings at 1pm in front of Gristedes in the Upper East Side. Hell, my brother's roommate in Harlem was clocked with a baseball bat in the head while leaving his apartment and subsequently robbed blind. By and large NYC and San Francisco are both very safe cites in the grand scheme of things. (Unless you are a car window in San Francisco. Then you are screwed).
    - dawhizkid 9y ago
      or if you are on BART are terrorized by a gang of teens https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/11/25/group-of-teens-strikes-again-in-bart-cellphone-snatching-thefts/ https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/11/25/group-of-teens-strik...
      - santaclaus 9y ago
        Sure, and groups of teens in NYC have been sucker punching random people on the streets for a few years now. [1] [1] http://www.newsweek.com/new-yorkers-are-getting-sucker-punched-face-thanks-knockout-game-695513 http://www.newsweek.com/new-yorkers-are-getting-sucker-punch...
JauntTrooper 9y ago
I just moved to NY from SF earlier this year, and I agree, it feels so much safer.
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
All* the violent crime in New York City (especially gang related) happens in the NYCHA ghettos, it has been this way for a long time and even that is lower now. Dnainfo had a map of nyc gangs and it was funny because they all looked like xbox live usernames, and then the awkward reality set in that the gangs are all 14* year olds *hyperbole
- exelius 9y ago
  GTA IRL.
- linkmotif 9y ago
  They probably are 14-16.
- lr4444lr 9y ago
  Despite the downvoting because the user is being a little snarky, his point about violent crime focused in NYCHA ghettos is essentially correct: https://spotcrime.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/newyorkcity.jpg https://spotcrime.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/newyorkcity.jp...
  - ringaroundthetx 9y ago
    Consensus driven websites reflect world view more than accuracy, but primarily because people dont use upvotes/downvotes for the same reasons Sites that pride themselves on accurate information should consider a different model
paul7986 9y ago
I loathe San Francisco it's a gross city especially Market St. and many of its surrounding areas. There's no other city in the US where Ive witnessed so many people on the streets; very sad and everywhere you go the sights & smells hits you. Makes you appreciate what you have, yet sad such a place exists (what can you do to help all these people) and I've lived in Philly, NYC, Baltimore and Nashville.
- fspeech 9y ago
  Have you considered how the weather condition differs in the cities you mentioned?
- beaner 9y ago
  This is a product of SF being extremely welcoming and supportive of the homeless and the poor. It's interesting to me how so many people confuse the absence of poverty/crime/homelessness with a system that has solved it. NYC has less of these things because it has undergone extreme gentrification and has politics and police which treat the homeless much worse. This is the opposite of what most people consider to be a real solution, yet NYC is praised for it. It is praised for the ends, not the means. SF actually employs more of the policies people claim that they want to see, and as a result, it welcomes more homeless, and as a result, has more homeless, and as a result, it is demonized. It's so backwards.
  - adventured 9y ago
    New York City has homeless shelter capacity for 60,000 or more people every night. It puts San Francisco to shame in that regard. The reason tens of thousands of homeless people aren't all in the street, is because they have such vast shelter capacity. San Francisco can't manage to handle 3,000 to 4,000 people without permanent shelter (~6,600 total homeless), despite its immense affluence as a city. It's a failure of priorities.
    - cheeseblubber 9y ago
      I think you need to account for the fact that SF has a population of ~860,000 where as NY has a population of ~8,500,000. You also have to account for the weather in SF vs NY. Not defending either city just trying to put the numbers in to perspective
Spooky23 9y ago
Nobody can afford to be a criminal in Manhattan. Poor people did what middle class people did 40 years ago — moved to Long Island.
- paulie_a 9y ago
  Isn't wall Street in Manhattan?
  - ptaipale 9y ago
    It is, but I understand that not very many people live on Wall Street. (Yes, recently the population of Manhattan has gone up, although it hasn't fully recovered from the downs of 1980's and is still much lower than 100 years ago).
    - BlackJack 9y ago
      OP was making a joke that Wall Street bankers are criminals :-)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
pj_mukh 9y ago
"Manhattan is so gentrified that there are few pockets of poorer communities where gang-related activity can thrive" This is basically slowly happening in SF as well. As much as SF-natives didn't want the "Manhattanization" of SF, it is happening just with a lot fewer people able to afford it.
samfisher83 9y ago
If you are poor and you can't afford housing NYC has some brutal weather. With the increasing prices its hard to get housing there. I don't really know how you can survive on the streets there. At least SF has more temperate climate.
tristor 9y ago
That's because SF is unarguably a complete shithole (like literally, as in there is human feces on every street). There is a reason I refuse unequivocally to ever take a job that requires me to live in the Bay Area. Remote work isn't just good for your startup's office rent, it's good for worker health, diversity of experience and regional cultures, and helps your workers live in places that don't suck. Bringing everyone to SF is unnecessarily expensive and that city is awful.

Gatsky 9y ago

All this talk about personal safety... there were so many homeless people in SF that clearly had an untreated psychiatric condition. How safe do you think it is for them? Everyone goes on about shit on the streets like it's a normal 'poor person' thing to do. It isn't.

hueving 9y ago
What are we supposed to do? People seem to be against institutionalization because it denies them their freedom and they refuse to use the many public and private homeless assistance programs available to them.
- akvadrako 9y ago
  It's not like this is a unique local issue, but SF seems to handle it worse than almost any other city in the developed world. All you need is the political will and to copy how other places do it.
- pjc50 9y ago
  Do they refuse, or are the facilities full or inadequate? What about the process by which people get into this state in the first place?
- DavidSJ 9y ago
  The high cost of housing no doubt plays a large role in the Bay Area's homelessness situation. That in turn has a demand side cause -- the continued influx of highly paid tech workers -- and a supply side cause -- the economically illiterate politics which paints housing development as some sort of handout to developers. The supply side of this problem could be fixed through political means, at no real cost to anyone. New York has 6x the population density of San Francisco yet lower housing prices, because it has the capacity to meet the demand.

forapurpose 9y ago

> poorer communities where gang-related activity can thrive I know the parent comment only said this in passing, but let's be careful about assuming poor communities are gang-infested or dangerous. AFAIK, gangs are not a problem in most American cities.

dawhizkid 9y ago
Not trying to overgeneralize but there’s definitely a correlation between poverty and gang activity. I’m also not necessarily suggesting gentrification is a net positive, just a big factor in declining crime rates in NYC. In Manhattan, I think the last pockets of seediness were in Alphabet City but that has quickly gentrified as well. As far as I know gang-related activity near NYC is now concentrated in parts of Brooklyn and Long Island (I.e MS-13)
- nerdponx 9y ago
  There was a major gang bust at the houses on Amsterdam Ave in Harlem a couple years ago. Plenty of bad shit still happens uptown. But it definitely is concentrated in pockets now, and it's definitely less bad than it was even a few years ago.
- forapurpose 9y ago
  > there’s definitely a correlation between poverty and gang activity Broadly, I agree. To refine my point: Most street gangs are in poor areas but most poor areas don't have street gangs. > gang-related activity near NYC is now concentrated in parts of Brooklyn and Long Island (I.e MS-13) Does anyone know any hard data on MS-13 activity? Government has made it a talking point recently but I haven't seen data on how common it really is. > I’m also not necessarily suggesting gentrification is a net positive, just a big factor in declining crime rates in NYC. That seems true to me and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. I guess my general point, which was not a criticism of yours (yours just made me think about it), was: Let's be careful about broad stereotypes which can and do result in criminalizing poor people. I will add an observation by the esteemed Woodrow Wilson Guthrie: "Some will rob you with a six-gun, / And some with a fountain pen." I would guess that the latter cause far more harm each year than the former, and in NYC especially.

zghst 9y ago

Where in SF did you feel unsafe? I walk around all parts of the city considered “dangerous” (Bayview, Mission, Ocean View/Ingleside) and nothing has happened to me. Really the only “bad” area SF has is the Tenderloin and it’s common sense not to be out there wandering around even during the day.

pfarnsworth 9y ago
Thanks for your anecdote. I have had friends beaten up and robbed in the Mission. I have a friend who lives in Bayview who had his windows shot out. My friend's friend was mugged in Glen Park BART station, she was punched in the face and the mugger grabbed her bag, no one did anything. My wife's friends had their phones stolen off their table at a Starbucks in Noe.
- santaclaus 9y ago
  Sure, and the same anecdotes hold in Manhattan. I've had friends robbed at knifepoint in the Upper West Side, I've seen phone jackings at 1pm in front of Gristedes in the Upper East Side. Hell, my brother's roommate in Harlem was clocked with a baseball bat in the head while leaving his apartment and subsequently robbed blind. By and large NYC and San Francisco are both very safe cites in the grand scheme of things. (Unless you are a car window in San Francisco. Then you are screwed).
  - dawhizkid 9y ago
    or if you are on BART are terrorized by a gang of teens https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/11/25/group-of-teens-strikes-again-in-bart-cellphone-snatching-thefts/ https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/11/25/group-of-teens-strik...
    - santaclaus 9y ago
      Sure, and groups of teens in NYC have been sucker punching random people on the streets for a few years now. [1] [1] http://www.newsweek.com/new-yorkers-are-getting-sucker-punched-face-thanks-knockout-game-695513 http://www.newsweek.com/new-yorkers-are-getting-sucker-punch...

JauntTrooper 9y ago

I just moved to NY from SF earlier this year, and I agree, it feels so much safer.

ringaroundthetx 9y ago

All* the violent crime in New York City (especially gang related) happens in the NYCHA ghettos, it has been this way for a long time and even that is lower now. Dnainfo had a map of nyc gangs and it was funny because they all looked like xbox live usernames, and then the awkward reality set in that the gangs are all 14* year olds *hyperbole

exelius 9y ago
GTA IRL.
linkmotif 9y ago
They probably are 14-16.
lr4444lr 9y ago
Despite the downvoting because the user is being a little snarky, his point about violent crime focused in NYCHA ghettos is essentially correct: https://spotcrime.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/newyorkcity.jpg https://spotcrime.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/newyorkcity.jp...
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  Consensus driven websites reflect world view more than accuracy, but primarily because people dont use upvotes/downvotes for the same reasons Sites that pride themselves on accurate information should consider a different model

paul7986 9y ago

I loathe San Francisco it's a gross city especially Market St. and many of its surrounding areas. There's no other city in the US where Ive witnessed so many people on the streets; very sad and everywhere you go the sights & smells hits you. Makes you appreciate what you have, yet sad such a place exists (what can you do to help all these people) and I've lived in Philly, NYC, Baltimore and Nashville.

fspeech 9y ago
Have you considered how the weather condition differs in the cities you mentioned?
beaner 9y ago
This is a product of SF being extremely welcoming and supportive of the homeless and the poor. It's interesting to me how so many people confuse the absence of poverty/crime/homelessness with a system that has solved it. NYC has less of these things because it has undergone extreme gentrification and has politics and police which treat the homeless much worse. This is the opposite of what most people consider to be a real solution, yet NYC is praised for it. It is praised for the ends, not the means. SF actually employs more of the policies people claim that they want to see, and as a result, it welcomes more homeless, and as a result, has more homeless, and as a result, it is demonized. It's so backwards.
- adventured 9y ago
  New York City has homeless shelter capacity for 60,000 or more people every night. It puts San Francisco to shame in that regard. The reason tens of thousands of homeless people aren't all in the street, is because they have such vast shelter capacity. San Francisco can't manage to handle 3,000 to 4,000 people without permanent shelter (~6,600 total homeless), despite its immense affluence as a city. It's a failure of priorities.
  - cheeseblubber 9y ago
    I think you need to account for the fact that SF has a population of ~860,000 where as NY has a population of ~8,500,000. You also have to account for the weather in SF vs NY. Not defending either city just trying to put the numbers in to perspective

Spooky23 9y ago

Nobody can afford to be a criminal in Manhattan. Poor people did what middle class people did 40 years ago — moved to Long Island.

paulie_a 9y ago
Isn't wall Street in Manhattan?
- ptaipale 9y ago
  It is, but I understand that not very many people live on Wall Street. (Yes, recently the population of Manhattan has gone up, although it hasn't fully recovered from the downs of 1980's and is still much lower than 100 years ago).
  - BlackJack 9y ago
    OP was making a joke that Wall Street bankers are criminals :-)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

pj_mukh 9y ago

"Manhattan is so gentrified that there are few pockets of poorer communities where gang-related activity can thrive" This is basically slowly happening in SF as well. As much as SF-natives didn't want the "Manhattanization" of SF, it is happening just with a lot fewer people able to afford it.

samfisher83 9y ago

If you are poor and you can't afford housing NYC has some brutal weather. With the increasing prices its hard to get housing there. I don't really know how you can survive on the streets there. At least SF has more temperate climate.

tristor 9y ago

That's because SF is unarguably a complete shithole (like literally, as in there is human feces on every street). There is a reason I refuse unequivocally to ever take a job that requires me to live in the Bay Area. Remote work isn't just good for your startup's office rent, it's good for worker health, diversity of experience and regional cultures, and helps your workers live in places that don't suck. Bringing everyone to SF is unnecessarily expensive and that city is awful.