4 ms·

I work near Civic center and go there everyday. You know, like, Chicago has 500 murders a year. Nothing in SF and Oakland even comes close to that. Oakland used

by dmode 8y ago

I work near Civic center and go there everyday. You know, like, Chicago has 500 murders a year. Nothing in SF and Oakland even comes close to that. Oakland used to be the crime capital in the US. People can actually live in West Oakland now. Oakland hill homes now run at $2mn. Drug use in SF has been prevalent since, what like 60s. I have been living in SF since well before the boom. Mid market and Tenderloin used to be way more troubling. I am continually amazed that they actually managed to our Uber, Twitter, and Dolby HQ there. Did you ever go to 9th and market prior to the tech boom ?

inferiorhuman 8y ago
Well, I grew up out here so yes I remember things like when the Mission was a war zone and when the Embarcadero was pretty sketchy due to that elevated highway. I worked at Sixth and Market for a few years, so, yes I think it's largely worse than it was in the early 2000s. The big tech companies haven't helped the situation by attempting to sanitize it. Getting rid of the chess players did not help anything. > You know, like, Chicago has 500 murders a year. Nice whataboutism though.
tptacek 8y ago
What's your point, regarding Chicago? Chicago is much larger than San Francisco; it's 5 times larger by area and over 3 times as many people. Chicago isn't one of the country's top cities by murder rate. Further, Chicago murders are largely confined to west and south sides of the city, a result of redlining, and most people in the city (even fewer professionals) don't live in those areas. It's true, San Francisco used to have sketchy areas (I lived in Bayview in the late 1990s) and now basically doesn't, since the worst apartment in Bayview probably costs more than my house in Chicago does. Ok, you win. But the comment you're responding to is about quality of life in San Francisco. Nobody in Chicago is going to ask for your popcorn and swing a stick at you if you don't comply. We don't have tent cities on our main-drag sidewalks. The CTA goes pretty much everywhere and isn't an open-air drug market. We manage this despite being a larger city, with our own real pressures, and having nothing resembling the tax base San Francisco has. San Francisco is broken. I'm sure it's fixable, but people probably need to stop pretending things are OK first.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  > The CTA goes pretty much everywhere and isn't an open-air drug market. To be fair, the antisocial behavior I witnessed on the CTA {Green Line|Red Line south of Roosevelt} and the Muni is comparable. I've never been verbally accosted by passengers on CTA like I have on Muni, but I did witness blatant pickpocketing and a drugged passenger break the bus door on CTA, which I've never seen on Muni. For what it's worth, my sense is that the issues that SF has Chicago doesn't--homelessness, untreated mental illness--largely stem from cost of living differences, particularly housing prices. Everything from opening shelters to operating mental health facilities to avoiding homelessness in the first place is easier when real estate is more affordable. (To give an example, my hometown of College Station, Texas--hardly a bastion of liberalism!--had a quite effective program for preventing homelessness in the '90s and the aughts: straight-up building enough houses to house virtually all the needy and pricing them far below market rate. This worked because of the combination of a rich suburban tax base and rock-bottom real estate prices, which would not work in Chicago or anywhere in California.) That doesn't excuse SF and the state of California from failing to better address the problems, of course.
  - inferiorhuman 8y ago
    For what it's worth, my sense is that the issues that SF has Chicago doesn't--homelessness, untreated mental illness--largely stem from cost of living differences, particularly housing prices. My experience is that Muni itself is generally OK (yes even the 8/9, 14, and 38), but that BART has gotten really bad over the past couple years. For a while Muni stopped running the (then new) hybrid buses in the Bayview because people would hit the external kill switches when the bus was stopped. There are a couple of California-specific and SF-specific issues at play as well. SFPD simply doesn't ride Muni, although I believe they're contractually obligated to. Meanwhile BART PD is spread very thin (around four officers at any given time for their SF stations). At the state level, California makes it very difficult to force someone to stay on psychiatric medication or keep them in an institution. I don't believe this is as much of an issue in Illinois.

by dmode 8y ago

inferiorhuman 8y ago

Well, I grew up out here so yes I remember things like when the Mission was a war zone and when the Embarcadero was pretty sketchy due to that elevated highway. I worked at Sixth and Market for a few years, so, yes I think it's largely worse than it was in the early 2000s. The big tech companies haven't helped the situation by attempting to sanitize it. Getting rid of the chess players did not help anything. > You know, like, Chicago has 500 murders a year. Nice whataboutism though.

tptacek 8y ago

What's your point, regarding Chicago? Chicago is much larger than San Francisco; it's 5 times larger by area and over 3 times as many people. Chicago isn't one of the country's top cities by murder rate. Further, Chicago murders are largely confined to west and south sides of the city, a result of redlining, and most people in the city (even fewer professionals) don't live in those areas. It's true, San Francisco used to have sketchy areas (I lived in Bayview in the late 1990s) and now basically doesn't, since the worst apartment in Bayview probably costs more than my house in Chicago does. Ok, you win. But the comment you're responding to is about quality of life in San Francisco. Nobody in Chicago is going to ask for your popcorn and swing a stick at you if you don't comply. We don't have tent cities on our main-drag sidewalks. The CTA goes pretty much everywhere and isn't an open-air drug market. We manage this despite being a larger city, with our own real pressures, and having nothing resembling the tax base San Francisco has. San Francisco is broken. I'm sure it's fixable, but people probably need to stop pretending things are OK first.

pcwalton 8y ago
> The CTA goes pretty much everywhere and isn't an open-air drug market. To be fair, the antisocial behavior I witnessed on the CTA {Green Line|Red Line south of Roosevelt} and the Muni is comparable. I've never been verbally accosted by passengers on CTA like I have on Muni, but I did witness blatant pickpocketing and a drugged passenger break the bus door on CTA, which I've never seen on Muni. For what it's worth, my sense is that the issues that SF has Chicago doesn't--homelessness, untreated mental illness--largely stem from cost of living differences, particularly housing prices. Everything from opening shelters to operating mental health facilities to avoiding homelessness in the first place is easier when real estate is more affordable. (To give an example, my hometown of College Station, Texas--hardly a bastion of liberalism!--had a quite effective program for preventing homelessness in the '90s and the aughts: straight-up building enough houses to house virtually all the needy and pricing them far below market rate. This worked because of the combination of a rich suburban tax base and rock-bottom real estate prices, which would not work in Chicago or anywhere in California.) That doesn't excuse SF and the state of California from failing to better address the problems, of course.
- inferiorhuman 8y ago
  For what it's worth, my sense is that the issues that SF has Chicago doesn't--homelessness, untreated mental illness--largely stem from cost of living differences, particularly housing prices. My experience is that Muni itself is generally OK (yes even the 8/9, 14, and 38), but that BART has gotten really bad over the past couple years. For a while Muni stopped running the (then new) hybrid buses in the Bayview because people would hit the external kill switches when the bus was stopped. There are a couple of California-specific and SF-specific issues at play as well. SFPD simply doesn't ride Muni, although I believe they're contractually obligated to. Meanwhile BART PD is spread very thin (around four officers at any given time for their SF stations). At the state level, California makes it very difficult to force someone to stay on psychiatric medication or keep them in an institution. I don't believe this is as much of an issue in Illinois.