9 ms·
The Streets of San Francisco
- nickthemagicman 7y agoI found it to be pretty bad when I was there. Not as bad as the conservative media makes it out to seem but still bad. Had my drink knocked out of my hand by a couple of guys,had to buy boots because of the human feces, saw smashed in car windows daily. Im super tolerant but that felt like alot.
- 52-6F-62 7y agoI visited about a year ago now and I didn’t have that experience at all. Stopped in at City Lights, bought a couple books, went for lunch, and walked through North Beach to the pier. Walked along Embarcadero to the BART station there and had a great (albeit short) layover there. I saw a few people who appeared to be homeless. No more than I see in Toronto or Hamilton—but I can’t speak to what kind of measure that is anymore.
- pentae 7y agoSorry but I don’t think visiting for a week once is a large enough set of data
- tarikozket 7y agohe didn't visit even for a week; it was just a layover.
- 52-6F-62 7y agoI didn’t claim it was anything of the sort. Just adding a singular data point. People often say the same kinds of things about Toronto but the place is hardly overrun. I just thought it would be a valuable single data point from a visitor’s perspective. No assumptions, just an experience.
- zamfi 7y agoSan Francisco’s homelessness is highly concentrated. You happened to be in areas that are relatively clean.
- 52-6F-62 7y agoWhere is it largely concentrated? That sort of sounds like Vancouver as well. Toronto has its spots as well. I just find much of the rhetoric makes it sound like the city is overrun and in shambles and that wasn't my experience. Of course, if I lived in those concentrated locales I might feel that way.
- yellowapple 7y ago- The whole Tenderloin district (and quite a bit of the surrounding areas, e.g. Polk Gulch) - Market St. - Embarcadero & Washington St. intersection - King St. (esp. around the CalTrain station) - Pretty much all the BART stations within SF city limits Those are the areas I'm in pretty frequently, at least.
- paul7986 7y agoTake a walk down market street.. by city hall. Disgusting and yet why is it so bad and in your face and not like that in say new york city? Doesn't NYC put the homeless up in hotels.. have a voucher program or something? San Fran doesn't care how terrible their city looks to tourists nor care for its people like NYC does? I don't get it ... uber super tech rich living in the most expensive houses in the US with human feces outside on their pavements or around the corner. Whatever San Fran is doing and methodology it's following it doesnt seem to be working out for itself!
- thrower123 7y agoIt's interesting watching movies from the 70s and 80s depicting New York. It looks like present day San Francisco or Baltimore, and not at all like modern New York.
- ummonk 7y agoYup, gives me hope that one day SF can improve.
- marcinzm 7y ago>San Fran doesn't care how terrible their city looks to tourists nor care for its people like NYC does? The way I see it, fundamentally, San Francisco views the homeless as part of it's people, many other places do not.
- paul7986 7y agoTheir feces that line the street, violent outbreaks, shooting up, the human destitution, shouting crazy one even with a megaphone on my 2013 visit. I guess that's now considered the charm of San Francisco. Disgusting!
- yellowapple 7y agoGo a block or so inland and it gets starkly worse, especially as you get closer to Market. You ain't having fun in San Francisco until you make eye contact with a guy "dropping a bomb" in broad daylight at Sue Bierman Park, or have your car broken into near Levi Plaza because someone wants to try to steal your jumper cables (and fail, in my case, as evidenced by them hanging out of my now-significantly-more-aerodynamic quarterpanel window). And the stench. Nothing like the glorious smell of ocean breezes and human excrement in the morning! And to think the Embarcadero is relatively clean by SF standards. The Tenderloin is where it gets real fun.
- cmoscoe 7y agoI've had this thing happen twice now while visiting SF, where I'm following google maps, end up walking through the Tenderloin, and have a bunch of people try to sell me drugs. The second time I asked one of the guys trying to sell me coke why that was happening, he said it was really the only reason white people walk there. The whole thing was very different from the super-liberal picture of SF I had in my head.
- tyri_kai_psomi 7y agoI just had a week long experience there and I found it to be surreal. I went in thinking "surely conservative media is exaggerating" and sure enough, I took a stroll from my conference at SVN down Market Street to a bar called Local Edition, and well, it was unfortunately as advertised. Rampant homelessness everywhere. Needles and feces on every other block, quite literally. I took pictures like a dumb tourist that I am and texted my spouse, "well what do you know it really is like this here, it's crazy, how can people put up with this?"
- ahuth 7y agoI empathize, and it's not always great. In response to "how can people put up with this?", I'm not sure what we can do. Meaning, I'm not sure there's an action I could take to improve things. Also, not saying it isn't bad, and not saying we shouldn't do something (anything) to make things better, but you probably walked down one of the worst stretches (depending on which part of market street you went down).
- djklanac 7y agoThe problem is pervasive, and speaking in noncommittal terms perpetuates passive acceptance. We can take action through our democratically elected representatives by re-opening mental health institutions and drug rehab centers. And we can enable law enforcement to lock up violent offenders with the assurance that the defendants will be given due process instead of being released without charges.
- thrax 7y agoAnd 10 blocks away, where I have lived for 10 years, I see none of what you describe. The city is funny like that. Sad fact is, the homeless are incredibly concentrated around areas with lots of tourism and public visibility, because when you're homeless, you want to be around other people because you have _nothing_.
- tyri_kai_psomi 7y agoPerhaps that contributes to why the problem exists in the first place? Out of sight out of mind?
- sorenn111 7y agoI lived there for 10 months. Walked along market street everyday and can confirm that it is pretty bad.
- anon9001 7y agoI've found it to be about as bad as conservative media makes it out to be. It really depends where you are, but I've seen people smoking crack (I assume, maybe meth), and I've seen people shooting up in plain view in daylight. There are exposed needles and human feces on the ground, and you will absolutely notice it if you walk anywhere. Boots are for sure recommended. I know that stuff happens everywhere, but it's so far out in the open in SF, you can't avoid it. Part of it also has to do with the topology of the city. Homeless people don't want to live on hills, but rich people do, so that creates pools of homeless camps in flat areas.
- scoofy 7y agoI live in SF. I consider myself very liberal. I know it's not the political orthodox for people on the left, but I will say, it is bad. It is very bad. You learn to live with it, but it's far worse than any other city i've ever lived in. I think it's a direct result of a complete and utter lack of real estate development, but the fact of the matter is people shit in the street here, regularly. People shoot up heroin openly here. Needles littered on the streets here is normal. People smoke meth and crack, openly. If you don't want to see it, you can avoid it with a car, but i bike and take transit. The tenderloin is drug dealers and junkies. 16th and Mission is mentally ill people. Haight is crustypunks. Besides that, there are more normal things like people in tents in parks and under the highways. I've seen things more like this in places on the west coast, but i've never seen the type of open and welcome drug dependency except in this region. I definitely am supportive of giving addicts a way to get help or even use in a healthy, non-threatening setting that is safe and separated from the rest of us going about our lives, but that's not what's happening.
- d-sc 7y agoIt’s worse than conservative media makes it out to be because in a wide swath of the country 6 figure incomes are large enough to completely insulate you form the issue.
- keanzu 7y agoPaywall. Facebook redirect allows you to read the article. http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-streets-of-san-francisco-11570143083 http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/the...
- HenryKissinger 7y agoIf you use Firefox, I would recommend installing this add-on: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox
- HenryKissinger 7y agoRates of homelessness by state: https://www.statista.com/statistics/727847/homelessness-rate-in-the-us-by-state/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/727847/homelessness-rate... CA is #5. Not something to be proud of, but it could be worse.
- dannykwells 7y agoHomelessness is a product of being urban. So this statistic needs to control for percent urban to be meaningful. Case in point : Mississippi has the lowest homelessness in the US.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- d-sc 7y agoIdk, I think the statistic is probably a bit misleading. But the case it point is a bit off as well. Alaska is top ten homelessness and very rural. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories_of_the_United_States_by_population_density https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territori...
- readhn 7y agopaid access. cant see article.
- keanzu 7y agoWhat on earth is going on in DC?
- ericzawo 7y agoThey've been having problems for nearly 4 decades.
- throw03172019 7y agoWow, surprising to see the DC numbers but I always felt the downtown area was much cleaner than SF.
- actualanswer 7y agoShameless plug - I did a photo series on this feeling when I moved to San Francisco. You see, you feel, you ignore. https://medium.com/@saimaddali/you-see-you-feel-you-ignore-market-street-san-francisco-66d1d515a27d https://medium.com/@saimaddali/you-see-you-feel-you-ignore-m...
- readhn 7y agogreat photos! thanks for sharing.
- SomeOldThrow 7y agoWe all know the cause of homelessness and it ain’t an excess of tolerance, that’s for damn sure.
- reaperducer 7y agoWe all know the cause of homelessness If you managed to identify the single cause of homelessness, you should be nominated for a Nobel Prize.
- baby 7y agoHealthcare? Housing?
- lizknope 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_and_mental_health https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_and_mental_health It is estimated that 20–25% of homeless people, compared with 6% of the non-homeless, have severe mental illness. Others estimate that up to one-third of the homeless suffer from mental illness.
- SomeOldThrow 7y agoAre you implying America discriminates against the mentally ill?
- SomeOldThrow 7y agoThe answer is yes.
- baby 7y agoI think a lot of people have mental illness but manage to live thanks to aids, healthcare, affordable housing, and so on. Because these structures are missing in America, these people end up in the street and their mental illness is the focus of the blame.
- allworknoplay 7y agoThis opinion piece provides no context to bits like "The “unsheltered” count continues to rise—up 17%, to 8,011, in 2019 from 2017—and San Francisco continues to wonder why." Or the 17 needle deposits that apparently teach all the children of a 900K-person city that drug use is the norm. In fact, San Francisco has grown by 100K people in the last 10 years, and construction hasn't kept up. Costs have risen incredibly, while incomes of longstanding citizens in many cases have not. This is simply a right-wing hit piece on the leftist movements against the war on drugs, gentrification, housing cost inflation, and mass incarceration. You can't claim the city is wrong about lack of public spending unless you discuss the spending, and the challenges, realistically and with context.
- thrax 7y agoExactly. Big money is scared of sanders/Warren. They will continue to escalate until the election.
- tonystubblebine 7y agoI'd never considered this as Right vs. Left, but I definitely perceive it as a category of article where New York Media likes to highlight San Francisco's failings. These are really meant to be feel good pieces for the readers by triggering a sense of superiority. I say this as a native San Franciscan who moved to NYC and plans to stay here. Some of these articles are less grim, for example this piece on Silicon Valley sock fashion was definitely read by many New Yorkers as reinforcing the idea that we have real style here (i.e. making socks your fashion calling card is like watching a little kid play dress up). https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/fashion/in-silicon-valley-socks-make-the-tech-entrepreneur.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/fashion/in-silicon-valley... Equally ridiculous to me was the NYT covering a San Francisco high school debating what to do with a mural. Where is the impact to a New York reader? Zero. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/us/san-francisco-murals.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/us/san-francisco-murals.h... Theoretically, the WSJ and NYT are national papers, but they do really have New York readers as their base. So for that reason, I never pay any attention to their take on anything bay area related.
- 7y ago
- grandmczeb 7y agoA relevant statistic I found interesting: SF had 10x the number of feces complaints as the entirety of NYC in 2017[1]. Having lived in both places, that’s a larger difference than I would have expected, although I do encounter it far more often in SF than I ever did in NYC. https://www.realtyhop.com/blog/doo-doo-the-new-urban-crisis/#figure1 https://www.realtyhop.com/blog/doo-doo-the-new-urban-crisis/...
- tenaciousDaniel 7y agoCan confirm. I lived in NYC for 4 years, only saw poop like once or twice. Visited SF for one week, saw poop about 5 times.
- TMWNN 7y agoMy theory is that the more variable weather in New York helps. While it's great essentially not having any rain in San Francisco for ten months of the year, moisture helps in removing feces and urine from sidewalks.
- hisnameisjimmy 7y agoI've been living in San Francisco for 7 years and it just feels lawless. I've been kicked while riding my bike, I've had people come up and start screaming obscenities at me, I've been followed for multiple blocks by someone yelling at me, I've been threatened, I've witnessed people shooting up heroin and smoking crack in broad daylight dozens of times, I've seen a man pee himself in his wheelchair. The list goes on and on. Sure, you're going to see more intense concentrations of this stuff in the Mission and the Tenderloin, but, damn. The sidewalks and streets are disgusting. The city just doesn't seem like it's actually governed. All the city supervisors seem to care about is blocking new housing because that's what their constituents want. You see enough of this stuff and you just start to try and ignore it. But it eats at me. Seeing people every day enduring levels of despair that are completely depraved hurts the soul.
- tonystubblebine 7y agoIt's good that that much despair eats at you--it means you are human. A former editor of the Street Sheet wrote a nice article about how people can respond to the homeless that we encounter: https://medium.com/better-humans/how-to-be-a-better-neighbor-to-homeless-people-5ab230d2c738 https://medium.com/better-humans/how-to-be-a-better-neighbor... What the article doesn't cover though is the silicon valley obsession with scale. A lot of us walk by the homeless either implicitly or explicitly thinking we are going to a job that is going to change the world. And that may be true. But there's a different school of thought that the most effective social change is done locally--where you personally know the people and the issues. So I would encourage people who still live in San Francisco to get involved in local politics/charity. (I say this as a former San Franciscan, 1st-12th grade + two startups).
- SpicyLemonZest 7y agoModern SF doesn't really tolerate local solutions. Many neighborhoods do invest in efforts to keep their streets clean and drug-free, and when they do activists come from other neighborhoods to yell at them for being heartless. And if the city decides it'd like to move a bunch of homeless people into your neighborhood, you're expected to accept it as your part in solving the citywide homelessness problem.
- hellllllllooo 7y agohttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/trumps-war-on-the-homeless/id1042433083?i=1000451959424 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/trumps-war-on-the-home... This podcast has a pretty good discussion and explaination on the different causes of homelessness. The distinction between "working homeless" in cities where housing costs are skyrocketing and people with medical issues or addiction was interesting to hear talked through with nuance.
- clay_the_ripper 7y agoDespite the clearly conservative leanings of this article (and I consider myself a moderate liberal) on this issue I whole-heartedly agree. I live in San Francisco, and to be quite honest the city is a disgrace. At what point do we draw the line between “let’s not lock people up for stupid reasons” and “literally anything goes whatsoever”. This city’s well-intentioned voters and government have created a monster. The city is disgusting. I would not advise anyone to visit. Recently some out of town friends visited and were horrified. They were accosted multiple times by homeless people. The trash, drug use and general squalor has gone completely overboard. And what’s the response? More services, more spending, more drug programs. And it’s just getting worse! I pay a massive premium to live here, but next year I’m moving out of the city. It’s really sad to see so many people desperate and poor, but we essentially told them to come here, that we would pay for services for them and also, feel free to commit any crimes you want. Ridiculous.
- xivzgrev 7y agoWhat does accosted by homeless people mean? I’ve lived in SF over 5 years and I’ve yet to be physically touched or yelled at by one. Now what DOES happen often is someone is loudly talking or yelling to themselves, and if you look at them or get close to them then they may react to you. I just steer clear of the craziness. Maybe your friends got caught up in that?
- otterley 7y agoJust because it hasn't happened to you, personally, doesn't mean it hasn't happened to other people.
- hisnameisjimmy 7y agoThat seems impossible. Where do you live in SF? Do you ever take public transit?
- changchuming 7y agoMaybe OP is just a 280-pound giant so nobody dares to get in his way. Could be possible.
- physcab 7y agoI’ve lived in SF for 10 years and my family of 4 is finally moving out. Part of it is economic as we can’t really afford to raise kids here. Part of it is rapid deterioration of public spaces. The breaking point was someone blocking my apartment door by shooting up heroin when I brought my newborn son home from the hospital. It’s not bad everywhere. The Marina, Noe, Pac Heights, Cole Valley, Outer Sunset, and parts of Richmond districts all manage to keep their neighborhoods clean. The mission feels like a 3rd world country. I’m democrat but I would most certainly vote in a hard line republican DA to take a stand. I’m done having my car broken into and literally shat on. I’m tired of seeing piles and piles of trash like we’re living in some kind of garbage mound. People just don’t care. It wasn’t this bad even 3 years ago, but it’s certainly taken a turn for the worse. It’s untenable.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- clay_the_ripper 7y agoI currently live in San Francisco. I’m moving in January after 1 year. The premium I pay to live here is insane, yet the city elects to tolerate a totally unacceptable Level of crime, drug use and general squalor. I don’t think we should lock people up for being drug addicts, but where do we draw the line between “locking people up for stupid reasons” and “literally do anything you want with no consequences”. No one here even calls the police for the blantanty criminal and disruptive behavior of mentally ill homeless people. The police won’t show up/do anything. I’m a pretty liberal person, but honestly the conservative media has it right with the situation in San Francisco. We spend a crapload of money every year on programs to help these people, at the total expense of law abiding tax paying citizens. While I believe the government is well intentioned, enough is enough. Do I and my neighbors not have a right to live in a habitable city? I had out of town friends visit from overseas and they were appalled. They were accosted multiple times and were afraid to walk around. I don’t blame them. I would not recommend anyone to visit this city. Good bye sf, I won’t be back.
- BrandoElFollito 7y agoI visited SF this spring, after 20 years (that was also the first trip to the US for my children). I could not recognize the city. We used to walk by night and the city left great memories. Now I had to almost run from the pier to my hotel nearby. We went to a fast food in the night and it was the worst place I have been in. At the same time, the guide of the tour we took mentioned rent prices so high that I thought I misunderstood what she was saying.
- negativez 7y agoI know this is about SF but Seattle seems to have essentially the same issues with their liberal response to homelessness. This local news piece was both heartbreaking and infuriating to watch. The interview with an proud, unrepentant criminal-who-is-homeless at 17:31 is something I won't ever forget. "Seattle Is Dying" (KOMO 4 News) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw
- skunkpocalypse 7y agoThe jumping up and down in a trash can is the part I won't forget. WTF.