6 ms·

This for sure. East bay, north bay all getting SF exodus. Then my friends in richmond moved even further away but still extended bay area. The place with the m

This for sure. East bay, north bay all getting SF exodus. Then my friends in richmond moved even further away but still extended bay area. The place with the most at risk is SF. Still huge concentration of wealth, but the non- employment factors have been hurt. Gone very light on crime - super light. At some point folks just get tired of dealing / seeing consequence free crime right in front of them. I think families with kids being impacted there particularly.

BurritoAlPastor 5y ago
What crime? I’ve got complaints about living in SF, but it’s basically crime-free from my experiences.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  Not the OP, but while I was living in SF I saw drugs sold on the street, needles left on the ground in public parks, people stealing registration stickers off license plates, smashed car windows, people blocking sidewalks and harassing pedestrians, ridiculously unsafe driving (e.g. running reds including cops, ppl cutting across three lanes to make a left from the right lane, etc), guests who visited me were flashed by randos, a dude was jerking into a newspaper box by the BART, neighbors would smoke inside nonsmoking apartments with shared ventilation, etc. I'd move back again for work if I have to, but it would take a lot of $$$$ to convince me.
  - olyjohn 5y ago
    Sounds like parts of just about every big city.
    - mc10 5y ago
      Many of these are absent in New York, including very visible homeless encampments, so no, these are not in “just about every big city”; many of these are specific to West Coast cities due to a failure in public policy.
      - ende 5y ago
        Year round fair weather is a public policy?
        mc10 5y ago
        Not building enough shelters and allowing NIMBYism at local levels is public policy: https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-homelessness-and-it-basically-succeeded-ab27f3ec5a65 https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-h...
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - csmiller 5y ago
      I have never experienced anything like this living on the east coast (NYC/Boston)
  - floren 5y ago
    Got off BART at Civic Center station at about 11:00 AM last Saturday. Walked past two guy sprawled in a hallway in the station smoking heroin or something from a piece of tin foil, and past another one doing the same as I climbed the stairs to the street. At the top of the stairs were a handful of guys gathered around a stereo smoking weed and, based on what I was seeing, selling it too. A few minutes later, just as I passed the tent city near City Hall, I ran into another guy torching something on a sheet of tin foil. More shit than I've ever seen on any city streets. Every doorway, tree, and wall reeks of piss. It's no way to live.
    - Aa9C4xPz43Gg7k6 5y ago
      All of what you mentioned is a reason why I only ride 1 station by BART and rest by Caltrain.
  - zeruch 5y ago
    "but while I was living in SF I saw drugs sold on the street, needles left on the ground in public parks, people stealing registration stickers off license plates, smashed car windows, people blocking sidewalks and harassing pedestrians, ridiculously unsafe driving" ...things I've also seen in Chicago, NYC, Miami, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Portland (among others). Not saying that's ok, just that SF is hardly unique in that regard.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  I think it's really easy how normalized a person can get to petty crime. Like a frog in boiling water. You'll talk to people in SF who totally brush off smash-and-grabs. They'll say something like "stupid me, shouldn't have left my AirPods visible in the center console." You don't even realize that it's not normal to have to worry about stuff like that.
  - mercutio2 5y ago
    It is normal to worry about smash and grabs in every US urban area I've ever lived in or visited.
    - dcolkitt 5y ago
      San Francisco has the worst property crime rate of any major city in America.[1] It's more than three times worse than what you'd find in New York, Boston or San Diego. It's even about twice as bad as Austin, Chicago or Philadelphia, which aren't exactly known as low crime cities. Moreover the discrepancy is likely understated since so much property crime goes unreported in SF. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
      - slownews45 5y ago
        Between all my bike thefts, car thefts, window break ins etc- I reported only car theft. Crime is widely understated in SF. People will step over a dying person in SF.
        nitrogen 5y ago
        It's not just street crime, either. The first building I lived in had its bike lockers broken into by a pro crew in masks, and tens of thousands of dollars of bikes stolen. I also forgot to mention the man screaming at the top of his lungs at a woman waiting for a bus, the coworker who fought off an attempted mugging, coming back to my car (probably at Lands End) to find one of the screws missing from the license plate, and other stuff I only heard about rather than saw. Based on this thread, there's a lot going on that people are lucky enough not to notice, or choose not to notice, but it definitely makes SF a risky choice for businesses. I probably fared as well as I did because I'm tall and didn't go out much without other people with me.
- slownews45 5y ago
  My car was broken into multiple times, stolen a few times (I used tickets to find it because the cops wouldn't take even the basic step of matching parking tickets with stolen car reports). I worked in the tenderloin - so plenty of open air drug dealing (not a huge problem) as well as random attacks on people (a problem). My roommate was jumped and beaten near our place - very disruptive to his life in general. I actually caught folks who had stolen my car, good response by police, got them in the car too driving it. I asked, if I pressed charges, what's the consequence. A few days in jail if I was lucky and wanted to spend years pursuing the case - these would be guys who I'd then have a beef with in my neighborhood. I didn't carry a gun or knife and just didn't want to beef with the dudes hanging out. At some point you are like, is this worth it? As you get older, have kids - you just want to let you kid play. Where I am now the kids can play on their own with neighbors on the street - no worries. Much nicer in my view.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    And here I am living in one of the places that most of the SF tech crowd would consider synonymous with "failed rust belt shithole" where none of that stuff happens at any appreciable scale.
- babesh 5y ago
  1. Two people with knives tried to mug my father. Chinatown. 2. Two people tried to mug me. Nob Hill. 3. Car was broken into. Model airplane was taken. Just off Van Ness. 4. Mother had her purse slashed. Chinatown. 5. Brother in law had his bike stolen. He locked it in front of the Exploratorium. 6. One brother had his car stolen (but this was Oakland). 7. Roommate got hit on the head, knocked out, had stuff taken. This was late at night a few blocks from the Haight.
  - slownews45 5y ago
    Don't worry - we pretty much all know the folks saying SF is "crime free" are total liars OR rich as hell and living in a gated mansion. The thing you don't realize is how nice, at a low and ongoing level, being in a low crime area is. It feels GREAT! Especially if you have a female in your family / friend group. Hey, want to meet up for ice cream at XXX? You get a ton more yeses because no one is nervous walking / biking / locking bikes etc. Early on with my wife I made the mistake of the cheap place that was in a higher crime area - I didn't mind but it really crimped her eagerness to meet me after work somewhere etc if she was going to be walking, and coming home late and walking from BART also stressed her a bit (in fairness we got off at one of the highest crime spots in BART system). I did the don't worry about it thing for a bit, but then there were some shootings and it just wasn't worth it and she wasn't re-assured (I would show her time of day charts for crime in our neighbhoorhood so she could go when it was less risky).
SiVal 5y ago
I think families with kids being impacted there particularly. Yes, one example that is not widely known of what happens when the Lions of the Left have the power to do what they really want is public middle school algebra in SF. ("The Lion of the Left" was the self-given nickname of one of SF's most-loved talk show hosts back in the 90s.) SF grandees noticed that some races tended to take geometry (the class after algebra I) more than others. The number one goal of public education, they claimed, was to "close the achievement gap", so they eliminated geometry from middle school. If no one took it, no one who didn't take it would be behind, so no gap. But then they noticed that some races still took algebra I more often than other races. So they eliminated that, too. [1] No one, no matter how well prepared, would be allowed to take algebra in any public middle school. The best students would be required to take the same classes as the worst, for great justice. Achievement gap closed. Except that better students still had four years in high school to try to catch up to where they would have been if not held back, and not all races were equally likely to do this. So, for more justice, all public schools in SF were required to keep their best math students in the same classes with the worst all the way from K-10. They are now only allowed to be different individuals the final two years of HS. Anyone who wants to take calculus in a SF high school now has to scramble to cram two years (algebra II/trig & pre-calc) into 11th grade to (poorly) prepare for calculus in 12th--until that miscarriage of justice can be eliminated, too. Those who can afford it go to work at tech companies where they use various means to silence the "haters" who resist, while sending their own children to private schools that don't have these policies. Many of those who can't afford it have been moving out of the city to suburbs that have begun the process (lots of districts have now eliminated middle school geometry and advanced placement classes) but are still lagging behind SF in implementing full justice. (Big Tech is working on it, but pockets of resistance remain.) SF Chronicle, a big proponent of policies like this, describes it as positively as they can: [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/education/article/SF-schools-move-to-delay-algebra-shows-13518860.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/education/article/SF-schools-mov...
- slownews45 5y ago
  I think there will be some state standards that will get rid of calculus in high school. I'm not actually against that, I never thought it was such as big deal. Other parts of the standards (focus on group work, and on racial justice work in math) which may be designed in part to help reduce achievement gap do raise some questions around preparedness of some students that would result. This will only work if they get rid of standardized testing I think in later years (college admissions etc).
duderific 5y ago
Anecdotally, my sister moved to SF from the east coast a couple of years ago. After her patio was burgled a few times, she didn't feel safe so she and her husband moved to Santa Rosa, about 90 minutes north. She's happy as a clam there.
abalone 5y ago
> Gone very light on crime - super light. At some point folks just get tired of dealing / seeing consequence free crime right in front of them. I think families with kids being impacted there particularly. I challenge that statement. Do you have any data support it? It is a myth repeated over and over by certain people and it’s never supported by data. Violent crime in SF is near all time lows. That’s just the facts.[1] My neighborhood I’ve lived in for 15 years has gotten so much safer and we are raising kids and loving it. The crazy thing is the conservative tech activists who moved to Miami.. moved to a city with higher crime! Miami is higher crime than SF. So is Dallas (that was another profile in the local paper). It’s insane that no one is challenging them on the facts. I think this is all because a bunch of progressive supervisors got elected who are critical of certain elements of the tech industry, and the tech guys don’t have a good response and so they are doing the usual conservative tough-on-crime political ploy to try to get rid of them. [1] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/san-francisco-officials-unveil-new-crime-stats/2218901/ https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/san-fran...
- whoknowswhat11 5y ago
  Sure - "'Out of control': Organized crime drives S.F. shoplifting, closing 17 Walgreens in five years" https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-politics/article/Out-of-control-Organized-crime-drives-S-F-16175755.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-politics/article/Out-of-co... If you haven't been seeing this you haven't been watching. It's absolutely brazen - daylight robbery literally - and turns the store workers and folks shopping into cynics. Chelsea (new DA) took office end of 2019 or early 2020. That really marked a major change. "A violent year: Bay Area killings spiked 35% in 2020" https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/A-violent-year-Bay-Area-murders-spiked-36-in-15857202.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/A-violent-year-Bay... You probably don't realize how much crime is simply unreported - it's a massive amount. Go to any car glass shop - they will tell you how "crime free" SF is. Note that I grew up in an actual low crime city. That means I never had a house key, we never locked the house. We left the keys in our cars. This isn't out in the middle of no where, this was a city (with very low crime). You say your children can walk to neighbors freely like children can in east bay? You are the exception in SF. I realized that folks in the city are just so used to crime, to the steps you have to take to avoid it, they don't realize the impact it has on their quality of life. You really don't get to know your neighbors that well (relative to a totally safe neighborhood where everyone is more welcoming). This last bit is anecdotal, but neighbors really look out for each other outside SF. Folks do the block email lists, get togethers. I did a quick comparison to Lafayette in east bay. San Francisco 2019 Murders (which was a low) - 4.5 murders per 100K. Lafayette - 0.0 per 100K. Robberies SF - 344 per 100K. Lafayette 11 per 100K. Lafayette had 3 robberies in the entire year. The differences are likely larger as in SF there are so many robberies per day that a fair number just don't get reported, especially in some parts of town where cops are not liked - folks are not calling it all in.

BurritoAlPastor 5y ago

What crime? I’ve got complaints about living in SF, but it’s basically crime-free from my experiences.

nitrogen 5y ago
Not the OP, but while I was living in SF I saw drugs sold on the street, needles left on the ground in public parks, people stealing registration stickers off license plates, smashed car windows, people blocking sidewalks and harassing pedestrians, ridiculously unsafe driving (e.g. running reds including cops, ppl cutting across three lanes to make a left from the right lane, etc), guests who visited me were flashed by randos, a dude was jerking into a newspaper box by the BART, neighbors would smoke inside nonsmoking apartments with shared ventilation, etc. I'd move back again for work if I have to, but it would take a lot of $$$$ to convince me.
- olyjohn 5y ago
  Sounds like parts of just about every big city.
  - mc10 5y ago
    Many of these are absent in New York, including very visible homeless encampments, so no, these are not in “just about every big city”; many of these are specific to West Coast cities due to a failure in public policy.
    - ende 5y ago
      Year round fair weather is a public policy?
      - mc10 5y ago
        Not building enough shelters and allowing NIMBYism at local levels is public policy: https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-homelessness-and-it-basically-succeeded-ab27f3ec5a65 https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-h...
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - csmiller 5y ago
    I have never experienced anything like this living on the east coast (NYC/Boston)
- floren 5y ago
  Got off BART at Civic Center station at about 11:00 AM last Saturday. Walked past two guy sprawled in a hallway in the station smoking heroin or something from a piece of tin foil, and past another one doing the same as I climbed the stairs to the street. At the top of the stairs were a handful of guys gathered around a stereo smoking weed and, based on what I was seeing, selling it too. A few minutes later, just as I passed the tent city near City Hall, I ran into another guy torching something on a sheet of tin foil. More shit than I've ever seen on any city streets. Every doorway, tree, and wall reeks of piss. It's no way to live.
  - Aa9C4xPz43Gg7k6 5y ago
    All of what you mentioned is a reason why I only ride 1 station by BART and rest by Caltrain.
- zeruch 5y ago
  "but while I was living in SF I saw drugs sold on the street, needles left on the ground in public parks, people stealing registration stickers off license plates, smashed car windows, people blocking sidewalks and harassing pedestrians, ridiculously unsafe driving" ...things I've also seen in Chicago, NYC, Miami, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Portland (among others). Not saying that's ok, just that SF is hardly unique in that regard.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dcolkitt 5y ago
I think it's really easy how normalized a person can get to petty crime. Like a frog in boiling water. You'll talk to people in SF who totally brush off smash-and-grabs. They'll say something like "stupid me, shouldn't have left my AirPods visible in the center console." You don't even realize that it's not normal to have to worry about stuff like that.
- mercutio2 5y ago
  It is normal to worry about smash and grabs in every US urban area I've ever lived in or visited.
  - dcolkitt 5y ago
    San Francisco has the worst property crime rate of any major city in America.[1] It's more than three times worse than what you'd find in New York, Boston or San Diego. It's even about twice as bad as Austin, Chicago or Philadelphia, which aren't exactly known as low crime cities. Moreover the discrepancy is likely understated since so much property crime goes unreported in SF. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
    - slownews45 5y ago
      Between all my bike thefts, car thefts, window break ins etc- I reported only car theft. Crime is widely understated in SF. People will step over a dying person in SF.
      - nitrogen 5y ago
        It's not just street crime, either. The first building I lived in had its bike lockers broken into by a pro crew in masks, and tens of thousands of dollars of bikes stolen. I also forgot to mention the man screaming at the top of his lungs at a woman waiting for a bus, the coworker who fought off an attempted mugging, coming back to my car (probably at Lands End) to find one of the screws missing from the license plate, and other stuff I only heard about rather than saw. Based on this thread, there's a lot going on that people are lucky enough not to notice, or choose not to notice, but it definitely makes SF a risky choice for businesses. I probably fared as well as I did because I'm tall and didn't go out much without other people with me.
slownews45 5y ago
My car was broken into multiple times, stolen a few times (I used tickets to find it because the cops wouldn't take even the basic step of matching parking tickets with stolen car reports). I worked in the tenderloin - so plenty of open air drug dealing (not a huge problem) as well as random attacks on people (a problem). My roommate was jumped and beaten near our place - very disruptive to his life in general. I actually caught folks who had stolen my car, good response by police, got them in the car too driving it. I asked, if I pressed charges, what's the consequence. A few days in jail if I was lucky and wanted to spend years pursuing the case - these would be guys who I'd then have a beef with in my neighborhood. I didn't carry a gun or knife and just didn't want to beef with the dudes hanging out. At some point you are like, is this worth it? As you get older, have kids - you just want to let you kid play. Where I am now the kids can play on their own with neighbors on the street - no worries. Much nicer in my view.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  And here I am living in one of the places that most of the SF tech crowd would consider synonymous with "failed rust belt shithole" where none of that stuff happens at any appreciable scale.
babesh 5y ago
1. Two people with knives tried to mug my father. Chinatown. 2. Two people tried to mug me. Nob Hill. 3. Car was broken into. Model airplane was taken. Just off Van Ness. 4. Mother had her purse slashed. Chinatown. 5. Brother in law had his bike stolen. He locked it in front of the Exploratorium. 6. One brother had his car stolen (but this was Oakland). 7. Roommate got hit on the head, knocked out, had stuff taken. This was late at night a few blocks from the Haight.
- slownews45 5y ago
  Don't worry - we pretty much all know the folks saying SF is "crime free" are total liars OR rich as hell and living in a gated mansion. The thing you don't realize is how nice, at a low and ongoing level, being in a low crime area is. It feels GREAT! Especially if you have a female in your family / friend group. Hey, want to meet up for ice cream at XXX? You get a ton more yeses because no one is nervous walking / biking / locking bikes etc. Early on with my wife I made the mistake of the cheap place that was in a higher crime area - I didn't mind but it really crimped her eagerness to meet me after work somewhere etc if she was going to be walking, and coming home late and walking from BART also stressed her a bit (in fairness we got off at one of the highest crime spots in BART system). I did the don't worry about it thing for a bit, but then there were some shootings and it just wasn't worth it and she wasn't re-assured (I would show her time of day charts for crime in our neighbhoorhood so she could go when it was less risky).

SiVal 5y ago

I think families with kids being impacted there particularly. Yes, one example that is not widely known of what happens when the Lions of the Left have the power to do what they really want is public middle school algebra in SF. ("The Lion of the Left" was the self-given nickname of one of SF's most-loved talk show hosts back in the 90s.) SF grandees noticed that some races tended to take geometry (the class after algebra I) more than others. The number one goal of public education, they claimed, was to "close the achievement gap", so they eliminated geometry from middle school. If no one took it, no one who didn't take it would be behind, so no gap. But then they noticed that some races still took algebra I more often than other races. So they eliminated that, too. [1] No one, no matter how well prepared, would be allowed to take algebra in any public middle school. The best students would be required to take the same classes as the worst, for great justice. Achievement gap closed. Except that better students still had four years in high school to try to catch up to where they would have been if not held back, and not all races were equally likely to do this. So, for more justice, all public schools in SF were required to keep their best math students in the same classes with the worst all the way from K-10. They are now only allowed to be different individuals the final two years of HS. Anyone who wants to take calculus in a SF high school now has to scramble to cram two years (algebra II/trig & pre-calc) into 11th grade to (poorly) prepare for calculus in 12th--until that miscarriage of justice can be eliminated, too. Those who can afford it go to work at tech companies where they use various means to silence the "haters" who resist, while sending their own children to private schools that don't have these policies. Many of those who can't afford it have been moving out of the city to suburbs that have begun the process (lots of districts have now eliminated middle school geometry and advanced placement classes) but are still lagging behind SF in implementing full justice. (Big Tech is working on it, but pockets of resistance remain.) SF Chronicle, a big proponent of policies like this, describes it as positively as they can: [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/education/article/SF-schools-move-to-delay-algebra-shows-13518860.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/education/article/SF-schools-mov...

slownews45 5y ago
I think there will be some state standards that will get rid of calculus in high school. I'm not actually against that, I never thought it was such as big deal. Other parts of the standards (focus on group work, and on racial justice work in math) which may be designed in part to help reduce achievement gap do raise some questions around preparedness of some students that would result. This will only work if they get rid of standardized testing I think in later years (college admissions etc).

duderific 5y ago

Anecdotally, my sister moved to SF from the east coast a couple of years ago. After her patio was burgled a few times, she didn't feel safe so she and her husband moved to Santa Rosa, about 90 minutes north. She's happy as a clam there.

abalone 5y ago

> Gone very light on crime - super light. At some point folks just get tired of dealing / seeing consequence free crime right in front of them. I think families with kids being impacted there particularly. I challenge that statement. Do you have any data support it? It is a myth repeated over and over by certain people and it’s never supported by data. Violent crime in SF is near all time lows. That’s just the facts.[1] My neighborhood I’ve lived in for 15 years has gotten so much safer and we are raising kids and loving it. The crazy thing is the conservative tech activists who moved to Miami.. moved to a city with higher crime! Miami is higher crime than SF. So is Dallas (that was another profile in the local paper). It’s insane that no one is challenging them on the facts. I think this is all because a bunch of progressive supervisors got elected who are critical of certain elements of the tech industry, and the tech guys don’t have a good response and so they are doing the usual conservative tough-on-crime political ploy to try to get rid of them. [1] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/san-francisco-officials-unveil-new-crime-stats/2218901/ https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/san-fran...

whoknowswhat11 5y ago
Sure - "'Out of control': Organized crime drives S.F. shoplifting, closing 17 Walgreens in five years" https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-politics/article/Out-of-control-Organized-crime-drives-S-F-16175755.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-politics/article/Out-of-co... If you haven't been seeing this you haven't been watching. It's absolutely brazen - daylight robbery literally - and turns the store workers and folks shopping into cynics. Chelsea (new DA) took office end of 2019 or early 2020. That really marked a major change. "A violent year: Bay Area killings spiked 35% in 2020" https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/A-violent-year-Bay-Area-murders-spiked-36-in-15857202.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/A-violent-year-Bay... You probably don't realize how much crime is simply unreported - it's a massive amount. Go to any car glass shop - they will tell you how "crime free" SF is. Note that I grew up in an actual low crime city. That means I never had a house key, we never locked the house. We left the keys in our cars. This isn't out in the middle of no where, this was a city (with very low crime). You say your children can walk to neighbors freely like children can in east bay? You are the exception in SF. I realized that folks in the city are just so used to crime, to the steps you have to take to avoid it, they don't realize the impact it has on their quality of life. You really don't get to know your neighbors that well (relative to a totally safe neighborhood where everyone is more welcoming). This last bit is anecdotal, but neighbors really look out for each other outside SF. Folks do the block email lists, get togethers. I did a quick comparison to Lafayette in east bay. San Francisco 2019 Murders (which was a low) - 4.5 murders per 100K. Lafayette - 0.0 per 100K. Robberies SF - 344 per 100K. Lafayette 11 per 100K. Lafayette had 3 robberies in the entire year. The differences are likely larger as in SF there are so many robberies per day that a fair number just don't get reported, especially in some parts of town where cops are not liked - folks are not calling it all in.