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27 year San Francisco resident here. The government here is dysfunctional because that's what people voted for. The fact that people pay so much to live here sa
by rpmcmurdo 5y ago
27 year San Francisco resident here. The government here is dysfunctional because that's what people voted for. The fact that people pay so much to live here says that people are willing to put up with a lot in exchange for living in a diverse and beautiful city.
- junon 5y agoThere's human feces everywhere outside the tourist/financial districts, and the entirety of the inner city (Tenderloin) is disintegrated and full of poverty, homelessness and crime - and it's predominantly people of color who accumulate there. If that's "diverse" and "beautiful" then I'd hate to think what "monocultural" and "dull" looks like...
- tdeck 5y ago> There's human feces everywhere outside the tourist/financial districts, This is not accurate. The Sunset, Richmond, Parkside, Presidio, Marina, and many other parts of the city are very clean (or at least not notably dirty for a city). Perhaps the Marina/Presidio could be called tourist areas but the Sunset and Richmond certainly are not.
- jbelich 5y agoI think the homeless dude passed out covered in (presumably his own) shit at the Stonestown muni stop not 2 hours ago would disagree with you
- junon 5y agoSunset, Parkside, and Marina are all wealthy areas in the north/west of the city. Richmond is not in SF city. Presidio is right next to the pier and thus I would consider it a "touristy area". You're living under a (perhaps bejeweled) rock if you've lived in SF and never seen human shit, someone peeing between some cars, dead animals, homeless literally everywhere, disheveled buildings, trash piles lining the gutters, etc.
- tdeck 5y agoSomeone who doesn't know that the Richmond is a district of San Francisco doesn't get to pompously lecture me on not knowing about the city I lived in for seven years. Also, the Sunset is not a particularly wealthy district and it's not in the northwest. I never claimed that these problems don't exist, but the idea that they're part of life in every part of the city is simply false.
- atdrummond 5y agoRichmond is also a city, hence why people usually say Richmond District if they want to explicitly refer to the NW District of SF when discussing the city and the surrounding area. Poster you’re replying to isn’t wrong, just as you aren’t.
- viscanti 5y agoThey were providing a list of neighborhoods in SF. It wasn't ambiguous and would have been well understood by anyone familiar enough with the city to comment on the state of SF. There's also a Richmond Virginia (among many other Richmonds), none would make sense in the context of a list of SF neighborhoods.
- lhorie 5y agoWhy are y'all talking about Sunset and Parkside as if they're different things? Parkside is in the Sunset district, is it not? Also many of the highest ranking schools are in the Sunset, and house prices there are very much on the high side (compared to, say, around Portola)
- junon 5y agoRichmond is not in SF City. It's in the greater SF area. Just like Oakland isn't in SF city. You're dodging the argument at this point.
- diogenescynic 5y agoSan Francisco has an Inner/Outer Richmond district. It’s the area north of Golden Gate Park. Inner/outer Sunset is south of Golden Gate Park. How can you be such an authority on SF and not know this? Yes there’s a Richmond city but it’s not what’s being referred to here…
- bryan0 5y agoI’ve seen someone take a shit on the sidewalk in the Marina (chestnut street). And I’ve seen similar stuff in the sunset. And to the OP I see this stuff fairly often in the financial district.
- tdeck 5y agoAnywhere near Market is mid to high levels of gross for sure. I think in FiDi and the East Cut companies pay for private cleaning services (and perhaps some private pseudo-policing as well) but these areas are directly adjacent to highly distressed parts of the city.
- cam0 5y agoI've lived here for over 5 years and can absolutely confirm there are a few parts of the city that are dirty and have the feces/needles that people who honestly can't afford to live here love to talk about when they're denigrating the city. As you've noted, there are lots of neighborhoods, MOST of the city, that are very clean, safe, and obviously very desirable to live in.
- throw123123123 5y agoThe parts youa re talking about are not city at all imo, its precisely the places that try to get as far away as possible from SF, within SF.
- stickfigure 5y agoHmmm. I lived in the heart of the Castro for 15 years. When I arrived it was lovely. When I left (3 years ago, pre-covid), it was... not. Homeless and vacant storefronts everywhere. The merchant who has been running the shop below my place longer than I have been alive (and I'm OLD by HN standards) put it this way: The Castro is dying. Maybe there are neighborhoods changing for the better somewhere to balance it out, but I kinda doubt it. The change is real.
- cam0 5y agoThe Castro is certainly not dying. I live in Noe and I walk through the Castro quite often - it's still a lively neighborhood.
- nzmsv 5y agoImagine saying "Yeah, there are human feces all over my living room and kitchen, but the bedrooms are clean. Overall it is a great place to live." Whenever I visit SF I run into someone who looks like an extra from a zombie movie every time, without fail. Sometimes they "violently beg" by lunging at your feet as you walk past. Scream obscenities. Offer stolen goods at red lights. And if you somehow don't see them you can certainly smell them. Just because we collectively got desensitized doesn't make all this OK.
- kodyo 5y agoProbably smells better.
- WalterSear 5y agoYou clearly have no idea what you are talking about.
- fallingknife 5y ago> people are willing to put up with a lot in exchange for living in a diverse and beautiful city. You mean in exchange for living in a city with high paying tech jobs?
- reilly3000 5y agoSan Francisco was brilliant before tech, and will be shining in the next boom. Some things are bigger than now, and maybe bigger than we can fully understand. Here’s some enjoyable reading for those with a few minutes to spare: http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist1/early.html http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist1/early.html To me the confluence of cultures, like the brackish waters of the bay, are it’s hallmark. The issues around sudden wealth, excess, limited housing, and visionary governance seem to be more about the place than a particular moment.
- Manuel_D 5y agoSan Francisco had a declining population from 1960 until 1990: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco So according to people voting with their feet: no, San Francisco was not a brilliant place before tech. Or at least it wasn't brilliant enough to attract a net increase in population.
- reilly3000 5y agoExodus is part of its ethos. By 2002 some people were ready to declare the city deceased. Boom towns need their busts like forests need fires. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/24/business/a-city-takes-a-breath-after-the-dot-com-crash-san-francisco-s-economy-is-slowing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/24/business/a-city-takes-a-b...
- reilly3000 5y agoI’ll also add that 60’s - 80’s San Francisco and the Bay Area at large gave the world counter-culture, organic food, gay rights, and the birth of modern computing. I would attribute the population swing more to general trends towards growth in suburbia.
- ithinkso 5y agoPeople are willing to put up with a lot if it means they don't give anything to someone that doesn't deserve it. 'I will walk through a pile of shit before my money is used for you to shit somewhere else you lazy fuck'
- metalforever 5y agoYou don't actually live in SF or you would know that there's not actually literal piles of shit everywhere.
- civilized 5y agoI went to a conference in SF once and walked up and down Market Street twice a day for a week, and never saw a single pile of shit! I was attacked by a disturbed man who chased and pulled a (probably fake) gun on me, but no piles of shit whatsoever!
- ithinkso 5y agoTrue, my comment was a bit loaded but 'shit' in my comment was not really mean excrements... I used it to mean 'problems' in a hard, loaded way like 'This is the shit I have to deal with' with some parallels to homelessness but if you read my comment again, it doesn't really say what you think it does
- omegaworks 5y agoThere is literal shit everywhere. A walk down any block needs one eye kept on where you step. If it's not human shit it's dog shit because pet owners can't seem to be bothered. There are few and dwindling public bathrooms to the point where gig workers struggle to find facilities[1] while they're out there doing critical work. Rich NIMBYs believe that bathrooms (and not the sky-high rents they seek) encourage people to become homeless, so they've successfully shut down the emergency facilities opened up during the pandemic[2]. 1. https://www.vice.com/en/article/884xyp/gig-workers-have-nowhere-to-pee https://www.vice.com/en/article/884xyp/gig-workers-have-nowh... 2. https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-politics/article/San-Francisco-s-latest-feud-What-to-do-about-16231736.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-politics/article/San-Franc...
- flyinglizard 5y agoNot sure I’d call a city which had one ruling party for forty years “diverse”.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nverno 5y agoin this social respect though, one party actively promotes 'diverse' lifestyles while the other just accepts them. I don't think SF would have come to be under the latter, nor could the latter exist in SF
- nemothekid 5y agoIt's not hard when the only other sizeable party would love to purge the queer 16% of the population. Diversity is when you elect people who actively try to make the population less diverse.
- runarberg 5y agoSan Francisco (and much of California) has effectively a one party system. This means that often the real elections are primaries or along party lines. Chesa Boudin and Gavin Newsom are both in the same political party, but their political views are vastly different.
- fnord77 5y agoyeah newsom could be characterized as a classic lib where as boudin and several supes are closer to being tankies
- runarberg 5y agoJust because people vote for it, it doesn’t mean it is what people want. There is also the option that the voting system is faulty and that the voters don’t have a real option. As an example, the city of Reykjavík has 23 representatives in the city council. They are voted proportionally from parties represented distinct views. San Francisco board of supervisors have 11 members, less then half of Reykjavík’s despite having more then 6 times the population. ~And to make it worse, each member is voted on a first past the post system.~ [Edit: Not true as pointed out in a comment] The San Francisco mayor is voted in a separate election and is not on the board of supervisors. Since this is a position where a lot of political capital is to be gained it is often used as an opportunity for a politician seeking a career, rather then as a passive position willing to let diverse opinions and find consensus among differing views. None of this is voter’s fault. Rather there is a systemic problem which can only be fixed by the people who are benefiting from the status quo.
- necubi 5y ago> And to make it worse, each member is voted on a first past the post system That's not actually true, we use RCV to elect supervisors (and the mayor).
- runarberg 5y agoThanks for correcting.
- tshaddox 5y ago> Just because people vote for it, it doesn’t mean it is what people want. This is really key, and should be a bigger topic of discussion in mainstream political philosophy. Governments that purport to be democracies ought to be responsible for aligning policies and outcomes with the preferences of the electorate. It's far too common for people to dismiss literally any problem in an ostensibly democratic jurisdiction as "well that's what the people voted for," as if the only end goal of a government is to pass some bare minimum threshold of being considered a "democracy" and the rest of the responsibility is on the electorate.
- pkdpic 5y agoI grew up in SF and still have family sticking it out there. I don't completely disagree with the sentiment here but last I heard I thought SF had a pretty serious diversity problem. Is that no longer the case?
- robbrown451 5y agoWhat do you mean by a "serious diversity problem"? Not white enough, or what?
- fmajid 5y agoAfrican-Americans ethnically cleansed from the city, first by Justin Herman’s “revitalization” of the Western Addition, or the shocking fact that black men in Bayview-Hunter’s Point have a life expectancy 20 years less than other SF males, and in fact lower than the US average for black males. Just because we have a black female mayor does not mean the real racism of SF is gone, just as electing Obama did not miraculously cure the US if it’s racism.
- robbrown451 5y agoAre you sure that's what the parent post meant? I don't agree that they have been "ethnically cleansed." I'm sure economics has forced some out. I've live in many parts of the country, and this is by far the least racist, and most racially diverse, place I've lived. Black men in the city would be expected to have a lower life span than black men nationwide, since urban black neighborhood are more prone to drugs and gangs. Have you compared to other big cities, as opposed to just nationwide?
- bastard_op 5y agoNot sure I would ever call San Francisco "beautiful" - it was a dirty, beat-down city when I lived there in 1999/2000. Unless you can afford a view to just stare over the actual city to the waterfronts, pretending a bum isn't taking a shit on your doorstep right now and leaving their heroine needle for you to clean up. Working in Manhattan many years later, I expected much the same arriving for the first time, but surprisingly wasn't so. What the hell are they doing wrong there? This article says much.
- Apocryphon 5y agoUnderrated observation. S.F. has always had a scraggly personality since the Gold Rush days. It's where Dirty Harry and tons of '70s police procedurals were set in, after all. The issue is that despite tech wealth since the late 2000s, none of it has seemed to better the city and in some ways has increased wealth inequality. Manhattan's answer is because of Giuliani's authoritarian mayoral reign. Cleanliness came at a cost of mass arrests and evictions of the homelessness, restrictions on shelters, and stop-and-frisk. Probably not a price that S.F. is willing to pay.
- fnord77 5y ago> Probably not a price that S.F. is willing to pay. a few years ago? definitely not. today? possibly. people are getting really fed up
- lhorie 5y agoSan Francisco's geography is extremely heterogeneous (especially considering the size of the city). All of these are simultaneously true: - yes, there's human feces and needles and tent cities in the Tenderloin/SOMA area - Painted Ladies is an old-ass building, as is much of the residential sprawl around it - Fishermans Wharf is a textbook tourist trap - there's a ton of nice forest-y areas (Presidio, Glen Canyon, Stern Grove, etc) - Sea cliff area is textbook rich person neighbourhood - Financial district actually looks like a modern metropolis Picking one facet and ignoring the rest is... cherrypicky.
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- 627467 5y agoI've lived in south china pre-2000, in southern Europe and in south America. The first (and only) time I've seen human excrement on the streets was 2 years ago in San Francisco. It's very... odd. I mean, I don't think we should obsessed with the human feces part of it, but it would be nice to understand what's going on that it is so visible.
- irrational 5y agoI agree. The only other place I’ve seen anything similar is India. Is San Francisco the India of the USA? Lots of techies in San Francisco are from India. Maybe they feel at home.
- proc0 5y agoLet me explain. The authorities there made it ok for people to do that. Police will not arrest you. You can use the streets as your bathroom. They even announced it on the local news (around 2014-2015). Either they are too stupid to realize people would take advantage of that, or they are malevolent and wanted to destroy SF for whatever political reason.