4 ms·

I've lived in San Francisco for 16 years. Yes, I have experienced the homeless problem. I had my car broken into once when I left my backpack inside. I have nev

I've lived in San Francisco for 16 years. Yes, I have experienced the homeless problem. I had my car broken into once when I left my backpack inside. I have never been mugged or robbed or had any physical violence occur, or be threatened. We have many lovely friends who live here. San Francisco is under a lot of pressure: population, finance, environmental. It is not a dystopia. It is a community where people build their lives and deserves love and support. I have spent significant amounts of time in New York, Paris and other world cities. I do not find San Francisco to be all that different from New York or Paris.

thatswrong0 5y ago
Really? Having lived in both for a good period of time, I found New York City to be far more livable and safer. The homeless, petty crime, and general disfunction issues here in SF are laughable for what some might consider to be a "world class city".
lhorie 5y ago
> I have never been mugged or robbed or had any physical violence occur, or be threatened. You're lucky (and not that I want to intentionally bring up this card, but I bet you're a burly caucasian male). I saw a guy jump over the Bart ticket gate on literally my first night in SF. I've witnessed multiple retail theft incidents. I've been spat on, literally out of nowhere. A coworker had his garage broken into and a bike stolen. Another mentioned a friend whose backpack was snatched. (All asians) > It is a community where people build their lives and deserves love and support. This comes across as an empty platitude. One can say that about literally anywhere, even a place like Kabul. For me, SF is markedly different from other places I've lived, and if we were talking in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it doesn't score very well.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  > You're lucky (and not that I want to intentionally bring up this card, but I bet you're a burly caucasian male). Stop this. I'm a non-burly non-caucasian male and this (being mugged, robbed, or undergoing physical violence) has never happened to me even once. Maybe you're unlucky? Drawing from your personal anecdotes gets tiring. > I've witnessed multiple retail theft incidents. I've been spat on, literally out of nowhere. I've seen this in SF. I've also seen it in LA, Dallas, Houston, Salt Lake City, and Chicago. I've seen it in NYC also, but not in Manhattan. The difference is that in most other big cities in the US, everyone drives around everywhere, so you're insulated from the folks on the street, or you clearly know which neighborhoods to avoid. > A coworker had his garage broken into and a bike stolen. Another mentioned a friend whose backpack was snatched. (All asians) A garage is race-blind, come on. I've lived in a house full of East Asians in the Sunset and this never happened to me. I lived in SOMA with caucasians and this happened to me (well us, nothing of mine was stolen). I think what you're seeing is that SF is physically a lot less class-segregated than other US cities and that folks drive around here a lot less than they do in other cities. In LA, the crazies mostly hang around Skid Row and the Arts District and if you spend most of your life outside these places (or in a car, as Angelenos are won't to do) you'll never encounter them. In Chicago if you stick to the Loop and downtown. you'll only see gleaming apartments. In Houston, Austin, and much of Salt Lake City (and honestly almost everyone in LA), most everyone just zooms around in a car and only interacts with the homeless or panhandlers as they drive around. As such most affluent folks know to avoid low-income or run-down neighborhoods and so never really interact with the homeless. In SF you can walk down Valencia between 17th and 22nd and it'll look shiny and fancy, like something out of a promotional poster about "Modern Living". Then you walk a block over to Guerrero and you'll see someone with scabs all over lying on the street naked. You walk down 7th or 8th and see fancy new cafes, but then you walk down 6th and see folks shooting up in broad daylight. Some of this is SF's more tolerant atmosphere for the mentally-ill homeless; in other cities they just get harassed until they accumulate in a part of town that doesn't have the residents, police funding, or political capital to push them out. I'm not saying SF is a bed of roses and I do think the police here need to take a much harder line on property crime, but I think a lot of the negative experiences here are motivated by SF's lack of physical segregation and its walking-first culture. America has historically just relegated the poor and homeless to the streets and used cars to literally and figuratively zoom away from them. Now that cities are coming back into vogue, the US will have to confront the fact that it never fixed its poverty problem but just shoved it out of sight.
  - lhorie 5y ago
    > Drawing from your personal anecdotes gets tiring. Perhaps that says more about the impact of high crime stats on real people than my individual luck. The reality remains that various forms of crime are deeply intertwined with various forms of inequality (be it correlation between race/gender/etc and violence/harrassment, or geographic segregation and property crime) I've lived in Toronto and Sao Paulo, so I have quite a bit of perspective on how far the crime-o-meter range stretches. Even if I did accept that my experience in SF was some sort of freaky statistical anomaly (and I don't, since even y'all "lucky" folks acknowledge being victims of break-ins), that can't fully explain why my volume of bad experiences in SF is so much higher than that of living near a huge slum in a 3rd world city with a ridiculously high crime rate. Objectively speaking, "it's not so bad" my ass :)
    - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      > huge slum in a 3rd world city with a ridiculously high crime rate. If you think Sao Paulo is a 3rd world city, then I don't know what you'd bin Naypyidaw or Monrovia into. 4th world maybe? You'd probably enjoy living in a South Bay suburb. There's lots of pockets of different races and you'd never have to meet anyone outside of that community and you'd have total local control of police response and other things. Crime rates are low and cultural values are homogeneous in the community.
      - lhorie 5y ago
        I try to avoid postulating about places I've not been to. I was born in Sao Paulo, under the reign of military dictatorship, at that (look up its relationship w/ the US if you feel like filling your daily dose of WTFs). The "3rd world" denomination is not something I came up with, and I certainly don't want to be the one drawing more classist lines as some attempt to distance myself from folks in Liberia or Myanmar or Afghanistan or whatever, as I'm sure they're already going through enough crap as is. South Bay is, as far as I can tell (I only lived there for a few months), quintessential North American suburbia. It's not that different from Toronto suburbia, to be honest; my wife wants to move to South Bay if we end up settling around these parts. The house prices though :/

thatswrong0 5y ago

Really? Having lived in both for a good period of time, I found New York City to be far more livable and safer. The homeless, petty crime, and general disfunction issues here in SF are laughable for what some might consider to be a "world class city".

lhorie 5y ago

> I have never been mugged or robbed or had any physical violence occur, or be threatened. You're lucky (and not that I want to intentionally bring up this card, but I bet you're a burly caucasian male). I saw a guy jump over the Bart ticket gate on literally my first night in SF. I've witnessed multiple retail theft incidents. I've been spat on, literally out of nowhere. A coworker had his garage broken into and a bike stolen. Another mentioned a friend whose backpack was snatched. (All asians) > It is a community where people build their lives and deserves love and support. This comes across as an empty platitude. One can say that about literally anywhere, even a place like Kabul. For me, SF is markedly different from other places I've lived, and if we were talking in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it doesn't score very well.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
> You're lucky (and not that I want to intentionally bring up this card, but I bet you're a burly caucasian male). Stop this. I'm a non-burly non-caucasian male and this (being mugged, robbed, or undergoing physical violence) has never happened to me even once. Maybe you're unlucky? Drawing from your personal anecdotes gets tiring. > I've witnessed multiple retail theft incidents. I've been spat on, literally out of nowhere. I've seen this in SF. I've also seen it in LA, Dallas, Houston, Salt Lake City, and Chicago. I've seen it in NYC also, but not in Manhattan. The difference is that in most other big cities in the US, everyone drives around everywhere, so you're insulated from the folks on the street, or you clearly know which neighborhoods to avoid. > A coworker had his garage broken into and a bike stolen. Another mentioned a friend whose backpack was snatched. (All asians) A garage is race-blind, come on. I've lived in a house full of East Asians in the Sunset and this never happened to me. I lived in SOMA with caucasians and this happened to me (well us, nothing of mine was stolen). I think what you're seeing is that SF is physically a lot less class-segregated than other US cities and that folks drive around here a lot less than they do in other cities. In LA, the crazies mostly hang around Skid Row and the Arts District and if you spend most of your life outside these places (or in a car, as Angelenos are won't to do) you'll never encounter them. In Chicago if you stick to the Loop and downtown. you'll only see gleaming apartments. In Houston, Austin, and much of Salt Lake City (and honestly almost everyone in LA), most everyone just zooms around in a car and only interacts with the homeless or panhandlers as they drive around. As such most affluent folks know to avoid low-income or run-down neighborhoods and so never really interact with the homeless. In SF you can walk down Valencia between 17th and 22nd and it'll look shiny and fancy, like something out of a promotional poster about "Modern Living". Then you walk a block over to Guerrero and you'll see someone with scabs all over lying on the street naked. You walk down 7th or 8th and see fancy new cafes, but then you walk down 6th and see folks shooting up in broad daylight. Some of this is SF's more tolerant atmosphere for the mentally-ill homeless; in other cities they just get harassed until they accumulate in a part of town that doesn't have the residents, police funding, or political capital to push them out. I'm not saying SF is a bed of roses and I do think the police here need to take a much harder line on property crime, but I think a lot of the negative experiences here are motivated by SF's lack of physical segregation and its walking-first culture. America has historically just relegated the poor and homeless to the streets and used cars to literally and figuratively zoom away from them. Now that cities are coming back into vogue, the US will have to confront the fact that it never fixed its poverty problem but just shoved it out of sight.
- lhorie 5y ago
  > Drawing from your personal anecdotes gets tiring. Perhaps that says more about the impact of high crime stats on real people than my individual luck. The reality remains that various forms of crime are deeply intertwined with various forms of inequality (be it correlation between race/gender/etc and violence/harrassment, or geographic segregation and property crime) I've lived in Toronto and Sao Paulo, so I have quite a bit of perspective on how far the crime-o-meter range stretches. Even if I did accept that my experience in SF was some sort of freaky statistical anomaly (and I don't, since even y'all "lucky" folks acknowledge being victims of break-ins), that can't fully explain why my volume of bad experiences in SF is so much higher than that of living near a huge slum in a 3rd world city with a ridiculously high crime rate. Objectively speaking, "it's not so bad" my ass :)
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    > huge slum in a 3rd world city with a ridiculously high crime rate. If you think Sao Paulo is a 3rd world city, then I don't know what you'd bin Naypyidaw or Monrovia into. 4th world maybe? You'd probably enjoy living in a South Bay suburb. There's lots of pockets of different races and you'd never have to meet anyone outside of that community and you'd have total local control of police response and other things. Crime rates are low and cultural values are homogeneous in the community.
    - lhorie 5y ago
      I try to avoid postulating about places I've not been to. I was born in Sao Paulo, under the reign of military dictatorship, at that (look up its relationship w/ the US if you feel like filling your daily dose of WTFs). The "3rd world" denomination is not something I came up with, and I certainly don't want to be the one drawing more classist lines as some attempt to distance myself from folks in Liberia or Myanmar or Afghanistan or whatever, as I'm sure they're already going through enough crap as is. South Bay is, as far as I can tell (I only lived there for a few months), quintessential North American suburbia. It's not that different from Toronto suburbia, to be honest; my wife wants to move to South Bay if we end up settling around these parts. The house prices though :/