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This article blames housing but doesn’t talk about crime and vagrancy. Stores get looted in broad daylight. Asian Americans have to fear physical attacks. Filth

This article blames housing but doesn’t talk about crime and vagrancy. Stores get looted in broad daylight. Asian Americans have to fear physical attacks. Filth, needles, and feces are a regular sight. Some blocks are open drug dens. Criminals get released with barely a slap on the wrist. It’s not just housing - it’s a city that has so overly committed to ideological policy making, like “restorative justice”, that it has sacrificed public safety and fails to meet basic expectations for quality of life. Between that, cost of living, and California taxes, I am surprised the polling numbers aren’t worse. For the bay to become attractive, it needs a more fundamental change - it needs a diversity of ideas and politics that it has been missing for quite some time.

snapetom 5y ago
Basically Seattle, too. We've had about 200 incidents of rock throwing at cars on freeways this year. City "leaders" finally did something about it at around incident #175 by clearing the homeless encampments along the freeway. Up until that point, if you didn't like rocks going through your windshield, it was because you lacked "compassion."
ggm 5y ago
Crime follows homelessness and unemployment around. If you fix homelessness, and give people meaningful work, or the best substitute, and invest in them as people, they stop doing as much crazy shit. It takes time. Once you have a street culture which includes public defecation and leaving drug detruitus around, it takes time to fix. Sure, you can Bloomberg "tough on crime" it away, I suspect some of that isn't viable now for a number of reasons. Not the least because some of the public health and mental health interventions, and the universal income stuff strongly suggest that kindness works better. I'm not pretending the problem isn't there. I just think that the root cause isn't the needle per-se: its why people are reduced to needles on the streets in the first place. Blaming this on lax social policy around arrests misses the point I think. (Where I live in Brisbane has pretty high rough-sleeping, and street drug use. Intervention programs to help people seem to work better here, moving them on, or beating them up, or locking them up doesn't seem to work that well overall)
- donw 5y ago
  > Blaming this on lax social policy around arrests misses the point I think. No. I'm old enough to remember visiting SF in the late 90s. The city was overall clean and safe. Only a few vagrants. The parks were parks and not shantytowns. Fast forward to today. None of this is true. That blame lies squarely on city leadership and the policies they push regardless of outcome.
  - fragmede 5y ago
    In the 80's and 90's, how often did you go to Dolores park? After dark? You didn't if you knew any better, because it was dangerous. It was dangerous for different reasons than threaten the city now though. There were gangs that controlled territory, in ways that you only hear about in movies these days. Gentrification has its issues, and San Francisco's certainly has its share issues, but lets not see the city's past through rose-colored lenses.
    - donw 5y ago
      "There were dangerous areas before" does not negate "things now are fantastically worse".
      - fragmede 5y ago
        It doesn't negate "things are bad now too", but you'll need to be more specific if you want to claim that things are "fantastically worse". Specifically, none of my friends have been mugged or threatened with a stabbing recently, though a friends sister was gunned down a bunch of years ago. The SFPD managed to find her killer and bring him to justice finally this year. It's popular to hate on them for being ineffectual but they (and the prosecutors office) got it done. To be clear, I'm not saying things aren't bad - they are. I'm saying let's not pretend that things were great in the past either.
- mc32 5y ago
  Not sure you are aware, but criminals avoid doing crimes in Daly City and opt for SF because SF will prosecute less than San Mateo. If you are not aware, not all crime is done by people who live in SF --many come to SF because there is less prosecution. I knew kids in HS who would shoplift not because the needed to but because they could. These guys would totally take advantage of the situation in SF if they were that age again. It's not normal to have people casing houses at night with flashlights but it happens in SF and people on NextDoor are like, "yeah, it's the city, that's how cities are" trying to gaslight newcomers. My ass. That's not how it is in cities. It's like that in _some_ cities (SFO SEA NYC) because the law is soft. There were homeless before in SF and it was never like it's been the last few years. It's definitely not like that in San Jose. And outside NYC (which also adopted SF-style enforcement) many other cities do not suffer the same wonton disregard for civilized behavior. Even in third world countries with poorer homeless people, this does not happen.

snapetom 5y ago

Basically Seattle, too. We've had about 200 incidents of rock throwing at cars on freeways this year. City "leaders" finally did something about it at around incident #175 by clearing the homeless encampments along the freeway. Up until that point, if you didn't like rocks going through your windshield, it was because you lacked "compassion."

ggm 5y ago

Crime follows homelessness and unemployment around. If you fix homelessness, and give people meaningful work, or the best substitute, and invest in them as people, they stop doing as much crazy shit. It takes time. Once you have a street culture which includes public defecation and leaving drug detruitus around, it takes time to fix. Sure, you can Bloomberg "tough on crime" it away, I suspect some of that isn't viable now for a number of reasons. Not the least because some of the public health and mental health interventions, and the universal income stuff strongly suggest that kindness works better. I'm not pretending the problem isn't there. I just think that the root cause isn't the needle per-se: its why people are reduced to needles on the streets in the first place. Blaming this on lax social policy around arrests misses the point I think. (Where I live in Brisbane has pretty high rough-sleeping, and street drug use. Intervention programs to help people seem to work better here, moving them on, or beating them up, or locking them up doesn't seem to work that well overall)

donw 5y ago
> Blaming this on lax social policy around arrests misses the point I think. No. I'm old enough to remember visiting SF in the late 90s. The city was overall clean and safe. Only a few vagrants. The parks were parks and not shantytowns. Fast forward to today. None of this is true. That blame lies squarely on city leadership and the policies they push regardless of outcome.
- fragmede 5y ago
  In the 80's and 90's, how often did you go to Dolores park? After dark? You didn't if you knew any better, because it was dangerous. It was dangerous for different reasons than threaten the city now though. There were gangs that controlled territory, in ways that you only hear about in movies these days. Gentrification has its issues, and San Francisco's certainly has its share issues, but lets not see the city's past through rose-colored lenses.
  - donw 5y ago
    "There were dangerous areas before" does not negate "things now are fantastically worse".
    - fragmede 5y ago
      It doesn't negate "things are bad now too", but you'll need to be more specific if you want to claim that things are "fantastically worse". Specifically, none of my friends have been mugged or threatened with a stabbing recently, though a friends sister was gunned down a bunch of years ago. The SFPD managed to find her killer and bring him to justice finally this year. It's popular to hate on them for being ineffectual but they (and the prosecutors office) got it done. To be clear, I'm not saying things aren't bad - they are. I'm saying let's not pretend that things were great in the past either.
mc32 5y ago
Not sure you are aware, but criminals avoid doing crimes in Daly City and opt for SF because SF will prosecute less than San Mateo. If you are not aware, not all crime is done by people who live in SF --many come to SF because there is less prosecution. I knew kids in HS who would shoplift not because the needed to but because they could. These guys would totally take advantage of the situation in SF if they were that age again. It's not normal to have people casing houses at night with flashlights but it happens in SF and people on NextDoor are like, "yeah, it's the city, that's how cities are" trying to gaslight newcomers. My ass. That's not how it is in cities. It's like that in _some_ cities (SFO SEA NYC) because the law is soft. There were homeless before in SF and it was never like it's been the last few years. It's definitely not like that in San Jose. And outside NYC (which also adopted SF-style enforcement) many other cities do not suffer the same wonton disregard for civilized behavior. Even in third world countries with poorer homeless people, this does not happen.