5 ms·

The most interesting thing about San Francisco, to me at least, is just ignorant some residents seem to be of just how bad the situation is. You simply can't wa

by cletus 5y ago

The most interesting thing about San Francisco, to me at least, is just ignorant some residents seem to be of just how bad the situation is. You simply can't walk down the Mission or anywhere near the Tenderloin and not see open drug use, drug dealing, homelessness and crime. By "ignorance" I mean I know a lot of people who work in tech (as I do), many of whom live in SF. I'm actually shocked at how often they'll tell me how amazing SF is. Like where do they live? Do they go out? I really don't get it. I'm against the culture of mass incarceration but not prosecuting thefts below $950 [1] isn't the answer. There's no simple answer here. There are lots of contributing factors. But pretty high on that list is income inequality and housing unaffordability. If it were up to me, I'd also get rid of the "are you a felon?" question that permanently excludes you from many jobs, renting somewhere to live and generally from many aspects of society, forever, with no recourse. If you do your time then your record should be expunged (except for sentencing for future convictions). Some crimes may exclude you from certain jobs (eg sexual or violent crimes and working with children). But it should be pretty limited. Felons should certainly not be stripped of the ability to vote. That should be illegal. If you exclude felons from society, what do you expect these people to do when crime is the only way they can support themselves? [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/san-francisco-shoplifting-epidemic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/san-francisco-shoplift...

rectang 5y ago
> You simply can't walk down the Mission or anywhere near the Tenderloin and not see open drug use, drug dealing, homelessness and crime. The Tenderloin was like that in the 1990s. Same with SOMA, the Lower Haight, 6th and Market, and other parts of the city as well but those were places I frequented often enough to have seen it myself.
- Uhhrrr 5y ago
  I lived in SOMA in the summer of '94, and it was pretty clean. The Tenderloin was bad, and the Lower Haight wasn't great, but neither of those places had tent cities and human poop.
  - rectang 5y ago
    I worked in central SOMA from 1995-2002. In the 90s, the most prominent neighborhood fixture was the homeless shelter at 6th and Bryant, and there most certainly were homeless around there and human poop in the alleys along 6th, it was notoriously stanky. The northeast end of SOMA wasn't as ripe, though. Things changed after the first DotCom boom and the advent of Pac Bell Park.
rednerrus 5y ago
There's no reason for people to put up with crime and squalor while we are waiting to fix the income inequality and housing affordability issues. Things were bad before COVID but not this bad. We could work to get them back to pre-COVID bad if there was enough political will.
xvedejas 5y ago
Most neighborhoods are not the mission or tenderloin. I work in a rough part of SF, but live in a neighborhood a few miles away that is both one of the more affordable and doesn't see much homelessness. This is not to excuse any ignorance, but to say that SF can be both wonderful and terrible at the same time; just not in the same place.
cam0 5y ago
I mean.. my simple but privileged answer is that I avoid the handful of bad neighborhoods. I have no idea why anyone would choose to live in the Mission and certainly not the Tenderloin unless that was the only place they could afford, in which case I'd probably not live in SF. My friends who love SF are the ones who can afford to ignore/avoid the ugly side of it.
- Aperocky 5y ago
  It's like a very nice living room but with two porta-potty in the middle of it. Sure you can walk around it but why.
  - kelnos 5y ago
    Because it's... not like that at all.
jankyxenon 5y ago
I don’t think the people living on the streets of the tenderloin are there because of housing prices. They’re there because of drug and mental health issues. In Europe, they’re not tolerant of drug use on the streets. Even in cities where it’s decriminalized. On the flip side, in countries with mass poverty issues and mass homelessness - the slums aren’t necessarily a place of rampant and constant drug usage. (You still see grinding poverty and families on the street, but it’s different)
- pvarangot 5y ago
  > In Europe, they’re not tolerant of drug use on the streets. Even in cities where it’s decriminalized. Ehm Berlin and Frankfurt are pretty much Europe and there's open drug use and selling on "sanctuary districts", same as San Francisco. On Frankfurt it's more blatant because it's right by the train station, but a little bit more nuanced than in SF because they have "safe drug use houses" so people don't do it in the sidewalk.
- cletus 5y ago
  You can't look at tolerance for open drug use in isolation. It's part of a complete system that includes a social safety net, access to medical care, treatment for mental health issues and the initial conditions that cause people to become drug dependent in the first place. Europe understands that people are entitled to and deserve a basic standard of living. It largely explains why the EU has expanded eastwards into former Soviet bloc countries where people are much poorer. The EU as a whole takes an economic hit for that but it's an undeniable good for those poorer members. Whereas in the US, people seem to be stuck in a 19th century "every man for himself" frontier cosplay.
  - refurb 5y ago
    Huh? Go to the downtown east side of Vancouver and it’s as bad if not worse than SF. And all those folks have free healthcare, plenty of social services and even clean injection sites. That didn’t solve the problem in the least. It certainly reduces harm, but not drug use.
  - 5y ago
TheSocialAndrew 5y ago
When talking to someone native to the area I would often times mention that I was taken aback by the amount of homelessness and open drug use in the streets of San Francisco. (This was pre-pandemic.) They seemed puzzled, as if I came from a small town and wasn't used to life in a big city. I've moved to SF from NYC. Several times I would get a variation of "isn't it the same in New York?" from them. It's not, it doesn't even get close to SF. Mid-pandemic NYC at 2am felt safer than pre-pandemic SF on a Monday morning.
- cletus 5y ago
  This is my experience as well as someone who lived in NYC for >10 years. For example, I was living downtown during Sandy and my area lost power for 4 days. The police were there to deter looting and property crime. Every hour or so, a police cruiser drive down my street with lights on but no siren checking for crime. I'd walk home at 3-4am and feel completely safe. This was in Manhattan and I realize the outer boroughs are, at least in part, a different story. I once had a car alarm go off outside my window at 2:30am early Sunday. While deciding what to do I called 311 after about 10 minutes. While talking to them a police car rolled up and officers broke into the car and disabled the alarm. I went out and talked to them and said they'd respond to any unattended car alarm, which was defined as an alarm that had been going off for more than 10 minutes. And here's a big one: lower income people are infinitely better off in NYC than SF IMO. While Subway coverage isn't complete in the outer boroughs, lower income people aren't typically burdened by the costs of car ownership and having to drive 4+ hours a day to get to and from work (unlike, say, the people who drive the tech giant buses [1]). It confused me why so many self-described liberals didn't see or didn't want to see the misery in their own city, caused by policies they supported to turned a blind eye to. [1]: https://abcnews.go.com/US/bus-drivers-working-alongside-silicon-valley-millionaires-struggle/story?id=44707434 https://abcnews.go.com/US/bus-drivers-working-alongside-sili...
- TMWNN 5y ago
  >Several times I would get a variation of "isn't it the same in New York?" from them. It's not, it doesn't even get close to SF. Don't forget SF's omnipresent smell of urine! (My theory is that the lack of rain in California (not because of drought, but in general) is part of what makes the situation worse than in NYC.)
kelnos 5y ago
> I'm actually shocked at how often they'll tell me how amazing SF is. Like where do they live? Do they go out? I live in the Dogpatch and it is amazing here, ditto for most of Potrero Hill. I do occasionally see a small number of homeless people about, but nothing particularly threatening, and I don't see trash and needles and whatnot everywhere. I go out nearly daily. I stay closer to home these days, since there's plenty to do in my neighborhood, and I feel like I've gotten a bit more insular since the pandemic began. And yeah, when I do venture out farther for dinners & drinks, well... it depends. Parts of the Mission have gotten really bad (they've been bad for many years, but have been getting worse). Parts of North Beach aren't great. Ten years ago I would cut through the Tenderloin on foot when walking places, but I would definitely not do that today, especially after dark. I used to live in Soma, and it got pretty bad there too. I felt unsafe at times, and that's part of why I moved. (And I didn't even live in the worst areas around mid-Market.) But consider places like the (inner) Sunset, Richmond, Lower Pac Heights, Bernal, Glen Park, Balboa Park, most of Japantown. They're... fine? A lot of these neighborhoods have reputations for being sleepy, but if you're content to make a night just at one restaurant followed by one bar, you can have a great time. If you want to do a bar crawl or see some serious nightlife, sure, you're going to have to go to the Mission, Nob Hill, Haight, Lower Haight, North Beach, Marina, the south-of-Geary Divis corridor, etc., and yeah, some of those places can feel varying degrees of unsafe at times, depending on where you are. That's definitely a problem that needs to be addressed. But this narrative that SF is just chock full of homeless people shooting up, with spent needles, trash, and human shit on the streets and sidewalks everywhere... no, that's just not my experience over the 11+ years I've lived here. No neighborhood is perfect, but these particular problems are nowhere near as widespread as some people make it sound. > I'm against the culture of mass incarceration but not prosecuting thefts below $950 isn't the answer. [...] There's no simple answer here. There are lots of contributing factors. But pretty high on that list is income inequality and housing unaffordability. I'm in full agreement with you here. I think some of the crime is driven by opportunism (if the cops won't even investigate, there's low risk), but a lot is driven by desperation and feelings of powerlessness. We need to get everyone in secure housing, get people with mental health and/or addiction issues the help they need, and somehow let people feel financially secure enough without having to work 3 jobs and 100 hours a week.
- 5y ago
cipheredStones 5y ago
> If it were up to me, I'd also get rid of the "are you a felon?" question that permanently excludes you from many jobs... This is already illegal in California - banned as of 2018 under the California Fair Chance Act. Through companies can still conduct background checks after extending offers.
diebeforei485 5y ago
A lot of people in power don't live in the Tenderloin. I mean, take District Attorney Chesa Boudin. He lives in the Outer Sunset, which is a super exclusionary suburby part of the city that's safe.
- BryantD 5y ago
  I used to live in the Outer Sunset around 48th and Judah. You didn't walk into Golden Gate Park after dark, because it just wasn't safe. The 7/11 a few blocks away saw its share of drug deals and troubled people living homeless. I liked the Outer Sunset because it was a relatively cheap place to live compared to most of the city. "Super exclusionary" doesn't seem like what I experienced there. https://www.zumper.com/blog/affordable-san-francisco-neighborhoods/ https://www.zumper.com/blog/affordable-san-francisco-neighbo...
  - diebeforei485 5y ago
    There aren't very many 1-bedroom apartments for rent in the Outer Sunset - it is mostly single-family homes - so Zumper data on 1-bedrooms is not really relevant here. Also, the apartments there are largely older builds (they are super nimby out there). > You didn't walk into Golden Gate Park after dark, because it just wasn't safe. This is laughably inaccurate. There are plenty of runners and recreational cyclists at night in that part of Golden Gate Park. Even more so now that they re-opened Great Highway to cars on weekdays. And if you think the 7/11 next to the Indian pizza place is shady - wow. You'll see far more shady stuff, in broad daylight, inside the Target at 4th and Mission on any afternoon. Which is why they cut hours down and only open at 9am and close by 6pm for their SF locations. Perhaps you left San Francisco a long time ago. Today the Outer Sunset has a median home price around $1.8M, and is the safest neighborhood in the city that isn't at the top of a hill.
    - BryantD 5y ago
      I'm not particularly interested in playing "my anecdotal data is better than yours," so I won't. Mostly I just wanted to counter the implication that Boudin was living in some sort of magical oasis, because he's not. I will point out that "isn't at the top of a hill" is not actually much of a distinction when you're talking about San Francisco. If there's one thing the city isn't short on, it's hills. NIMBY is correct. The neighborhoods are highly resistant to new construction.
seoaeu 5y ago
> and not see open drug use, drug dealing, homelessness and crime. One of these is not like the others.

by cletus 5y ago

rectang 5y ago

> You simply can't walk down the Mission or anywhere near the Tenderloin and not see open drug use, drug dealing, homelessness and crime. The Tenderloin was like that in the 1990s. Same with SOMA, the Lower Haight, 6th and Market, and other parts of the city as well but those were places I frequented often enough to have seen it myself.

Uhhrrr 5y ago
I lived in SOMA in the summer of '94, and it was pretty clean. The Tenderloin was bad, and the Lower Haight wasn't great, but neither of those places had tent cities and human poop.
- rectang 5y ago
  I worked in central SOMA from 1995-2002. In the 90s, the most prominent neighborhood fixture was the homeless shelter at 6th and Bryant, and there most certainly were homeless around there and human poop in the alleys along 6th, it was notoriously stanky. The northeast end of SOMA wasn't as ripe, though. Things changed after the first DotCom boom and the advent of Pac Bell Park.

rednerrus 5y ago

There's no reason for people to put up with crime and squalor while we are waiting to fix the income inequality and housing affordability issues. Things were bad before COVID but not this bad. We could work to get them back to pre-COVID bad if there was enough political will.

xvedejas 5y ago

Most neighborhoods are not the mission or tenderloin. I work in a rough part of SF, but live in a neighborhood a few miles away that is both one of the more affordable and doesn't see much homelessness. This is not to excuse any ignorance, but to say that SF can be both wonderful and terrible at the same time; just not in the same place.

cam0 5y ago

I mean.. my simple but privileged answer is that I avoid the handful of bad neighborhoods. I have no idea why anyone would choose to live in the Mission and certainly not the Tenderloin unless that was the only place they could afford, in which case I'd probably not live in SF. My friends who love SF are the ones who can afford to ignore/avoid the ugly side of it.

Aperocky 5y ago
It's like a very nice living room but with two porta-potty in the middle of it. Sure you can walk around it but why.
- kelnos 5y ago
  Because it's... not like that at all.

jankyxenon 5y ago

I don’t think the people living on the streets of the tenderloin are there because of housing prices. They’re there because of drug and mental health issues. In Europe, they’re not tolerant of drug use on the streets. Even in cities where it’s decriminalized. On the flip side, in countries with mass poverty issues and mass homelessness - the slums aren’t necessarily a place of rampant and constant drug usage. (You still see grinding poverty and families on the street, but it’s different)

pvarangot 5y ago
> In Europe, they’re not tolerant of drug use on the streets. Even in cities where it’s decriminalized. Ehm Berlin and Frankfurt are pretty much Europe and there's open drug use and selling on "sanctuary districts", same as San Francisco. On Frankfurt it's more blatant because it's right by the train station, but a little bit more nuanced than in SF because they have "safe drug use houses" so people don't do it in the sidewalk.
cletus 5y ago
You can't look at tolerance for open drug use in isolation. It's part of a complete system that includes a social safety net, access to medical care, treatment for mental health issues and the initial conditions that cause people to become drug dependent in the first place. Europe understands that people are entitled to and deserve a basic standard of living. It largely explains why the EU has expanded eastwards into former Soviet bloc countries where people are much poorer. The EU as a whole takes an economic hit for that but it's an undeniable good for those poorer members. Whereas in the US, people seem to be stuck in a 19th century "every man for himself" frontier cosplay.
- refurb 5y ago
  Huh? Go to the downtown east side of Vancouver and it’s as bad if not worse than SF. And all those folks have free healthcare, plenty of social services and even clean injection sites. That didn’t solve the problem in the least. It certainly reduces harm, but not drug use.
- 5y ago

TheSocialAndrew 5y ago

When talking to someone native to the area I would often times mention that I was taken aback by the amount of homelessness and open drug use in the streets of San Francisco. (This was pre-pandemic.) They seemed puzzled, as if I came from a small town and wasn't used to life in a big city. I've moved to SF from NYC. Several times I would get a variation of "isn't it the same in New York?" from them. It's not, it doesn't even get close to SF. Mid-pandemic NYC at 2am felt safer than pre-pandemic SF on a Monday morning.

cletus 5y ago
This is my experience as well as someone who lived in NYC for >10 years. For example, I was living downtown during Sandy and my area lost power for 4 days. The police were there to deter looting and property crime. Every hour or so, a police cruiser drive down my street with lights on but no siren checking for crime. I'd walk home at 3-4am and feel completely safe. This was in Manhattan and I realize the outer boroughs are, at least in part, a different story. I once had a car alarm go off outside my window at 2:30am early Sunday. While deciding what to do I called 311 after about 10 minutes. While talking to them a police car rolled up and officers broke into the car and disabled the alarm. I went out and talked to them and said they'd respond to any unattended car alarm, which was defined as an alarm that had been going off for more than 10 minutes. And here's a big one: lower income people are infinitely better off in NYC than SF IMO. While Subway coverage isn't complete in the outer boroughs, lower income people aren't typically burdened by the costs of car ownership and having to drive 4+ hours a day to get to and from work (unlike, say, the people who drive the tech giant buses [1]). It confused me why so many self-described liberals didn't see or didn't want to see the misery in their own city, caused by policies they supported to turned a blind eye to. [1]: https://abcnews.go.com/US/bus-drivers-working-alongside-silicon-valley-millionaires-struggle/story?id=44707434 https://abcnews.go.com/US/bus-drivers-working-alongside-sili...
TMWNN 5y ago
>Several times I would get a variation of "isn't it the same in New York?" from them. It's not, it doesn't even get close to SF. Don't forget SF's omnipresent smell of urine! (My theory is that the lack of rain in California (not because of drought, but in general) is part of what makes the situation worse than in NYC.)

kelnos 5y ago

> I'm actually shocked at how often they'll tell me how amazing SF is. Like where do they live? Do they go out? I live in the Dogpatch and it is amazing here, ditto for most of Potrero Hill. I do occasionally see a small number of homeless people about, but nothing particularly threatening, and I don't see trash and needles and whatnot everywhere. I go out nearly daily. I stay closer to home these days, since there's plenty to do in my neighborhood, and I feel like I've gotten a bit more insular since the pandemic began. And yeah, when I do venture out farther for dinners & drinks, well... it depends. Parts of the Mission have gotten really bad (they've been bad for many years, but have been getting worse). Parts of North Beach aren't great. Ten years ago I would cut through the Tenderloin on foot when walking places, but I would definitely not do that today, especially after dark. I used to live in Soma, and it got pretty bad there too. I felt unsafe at times, and that's part of why I moved. (And I didn't even live in the worst areas around mid-Market.) But consider places like the (inner) Sunset, Richmond, Lower Pac Heights, Bernal, Glen Park, Balboa Park, most of Japantown. They're... fine? A lot of these neighborhoods have reputations for being sleepy, but if you're content to make a night just at one restaurant followed by one bar, you can have a great time. If you want to do a bar crawl or see some serious nightlife, sure, you're going to have to go to the Mission, Nob Hill, Haight, Lower Haight, North Beach, Marina, the south-of-Geary Divis corridor, etc., and yeah, some of those places can feel varying degrees of unsafe at times, depending on where you are. That's definitely a problem that needs to be addressed. But this narrative that SF is just chock full of homeless people shooting up, with spent needles, trash, and human shit on the streets and sidewalks everywhere... no, that's just not my experience over the 11+ years I've lived here. No neighborhood is perfect, but these particular problems are nowhere near as widespread as some people make it sound. > I'm against the culture of mass incarceration but not prosecuting thefts below $950 isn't the answer. [...] There's no simple answer here. There are lots of contributing factors. But pretty high on that list is income inequality and housing unaffordability. I'm in full agreement with you here. I think some of the crime is driven by opportunism (if the cops won't even investigate, there's low risk), but a lot is driven by desperation and feelings of powerlessness. We need to get everyone in secure housing, get people with mental health and/or addiction issues the help they need, and somehow let people feel financially secure enough without having to work 3 jobs and 100 hours a week.

5y ago

cipheredStones 5y ago

> If it were up to me, I'd also get rid of the "are you a felon?" question that permanently excludes you from many jobs... This is already illegal in California - banned as of 2018 under the California Fair Chance Act. Through companies can still conduct background checks after extending offers.

diebeforei485 5y ago

A lot of people in power don't live in the Tenderloin. I mean, take District Attorney Chesa Boudin. He lives in the Outer Sunset, which is a super exclusionary suburby part of the city that's safe.

BryantD 5y ago
I used to live in the Outer Sunset around 48th and Judah. You didn't walk into Golden Gate Park after dark, because it just wasn't safe. The 7/11 a few blocks away saw its share of drug deals and troubled people living homeless. I liked the Outer Sunset because it was a relatively cheap place to live compared to most of the city. "Super exclusionary" doesn't seem like what I experienced there. https://www.zumper.com/blog/affordable-san-francisco-neighborhoods/ https://www.zumper.com/blog/affordable-san-francisco-neighbo...
- diebeforei485 5y ago
  There aren't very many 1-bedroom apartments for rent in the Outer Sunset - it is mostly single-family homes - so Zumper data on 1-bedrooms is not really relevant here. Also, the apartments there are largely older builds (they are super nimby out there). > You didn't walk into Golden Gate Park after dark, because it just wasn't safe. This is laughably inaccurate. There are plenty of runners and recreational cyclists at night in that part of Golden Gate Park. Even more so now that they re-opened Great Highway to cars on weekdays. And if you think the 7/11 next to the Indian pizza place is shady - wow. You'll see far more shady stuff, in broad daylight, inside the Target at 4th and Mission on any afternoon. Which is why they cut hours down and only open at 9am and close by 6pm for their SF locations. Perhaps you left San Francisco a long time ago. Today the Outer Sunset has a median home price around $1.8M, and is the safest neighborhood in the city that isn't at the top of a hill.
  - BryantD 5y ago
    I'm not particularly interested in playing "my anecdotal data is better than yours," so I won't. Mostly I just wanted to counter the implication that Boudin was living in some sort of magical oasis, because he's not. I will point out that "isn't at the top of a hill" is not actually much of a distinction when you're talking about San Francisco. If there's one thing the city isn't short on, it's hills. NIMBY is correct. The neighborhoods are highly resistant to new construction.

seoaeu 5y ago

> and not see open drug use, drug dealing, homelessness and crime. One of these is not like the others.