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I am skeptical that the claims made are accurate. I am sure that there is crime in San Francisco, however, SF is a large city, and it doesn't add up to me that

I am skeptical that the claims made are accurate. I am sure that there is crime in San Francisco, however, SF is a large city, and it doesn't add up to me that a large company would completely move out of an entire city over the issue of crime. It sounds like a clumsy PR play tbh.

ProAm 4y ago
What about when Amazon does it in Seattle? [0] [Q] https://seattlemedium.com/amazon-relocates-workers-due-to-crime-in-downtown-seattle/ https://seattlemedium.com/amazon-relocates-workers-due-to-cr...
- bufferoverflow 4y ago
  Seattle has a similar crime and drug problem.
  - ProAm 4y ago
    Exactly, I dont think this is a clumsy PR play as the OP suggested. All big cities are experiencing increase in homelessness, crime and violence, drug use. You see it in Austin, Denver, SF, Seattle, LA, Chicago. Many of these cities were already bad and are getting worse, but others used to be 'good' cities and are now moving into thunderdome territory.
    - saila 4y ago
      The city I live in has been an ongoing target of this kind of "thunderdome" rhetoric, and while there are well-known problem areas, the reality is nowhere near as bad as it's made out to be. With regard to things getting worse over the past couple years, I'm not sure what people were expecting to happen when sky high rents intersected with a global pandemic, especially in places where there's not much of a safety net.
    - softwarebeware 4y ago
      There's two things happening. There's a "{{YOUR_CITY}} is dying" narrative that is constantly being pushed by far-right-owned media companies. It has been going on for years. (see https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/24/fact-check-linking-city-violence-democratic-politics-reach/3248102001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/24/fac...). And that narrative is now having some success. It is getting people to apply a confirmation bias such that they perceive their city as crime-infested. Meanwhile, crime statistics in many (most? all?) of these cities are actually down or flat. And compared on a per-capita basis look like even weaker support for that narrative.
      - ProAm 4y ago
        I dont think its being pushed by far right or far left, I see both sides complaining about it which means there is factual evidence and experience to prove it a real issue. Crime is up in a lot of cities, example of a recent study in Denver, sure it depends on what you measure and how, but that is how statistics work: - While Colorado’s rates for homicide, aggravated assault and motor vehicle theft rose by more than 10% in 2020 over the average of the prior three years, rates for rape, larceny, robbery and burglary stayed relatively level or declined. - Increases in aggravated assaults — which include shootings and stabbings — and motor vehicle thefts are the biggest drivers of increased rates statewide of violent crime and property crime. - Colorado’s communities are not a monolith. Trends in the state’s largest cities differ from each other, as do those in medium-sized towns. Colorado’s 2020 violent crime rate was the highest it’s been since 1995, but is lower than it was between 1985 and 1995. The state’s 2020 property crime rate was the highest recorded since 2008, but is less than half the rate recorded in the mid-1980s. - While Colorado’s violent crime rate jumped 10% between 2019 and 2020 — the largest single-year increase since 1990 — that increase came as part of a six-year upward trend. The state’s violent crime rate increased by 8% year-over-year in 2016, 2017 and 2018.
        softwarebeware 4y ago
        I'm skeptical when percentages are named because I remember seeing one study like this where it was like, "homicides are up 10%" and then when I looked, there were 10 homicides last year and 11 the next.
  - smaryjerry 4y ago
    I’m sure everyone knows it but it’s in almost all cities that had a very prominent defund the police movement. In Seattle and other Washington cities like Olympia they just don’t have a police force that is capable or even allowed to act. In Olympia for example a homeless person constantly goes to the same area and pisses and shits on the sidewalk. He stood in front of a glass window of a salon and shit in front of everyone and the business called the police only to be told that because they were just a tenant at the shopping center that the police would not come out. They made a rule (I dont know if law) that only the property owner can call the police now, and becaus the person shitting wasn’t inside the store, the property owner had to make the call. Like seriously? Property owners are banding together to hire essentially a private police force to patrol now because the government won’t police. Apparently only the businesses care about safety because the city councils do nothing and voters dont change anything.
    - mywittyname 4y ago
      > it’s in almost all cities that had a very prominent defund the police movement. In Seattle and other Washington cities like Olympia they just don’t have a police force that is capable or even allowed to act. Or police are actively making the cities worse places to live as a way of punishing people with these attitudes. I guess we'll find out when departments slip up and put into writing policies that were previously said behind closed doors.
    - softwarebeware 4y ago
      > In Seattle and other Washington cities like Olympia they just don’t have a police force that is capable or even allowed to act. You may want to check into this a bit more. As with anything it's much more complicated than that. For example, have the Seattle "police" been defunded? In late 2020, the Seattle City Council cut less than $10M off the specific police budget, with funds specifically allocated for adding 125 officers. Meanwhile they budgeted $100M MORE for additional community safety initiatives (see https://crosscut.com/news/2020/11/seattle-cuts-doesnt-defund-police-budget-2021 https://crosscut.com/news/2020/11/seattle-cuts-doesnt-defund...). Every time there was discussion of anything like "police reform" the past two years in Seattle, the Seattle Times ran an article with a headline like "Seattle City Council defunds police" and you would read the article and find that nothing had even changed, but that the council had just issued a statement of support for the idea of reform. This is the kind of spin/propaganda that is happening.
mathattack 4y ago
Very hard to attract workers to come to a city where they have to walk through needles and poop to get to the office. Or after they’ve been attacked by a mentally ill pan handler. It’s not an easy thing to solve, otherwise the city would have thrown money at the problem. If you’re on the fence about going remote, the crime hassles could push you over the top in a way that wouldn’t pre-COVID.
- ashtonkem 4y ago
  > Very hard to attract workers to come to a city where they have to walk through needles and poop to get to the office. Or after they’ve been attacked by a mentally ill pan handler. Are we ignoring the past 20 years of startups and major tech companies attracting high level of talent to SF? Because pre pandemic it was very, very easy to attract workers, very expensive workers, to move to SF despite all of its issues. Every few years we’d have these discussions, and yet major startups and FAANGs would keep hiring there. I think remote is an issue for SF, but it is also worth pointing out that remote work is extremely popular outside SF too. $CORP is really struggling to get on site workers across a variety of cities where satellite offices exist, and not just CA cities either. My feel is that this is a general cultural change across the industry, and maybe SF is a bit more affected because it’s so much more expensive than other metro areas. My guess is that like a ton of other tech companies, they were either losing staff to remote jobs, or having a hard time justifying having an office when a large percentage of their work force didn’t come in, and this is how they decided to spin the PR.
  - valenterry 4y ago
    I rejected a fairly good FAANG offer because they required me moving to SF. That was 2019, but I still rejected it after watching some bikers driving through and filming the city on YouTube.
    - ashtonkem 4y ago
      I stopped a Google interview halfway through in 2012 because they would only consider junior engineers in NYC and Mountain View, and I didn’t want to leave Chicago. But I don’t think our one off experiences make a trend. Facebook and Google alone hired and kept a ton of talent in SF pre pandemic, never mind the countless non FAANG companies there. Not everyone obviously, but a gob smacking number of engineers lived in the Bay Area.
pjlegato 4y ago
I can confirm, having lived in San Francisco for many years: street conditions were never great, but over the past two years, they have gotten far worse than ever before. Street-level crime is rampant now throughout the city, and particularly in the largely abandoned downtown area where Kraken's offices are. San Francisco is not a large city at all. It's 7 miles by 7 miles. There are not a lot of areas where you can rent a single office large enough to hold all of Kraken's employees, and most of those are in what is now a high crime area downtown and in SOMA. It's also still very expensive to rent compared to other nearby cities and suburbs (somehow), and has extra payroll taxes levied on large employers. I'm not surprised at all that yet another large tech company is abandoning the city. There are many other areas, even nearby, that are far cheaper and where employees can come to work every day without fearing for their lives.
awillen 4y ago
SF is not a particularly large city relative to other major cities. It's not even the biggest city in the Bay Area (San Jose). Geographically, it's very small, just 7x7, and the amount of space where one can rent office space (especially a significant amount for a growing company) is a small fraction of that. I'd be really surprised if you told me you live in SF. Getting screamed at as you're walking through the Financial District during working hours on a weekday is commonplace. Feces is commonplace. Maybe you've heard of the Tenderloin and how bad it is? That's almost adjacent to the FiDi. Add to the fact that these things, plus the move towards WFH coupled with insane housing costs, are driving large numbers of workers out of SF, and why wouldn't a company move out? They'd probably put up with the crime if they still had to be there in order to attract top-tier talent, but once the talent leaves, there's no point in staying, enduring harrassment and the smell of urine and feces, and paying sky-high rents.

ProAm 4y ago

What about when Amazon does it in Seattle? [0] [Q] https://seattlemedium.com/amazon-relocates-workers-due-to-crime-in-downtown-seattle/ https://seattlemedium.com/amazon-relocates-workers-due-to-cr...

bufferoverflow 4y ago
Seattle has a similar crime and drug problem.
- ProAm 4y ago
  Exactly, I dont think this is a clumsy PR play as the OP suggested. All big cities are experiencing increase in homelessness, crime and violence, drug use. You see it in Austin, Denver, SF, Seattle, LA, Chicago. Many of these cities were already bad and are getting worse, but others used to be 'good' cities and are now moving into thunderdome territory.
  - saila 4y ago
    The city I live in has been an ongoing target of this kind of "thunderdome" rhetoric, and while there are well-known problem areas, the reality is nowhere near as bad as it's made out to be. With regard to things getting worse over the past couple years, I'm not sure what people were expecting to happen when sky high rents intersected with a global pandemic, especially in places where there's not much of a safety net.
  - softwarebeware 4y ago
    There's two things happening. There's a "{{YOUR_CITY}} is dying" narrative that is constantly being pushed by far-right-owned media companies. It has been going on for years. (see https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/24/fact-check-linking-city-violence-democratic-politics-reach/3248102001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/24/fac...). And that narrative is now having some success. It is getting people to apply a confirmation bias such that they perceive their city as crime-infested. Meanwhile, crime statistics in many (most? all?) of these cities are actually down or flat. And compared on a per-capita basis look like even weaker support for that narrative.
    - ProAm 4y ago
      I dont think its being pushed by far right or far left, I see both sides complaining about it which means there is factual evidence and experience to prove it a real issue. Crime is up in a lot of cities, example of a recent study in Denver, sure it depends on what you measure and how, but that is how statistics work: - While Colorado’s rates for homicide, aggravated assault and motor vehicle theft rose by more than 10% in 2020 over the average of the prior three years, rates for rape, larceny, robbery and burglary stayed relatively level or declined. - Increases in aggravated assaults — which include shootings and stabbings — and motor vehicle thefts are the biggest drivers of increased rates statewide of violent crime and property crime. - Colorado’s communities are not a monolith. Trends in the state’s largest cities differ from each other, as do those in medium-sized towns. Colorado’s 2020 violent crime rate was the highest it’s been since 1995, but is lower than it was between 1985 and 1995. The state’s 2020 property crime rate was the highest recorded since 2008, but is less than half the rate recorded in the mid-1980s. - While Colorado’s violent crime rate jumped 10% between 2019 and 2020 — the largest single-year increase since 1990 — that increase came as part of a six-year upward trend. The state’s violent crime rate increased by 8% year-over-year in 2016, 2017 and 2018.
      - softwarebeware 4y ago
        I'm skeptical when percentages are named because I remember seeing one study like this where it was like, "homicides are up 10%" and then when I looked, there were 10 homicides last year and 11 the next.
- smaryjerry 4y ago
  I’m sure everyone knows it but it’s in almost all cities that had a very prominent defund the police movement. In Seattle and other Washington cities like Olympia they just don’t have a police force that is capable or even allowed to act. In Olympia for example a homeless person constantly goes to the same area and pisses and shits on the sidewalk. He stood in front of a glass window of a salon and shit in front of everyone and the business called the police only to be told that because they were just a tenant at the shopping center that the police would not come out. They made a rule (I dont know if law) that only the property owner can call the police now, and becaus the person shitting wasn’t inside the store, the property owner had to make the call. Like seriously? Property owners are banding together to hire essentially a private police force to patrol now because the government won’t police. Apparently only the businesses care about safety because the city councils do nothing and voters dont change anything.
  - mywittyname 4y ago
    > it’s in almost all cities that had a very prominent defund the police movement. In Seattle and other Washington cities like Olympia they just don’t have a police force that is capable or even allowed to act. Or police are actively making the cities worse places to live as a way of punishing people with these attitudes. I guess we'll find out when departments slip up and put into writing policies that were previously said behind closed doors.
  - softwarebeware 4y ago
    > In Seattle and other Washington cities like Olympia they just don’t have a police force that is capable or even allowed to act. You may want to check into this a bit more. As with anything it's much more complicated than that. For example, have the Seattle "police" been defunded? In late 2020, the Seattle City Council cut less than $10M off the specific police budget, with funds specifically allocated for adding 125 officers. Meanwhile they budgeted $100M MORE for additional community safety initiatives (see https://crosscut.com/news/2020/11/seattle-cuts-doesnt-defund-police-budget-2021 https://crosscut.com/news/2020/11/seattle-cuts-doesnt-defund...). Every time there was discussion of anything like "police reform" the past two years in Seattle, the Seattle Times ran an article with a headline like "Seattle City Council defunds police" and you would read the article and find that nothing had even changed, but that the council had just issued a statement of support for the idea of reform. This is the kind of spin/propaganda that is happening.

mathattack 4y ago

Very hard to attract workers to come to a city where they have to walk through needles and poop to get to the office. Or after they’ve been attacked by a mentally ill pan handler. It’s not an easy thing to solve, otherwise the city would have thrown money at the problem. If you’re on the fence about going remote, the crime hassles could push you over the top in a way that wouldn’t pre-COVID.

ashtonkem 4y ago
> Very hard to attract workers to come to a city where they have to walk through needles and poop to get to the office. Or after they’ve been attacked by a mentally ill pan handler. Are we ignoring the past 20 years of startups and major tech companies attracting high level of talent to SF? Because pre pandemic it was very, very easy to attract workers, very expensive workers, to move to SF despite all of its issues. Every few years we’d have these discussions, and yet major startups and FAANGs would keep hiring there. I think remote is an issue for SF, but it is also worth pointing out that remote work is extremely popular outside SF too. $CORP is really struggling to get on site workers across a variety of cities where satellite offices exist, and not just CA cities either. My feel is that this is a general cultural change across the industry, and maybe SF is a bit more affected because it’s so much more expensive than other metro areas. My guess is that like a ton of other tech companies, they were either losing staff to remote jobs, or having a hard time justifying having an office when a large percentage of their work force didn’t come in, and this is how they decided to spin the PR.
- valenterry 4y ago
  I rejected a fairly good FAANG offer because they required me moving to SF. That was 2019, but I still rejected it after watching some bikers driving through and filming the city on YouTube.
  - ashtonkem 4y ago
    I stopped a Google interview halfway through in 2012 because they would only consider junior engineers in NYC and Mountain View, and I didn’t want to leave Chicago. But I don’t think our one off experiences make a trend. Facebook and Google alone hired and kept a ton of talent in SF pre pandemic, never mind the countless non FAANG companies there. Not everyone obviously, but a gob smacking number of engineers lived in the Bay Area.

pjlegato 4y ago

I can confirm, having lived in San Francisco for many years: street conditions were never great, but over the past two years, they have gotten far worse than ever before. Street-level crime is rampant now throughout the city, and particularly in the largely abandoned downtown area where Kraken's offices are. San Francisco is not a large city at all. It's 7 miles by 7 miles. There are not a lot of areas where you can rent a single office large enough to hold all of Kraken's employees, and most of those are in what is now a high crime area downtown and in SOMA. It's also still very expensive to rent compared to other nearby cities and suburbs (somehow), and has extra payroll taxes levied on large employers. I'm not surprised at all that yet another large tech company is abandoning the city. There are many other areas, even nearby, that are far cheaper and where employees can come to work every day without fearing for their lives.

awillen 4y ago

SF is not a particularly large city relative to other major cities. It's not even the biggest city in the Bay Area (San Jose). Geographically, it's very small, just 7x7, and the amount of space where one can rent office space (especially a significant amount for a growing company) is a small fraction of that. I'd be really surprised if you told me you live in SF. Getting screamed at as you're walking through the Financial District during working hours on a weekday is commonplace. Feces is commonplace. Maybe you've heard of the Tenderloin and how bad it is? That's almost adjacent to the FiDi. Add to the fact that these things, plus the move towards WFH coupled with insane housing costs, are driving large numbers of workers out of SF, and why wouldn't a company move out? They'd probably put up with the crime if they still had to be there in order to attract top-tier talent, but once the talent leaves, there's no point in staying, enduring harrassment and the smell of urine and feces, and paying sky-high rents.