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Question for people who actually live in SF now and have lived there for a long period of time: Is it as bad as I see online? 10-15 years ago I would have love

Question for people who actually live in SF now and have lived there for a long period of time: Is it as bad as I see online? 10-15 years ago I would have loved to live in SF, work for a startup etc. and all I heard were good things about the city. There was a homelessness problem but I didn't hear much more than that. Now it sounds like a hell hole. Crime seems to be the main issue and I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable visiting as a tourist never mind living there. Is my perspective skewed by the sources I'm reading or have things really deteriorated to that extent?

MAGZine 4y ago
It's not great but I visit semi frequently. I think the media has exaggerated it. I left sf but it wasn't because of the crime.
bushbaba 4y ago
Lived in SF in 2014. It’s way worse now. Back in 2014 you had a mesh of artistic and tech. This lead to a great social scene. Now the artists were priced out and they moved to Oakland. The SF tech workers left in droves. What’s left is the homeless and crime. Much of the city still hasn’t recovered from covid. Soma and fidi are in shambles. Feels like only 1 out of every 4 places is still in business. However Silicon Valley (San Mateo & Santa Clara county), San Jose, and east bay are all thriving relative to their past
- jeffbee 4y ago
  > Now the artists were priced out and they moved to Oakland This is the main part of the problem to me. There's nothing even remotely interesting going on in that city's culture. The entire city is split between people who can afford a 2-million-dollar house, retirees, and people who sleep on the street. Crime is about the same. When I moved to SF in '98 the very first thing that happened to me was my bicycle got stolen, and my convertible car got its top slashed so many times that I started leaving the doors unlocked, at which point people started sleeping in my car, so I sold it. Violent crime is actually much lower but that's a long-term trend. IMHO the problems with that city all stem from the inequality caused by the housing crisis. It drives property crime and it's the reason the city is intensely boring.
- absolutelymild 4y ago
  > The SF tech workers left in droves. What’s left is the homeless and crime. It’s still 3k for a 1 bedroom, so I’m assuming there are still some tech workers left
  - bushbaba 4y ago
    SFs evictions and Rent control laws encourage landlords to keep units vacant than rent them out for a discount or to a subpar tenant. A 1 bedroom apartment in SF has been ~3k for half a decade now. With inflation this means effective price was lowered.
    - absolutelymild 4y ago
      Progressive politics fails us again!
- arcticbull 4y ago
  > Soma and fidi are in shambles Nah. SoMa is exactly the same as it always was, fidi is just quiet but otherwise also unchanged.
- derevaunseraun 4y ago
  > However Silicon Valley (San Mateo & Santa Clara county), San Jose, and east bay are all thriving relative to their past Are car break ins relatively common in San Mateo and Santa Clara?
  - bushbaba 4y ago
    Not common in those counties. It is very rare for a car break in to happen.
    - bradlys 4y ago
      This is just not true... Car break ins happen almost everywhere in SFBA as long as you're in a relatively populated area. It's unlikely to happen in Loma Mar because no one is going to Loma Mar to steal shit. Catalytic converter theft is incredibly common in the rest of the SFBA along with other forms of theft.
      - aidenn0 4y ago
        Cat theft is common everywhere that there are sufficient density of cars parked outside overnight to make it profitable.
2arrs2ells 4y ago
It’s not that bad. It’s normal to have your car window broken overnight or to see people shoplifting openly at the pharmacy or grocery store. In certain parts of the city there’s fairly open drug dealing & use. And the homelessness is heartbreaking. Violent crime / theft happens - but not at a noticeably different rate than other large cities. Still the most beautiful city in the US (imo) and the natural beauty 30 min outside the city in any direction is insane.
- everdrive 4y ago
  I’ll never understand this mentality. “Sure, you’ll likely be violently assaulted and your car will be broken into regularly, but there are a lot of nice restaurants!”
  - chasd00 4y ago
    That sums of San Francisco nicely. No thanks.
  - rkk3 4y ago
    And with outdoor restaurants it's possible to combine the thrill of potentially being randomly assaulted with the pleasure of fine dining!
  - gsibble 4y ago
    I was at Quince once ($5,000 meal) and looked out the window to see a homeless man shitting on the window. Ah SF.
- option 4y ago
  “to have your car window broken overnight or to see people shoplifting openly at the pharmacy or grocery store. In certain parts of the city there’s fairly open drug dealing & use. And the homelessness is heartbreaking.” - Well, no, this is NOT normal. these are the points of a failed city.
- jl6 4y ago
  That first paragraph is what you call “not that bad”? It sounds dire.
option 4y ago
I live in San Jose. I used to love going to SF with my kids - Cal Academy of Sciences, Fisherman’s Wharf, Botanic Garden, etc. I don’t go there anymore - too many drug addicts using drugs openly on the streets, people assaulted by mentally ill people. Also, I will never/ever drive there in my car unless my destination has a gated/closed parking. Otherwise the car’s windows will be smashed. Another anecdotal point: my sister just escaped a war in Ukraine. She is too afraid to go visit SF because it seems way too unsafe.
- jankcorn 4y ago
  We go up to SF every 3-4 weeks and find it pretty unnerving each time. The homelessness (mentally ill), open drug use, and theft/vandalism are pretty draining. I lived for a long time in Cambridge/Boston and very, very rarely had any similar experience.
  - philjohn 4y ago
    I mean, homeless people freeze to death if they stay in places like MA - is it really hard to think that CA with a far more temperate climate would see more homeless people?
    - option 4y ago
      In SF it can be quite cold too for outside. But drug addicts get ~800$ a month and easy access to drugs for being there.
      - philjohn 4y ago
        10c is survivable with a good blanket for a long stretch (average Jan temperature) -2c in MA is not (and it's often far colder than that)
mistrial9 4y ago
I can offer some local perspective but not as a San Francisco dweller. My grandmother's family lived in San Francisco and they moved across the Bay, before WWII. Later I did research and a relative of hers was actually the real Mayor of San Francisco from her large Catholic German family. When I was small I heard that San Francisco "had problems with disease" and that was part of why they moved away, apparently. Nothing said about money but that family was not rich. So forward to more modern times, Gay-everything in your face at every corner, obvious hard core drug abuse on the sidewalks, yet world-class views, architecture, food and steady tourism made the city go.. No overview is complete without mentioning that the quiet side of San Francisco is the Chinese-American community. The highest density of ethnic chinese population in the USA. Aside from Mayor Ed Lee dying of a heart attack in office, you just don't see many obvious attention-getting events with the SF chinese population overall. The cost of living, the excess of all kinds, the reliable income, all came to a grinding car-crash result with covid-19. The balance on the street of healthy daily people versus dying-in-front-of-you, was lost. The ability of individuals of lots of non-dot-com people, to cope with expenses, was lost. Tourism dollars ceased. Restaurants closed. Of course it is a train-wreck. It really is a train-wreck, with nowhere to hide. Yet "billionaire-in-training" dot-com'ers and Bloomberg employees and 23andMe people and whatnow, glide through on a levitation walkway made of money. As others have said, some people are so well insulated from the consequences of these changes that there is no incentive.. in fact a badge of membership to overlook and ignore it seems.. no "community" .. the literally-insane people at Mozilla have indeed changed the world, and they can step over the bodies to get to their electric BMWs in the secure parking lot to move through it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- antiterra 4y ago
  What exactly is your rationale for ‘gay everything in your face’ being grouped with ‘obvious hard core drug use’ in your description of modern times?
  - usrn 4y ago
Swizec 4y ago
I’ve been here for 7 years now. The best way to describe San Francisco is that it feels like living in a cyberpunk utopia. Alita Battle Angel, the movie, is almost exactly how San Francisco feels. There are actually 2 cities. San Francisco, the tech town, is booming like crazy. New highrises and shiny skyscrapers are coming online almost every month. Areas that were barren wastelands when I moved here in 2015 are now bustling with new construction, street level businesses, full of upper middle class rich people running to and fro enjoying their lives. The skyscrapers are fast encroaching on the other San Francisco, the poor and troubled city. They’re squeezing homeless people, drug addicts, etc into a smaller and smaller area. In some neighborhoods the concentration of shanty towns and “bad elements” is so high it looks and feels like a slum. Because that’s what it is. Look at the actual numbers though and, at least officially, it’s not that bad. A city of ~800,000 residents has ~8,000 people living on the streets[1]. Around 1%, same as the ratio for USA as a whole with 580,000 homeless people[2]. What has changed during the pandemic is that these homeless people became more visible because while the upper middle class retreated into working from home. Now that people are coming back to the office, the city is again filling with commuters and the “undesirables” are slowly retreating back to wherever they were hiding before. As others have said, lots of downtown businesses shut down due to lack of foot traffic. Because few people actually live downtown. Hopefully that gets restored as commuters come back. Another way to sum up San Francisco is that seeing a person shooting up on the street is normal and seeing a Tesla is about as remarkable as a Toyota Corolla. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/New-data-shows-fewer-people-are-homeless-in-San-17176319.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/New-data-shows-fewer-... [2] https://theweek.com/briefing/1013082/living-on-the-streets https://theweek.com/briefing/1013082/living-on-the-streets
- notacoward 4y ago
  > There are actually 2 cities. I think your comment can teach an important lesson in statistics. Without proper segmentation, totals and averages and medians can obscure real and important results. (This is only one part of the general "garbage in garbage out" data-quality problem BTW.) If the arbitrary political boundary that defines "San Francisco" were changed so that it actually became two cities, it would be abundantly clear that one of them has severe problems and it would probably qualify for all sorts of state/federal assistance that the current aggregate does not.
about3fitty 4y ago
I live in SF and volunteer in the Tenderloin. I absolutely love it here. No idea what is going on with the public perception of this city. Just seems like a lot of political hot air. When you get down to the street level and actually talk with some of the people out here, you realize that they are people too. There’s a lot of humanity missing from the discussions about SF. Things might be dirty or smelly or even unsafe in particular areas, but I wouldn’t trade living here for anywhere else. And I’ve lived in a lot of places.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  How long have you lived there? Are you "poor" by SF standards? These are the long term trends I've seen in my lifetime (50 years, nonresident but visited ~5 times): - dotcom/SV pricing out almost everyone else - leading to, unsurprisingly a homeless crisis - also worsening the property value NIMBYism continuing to exacerbate the housing crisis - the dystopian culture destruction effects of a host of services designed for apartment shutins built in-town or south of town - finally, a host of policy failures enacted due to excessive virtue signalling and a social left wing gone rampant, although actually this is political paralysis of various NIMBY virtue signalers doing what they can to stop the undermining of their property values. A lot of these are issues faced by other cities as well, hamstrung by two party deadlock at various levels of government.
- Redoubts 4y ago
  > No idea what is going on with the public perception of this city Really? > I’ve lived in a lot of places. Really? How much broken car window glass have you seen in SF, vs other cities? It’s easily the top for me, by far. How many times have you personally seen someone shooting up on the sidewalk, or shitting on it, vs other cities? San Francisco takes the cake here vs any other city I’ve seen, in the US or abroad.
Gimpei 4y ago
I’m born and raised in SF. I love it here. It’s a beautiful city with a nice temperate climate, great food, and some culture. At the same time it does have a huge homeless problem. This has actually always been a problem, but it has gotten worse in the past few years and more deadly with the arrival of fentanyl. I cannot stand the majority of the current city government and I do think they are responsible for a lot of the issues in SF. SF was blessed by a huge economic boom. Normally this is a great thing for a region: more jobs and higher pay. But the board of support (BOS) has turned it into a nightmare by refusing to build housing. And the worst part is that the wrap their NIMBYism in a veil of smarmy self-righteousness, oblivious that they have ruined the city. When I was a kid, SF was a middle-class city. Now it’s a city of extremes. It’s still a great city, but it could be so much better.
- basisword 4y ago
  Interesting point on the city being blessed by a boom and then failing to build and take advantage of that. I wonder how things will go now with the potential for a lot of capital to start flowing out of the city (with tech companies going remote etc).
  - bradlys 4y ago
    As long as housing is treated as an investment - people in SF will continue to not allow housing to be built.
tlogan 4y ago
Yes - it is bad. San Francisco always has bad parts: but the problem now is that it is kinda everywhere. For tourists, the biggest shock is Market Street: they closed it for traffic and that caused that it is very dangerous to walk there in evenings. I think crime and all problems are caused by drug epidemic. Or maybe because they kept schools closed for 2 years causing a lot of families to leave the city? Or maybe because they terrorized restaurants with COVID mandates cause less tourists and more restaurant closures? Or maybe because they closed street for car traffic causing less foot traffic in evenings? Or because BART is scary to ride so there less visitors from other parts of Bay Area? Or maybe just because offices got closed? Not sure what is caused this but what I’m concerned that city leaders are doing absolutely nothing to fix issues. Thus all these recalls…
_jal 4y ago
I've lived here since the early 90s, with a break in 00s. The city has gone down hill, no doubt. Rent increases have chased off my artsy friends, which is the primary reason I'm going to follow - I'm far less fond of greedy nerds than I am artists. San Francisco just isn't very interesting anymore. Crime is really no worse than anywhere else - look at the stats, don't listen to the hyperventilating. Crime did weird things during COVID and still looks different than it used to. It is no more San Francisco-specific than inflation is US-specific. That said, my local neighborhood has gone to hell - that's mostly a function of cops deciding to funnel campers on our street. (I'm not going to argue with people who claim the cops don't do this - they do and will admit it is "verbal policy", but only off the record.) So yeah, on balance, I would not have moved back here today. But that is not because of crime or shit on the streets, it is because the town's character is mostly gone. Anyone who thinks SF crime was the result of Chesea's policy needs to explain two things about Jacksonville, Florida: (1) why they're seeing murder spikes, and (2) why nobody is calling for their DA's head. https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/news/crime/like-covid-19-jacksonvilles-homicides-surge-in-2020-and-top-out-at-unprecedented-175/77-a277f699-2eed-4c43-837e-72b057ad155c https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/news/crime/like-covid...
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  From the outside, all the SF "crime wave" stories feel an awful lot like someone with money pushing an agenda. It's hard to know the truth of the matter without living there.
dfxm12 4y ago
Is it as bad as I see online? No. There's a weird concerted media push to just vilify the city recently. I don't know if it's new, very rich, residents who shudder at the sight of anything outside their sheltered worldview (like homeless people or people addicted to opioids on the streets, which probably was exacerbated by the pandemic), or if it is a political agenda like the post elsewhere in this thread talking about how bad "progressive cities" are (I wonder how progressive SF really is, given its policies around housing, zoning, taxing, political funds going to non-progressive groups like Grow SF nd Together SF, etc...). It's expensive and that is certainly as bad as it ever has been, but if you're a social being, there's always stuff going on to do, and it is surrounded by beautiful natural features! Today, there are other great cities where you can work at a start up though, probably because of how expensive SF is.
- basisword 4y ago
  >> I don't know if it's new, very rich, residents who shudder at the sight of anything outside their sheltered worldview (like homeless people or people addicted to opioids on the streets, which probably was exacerbated by the pandemic) I wouldn't say that shuddering at open drug use on the streets indicates a sheltered world view. In most major cities that is not a normal problem. I live in a much larger city than SF for example and, although you occasionally see people walk by who are high, the only open drug use I've seen anywhere in the city is weed. I've never seen someone shoot up, I never see used needles, and this includes in more deprived areas of the city. It's just not normal.
  - dfxm12 4y ago
    I wouldn't say that shuddering at open drug use on the streets indicates a sheltered world view. Why would you? I just said that addicts and homeless people are on the street. Before covid, there was, and still is, an opioid epidemic. It sucks how we got here and it sucks that it's where we're at and it sucks that nearly all levels of government have failed to address it properly. It sucks that while some people have the means to deal with it on their, a lot of people run out of options and end up on the street. I'm happy that where you live you don't have to see the effects of it, but despite your anecdata, it's still issue and it doesn't mean the people affected by it aren't normal in some way.
arcticbull 4y ago
Lived in SF for ~12 years. 8 years in the Mission. > Is my perspective skewed by the sources I'm reading or have things really deteriorated to that extent? SF has always been a mess, for the entire decade I've been here. I used to walk to/from work along Mission. Over the last 10 years, things got a lot better - 16th/Mission was unsafe. Most of the mission used to literally smell like a toilet. You couldn't walk between 5th and 7th along Market. I once watched a lady in a wheelchair chasing someone down the street. She was rolling as fast as she could with one hand, and holding a knife out in front of her with the other while the guy ran. Crime was always an issue. The planters along the street with the trees used to be a prime place to drop used heroin needles. Like, you could occasionally stumble on a planter with 5-10 used hypodermic needs in it. On Market. The mid-Mission and Capp area used to run thick with prostitutes. I don't see nearly as much of this anymore. It got worse in the midst of COVID, but petered out. I think the quantity of all the above issues went down, but so did the population. As such, the albeit lower crime stands out more. And SF is such a transient city that the people complaining about it now (rightly, imo) didn't see how bad it was because they weren't here. [edit] It's bad - but it's not any worse now than before. There's a lot of great reasons to live here too though! It's so pretty, great food, bars, activities, it's small, walkable, bikeable. I know a ton of folks here so it's kind of hard to leave now, heh.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  > You couldn't walk between 5th and 7th along Market. I walked down Market back and forth from New Montgomery to Guerrero every day for work for many years. It is not true that there was some impassable section of Market. Most of the people out on the street were just normal people. It is true though that there are now places you literally cannot walk down the street because the sidewalk encampments are so thickly settled that there's no space to pass. For example the west side of Folsom between 14th and 15th. They keep clearing the encampment but it just comes right back.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    I think that's fair, but I suspect we can agree that the stretch along 6th between Mission and Market has long been just about the worst part of town.
bpsh 4y ago
I feel SF is just difficult to live in for people not making ridiculous tech salaries or have enough wealth to afford it there. You can enjoy life in any city if you make 100k+, and some people that do will still complain about being poor ...
nonameiguess 4y ago
One of the thousand of so times this came up recently, I tried to look up actual data and found property crime rates had increased quite a bit in San Francisco in the last decade and were higher than comparable cities, but every other kind of crime was a normal or lower-than-normal rate and hadn't changed much. Of course, that doesn't mean anything if the real problem is behaviors pissing off residents aren't classified as crimes. It is far from impossible to quantify quality of life using measures other than crime rates, but I'm not sure who still does that. I haven't personally been in San Francisco since 2007, but I do remember back then that world rankings of livable cities consistently included San Francisco as the only American city in the global top ten, so to drop from that lofty position to this perception of a post-apocalyptic hellhole is quite a contrast. It does seem to me that the nature of the complaints don't seem unique to San Francisco. I've had my catalytic converter sawed off twice in the last five years, my car ransacked once, power tools taken from my garage, and gigantic homeless encampments are all over the place around me, in good old Dallas. My work office that I visit quarterly is in downtown San Antonio, and they have the same issues, too. Streets are overloaded with people wearing rags who haven't showered in ten years wandering out into the street and yelling at ghosts, sleeping in the doorways you have to step over to get into the building. From the outside, it seems to me like residents of San Francisco are mostly pissed off that they're paying so much to live there, yet still experiencing all of the problems normally associated with poor neighborhoods in cities. Even that isn't unique to San Francisco, though, as city centers have becoming increasingly hip places to live. My neighborhood is not poor, and I don't think downtown San Antonio is poor, but rapidly increasing property values don't just eliminate all of the poor people if they live on the street. It only eliminates the low end of the buyer market, not extreme poverty.
stupendoustrace 4y ago
This is just my perspective, but it's gotten extremely bad. I was frequently traveling to SF 10-15 years ago, and crime and homelessness felt on par with the average American city. I enjoyed the area so much that 5 years ago I decided to move to SF proper, and lived in a few different neighborhoods in the city. In the approximately 3 years I lived there I saw a dramatic decline in the safety and cleanliness of the city. It's a shame because SF has the potential to be a beautiful place to live, offering a lot of unique benefits. There are few cities you can live in that have the proximity to nature offered by SF, with the variability you find in the landscape of Wine Country as well. Now, I avoid even traveling there. While it's anecdotal, I had too many close calls to bad situations where I or my wife was followed, harassed, assaulted, etc. I have too many friends and colleagues who have also been assaulted or robbed. I really hope SF is able to enact policies that make sense, because the trend has only worsened.
gsibble 4y ago
I left in 2018. It was a crime ridden, filty, disgusting hellhole then and my friends still there tell me it's gotten much worse. They'd all leave except they're executives at tech companies and are making too much.
nemothekid 4y ago
I've lived in SF for ~12 years and the way my mother speaks about SF from what she sees in the news you would think I'm living in Mad Max. My own 2 cents: 1. The problems with crime and homelessness is not particularly worse than it was 11 years ago. When I first moved here my boss, an SF native, proudly told a story of being bit by a homeless guy on Market while protecting his date and getting tested for every disease. Many parts of the Mission, SOMA and Market used to be _worse_ before they gentrified. Today most people consider 6th street to be rough, but when I moved here, 6th street all the way 10th street was rough. The day I landed in SF I was told by multiple people not to leave items in the car or they would be broken into (again, this was in 2011). 2. What has changed is the media reception of San Francisco; drastically. During the Obama years there was no effort to paint any city as falling over to crime. I remember back in 2014 or so, there a guy who wrote a post complaining about having to step over poop on his way to work on Medium and he was practically exiled. Now the atlantic can post the same story without worry. My own feelings are that San Francisco effectively priced out 20-somethings and all that's left is jaded 30-somethings who are tired of living in the city and are just sour grapes about it. Without the younger crowd to constantly defend how magical it is everyone is free to shit on the city. Anyone who's telling you about how much better San Jose/Mountain View/Palo Alto probably wouldn't have liked San Francisco 10 years ago either. My ongoing gripe with the city isn't crime; it's housing. Almost everyone interesting, even in tech, who was working on getting their weird startup ideas off the ground can no longer do that in SF. Likewise the city is filled with spick and span elite school grads who work for FAANG but would have never considered Facebook over Deloitte 10 years ago. The cost of housing has made experimentation impossible.
eternalban 4y ago
I visited SV/SF recently for the first time. First impression of the city was how much it reminded of NYC in 80s in parts (read: not good). But I then spent the day just walking the city and finally visited Pacific Heights and dman it, I wish I was a zillionaire so I could live there. Just simply beautiful & immaculate. As always, everything boils down to money. Rich SF is sublime. The rest, meh. Also, I only ran into ~crazed homeless in Mountain View (on Castro).

MAGZine 4y ago

It's not great but I visit semi frequently. I think the media has exaggerated it. I left sf but it wasn't because of the crime.

bushbaba 4y ago

Lived in SF in 2014. It’s way worse now. Back in 2014 you had a mesh of artistic and tech. This lead to a great social scene. Now the artists were priced out and they moved to Oakland. The SF tech workers left in droves. What’s left is the homeless and crime. Much of the city still hasn’t recovered from covid. Soma and fidi are in shambles. Feels like only 1 out of every 4 places is still in business. However Silicon Valley (San Mateo & Santa Clara county), San Jose, and east bay are all thriving relative to their past

jeffbee 4y ago
> Now the artists were priced out and they moved to Oakland This is the main part of the problem to me. There's nothing even remotely interesting going on in that city's culture. The entire city is split between people who can afford a 2-million-dollar house, retirees, and people who sleep on the street. Crime is about the same. When I moved to SF in '98 the very first thing that happened to me was my bicycle got stolen, and my convertible car got its top slashed so many times that I started leaving the doors unlocked, at which point people started sleeping in my car, so I sold it. Violent crime is actually much lower but that's a long-term trend. IMHO the problems with that city all stem from the inequality caused by the housing crisis. It drives property crime and it's the reason the city is intensely boring.
absolutelymild 4y ago
> The SF tech workers left in droves. What’s left is the homeless and crime. It’s still 3k for a 1 bedroom, so I’m assuming there are still some tech workers left
- bushbaba 4y ago
  SFs evictions and Rent control laws encourage landlords to keep units vacant than rent them out for a discount or to a subpar tenant. A 1 bedroom apartment in SF has been ~3k for half a decade now. With inflation this means effective price was lowered.
  - absolutelymild 4y ago
    Progressive politics fails us again!
arcticbull 4y ago
> Soma and fidi are in shambles Nah. SoMa is exactly the same as it always was, fidi is just quiet but otherwise also unchanged.
derevaunseraun 4y ago
> However Silicon Valley (San Mateo & Santa Clara county), San Jose, and east bay are all thriving relative to their past Are car break ins relatively common in San Mateo and Santa Clara?
- bushbaba 4y ago
  Not common in those counties. It is very rare for a car break in to happen.
  - bradlys 4y ago
    This is just not true... Car break ins happen almost everywhere in SFBA as long as you're in a relatively populated area. It's unlikely to happen in Loma Mar because no one is going to Loma Mar to steal shit. Catalytic converter theft is incredibly common in the rest of the SFBA along with other forms of theft.
    - aidenn0 4y ago
      Cat theft is common everywhere that there are sufficient density of cars parked outside overnight to make it profitable.

2arrs2ells 4y ago

It’s not that bad. It’s normal to have your car window broken overnight or to see people shoplifting openly at the pharmacy or grocery store. In certain parts of the city there’s fairly open drug dealing & use. And the homelessness is heartbreaking. Violent crime / theft happens - but not at a noticeably different rate than other large cities. Still the most beautiful city in the US (imo) and the natural beauty 30 min outside the city in any direction is insane.

everdrive 4y ago
I’ll never understand this mentality. “Sure, you’ll likely be violently assaulted and your car will be broken into regularly, but there are a lot of nice restaurants!”
- chasd00 4y ago
  That sums of San Francisco nicely. No thanks.
- rkk3 4y ago
  And with outdoor restaurants it's possible to combine the thrill of potentially being randomly assaulted with the pleasure of fine dining!
- gsibble 4y ago
  I was at Quince once ($5,000 meal) and looked out the window to see a homeless man shitting on the window. Ah SF.
option 4y ago
“to have your car window broken overnight or to see people shoplifting openly at the pharmacy or grocery store. In certain parts of the city there’s fairly open drug dealing & use. And the homelessness is heartbreaking.” - Well, no, this is NOT normal. these are the points of a failed city.
jl6 4y ago
That first paragraph is what you call “not that bad”? It sounds dire.

option 4y ago

I live in San Jose. I used to love going to SF with my kids - Cal Academy of Sciences, Fisherman’s Wharf, Botanic Garden, etc. I don’t go there anymore - too many drug addicts using drugs openly on the streets, people assaulted by mentally ill people. Also, I will never/ever drive there in my car unless my destination has a gated/closed parking. Otherwise the car’s windows will be smashed. Another anecdotal point: my sister just escaped a war in Ukraine. She is too afraid to go visit SF because it seems way too unsafe.

jankcorn 4y ago
We go up to SF every 3-4 weeks and find it pretty unnerving each time. The homelessness (mentally ill), open drug use, and theft/vandalism are pretty draining. I lived for a long time in Cambridge/Boston and very, very rarely had any similar experience.
- philjohn 4y ago
  I mean, homeless people freeze to death if they stay in places like MA - is it really hard to think that CA with a far more temperate climate would see more homeless people?
  - option 4y ago
    In SF it can be quite cold too for outside. But drug addicts get ~800$ a month and easy access to drugs for being there.
    - philjohn 4y ago
      10c is survivable with a good blanket for a long stretch (average Jan temperature) -2c in MA is not (and it's often far colder than that)

mistrial9 4y ago

I can offer some local perspective but not as a San Francisco dweller. My grandmother's family lived in San Francisco and they moved across the Bay, before WWII. Later I did research and a relative of hers was actually the real Mayor of San Francisco from her large Catholic German family. When I was small I heard that San Francisco "had problems with disease" and that was part of why they moved away, apparently. Nothing said about money but that family was not rich. So forward to more modern times, Gay-everything in your face at every corner, obvious hard core drug abuse on the sidewalks, yet world-class views, architecture, food and steady tourism made the city go.. No overview is complete without mentioning that the quiet side of San Francisco is the Chinese-American community. The highest density of ethnic chinese population in the USA. Aside from Mayor Ed Lee dying of a heart attack in office, you just don't see many obvious attention-getting events with the SF chinese population overall. The cost of living, the excess of all kinds, the reliable income, all came to a grinding car-crash result with covid-19. The balance on the street of healthy daily people versus dying-in-front-of-you, was lost. The ability of individuals of lots of non-dot-com people, to cope with expenses, was lost. Tourism dollars ceased. Restaurants closed. Of course it is a train-wreck. It really is a train-wreck, with nowhere to hide. Yet "billionaire-in-training" dot-com'ers and Bloomberg employees and 23andMe people and whatnow, glide through on a levitation walkway made of money. As others have said, some people are so well insulated from the consequences of these changes that there is no incentive.. in fact a badge of membership to overlook and ignore it seems.. no "community" .. the literally-insane people at Mozilla have indeed changed the world, and they can step over the bodies to get to their electric BMWs in the secure parking lot to move through it.

deleted 4y ago
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antiterra 4y ago
What exactly is your rationale for ‘gay everything in your face’ being grouped with ‘obvious hard core drug use’ in your description of modern times?
- usrn 4y ago

Swizec 4y ago

I’ve been here for 7 years now. The best way to describe San Francisco is that it feels like living in a cyberpunk utopia. Alita Battle Angel, the movie, is almost exactly how San Francisco feels. There are actually 2 cities. San Francisco, the tech town, is booming like crazy. New highrises and shiny skyscrapers are coming online almost every month. Areas that were barren wastelands when I moved here in 2015 are now bustling with new construction, street level businesses, full of upper middle class rich people running to and fro enjoying their lives. The skyscrapers are fast encroaching on the other San Francisco, the poor and troubled city. They’re squeezing homeless people, drug addicts, etc into a smaller and smaller area. In some neighborhoods the concentration of shanty towns and “bad elements” is so high it looks and feels like a slum. Because that’s what it is. Look at the actual numbers though and, at least officially, it’s not that bad. A city of ~800,000 residents has ~8,000 people living on the streets[1]. Around 1%, same as the ratio for USA as a whole with 580,000 homeless people[2]. What has changed during the pandemic is that these homeless people became more visible because while the upper middle class retreated into working from home. Now that people are coming back to the office, the city is again filling with commuters and the “undesirables” are slowly retreating back to wherever they were hiding before. As others have said, lots of downtown businesses shut down due to lack of foot traffic. Because few people actually live downtown. Hopefully that gets restored as commuters come back. Another way to sum up San Francisco is that seeing a person shooting up on the street is normal and seeing a Tesla is about as remarkable as a Toyota Corolla. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/New-data-shows-fewer-people-are-homeless-in-San-17176319.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/New-data-shows-fewer-... [2] https://theweek.com/briefing/1013082/living-on-the-streets https://theweek.com/briefing/1013082/living-on-the-streets

notacoward 4y ago
> There are actually 2 cities. I think your comment can teach an important lesson in statistics. Without proper segmentation, totals and averages and medians can obscure real and important results. (This is only one part of the general "garbage in garbage out" data-quality problem BTW.) If the arbitrary political boundary that defines "San Francisco" were changed so that it actually became two cities, it would be abundantly clear that one of them has severe problems and it would probably qualify for all sorts of state/federal assistance that the current aggregate does not.

about3fitty 4y ago

I live in SF and volunteer in the Tenderloin. I absolutely love it here. No idea what is going on with the public perception of this city. Just seems like a lot of political hot air. When you get down to the street level and actually talk with some of the people out here, you realize that they are people too. There’s a lot of humanity missing from the discussions about SF. Things might be dirty or smelly or even unsafe in particular areas, but I wouldn’t trade living here for anywhere else. And I’ve lived in a lot of places.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago
How long have you lived there? Are you "poor" by SF standards? These are the long term trends I've seen in my lifetime (50 years, nonresident but visited ~5 times): - dotcom/SV pricing out almost everyone else - leading to, unsurprisingly a homeless crisis - also worsening the property value NIMBYism continuing to exacerbate the housing crisis - the dystopian culture destruction effects of a host of services designed for apartment shutins built in-town or south of town - finally, a host of policy failures enacted due to excessive virtue signalling and a social left wing gone rampant, although actually this is political paralysis of various NIMBY virtue signalers doing what they can to stop the undermining of their property values. A lot of these are issues faced by other cities as well, hamstrung by two party deadlock at various levels of government.
Redoubts 4y ago
> No idea what is going on with the public perception of this city Really? > I’ve lived in a lot of places. Really? How much broken car window glass have you seen in SF, vs other cities? It’s easily the top for me, by far. How many times have you personally seen someone shooting up on the sidewalk, or shitting on it, vs other cities? San Francisco takes the cake here vs any other city I’ve seen, in the US or abroad.

Gimpei 4y ago

I’m born and raised in SF. I love it here. It’s a beautiful city with a nice temperate climate, great food, and some culture. At the same time it does have a huge homeless problem. This has actually always been a problem, but it has gotten worse in the past few years and more deadly with the arrival of fentanyl. I cannot stand the majority of the current city government and I do think they are responsible for a lot of the issues in SF. SF was blessed by a huge economic boom. Normally this is a great thing for a region: more jobs and higher pay. But the board of support (BOS) has turned it into a nightmare by refusing to build housing. And the worst part is that the wrap their NIMBYism in a veil of smarmy self-righteousness, oblivious that they have ruined the city. When I was a kid, SF was a middle-class city. Now it’s a city of extremes. It’s still a great city, but it could be so much better.

basisword 4y ago
Interesting point on the city being blessed by a boom and then failing to build and take advantage of that. I wonder how things will go now with the potential for a lot of capital to start flowing out of the city (with tech companies going remote etc).
- bradlys 4y ago
  As long as housing is treated as an investment - people in SF will continue to not allow housing to be built.

tlogan 4y ago

Yes - it is bad. San Francisco always has bad parts: but the problem now is that it is kinda everywhere. For tourists, the biggest shock is Market Street: they closed it for traffic and that caused that it is very dangerous to walk there in evenings. I think crime and all problems are caused by drug epidemic. Or maybe because they kept schools closed for 2 years causing a lot of families to leave the city? Or maybe because they terrorized restaurants with COVID mandates cause less tourists and more restaurant closures? Or maybe because they closed street for car traffic causing less foot traffic in evenings? Or because BART is scary to ride so there less visitors from other parts of Bay Area? Or maybe just because offices got closed? Not sure what is caused this but what I’m concerned that city leaders are doing absolutely nothing to fix issues. Thus all these recalls…

_jal 4y ago

I've lived here since the early 90s, with a break in 00s. The city has gone down hill, no doubt. Rent increases have chased off my artsy friends, which is the primary reason I'm going to follow - I'm far less fond of greedy nerds than I am artists. San Francisco just isn't very interesting anymore. Crime is really no worse than anywhere else - look at the stats, don't listen to the hyperventilating. Crime did weird things during COVID and still looks different than it used to. It is no more San Francisco-specific than inflation is US-specific. That said, my local neighborhood has gone to hell - that's mostly a function of cops deciding to funnel campers on our street. (I'm not going to argue with people who claim the cops don't do this - they do and will admit it is "verbal policy", but only off the record.) So yeah, on balance, I would not have moved back here today. But that is not because of crime or shit on the streets, it is because the town's character is mostly gone. Anyone who thinks SF crime was the result of Chesea's policy needs to explain two things about Jacksonville, Florida: (1) why they're seeing murder spikes, and (2) why nobody is calling for their DA's head. https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/news/crime/like-covid-19-jacksonvilles-homicides-surge-in-2020-and-top-out-at-unprecedented-175/77-a277f699-2eed-4c43-837e-72b057ad155c https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/news/crime/like-covid...

AlexandrB 4y ago
From the outside, all the SF "crime wave" stories feel an awful lot like someone with money pushing an agenda. It's hard to know the truth of the matter without living there.

dfxm12 4y ago

Is it as bad as I see online? No. There's a weird concerted media push to just vilify the city recently. I don't know if it's new, very rich, residents who shudder at the sight of anything outside their sheltered worldview (like homeless people or people addicted to opioids on the streets, which probably was exacerbated by the pandemic), or if it is a political agenda like the post elsewhere in this thread talking about how bad "progressive cities" are (I wonder how progressive SF really is, given its policies around housing, zoning, taxing, political funds going to non-progressive groups like Grow SF nd Together SF, etc...). It's expensive and that is certainly as bad as it ever has been, but if you're a social being, there's always stuff going on to do, and it is surrounded by beautiful natural features! Today, there are other great cities where you can work at a start up though, probably because of how expensive SF is.

basisword 4y ago
>> I don't know if it's new, very rich, residents who shudder at the sight of anything outside their sheltered worldview (like homeless people or people addicted to opioids on the streets, which probably was exacerbated by the pandemic) I wouldn't say that shuddering at open drug use on the streets indicates a sheltered world view. In most major cities that is not a normal problem. I live in a much larger city than SF for example and, although you occasionally see people walk by who are high, the only open drug use I've seen anywhere in the city is weed. I've never seen someone shoot up, I never see used needles, and this includes in more deprived areas of the city. It's just not normal.
- dfxm12 4y ago
  I wouldn't say that shuddering at open drug use on the streets indicates a sheltered world view. Why would you? I just said that addicts and homeless people are on the street. Before covid, there was, and still is, an opioid epidemic. It sucks how we got here and it sucks that it's where we're at and it sucks that nearly all levels of government have failed to address it properly. It sucks that while some people have the means to deal with it on their, a lot of people run out of options and end up on the street. I'm happy that where you live you don't have to see the effects of it, but despite your anecdata, it's still issue and it doesn't mean the people affected by it aren't normal in some way.

arcticbull 4y ago

Lived in SF for ~12 years. 8 years in the Mission. > Is my perspective skewed by the sources I'm reading or have things really deteriorated to that extent? SF has always been a mess, for the entire decade I've been here. I used to walk to/from work along Mission. Over the last 10 years, things got a lot better - 16th/Mission was unsafe. Most of the mission used to literally smell like a toilet. You couldn't walk between 5th and 7th along Market. I once watched a lady in a wheelchair chasing someone down the street. She was rolling as fast as she could with one hand, and holding a knife out in front of her with the other while the guy ran. Crime was always an issue. The planters along the street with the trees used to be a prime place to drop used heroin needles. Like, you could occasionally stumble on a planter with 5-10 used hypodermic needs in it. On Market. The mid-Mission and Capp area used to run thick with prostitutes. I don't see nearly as much of this anymore. It got worse in the midst of COVID, but petered out. I think the quantity of all the above issues went down, but so did the population. As such, the albeit lower crime stands out more. And SF is such a transient city that the people complaining about it now (rightly, imo) didn't see how bad it was because they weren't here. [edit] It's bad - but it's not any worse now than before. There's a lot of great reasons to live here too though! It's so pretty, great food, bars, activities, it's small, walkable, bikeable. I know a ton of folks here so it's kind of hard to leave now, heh.

jeffbee 4y ago
> You couldn't walk between 5th and 7th along Market. I walked down Market back and forth from New Montgomery to Guerrero every day for work for many years. It is not true that there was some impassable section of Market. Most of the people out on the street were just normal people. It is true though that there are now places you literally cannot walk down the street because the sidewalk encampments are so thickly settled that there's no space to pass. For example the west side of Folsom between 14th and 15th. They keep clearing the encampment but it just comes right back.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  I think that's fair, but I suspect we can agree that the stretch along 6th between Mission and Market has long been just about the worst part of town.

bpsh 4y ago

I feel SF is just difficult to live in for people not making ridiculous tech salaries or have enough wealth to afford it there. You can enjoy life in any city if you make 100k+, and some people that do will still complain about being poor ...

nonameiguess 4y ago

One of the thousand of so times this came up recently, I tried to look up actual data and found property crime rates had increased quite a bit in San Francisco in the last decade and were higher than comparable cities, but every other kind of crime was a normal or lower-than-normal rate and hadn't changed much. Of course, that doesn't mean anything if the real problem is behaviors pissing off residents aren't classified as crimes. It is far from impossible to quantify quality of life using measures other than crime rates, but I'm not sure who still does that. I haven't personally been in San Francisco since 2007, but I do remember back then that world rankings of livable cities consistently included San Francisco as the only American city in the global top ten, so to drop from that lofty position to this perception of a post-apocalyptic hellhole is quite a contrast. It does seem to me that the nature of the complaints don't seem unique to San Francisco. I've had my catalytic converter sawed off twice in the last five years, my car ransacked once, power tools taken from my garage, and gigantic homeless encampments are all over the place around me, in good old Dallas. My work office that I visit quarterly is in downtown San Antonio, and they have the same issues, too. Streets are overloaded with people wearing rags who haven't showered in ten years wandering out into the street and yelling at ghosts, sleeping in the doorways you have to step over to get into the building. From the outside, it seems to me like residents of San Francisco are mostly pissed off that they're paying so much to live there, yet still experiencing all of the problems normally associated with poor neighborhoods in cities. Even that isn't unique to San Francisco, though, as city centers have becoming increasingly hip places to live. My neighborhood is not poor, and I don't think downtown San Antonio is poor, but rapidly increasing property values don't just eliminate all of the poor people if they live on the street. It only eliminates the low end of the buyer market, not extreme poverty.

stupendoustrace 4y ago

This is just my perspective, but it's gotten extremely bad. I was frequently traveling to SF 10-15 years ago, and crime and homelessness felt on par with the average American city. I enjoyed the area so much that 5 years ago I decided to move to SF proper, and lived in a few different neighborhoods in the city. In the approximately 3 years I lived there I saw a dramatic decline in the safety and cleanliness of the city. It's a shame because SF has the potential to be a beautiful place to live, offering a lot of unique benefits. There are few cities you can live in that have the proximity to nature offered by SF, with the variability you find in the landscape of Wine Country as well. Now, I avoid even traveling there. While it's anecdotal, I had too many close calls to bad situations where I or my wife was followed, harassed, assaulted, etc. I have too many friends and colleagues who have also been assaulted or robbed. I really hope SF is able to enact policies that make sense, because the trend has only worsened.

gsibble 4y ago

I left in 2018. It was a crime ridden, filty, disgusting hellhole then and my friends still there tell me it's gotten much worse. They'd all leave except they're executives at tech companies and are making too much.

nemothekid 4y ago

I've lived in SF for ~12 years and the way my mother speaks about SF from what she sees in the news you would think I'm living in Mad Max. My own 2 cents: 1. The problems with crime and homelessness is not particularly worse than it was 11 years ago. When I first moved here my boss, an SF native, proudly told a story of being bit by a homeless guy on Market while protecting his date and getting tested for every disease. Many parts of the Mission, SOMA and Market used to be _worse_ before they gentrified. Today most people consider 6th street to be rough, but when I moved here, 6th street all the way 10th street was rough. The day I landed in SF I was told by multiple people not to leave items in the car or they would be broken into (again, this was in 2011). 2. What has changed is the media reception of San Francisco; drastically. During the Obama years there was no effort to paint any city as falling over to crime. I remember back in 2014 or so, there a guy who wrote a post complaining about having to step over poop on his way to work on Medium and he was practically exiled. Now the atlantic can post the same story without worry. My own feelings are that San Francisco effectively priced out 20-somethings and all that's left is jaded 30-somethings who are tired of living in the city and are just sour grapes about it. Without the younger crowd to constantly defend how magical it is everyone is free to shit on the city. Anyone who's telling you about how much better San Jose/Mountain View/Palo Alto probably wouldn't have liked San Francisco 10 years ago either. My ongoing gripe with the city isn't crime; it's housing. Almost everyone interesting, even in tech, who was working on getting their weird startup ideas off the ground can no longer do that in SF. Likewise the city is filled with spick and span elite school grads who work for FAANG but would have never considered Facebook over Deloitte 10 years ago. The cost of housing has made experimentation impossible.

eternalban 4y ago

I visited SV/SF recently for the first time. First impression of the city was how much it reminded of NYC in 80s in parts (read: not good). But I then spent the day just walking the city and finally visited Pacific Heights and dman it, I wish I was a zillionaire so I could live there. Just simply beautiful & immaculate. As always, everything boils down to money. Rich SF is sublime. The rest, meh. Also, I only ran into ~crazed homeless in Mountain View (on Castro).