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Speaking from experience, if you go walking the Bronx Concourse at 2am, you are getting robbed at gun point.
by PM_me_your_math 4y ago
Speaking from experience, if you go walking the Bronx Concourse at 2am, you are getting robbed at gun point.
- sokoloff 4y agoThere are a lot of places in the world where "nothing good happens after 2 AM..."
- baremetal 4y ago[flagged]
- neoromantique 4y ago[flagged]
- xp84 4y agoI’m not going to pretend anything is a simple obvious cause/effect — but in the case of SF, you’d be hard pressed to find a city that bends over backwards more with social policies. So I’m curious why unlike the Europe comparison, SF and LA are some of the worst places here in terms of people still mired in poverty and also doing crime. I think plenty of people really are helped by those policies and move on in their lives, but also that plenty of others take advantage of the “liberal guilt” atmosphere, which makes administering punishment very uncomfortable, to do lots of crimes. I see it as an unintended consequence. And officially, I guess I don’t mind it. I left SF, and if the current residents are happy with the current results, they’re free to continue.
- neoromantique 4y ago>you’d be hard pressed to find a city that bends over backwards more with social policies That really doesn't mesh together with the extremely restrictive building code that makes housing crisis so much worse.
- xp84 4y agoAre you saying people breaking into cars and stabbing people are doing so because they can afford say, $1800 in rent but can’t find a place under $2900? Because if the city could drive rents down that far across the board by encouraging new home construction, I would consider that a wildly successful outcome. But even then I don’t think it would change almost anything about the crime and homelessness problems. I think the criminals are mostly either desperate addicts who have no chance at turning it around unless they had serious help with their illnesses, or, just callous criminals who could change but prefer doing crime to working. And it doesn’t even take that many — especially of that second group — to make everybody miserable. Edit: just want to clarify: I am absolutely in favor of a “build, build, build, build, build” housing policy. Despite everything I said, it would still make lots of things better including improving density, making transit make sense.
- neoromantique 4y agoI am saying that this is of course a complex issue with many driving forces behind it, but housing crisis is definitively a major part of it.
- dang 4y agoPlease don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- neoromantique 4y agoI would argue half a thousand of other comments blaming abstract "liberals" for known shortfalls of US policy is the more logical recipient of this remark.
- dang 4y agoSure, it comes thick and fast from all sides - but it's also the case that everyone always feels like the other side started it and did worse; and that the mods are scolding the other side less than it deserves.
- dang 4y agoPlease don't use HN for ideological flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ajmurmann 4y agoA big difference between SF (and Portland for that matter) and other US cities seems to be that there is no clear line between "the good parts" of town and "the bad parts". You know the Bronx Concourse is bad, but in SF it's less clear which part isn't bad. Even 14 years ago I had friends visit from LA who walked 1 or 2 blocks in the wrong direction from Union Square and felt unsafe enough that they walked into a store and called a taxi to not have to walk "back to safety".
- tmpz22 4y agoThis is just 100% wrong. Much of SFs homeless population and crime is concentrated around the Tenderloin and SOMA areas with downtown also being relevant. You can use something like the Citizen app to get a rough geographic understanding. This is an important topic but so many clueless individuals (not OP, in general) decide to comment anyways.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nostrademons 4y agoIs that really true? If you're in the Tenderloin, Civic Center area, parts of the Mission or SoMA, then sure, you know you're in a dodgy area. But I'm pretty sure that if you're in Forest Hills, West Portal, Lake Merced, or the Presidio, you'll feel pretty safe, and crime maps seem to bear that out. I'll take my preschoolers alone to visit friends in the city on public transportation - I drive to Forest Hills, park in the neighborhood, muni to the Castro. Never had a problem. I think that what gets tourists to SF is that areas you'd expect would be safe are actually bad. Normally you'd expect that major shopping districts like Union Square, or the city government like Civic Center, would be safe. In SF they're right next to the Tenderloin, which is a cesspit of filth and addicts. And gentrified vs. dodgy areas in SF are very close together, like walking two blocks toward Valencia and Guerrero in the Mission is dramatically different from walking two blocks in the opposite direction to Van Ness and Folsom, or being on the north side of Potrero is dramatically different from wandering the south side.
- dehrmann 4y agoThat's not a fair comparison. This murder was FiDi-adjacent. Pre-pandemic, I wouldn't have been worried in that neighborhood. No idea these days.