6 ms·

Queue the anecdotes of people feeling unsafe, and others who feel completely safe. Queue the speculation about whether this had underlying reasons, other than w

• wackget 3y ago
  Cue*
  • jimmygrapes 3y ago
    Only for the first one, after that queue em up
    • zizee 3y ago
      Hehehe, thanks both ;-p
• philjohn 3y ago
  I'm from the UK, but was in San Fran for a weekend last year. Did I ever feel unsafe? No. Was it sad seeing a lot of, very obviously mentally ill, homeless people? Yes. How to solve this? Hard to say.
  • sky_rw 3y ago
    >Did I ever feel unsafe? No. How safe you _feel_ often has little correlation to how much danger you are actually in. A lot of people are oblivious to their impending assault or murder until just before it happens to them.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      Sure, but likewise many people spend large amounts of time feeling in tremendous danger and yet nothing happens to them.
    • ceejayoz 3y ago
      The opposite is also true, and much more frequently. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/16/voters-perceptions-of-crime-continue-to-conflict-with-reality/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/16/voters-perc... Making you feel unsafe is a specific political tactic: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/nov/25/fox-news-crime-coverage-decline-us-midterm-elections https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/nov/25/fox-news-crime...
      • AbrahamParangi 3y ago
        While this is true, the amount of blatant denial about SF in particular is ridiculous. The city is a place of both incredible wealth and incredible human misery. It’s shameful to not acknowledge this or the fact that whatever the causes, nothing anyone is doing seems to be making it better.
  • ActorNightly 3y ago
    >How to solve this? Hard to say. There is one solution that bypasses politics, bureaucracy, or having to assign people to protect things: let people have reasonable access to firearms and legal recourse in their use to defend themselves and property. The vast majority of people are normal, decent human beings that won't resort to shooting each other at every argument. The rest would probably pursue deadly force even if they didn't have access to firearms. Yes, US has a disproportionally a larger number of those due to our culture, but the way to fix that is to let former people arm themselves and the problem will be minimized.
    • troygoode 3y ago
      You want to solve "seeing a lot of, very obviously mentally ill, homeless people" by... giving more people guns?
      • ActorNightly 3y ago
        I hate how once you mention guns, peoples brains shut off and turn into "must virtue signal my ideology mode", that prevents them from either reading or comprehending the full post. There is a world where normal ordinary people with a job and a place to live get guns, while people who are homeless/mentally ill/ on drugs dont.
        • troygoode 3y ago
          What I don't understand is how your comment connects to the comment you were replying to.
          • ActorNightly 3y ago
            > let people have *reasonable* access to firearms and legal recourse in their use to defend themselves and property. That sort of implies that we don't go Oprah on SF where everyone and their mother gets a gun. Reasonable access means that you have to meet certain conditions, like not be homeless, have an id, have no criminal record, e.t.c.
  • kelp 3y ago
    I lived in SOMA until a year ago. We had a dog and I'd need to walk her in the evening, and before bed. I usually felt fine. My wife on the other hand did not like walking the dog in the evening. More often than not she'd have some random creepy person follow her around and say weird shit to her. Nothing worse ever happened thankfully, but it was regular low key harassment for her. We sold the place, to a single guy. We had a few couples interested, but in each case, the woman was worried about what it would be like after dark. Rightfully so based on my wife's experiences.
• kylehotchkiss 3y ago
  I was around the touristy parts 2 days ago. No more visible homeless than the previous time I visited in 2019. Some of their tents were more developed, pallet floors and stuff. I wasn't curious enough to try my luck going too deep into the city. Downtown was eerie empty though, just a small handful of people walking on sidewalks. Not as alive as it used to be. I kept handbag under my feet in the car, I saw somebodies link here about a car being broken into at a stoplight to take a handbag by the back window. I did however see a very large amount of Giants fans going to the stadium.
• wpietri 3y ago
  Cue also the people who are shocked at how terrible it has gotten, and how that means it can be blamed on the people they were already very inclined to blame! I've lived in San Francisco more than 20 years at this point. Some things get better, some things get worse, but overall I'd say it's about the same. I used to work a couple blocks from there, and I just ran past it on Sunday, and the neighborhood was always kinda sketchy. And just a couple of blocks away is a pleasant, upscale grocery store, Harvest Urban Market, that has done just fine. So I suspect this is something more about Whole Foods than any surprising change. E.g., did the pandemic and the resulting drop in the downtown population in the area put a whole in the store's profitability?
  • kelp 3y ago
    According to a posting on yelp (https://www.yelp.com/biz/harvest-urban-market-san-francisco https://www.yelp.com/biz/harvest-urban-market-san-francisco) Harvest Urban Market was shut down recently by the city due to major vermin infestation. Also it seems like they were threatening to close in 2019 due to exactly the kinds of issues that Whole Foods says is causing their closure: https://abc7news.com/south-of-market-sf-san-francisco-soma/5529909/ https://abc7news.com/south-of-market-sf-san-francisco-soma/5...
    • wpietri 3y ago
      Thanks for the update! I'm sorry to hear it. It reminds me of working around there 2010-12. It was very sketchy then, too. I recall my cofounder going out looking for a FedEx delivery that had gone awry, something important coming from one of our investors. He came back laughing because his founder-looking-for-vital-papers energy was misunderstood by the people across the street. Before he could even say anything, they said the methadone clinic didn't open until noon and he'd just have to wait.
  • corbulo 3y ago
    Its about the same?
  • dilyevsky 3y ago
    Head meets sand. I’ve worked right across the street from that WF (orpheum building), saw it went up. Since covid that whole area turned in a little snippet of war-torn country. There’s just no way anyone sane would live or even go near that without a pressing need and i guess $13 eggs are just not that alluring
• happytiger 3y ago
  I’ve seen this technique be a way big companies put government agencies on notice. That one missed the list. ;)
• epgui 3y ago
  Reading the comments that I think you're referencing, it sounds more like most people are talking about different facets of broadly-the-same facts. I don't think it's fair to go from "people have different perspectives" to "people have different truths" in this context, at least not so easily. If I discard the handful of patently unreasonable takes, I just see people sharing different information that isn't necessarily mutually exclusive.
• garrickvanburen 3y ago
  History books are heavily, heavily edited. Source: currently reading a book about the American Revolution from the opposition’s perspective.
• kelp 3y ago
  Part of the different perceptions really depends on what part of SF you spend your time in and what parts you avoid. Yeah the city is only a 7x7 mile square. But block by block it can be dramatically different. Check out the map of violent crime halfway down this article: https://sfstandard.com/criminal-justice/bob-lee-killing-violent-crime-wave-rate-san-francisco/ https://sfstandard.com/criminal-justice/bob-lee-killing-viol... I lived on Nob Hill for 7 years, it was fairly quiet, always felt safe. We had one unhoused guy who was harmless, you'd see him around. Go down the hill, and cross Geary and you're in the Tenderloin. Violent crime on that map goes from 64 to 361. People are passed out on the sidewalk with needles hanging out of their arms. There are tents, trash, squalor everywhere. Go over the Pacific Heights and it's $10-20M houses everywhere. The Richmond and the Sunset are like any suburbs, just a tiny bit more dense (houses are touching but they often have back yards). Low crime. Sleepy. After Nob Hill I lived in SOMA for 5 years, just half a block from 6th street. I once counted 12 tents on my block. A guy was tapping the street light for electricity. Needles in arms, people screaming, the sidewalk is a bathroom. Go east of 5th street (or maybe east of 4th) and it's all modern buildings. In the time since SalesForce tower went up, that area completely transformed. It's hyper modern full of high end office and residential buildings. (This is the area where Bob Lee was killed When I lived in Nob Hill, I felt like I was in this great dense walkable urban neighborhood. Then I made the mistake of moving to SOMA, it was nice that I was close to so many tech jobs, but being exposed to what went on there made me grow to hate San Francisco. A lot of people just actively avoid those really bad areas. So they never see it. Unfortunately I either lived in the middle of it, or regularly walked through it.
  • 8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago
    People need to vote on the ballot and with their feet. Don’t be a hero and make a statement by renting on lower Larkin or on 5th and Mission. Do what the city administration does and avoid living in any of those areas. If they want to turn those areas into a Mad Max hell scape, let them, and don’t work anywhere that requires you to risk it out there either. Why be a martyr? In the end people still actively rent in the luxury apartments in the worst parts of SoMa, so the markets are clearing. Why they do it is beyond me, but to each their own. My guess is that it's the usual new batch of tech space cadets in their 20s who do their time and bail as soon as they need more space, safety and they can afford it.
• ericbarrett 3y ago
  I guess I'll throw my anecdote in the pot. I used to live in SOMA Grand, the condo building sandwiched between the Federal Building and Trinity Towers, right around the corner from this Whole Foods. I left SF around 2015. I recently walked the neighborhood and holy shit it is much worse than I remembered. There is a methadone / treatment clinic on Minna, the alley between the Federal Building and the condo. So there's always been a few people coming or going from treatment, and a tent or two. But this time there had to be a hundred people or more crowded in the alley, hanging out on the steps of the Federal Building, and so on. I'm not sure if they were all there for the clinic but nobody seemed to be coming or going. People were openly burning trash on Market St. like some kind of dystopian 80s flick. I used to see active drug use maybe once a week; this time I saw it half a dozen times in two blocks. Maybe it has not changed in the last year or two, but as a former resident of the exact area under discussion, and one who's not unsympathetic to the plight of the homeless, the area has become unliveable. I often miss the City and have found myself questioning the choices that led me away. After this last visit—no more! To your point, I wonder if it is "boiling the frog." Maybe things didn't change that much in the last 2-3 years, but they sure have in the last 8. Taqueria Cancun still slaps, though.
  • kelp 3y ago
    Yeah I moved to SF in 2009 and away in 2022. It got a LOT worse in the last few years, especially the area you talk about. In the early to mid 2010s I used to spend quite a bit of time in the TL. There were restaurants and bars there you'd want to go to. Now, you don't even really want to drive through. It's so bad...
  • RC_ITR 3y ago
    I think something important to note is that SF does not have jurisdiction over the Federal Building's plaza/steps. I say that because it's a reminder of two things: 1) This isn't really a policing issue (if it were, wouldn't you expect the Feds to police their plaza better?) 2)This isn't really an SF-specific issue, since America has freedom of movement. People go to SF because they don't have better alternatives. I think everyone in this thread who lives in a jurisdiction that would either jail or forcibly remove these people should remember that as they discuss SF policies, since their government (The US Federal Government) is just as capable of solving these problems as SF's is, and can't actually do anything about it with the current toolkit (even in a 10,000 sqft area). I also send this as a warning to those people, since SF is famous for experiencing social issues a decade or two before the rest of the country - Enjoy feeling like this is a foreign SF-specific thing while it lasts.
• bhyolken 3y ago
  I lived on that block for close to 10 years and can confirm that the safety situation around there significantly degraded over the last 1-2 years. Gangs of drug dealers moved in and took over key sidewalk areas (particularly 7th and 8th streets between Market and Mission), and violent crime and property destruction increased significantly. In my last year, there were two murders nearby (including one that I heard the gunshots for), and I witnessed a bunch of things I had never seen in the neighborhood before including trash fires, people screaming at all hours of the night, and overdose victims being revived on the sidewalk. Although nothing bad happened to me personally, it just got really depressing and emotionally draining to live in a place where you're surrounded by so much suffering and destruction, and where you have to be hyper-vigilant every time you step outside. I packed up my things and left in December. My mental health and happiness have improved since then. I don't blame Whole Foods and other businesses in the neighborhood for shutting down. The city leadership, including the mayor and a majority of the Board of Supervisors (SF's legislative body) really didn't seem to care one bit about the problems in that area of the city. Maybe if enough people and businesses vote with their feet, they'll be motivated to actually fix things.
• thunderbong 3y ago
  Totally agree. One nitpick though - it should be 'cue' not 'queue'
  • zizee 3y ago
    Noted, thanks!