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On a recent HN discussion on crime in SF, someone said one of the reasons it's so visible is that high income and low income sections are adjacent and intertwin
by causi 4y ago
On a recent HN discussion on crime in SF, someone said one of the reasons it's so visible is that high income and low income sections are adjacent and intertwined. Is this true? More importantly if perhaps more crassly, is it worth it? Does not keeping your crime isolated to the "bad part of town" result in a meaningful drop in the overall crime rate?
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoNot it's visible because the victims have more money than the average one, and they are not used to be attacked, so it makes a lot of noise.
- billythemaniam 4y agoSpecifically on high/low income intertwined, yes. There is certainly some segmentation, but there are also places where one street is good and the very next street is bad and the next street is good. It's an interesting city for sure.
- 0zemp1c 4y agoSF is 7 miles across, by size it is tiny probably the very best place in SF is the corner of Broadway and Broderick...still within half a mile of a tent camp
- alephnerd 4y agoIt definetly plays a role. For example, the Whole Foods that shut down in the gentrified area around 9th street is a couple blocks from Hyde & Turk - which is the main drug market in the city. The high rises along 5th Street near Moscone are adjacent to the SROs and homeless shelters on 6th. Similar stuff in Mission District and Polk Street/Lower Nob Hill as well - a lot of older SROs/cheap apartments got converted into Hotels, Airbnbs, or resold as condos. And despite all this, no one noticed the intergenerational poverty and gun crime in the Projects in Hunters Point and Visitacion Valley because they are cut off from the rest of the city.
- deanCommie 4y agoYes. West Coast cities (San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Vancouver Canada) consistently get talked about with this even more disproportionately because the citizens there confuse crime with visible poverty. People hear "Someone was randomly stabbed", then they go on the streets, see someone homeless and on opiates passed out in the street, or get screamed at by someone on meth, feel unsafe, and correlate the two. Then they look around at the state of certain parts of the cities and scream the city is dying, and demand superficial solutions like impeaching the DA, or cleaning up a homeless encampment. But the cities don't have a crime problem (more than other cities in North America). They have a VISIBLE POVERTY problem. They have a houselessness problem. And they have a drug addiction problem (which almost certainly is an outcome of poverty and houselessness. The root cause for these is complex, from wealth imbalance, to insufficient social services, but the reason why THOSE CITIES specifically have them is that the west coast provinces and states are 1/ Progressive, 2/ Mild-climated in the Winter. There is no other province or state that is both consistently progressive (and as a result offers SOME social services for homeless, mentally ill, or drug addicted people) AND you can survive a winter in the street. The east coast has the former, but not the latter. The southwest has the latter but not the former. The combination of the above creates the effect you see.
- causi 4y agoSome people claim social services for the homeless make it "too easy" to stay unhoused. Googling the problem seems to only result in punditry and rhetoric but not any kind of meaningful analysis as to whether a "tough love" approach has any advantage over a generous one.
- TMWNN 4y ago>Some people claim social services for the homeless make it "too easy" to stay unhoused. The city of San Francisco spends $70,000 annually per homeless person! <https://abc7news.com/sf-homeless-plan-housing-all-san-francisco-supervisor-rafael-mandelman/12760671/ https://abc7news.com/sf-homeless-plan-housing-all-san-franci...>
- 4y ago