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SF Declared Dead, Full of Drugs and Homeless, Multiple Times in Last 50 Years
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- _yb2s 3y agoThings have really changed in downtown SF in a way that is totally different than in the past. Walking ~3 blocks in broad daylight I saw people openly injecting themselves with drugs, people having sex right on the sidewalk, numerous people passed out (or dead?) laying flat across the sidewalk with other people ignoring them and stepping around them, hundreds of piles of human feces, and a lot of mentally ill people aggressively confronting strangers. I was in the area near the recently shut down Whole foods, and couldn't find a place to use a restroom even as a paying customer- nearly all of the businesses were shut down or boarded up. I finally found a public library with restrooms, and there were guards posted inside every restroom in attempt to curb drug use. The situation is dehumanizing and terrifying, and nothing like when I visited the same area 20 years ago.
- junofan 3y agoPeople inject god knows what and shit on the street. We call them zombies. There’s no way it’s anything like it was in the past. The people today need medical attention.
- ProjectArcturis 3y agoI had the same experience. Coming from St Louis, I'm accustomed to a certain level of squalor, but downtown SF was worse than literally any neighborhood I've seen at home.
- 26fingies 3y agoyou walking around the tenderloin? yea homelessness is bad but man HN (and reddit) loves to really play it up
- anm89 3y agoYou know things are going well when you have to yell at the internet that your not dead.
- DuckFeathers 3y ago[dead]
- ianbicking 3y agoI visited SF recently for the first time in several years. Hardly a scientific sampling, but I did revisit some exact locations that I had been to before. Overall it seemed cleaner and safer than it had been in the past (2019?). There were even more kids.
- tomohawk 3y agoSF was where the Dirty Harry movies were shot. By the standards of the time, SF was gritty and lawless. The movies poke at the luxury beliefs of the elites and what that was doing to SF. However, it got turned around to some extent so that by the early 2000s it was a top place to visit. Many conventions chose it as a destination. I recall going with a group to Java One and we were all excited to get to SF and the conference. But it's been on a decidedly downward trend since then, under one party rule. There's no way I'd go to a conference there now, or for any other reason.
- akomtu 3y ago[flagged]
- NX9mqsSv8 3y agoExposure to evil helps some realize evil truly exists and indirectly points the way to God.
- jncfhnb 3y agoWhat’s animalistic sexuality look like
- hindsightbias 3y agoPerhaps we should give ground zero of tech culture more of a chance. But it is pretty shameful how the anarcho-libertarian crowd is so bent on authoritarian means when they have to face the realities they birth. Strange days, William Gibson fans wanting Walt Disney World.
- ProjectArcturis 3y agoSounds like you're blaming this all on the gays?
- torsday 3y ago[flagged]
- infamouscow 3y agoEvery single mechanism suggested (and has been used successfully in many other cities all over the world) to curb the trajectory SF is on is outright refused for either idealogical or political reasons. This is literally a problem of their own making. If the state of California legalized FAFO to include lethal force for self-defense, a vast majority of these problems would go away overnight.
- gizmo385 3y ago> If the state of California legalized FAFO to include lethal force for self-defense, a vast majority of these problems would go away overnight. I’m sorry, maybe I am misunderstanding but are you suggesting that we make it legal for you to just kill these people…?
- infamouscow 3y agoNo. If you look over my comment history the last two years, you'll see I've advocated and argued against violence more than most here, despite it being unpopular most of the time. What I'm suggesting that if people voluntarily makes a decision to put others in existential immediate danger, then the those whose lives are in immediate danger shouldn't have to pause, think, or call a lawyer before protecting themselves from an existentially dangerous threat. If that means ending the life of the person that voluntarily made a very poor decision, that shouldn't be on the innocent person, nor should the innocent person have their life up-ended or put into financial ruin because the government failed and a person voluntarily decided to want to risk dying. There is no distinction between voluntarily deciding to jumping out of an airplane with no parachute and voluntarily deciding to put others in existential immediate danger. This line of reasoning and justification stems from the same causality as laws against drunk driving. It will be hundreds of years before political scientists and sociologists figure out how the state California managed to flip all this upside down.
- mustacheemperor 3y agoThe people complained about living on the streets of SF are generally doing and dealing drugs, not attacking random passerby. I don’t know what boogeymen this post is about, it’s completely orthogonal to the problems in downtown SF. Edit: as usual, I regret opening much less participating in any politics-adjacent topic on HN.
- refurb 3y agoFunny the article limits it to 50 years, might be good to go back a bit further. From 1950 (775,000) to 1980 (678,000) San Francisco's population dropped by 13%. I'm not arguing SF is on the same trend now, but there is no reason why it couldn't happen again. That said, I've noticed some changes with the new DA and a lot more police presence in the downtown core to try and stem some of the worst issue (casual shoplifting), so maybe things will get better.
- asielen 3y agoYeah, it does seem that at least on a microscale things are getting better from where they were even 6 months ago. But that doesn't solve the large issue of not enough housing and a looming commercial real-estate bubble pop. However expensive it would be, it seems those two issues could solve each other with some creative governance.
- JamesLeonis 3y agoThere is a very interesting comment near the bottom: > As someone who moved here in 1992 from Washington, DC, the current drug crisis reminds me of the crack cocaine crisis, lots of petty theft and a sense of menace with drug addled people on the streets. The big difference between the earlier waves of homelessness is perhaps the tents. The only place anyone would pitch a tent during the Willie Brown era was in Golden Gate Part (Brown famously wanted to fly helicopters with infrared cameras to find all the encampments and remove them.) Tents are very in your face and perhaps that's one reason that people see homelessness as worse today than in past times, even though the numbers tell a different story. Lots of other great comments from older residents that give perspective of San Francisco of different eras.
- mint2 3y agoRelevant history? “ However, the neighborhood faced decline during the Depression and post-WWII period. In the 1960s, the district became a haven for hippies due to the availability of cheap rooms and vacant properties, turning it into a center for counterculture, drugs, and music. The 1967 Summer of Love brought national attention and popularized the counterculture movement. However, the Haight-Ashbury district later faced issues of overcrowding, homelessness, hunger, drug problems, and crime. ”
- mjfl 3y agowho cares about SF. It's a little square at the top left of the bay. Silicon Valley is distinctly the south bay and San Jose. nothing important has ever happened in san francisco. Salesforce? Come on. If it wants to be a pile of feces, let it. I don't want to hear about it.
- QuantumG 3y agoIs this about the upcoming Bell riots?
- black_13 3y ago[dead]
- amadeuspagel 3y agoFun article, but note that there is such a thing as a long term trend. The fact that people have been pointing out a trend for a long time doesn't mean it's not real.
- JohnFen 3y agoTrue. I've been having to travel to SF at various times for 30 years or so, and it's always been one of my least favorite cities for the reasons stated in the article. And I've watched it gradually and consistently get worse over the decades -- but once the SV crowd really took over, that gradual trend greatly increased in velocity. It's not gradual anymore.
- guestbest 3y agoIt seemed like a pretty safe and fun town when I visited in the late 1990’s
- WWLink 3y agoWord. I visited last in like 2014 and it was still wonderful. Honestly I'm still convinced all of these heavily negative posts are aztroturfing but I give them a little benefit of the doubt because I haven't been in nearly 10 years. Honestly I think the aztroturfing is because of the opiod crisis that practically destroyed the south.
- junofan 3y agoIt changed a lot with fentanyl.
- ProjectArcturis 3y agoIt was fine in 2014. It has changed radically since then.
- mc32 3y agoI've heard that when manufacturing left town in the 70s and 80s it was pretty bad. But probably in significant ways, not as bad as it is today. What was bad then was the RE market --it just tanked, and there was crime too (hence Dirty Harry), but not as pernicious as today and not the faeces, nor as much hard drugs nor as many people with severe psychological problems. Willie Brown tried but he too got sick and tired of the homeless situation and threw his hands up.