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Yeah, I think SF has more dangerous places then I've ever been to in NYC. In fact, though I've travelled quite a lot around the US and around the world, I'd sa
by gnosis 17y ago
Yeah, I think SF has more dangerous places then I've ever been to in NYC. In fact, though I've travelled quite a lot around the US and around the world, I'd say that I've never felt more threatened than I was in parts of SF.
SF is kind of weird in that it has these micro-neighborhoods, where you could go from a quite nice, posh neighborhood to a junky hangout in the space of a block. In NYC the transition from neighborhood to neighborhood is much more gradual, so you've got more of a warning.
And Market St in SF is just insane. I have never seen so many homeless people in my life. It's like a homeless army. It's really quite sad.
I heard that at one point there was an actual proposal being considered by the SF government to round up all their homeless people and send them to Treasure Island.
- DanielBMarkham 17y agoI was coming off Market and heading towards California one day when I happened to look at a homeless guy. I mean it was just an innocent glance -- like anybody does all the time. His eyes got big and round and he walked over to me and started screaming, at the top of his lungs. Every sort of paranoid delusion and profanity you could imagine: he yelled it right in my face. I, of course, totally ignored him at this point. Lord knows what he would have done if I had confronted him. He followed me all the way home -- about a half-mile. Screaming the entire time. I was very thankful to live in a secure apartment building! Sadly, this same thing happened to me a few months later with a different guy. SF is a beautiful city, but it has a lot of issues.
- gnosis 17y agoI honestly think many of those homeless people are suffering from quite serious mental illness. They are not on the streets by choice.
- DanielBMarkham 17y agoMy wife studied sociology. She tells me that there was a big push like in the 1970s to let a lot of crazy people out on the streets. It was deemed to be better to have them on the streets than in institutions. If that's true, I don't think it's worked out very well.
- gnosis 17y agoI think it was due to budget cuts to social services across the board. That included closing a lot of asylums.
- DanielBMarkham 17y agoI've heard both that it was due to budget cuts and I've heard that it was due to well-meaning activists who were pushing for patient's rights. Honestly I never dug into it to figure out what really happened. Whatever happened, it's a sad state of affairs.