Oakland is a big place. It varies by neighborhood same as San Francisco. Most is fine, certainly no worse than the Tenderloin.

I'm living in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Oakland, and I would definitely not consider it "fine". The area is beautiful, but we're plagued by gunpoint robberies, burglaries, dumping, etc — people coming in and treating us as a place to loot and leave.

I love Oakland, but I'm gone as soon as our rent is up. There's a general lawlessness here that's incredibly frustrating.

I'm sorry you've had that experience, where I lived in Oakland nothing like that happened with any regularity. And I did not live in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Oakland.

But I mean, it is a city. These things happen in cities, I just don't see how it could credibly be claimed to be worse than San Francisco when the geographical variability is so high.

Anything I saw in Oakland was no worse than any other city I have ever lived in. I don't really know a better way to put it, I'm not saying it's perfect, I'm saying it's as fine as anywhere else of comparable density.

I appreciate your viewpoint, but I want to push back on "this just happens in cities". The only other place I experienced this level of criminality was when I was living in South America. (And I'm certainly not saying SF is much better.)

I'm originally from Europe, and have lived in and visited a huge variety of cities around the world. This level of anti-social behaviour / criminality is not normal, or acceptable in most developed countries.

My friend lives in the Oakland hills which is one of the nicest areas in oakland. His car has been stolen three times in the past five years. They’ve had an attempted break in and a contractor they hired had his truck stolen. Oakland is a hell hole.

That's not exactly a high bar

And the vast majority of Oakland is fine. I used an extreme example to demonstrate that the idea that Oakland has worse crime issues than SF is highly dependent on where you happen to be. Oakland is just physically huge, suggesting it has an issue with "crime in general" is myopic and ignores that almost all of it is fine, same as SF.

Ah OK, gotcha - I misinterpreted your comment as meaning things are fine in the Tenderloin.

How does SF have so many neighborhoods when it's so small, anyway? You can walk across the city and back in a day.

How big does a neighborhood need to be / how many should it have?

The neighborhoods in SF as most people think of them are larger than the areas that many suburb residents tend to think of as defining their neighborhoods.

It’s more than suburban areas bleed into each other less because you can’t walk between them - instead there’s some dense areas you drive between.