I cannot stand the majority of the current city government and I do think they are responsible for a lot of the issues in SF. SF was blessed by a huge economic boom. Normally this is a great thing for a region: more jobs and higher pay. But the board of support (BOS) has turned it into a nightmare by refusing to build housing. And the worst part is that the wrap their NIMBYism in a veil of smarmy self-righteousness, oblivious that they have ruined the city. When I was a kid, SF was a middle-class city. Now it’s a city of extremes. It’s still a great city, but it could be so much better.

When you get down to the street level and actually talk with some of the people out here, you realize that they are people too. There’s a lot of humanity missing from the discussions about SF.

Things might be dirty or smelly or even unsafe in particular areas, but I wouldn’t trade living here for anywhere else. And I’ve lived in a lot of places.

Really?

> I’ve lived in a lot of places.

Really?

How much broken car window glass have you seen in SF, vs other cities? It’s easily the top for me, by far.

How many times have you personally seen someone shooting up on the sidewalk, or shitting on it, vs other cities? San Francisco takes the cake here vs any other city I’ve seen, in the US or abroad.

These are the long term trends I've seen in my lifetime (50 years, nonresident but visited ~5 times):

- dotcom/SV pricing out almost everyone else

- leading to, unsurprisingly a homeless crisis

- also worsening the property value NIMBYism continuing to exacerbate the housing crisis

- the dystopian culture destruction effects of a host of services designed for apartment shutins built in-town or south of town

- finally, a host of policy failures enacted due to excessive virtue signalling and a social left wing gone rampant, although actually this is political paralysis of various NIMBY virtue signalers doing what they can to stop the undermining of their property values.

A lot of these are issues faced by other cities as well, hamstrung by two party deadlock at various levels of government.

No. There's a weird concerted media push to just vilify the city recently. I don't know if it's new, very rich, residents who shudder at the sight of anything outside their sheltered worldview (like homeless people or people addicted to opioids on the streets, which probably was exacerbated by the pandemic), or if it is a political agenda like the post elsewhere in this thread talking about how bad "progressive cities" are (I wonder how progressive SF really is, given its policies around housing, zoning, taxing, political funds going to non-progressive groups like Grow SF nd Together SF, etc...).

It's expensive and that is certainly as bad as it ever has been, but if you're a social being, there's always stuff going on to do, and it is surrounded by beautiful natural features! Today, there are other great cities where you can work at a start up though, probably because of how expensive SF is.

I wouldn't say that shuddering at open drug use on the streets indicates a sheltered world view. In most major cities that is not a normal problem. I live in a much larger city than SF for example and, although you occasionally see people walk by who are high, the only open drug use I've seen anywhere in the city is weed. I've never seen someone shoot up, I never see used needles, and this includes in more deprived areas of the city. It's just not normal.

Why would you? I just said that addicts and homeless people are on the street. Before covid, there was, and still is, an opioid epidemic. It sucks how we got here and it sucks that it's where we're at and it sucks that nearly all levels of government have failed to address it properly. It sucks that while some people have the means to deal with it on their, a lot of people run out of options and end up on the street. I'm happy that where you live you don't have to see the effects of it, but despite your anecdata, it's still issue and it doesn't mean the people affected by it aren't normal in some way.

You put "progressive cities" in quotes here, but everyone knows SF as a progressive city because that's how it brands itself. I agree that SF is probably not as "progressive" as some will claim, given the massive wealth inequality (among other things), but to say it's a "political agenda" to brand SF as a progressive city is nonsense. Sure, people will use that sentiment to paint it in a bad light, but the leaders of SF very much want SF to be known as a progressive city.

Well, which is it?

but the leaders of SF very much want SF to be known as a progressive city.

This is beside the point, but whether a city is progressive or not is defined by its policies, who the people are voting out, etc., not by what people say about it.

To bring it back on topic, to point at SF and say "see, progressive cities are bad" (as people posting here) isn't really right because SF isn't as progressive as they claim.

If you want to explore who calls themselves progressive or not and compare the locales they run, you're on your own, because again, that's a different discussion.

Because either way, the fault seems to lie with progressive politicians, whether they are "real progressives" or not.

This sentence makes no sense. The only progressive politicians are real progressives, no? Why are you so intent on arbitrarily labeling people as something despite their actions? Or are you still stuck on this branding thing? Cause if so, I've got a bridge to sell you...

I am intent on illustrating my point that the leaders of SF have successfully labelled themselves as progressives so that the progressives that live there will vote for them. I get your point that they aren't really progressive, but people vote for them because they sell themselves as progressive.

I'm also not "stuck on this branding thing" - just because you disagree with me doesn't mean I'm dumb :)

Did you happen to see the results of yesterday's election?

Or when Breed defeated progressive challengers?

> Is my perspective skewed by the sources I'm reading or have things really deteriorated to that extent?

SF has always been a mess, for the entire decade I've been here. I used to walk to/from work along Mission. Over the last 10 years, things got a lot better - 16th/Mission was unsafe. Most of the mission used to literally smell like a toilet.

You couldn't walk between 5th and 7th along Market. I once watched a lady in a wheelchair chasing someone down the street. She was rolling as fast as she could with one hand, and holding a knife out in front of her with the other while the guy ran.

Crime was always an issue. The planters along the street with the trees used to be a prime place to drop used heroin needles. Like, you could occasionally stumble on a planter with 5-10 used hypodermic needs in it. On Market.

The mid-Mission and Capp area used to run thick with prostitutes.

I don't see nearly as much of this anymore. It got worse in the midst of COVID, but petered out. I think the quantity of all the above issues went down, but so did the population. As such, the albeit lower crime stands out more. And SF is such a transient city that the people complaining about it now (rightly, imo) didn't see how bad it was because they weren't here.

[edit] It's bad - but it's not any worse now than before. There's a lot of great reasons to live here too though! It's so pretty, great food, bars, activities, it's small, walkable, bikeable. I know a ton of folks here so it's kind of hard to leave now, heh.

I walked down Market back and forth from New Montgomery to Guerrero every day for work for many years. It is not true that there was some impassable section of Market. Most of the people out on the street were just normal people.

It is true though that there are now places you literally cannot walk down the street because the sidewalk encampments are so thickly settled that there's no space to pass. For example the west side of Folsom between 14th and 15th. They keep clearing the encampment but it just comes right back.

1. The problems with crime and homelessness is not particularly worse than it was 11 years ago. When I first moved here my boss, an SF native, proudly told a story of being bit by a homeless guy on Market while protecting his date and getting tested for every disease. Many parts of the Mission, SOMA and Market used to be _worse_ before they gentrified. Today most people consider 6th street to be rough, but when I moved here, 6th street all the way 10th street was rough. The day I landed in SF I was told by multiple people not to leave items in the car or they would be broken into (again, this was in 2011).

2. What has changed is the media reception of San Francisco; drastically. During the Obama years there was no effort to paint any city as falling over to crime. I remember back in 2014 or so, there a guy who wrote a post complaining about having to step over poop on his way to work on Medium and he was practically exiled. Now the atlantic can post the same story without worry.

My own feelings are that San Francisco effectively priced out 20-somethings and all that's left is jaded 30-somethings who are tired of living in the city and are just sour grapes about it. Without the younger crowd to constantly defend how magical it is everyone is free to shit on the city. Anyone who's telling you about how much better San Jose/Mountain View/Palo Alto probably wouldn't have liked San Francisco 10 years ago either.

My ongoing gripe with the city isn't crime; it's housing. Almost everyone interesting, even in tech, who was working on getting their weird startup ideas off the ground can no longer do that in SF. Likewise the city is filled with spick and span elite school grads who work for FAANG but would have never considered Facebook over Deloitte 10 years ago. The cost of housing has made experimentation impossible.

The city has gone down hill, no doubt. Rent increases have chased off my artsy friends, which is the primary reason I'm going to follow - I'm far less fond of greedy nerds than I am artists. San Francisco just isn't very interesting anymore.

Crime is really no worse than anywhere else - look at the stats, don't listen to the hyperventilating. Crime did weird things during COVID and still looks different than it used to. It is no more San Francisco-specific than inflation is US-specific.

That said, my local neighborhood has gone to hell - that's mostly a function of cops deciding to funnel campers on our street. (I'm not going to argue with people who claim the cops don't do this - they do and will admit it is "verbal policy", but only off the record.)

So yeah, on balance, I would not have moved back here today. But that is not because of crime or shit on the streets, it is because the town's character is mostly gone.

Anyone who thinks SF crime was the result of Chesea's policy needs to explain two things about Jacksonville, Florida: (1) why they're seeing murder spikes, and (2) why nobody is calling for their DA's head.

https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/news/crime/like-covid...

Back in 2014 you had a mesh of artistic and tech. This lead to a great social scene.

Now the artists were priced out and they moved to Oakland. The SF tech workers left in droves. What’s left is the homeless and crime.

Much of the city still hasn’t recovered from covid. Soma and fidi are in shambles. Feels like only 1 out of every 4 places is still in business.

However Silicon Valley (San Mateo & Santa Clara county), San Jose, and east bay are all thriving relative to their past

This is the main part of the problem to me. There's nothing even remotely interesting going on in that city's culture. The entire city is split between people who can afford a 2-million-dollar house, retirees, and people who sleep on the street.

Crime is about the same. When I moved to SF in '98 the very first thing that happened to me was my bicycle got stolen, and my convertible car got its top slashed so many times that I started leaving the doors unlocked, at which point people started sleeping in my car, so I sold it.

Violent crime is actually much lower but that's a long-term trend.

IMHO the problems with that city all stem from the inequality caused by the housing crisis. It drives property crime and it's the reason the city is intensely boring.

It’s still 3k for a 1 bedroom, so I’m assuming there are still some tech workers left

A 1 bedroom apartment in SF has been ~3k for half a decade now. With inflation this means effective price was lowered.

Are car break ins relatively common in San Mateo and Santa Clara?

Nah. SoMa is exactly the same as it always was, fidi is just quiet but otherwise also unchanged.

I don’t go there anymore - too many drug addicts using drugs openly on the streets, people assaulted by mentally ill people.

Also, I will never/ever drive there in my car unless my destination has a gated/closed parking. Otherwise the car’s windows will be smashed.

Another anecdotal point: my sister just escaped a war in Ukraine. She is too afraid to go visit SF because it seems way too unsafe.

The homelessness (mentally ill), open drug use, and theft/vandalism are pretty draining.

I lived for a long time in Cambridge/Boston and very, very rarely had any similar experience.

-2c in MA is not (and it's often far colder than that)

In the approximately 3 years I lived there I saw a dramatic decline in the safety and cleanliness of the city. It's a shame because SF has the potential to be a beautiful place to live, offering a lot of unique benefits. There are few cities you can live in that have the proximity to nature offered by SF, with the variability you find in the landscape of Wine Country as well.

Now, I avoid even traveling there. While it's anecdotal, I had too many close calls to bad situations where I or my wife was followed, harassed, assaulted, etc. I have too many friends and colleagues who have also been assaulted or robbed. I really hope SF is able to enact policies that make sense, because the trend has only worsened.

I think crime and all problems are caused by drug epidemic. Or maybe because they kept schools closed for 2 years causing a lot of families to leave the city? Or maybe because they terrorized restaurants with COVID mandates cause less tourists and more restaurant closures? Or maybe because they closed street for car traffic causing less foot traffic in evenings? Or because BART is scary to ride so there less visitors from other parts of Bay Area? Or maybe just because offices got closed?

Not sure what is caused this but what I’m concerned that city leaders are doing absolutely nothing to fix issues. Thus all these recalls…

It is far from impossible to quantify quality of life using measures other than crime rates, but I'm not sure who still does that. I haven't personally been in San Francisco since 2007, but I do remember back then that world rankings of livable cities consistently included San Francisco as the only American city in the global top ten, so to drop from that lofty position to this perception of a post-apocalyptic hellhole is quite a contrast.

It does seem to me that the nature of the complaints don't seem unique to San Francisco. I've had my catalytic converter sawed off twice in the last five years, my car ransacked once, power tools taken from my garage, and gigantic homeless encampments are all over the place around me, in good old Dallas. My work office that I visit quarterly is in downtown San Antonio, and they have the same issues, too. Streets are overloaded with people wearing rags who haven't showered in ten years wandering out into the street and yelling at ghosts, sleeping in the doorways you have to step over to get into the building.

From the outside, it seems to me like residents of San Francisco are mostly pissed off that they're paying so much to live there, yet still experiencing all of the problems normally associated with poor neighborhoods in cities. Even that isn't unique to San Francisco, though, as city centers have becoming increasingly hip places to live. My neighborhood is not poor, and I don't think downtown San Antonio is poor, but rapidly increasing property values don't just eliminate all of the poor people if they live on the street. It only eliminates the low end of the buyer market, not extreme poverty.

Violent crime / theft happens - but not at a noticeably different rate than other large cities.

Still the most beautiful city in the US (imo) and the natural beauty 30 min outside the city in any direction is insane.

I can go months in Boston without seeing a single homeless person, drive around all winter with all my skiing gear in the back of my car, hell even leave my car unlocked with my laptop in it while running into a store, and never once seen a robbery or violent attack.

No, what happens in SF is extremely disproportionate to normal around the rest of the US.

- there is homelessness, but also something expensive that I enjoy

- there is crime, but also something expensive that I enjoy

- there is open drug use, but also there is something expensive I enjoy

It seems like a 'let them eat cake' response. "Why doesn't everyone just spend the money I do so I don't have to see all these problems?"

Some level of crime happens in most large cities, but if it became 'normal' something is extremely wrong. It does not have to be like this.

SF will likely have tax rev shortfalls this year, and their reserves were already tapped into. The surrounding communities however are much more fiscally conservative with large reserves still in tact.

That's an anecdote I guess but according to SFPD's own stats violent crime hit an all-time low in 2020 and was the same in 2021 and up only slightly in the first 5 months of 2022.

All my SF network stopped calling the police when crime happened. That includes violent crime such as street fights.

I was walking in SF and saw a guy holding a machete. He looked at me and said “don’t worry I’m not going to hurt you.” He then pointed down the street and said, “This is for him”. I called the SFPD and they never showed up. Later on a death was reported.

That told me all I needed to know about SFPD. you dont rely on them.

A peer once told me if you want the SFPD to show up, state you have a weapon and will use it in a public setting if necessary in defense of your life as the law permits.

- Well, no, this is NOT normal. these are the points of a failed city.

I couldn't imagine living in a place like that, let alone having kids grow up there.

Alita Battle Angel, the movie, is almost exactly how San Francisco feels.

There are actually 2 cities. San Francisco, the tech town, is booming like crazy. New highrises and shiny skyscrapers are coming online almost every month. Areas that were barren wastelands when I moved here in 2015 are now bustling with new construction, street level businesses, full of upper middle class rich people running to and fro enjoying their lives.

The skyscrapers are fast encroaching on the other San Francisco, the poor and troubled city. They’re squeezing homeless people, drug addicts, etc into a smaller and smaller area. In some neighborhoods the concentration of shanty towns and “bad elements” is so high it looks and feels like a slum. Because that’s what it is.

Look at the actual numbers though and, at least officially, it’s not that bad. A city of ~800,000 residents has ~8,000 people living on the streets[1]. Around 1%, same as the ratio for USA as a whole with 580,000 homeless people[2].

What has changed during the pandemic is that these homeless people became more visible because while the upper middle class retreated into working from home. Now that people are coming back to the office, the city is again filling with commuters and the “undesirables” are slowly retreating back to wherever they were hiding before.

As others have said, lots of downtown businesses shut down due to lack of foot traffic. Because few people actually live downtown. Hopefully that gets restored as commuters come back.

Another way to sum up San Francisco is that seeing a person shooting up on the street is normal and seeing a Tesla is about as remarkable as a Toyota Corolla.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/New-data-shows-fewer-...

[2] https://theweek.com/briefing/1013082/living-on-the-streets

Utopia? More like a Cyberpunk Dystopia...

> Look at the actual numbers though and, at least officially, it’s not that bad. A city of ~800,000 residents has ~8,000 people living on the streets[1]. Around 1%, same as the ratio for USA as a whole with 580,000 homeless people[2].

1% of the US would be around 3 Million people...

I think that depends where you land. San Francisco is in the top 10 cities in the world for “billionaires per capita”. SFBA as a whole takes the cake if I remember correctly.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2022/04/05/where-t...

> 1% of the US would be around 3 Million people...

You are right, I decimal’d wrong. USA as a whole is 0.2% homeless

"dystopia: an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice"

That doesn't preclude rich people. In fact having rich people help with the contrast, like in the article where a human beings body rotted on the sidewalk for a day outside a 5 million dollar home.

I think your comment can teach an important lesson in statistics. Without proper segmentation, totals and averages and medians can obscure real and important results. (This is only one part of the general "garbage in garbage out" data-quality problem BTW.) If the arbitrary political boundary that defines "San Francisco" were changed so that it actually became two cities, it would be abundantly clear that one of them has severe problems and it would probably qualify for all sorts of state/federal assistance that the current aggregate does not.

As always, everything boils down to money. Rich SF is sublime. The rest, meh. Also, I only ran into ~crazed homeless in Mountain View (on Castro).

So forward to more modern times, Gay-everything in your face at every corner, obvious hard core drug abuse on the sidewalks, yet world-class views, architecture, food and steady tourism made the city go.. No overview is complete without mentioning that the quiet side of San Francisco is the Chinese-American community. The highest density of ethnic chinese population in the USA. Aside from Mayor Ed Lee dying of a heart attack in office, you just don't see many obvious attention-getting events with the SF chinese population overall.

The cost of living, the excess of all kinds, the reliable income, all came to a grinding car-crash result with covid-19. The balance on the street of healthy daily people versus dying-in-front-of-you, was lost. The ability of individuals of lots of non-dot-com people, to cope with expenses, was lost. Tourism dollars ceased. Restaurants closed. Of course it is a train-wreck. It really is a train-wreck, with nowhere to hide. Yet "billionaire-in-training" dot-com'ers and Bloomberg employees and 23andMe people and whatnow, glide through on a levitation walkway made of money. As others have said, some people are so well insulated from the consequences of these changes that there is no incentive.. in fact a badge of membership to overlook and ignore it seems.. no "community" .. the literally-insane people at Mozilla have indeed changed the world, and they can step over the bodies to get to their electric BMWs in the secure parking lot to move through it.