Portland is by far less safe than San Francisco. It had double the homicides in 2022 with 2/3rds the population.

SF is weird and should probably not be considered a city for these kinds of analyses without Oakland and possibly the rest of the bay: the majority of the violence occurs in Oakland.

You can go your entire time in San Francisco without visiting Oakland, and all the cities on the Peninsula or North Bay you're likely to visit instead have much, much lower crime rates. I'm not sure why including Oakland is necessary to make an apples-to-apples comparison to Portland, which OP claims was safer than San Francisco.

Sure and you can live in Chicago without venturing to the south-side, most people who live on the west-side in LA only go to south LA for events and stay out of east LA.

My point is that SF is a bit odd in that it's a county and city that ends very abruptly, and Oakland is a 12 minute car or BART or 25 minute ferry ride from Embarcadero, thus the crime stats in the bay don't make much sense until you start averaging them across the metro area. It's not that Oakland is crazy violent, it's just that the a lot of the most violent areas of the metro fall in its borders, it's not that SF has the most vagrant or larcenous population, it's that it has a good climate for it: lots of the soft targets and toothless police force.

you are probably right, i haven't been back to portland in 15 years and i've heard it's gotten worse.

How safe you feel and how safe you are are two different things. San Francisco’s homicide rate, compared to other large American cities, is not high. America is just a batshit violent country.

St. Louis is literally the worst major city in the US for murder.

Do you feel it was a mistake to move there?

no because i live in mountain view area now and there's a community of tech enthusiasts/engineer here that makes it valuable for what i'm looking for in life. It comes down to your goals and what you or your family want/need. Everyone will be slightly different so it may not be the best decision for anyone else.