I often miss the City and have found myself questioning the choices that led me away. After this last visit—no more!
To your point, I wonder if it is "boiling the frog." Maybe things didn't change that much in the last 2-3 years, but they sure have in the last 8.
Taqueria Cancun still slaps, though.
In the early to mid 2010s I used to spend quite a bit of time in the TL. There were restaurants and bars there you'd want to go to. Now, you don't even really want to drive through. It's so bad...
I say that because it's a reminder of two things:
1) This isn't really a policing issue (if it were, wouldn't you expect the Feds to police their plaza better?)
2)This isn't really an SF-specific issue, since America has freedom of movement. People go to SF because they don't have better alternatives. I think everyone in this thread who lives in a jurisdiction that would either jail or forcibly remove these people should remember that as they discuss SF policies, since their government (The US Federal Government) is just as capable of solving these problems as SF's is, and can't actually do anything about it with the current toolkit (even in a 10,000 sqft area).
I also send this as a warning to those people, since SF is famous for experiencing social issues a decade or two before the rest of the country - Enjoy feeling like this is a foreign SF-specific thing while it lasts.
Interesting, what other social issues? Do you mean housing for example?
LGBT rights, recreational drug use, Nimby-ism (to your point), Internet socialization/commerce, rejecting elevated freeways, freely moving between jobs multiple times in a career (see: The treacherous 8), voting by mail, bicycle commuting, living alone/not having a traditional family structure.
SF is a place full of wealthy college educated people and as the saying goes “The future is here, it’s just for the rich.”
I’d argue that national trends around a drug use, housing policy, family structure, and Internet usage (phones make being homeless way better than before) are going to make homelessness much more common everywhere, SF is just at the frontier.
I did however see a very large amount of Giants fans going to the stadium.
Source: currently reading a book about the American Revolution from the opposition’s perspective.
Yeah the city is only a 7x7 mile square. But block by block it can be dramatically different.
Check out the map of violent crime halfway down this article: https://sfstandard.com/criminal-justice/bob-lee-killing-viol...
I lived on Nob Hill for 7 years, it was fairly quiet, always felt safe. We had one unhoused guy who was harmless, you'd see him around.
Go down the hill, and cross Geary and you're in the Tenderloin. Violent crime on that map goes from 64 to 361. People are passed out on the sidewalk with needles hanging out of their arms. There are tents, trash, squalor everywhere.
Go over the Pacific Heights and it's $10-20M houses everywhere.
The Richmond and the Sunset are like any suburbs, just a tiny bit more dense (houses are touching but they often have back yards). Low crime. Sleepy.
After Nob Hill I lived in SOMA for 5 years, just half a block from 6th street. I once counted 12 tents on my block. A guy was tapping the street light for electricity. Needles in arms, people screaming, the sidewalk is a bathroom. Go east of 5th street (or maybe east of 4th) and it's all modern buildings. In the time since SalesForce tower went up, that area completely transformed. It's hyper modern full of high end office and residential buildings. (This is the area where Bob Lee was killed
When I lived in Nob Hill, I felt like I was in this great dense walkable urban neighborhood. Then I made the mistake of moving to SOMA, it was nice that I was close to so many tech jobs, but being exposed to what went on there made me grow to hate San Francisco.
A lot of people just actively avoid those really bad areas. So they never see it. Unfortunately I either lived in the middle of it, or regularly walked through it.
If they want to turn those areas into a Mad Max hell scape, let them, and don’t work anywhere that requires you to risk it out there either. Why be a martyr?
In the end people still actively rent in the luxury apartments in the worst parts of SoMa, so the markets are clearing. Why they do it is beyond me, but to each their own.
It was cool. But I cringed every time I wrote my property tax check.
The neighborhood got worse and I got married and my wife didn’t feel comfortable there. Sold it (at a loss) and moved out of SF.
I've lived in San Francisco more than 20 years at this point. Some things get better, some things get worse, but overall I'd say it's about the same. I used to work a couple blocks from there, and I just ran past it on Sunday, and the neighborhood was always kinda sketchy. And just a couple of blocks away is a pleasant, upscale grocery store, Harvest Urban Market, that has done just fine.
So I suspect this is something more about Whole Foods than any surprising change. E.g., did the pandemic and the resulting drop in the downtown population in the area put a whole in the store's profitability?
Also it seems like they were threatening to close in 2019 due to exactly the kinds of issues that Whole Foods says is causing their closure: https://abc7news.com/south-of-market-sf-san-francisco-soma/5...
It reminds me of working around there 2010-12. It was very sketchy then, too. I recall my cofounder going out looking for a FedEx delivery that had gone awry, something important coming from one of our investors. He came back laughing because his founder-looking-for-vital-papers energy was misunderstood by the people across the street. Before he could even say anything, they said the methadone clinic didn't open until noon and he'd just have to wait.
Did I ever feel unsafe? No.
Was it sad seeing a lot of, very obviously mentally ill, homeless people? Yes.
How to solve this? Hard to say.
My wife on the other hand did not like walking the dog in the evening. More often than not she'd have some random creepy person follow her around and say weird shit to her. Nothing worse ever happened thankfully, but it was regular low key harassment for her.
We sold the place, to a single guy. We had a few couples interested, but in each case, the woman was worried about what it would be like after dark. Rightfully so based on my wife's experiences.
There is one solution that bypasses politics, bureaucracy, or having to assign people to protect things: let people have reasonable access to firearms and legal recourse in their use to defend themselves and property.
The vast majority of people are normal, decent human beings that won't resort to shooting each other at every argument. The rest would probably pursue deadly force even if they didn't have access to firearms. Yes, US has a disproportionally a larger number of those due to our culture, but the way to fix that is to let former people arm themselves and the problem will be minimized.
There is a world where normal ordinary people with a job and a place to live get guns, while people who are homeless/mentally ill/ on drugs dont.
That sort of implies that we don't go Oprah on SF where everyone and their mother gets a gun. Reasonable access means that you have to meet certain conditions, like not be homeless, have an id, have no criminal record, e.t.c.
I live in SF and it is not at all clear to me how expanding access to guns would either help or hurt the homelessness challenges in the city.
Some argue that it's inhumane to be armed when you're assaulted by someone who doesn't have full control of themselves and isn't responsible for their actions. But folks also don't deserve to die just because someone has completely lost it and is now in the process of beating them to a pulp.
Right now you’re a sitting duck, hoping that it’s someone else’s turn to get stabbed today. Ultimately you either empower law enforcement, which is not happening, or you empower law-abiding pro-social citizens, which is also not happening. The only options people have left are to either suck it up, or move.
The best thing one can realistically hope for is inverting the opportunity cost committing crime the other way, where its generally more favorable not to steal. If homeless people can be shot by security guards for shoplifting, its almost guaranteed that you would see crime statistics reduced overnight. Homeless people would be more incentivized to pursue lives closer to normal.
I hope I'm not making a straw man here, but I think your argument is that people who are going to resort to violence will find a way, even if they don't have a gun.
The thing that always gets glossed over in this argument is how much damage you can do with various weapons.
Yes, there are people prone to violence for various reasons. And yes, people, do get beat with pipes, or stabbed (both big SF news stories lately.)
But you can kill much much more efficiently with a gun. So those prone to violence, with access to guns are able to do much more damage much more quickly and easily.
Look at places like college towns where there are a lot of drunk people, and fights break out. How often do you see people being killed in these regards? These are people of all sorts of mental temperaments, under the influence, managing to just punch/kick/wrestle each other without resulting to stabbing each other, despite knives being readily available.
Even more so, for the people that could be prone to violence but of sane mind, knowing that someone may be armed can be a deterrent for them actually engaging in violence, because most of those people still have a sense of self preservation, not willing to die over someone disrespecting them in some way.
And when that one outlier person who is not of sane mind and violent enough to actually use deadly force decides to go at it, its much better that if everyone else has the means to stop him.
I was not saying that at all.
I was specifically responding to the part of your comment that I quoted, where you said:
> The rest would probably pursue deadly force even if they didn't have access to firearms.
And I was specifically addressing that point and only that point.
How safe you _feel_ often has little correlation to how much danger you are actually in. A lot of people are oblivious to their impending assault or murder until just before it happens to them.
Making you feel unsafe is a specific political tactic: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/nov/25/fox-news-crime...
The city is a place of both incredible wealth and incredible human misery. It’s shameful to not acknowledge this or the fact that whatever the causes, nothing anyone is doing seems to be making it better.
I don't think it's fair to go from "people have different perspectives" to "people have different truths" in this context, at least not so easily. If I discard the handful of patently unreasonable takes, I just see people sharing different information that isn't necessarily mutually exclusive.
Although nothing bad happened to me personally, it just got really depressing and emotionally draining to live in a place where you're surrounded by so much suffering and destruction, and where you have to be hyper-vigilant every time you step outside. I packed up my things and left in December. My mental health and happiness have improved since then.
I don't blame Whole Foods and other businesses in the neighborhood for shutting down. The city leadership, including the mayor and a majority of the Board of Supervisors (SF's legislative body) really didn't seem to care one bit about the problems in that area of the city. Maybe if enough people and businesses vote with their feet, they'll be motivated to actually fix things.
As an outsider, it's really interesting how varied everyone's perceptions on this is. How everyone has a different truth. It makes you wonder how accurate history books are, if people cannot agree what is happening right in front of them.