Nope. One of the wealthiest cities in the world fails to look after its inhabitants. A failure of government
The government isn't some distant third party. It's people from the community who are elected by their neighbors to run things in a certain way.
>One of the wealthiest cities in the world fails to look after its inhabitants...
These are the same thing.
But really, if you took Stockholm out of Sweden and plunked it down into the middle of the US, how long do you think the social safety net would last before it went bankrupt? And this is assuming you retain the european willingness to be coercive about mandatory rehab and confinement (something US based progressives are reluctant to note is a feature of the european social safety programs they otherwise praise).
But the article here is how this was some conflict between friends, so the city doesn’t really matter. All the fearful people should be reassured by this outcome. Manage your domestic life well for good safety outcomes.
If you want to get a good feel for San Francisco ghetto logic, or ghetto logic in general, I recommend the hard to get a hold of documentary, "Straight Outta Hunter's Point" (2003) in which an amateur film maker who was a resident of the Hunter's Point housing projects walked around the low-income housing projects in Hunter's Point and interviewed anyone who would talk to him.
Give me the risk any day.
I think part of this is not realizing that a lot of the locals (the previous colonizers) are part of the problem. I can guarantee that the colonizers would love for more housing to be built in SF because they don't want to pay $2m for a 2bd townhouse either.
A huge portion of the SF "colonizer" demographic can't even fucking vote. They're all on visas.
I'm curious who you think you're referring to when you make a statement like this. (Hint: You're probably wrong).
I worked in the Warfield building from 2014 to 2017. It wasn't deep in the TL, but it still numbed me to things. Crossing police tape to get into the office? NBD. Coworkers getting assaulted? Happens every few months.
> Y'all colonized the poorest parts of the city and gave the poorest folks nowhere to go
If you said something like this about The Mission, I'd agree, but the TL wasn't even close to gentrifying. People tried to make it happen, but it never got to a point where people wanted to be there, and that was only at its periphery.
1.) I grew up in the rural South, and was literally harassed for most of my career for saying "y'all" and "folks" but glad to see it's trendy to speak that way amongst the exact kind of people who used to assume I was ignorant for speaking that way.
2.) Your statement could just as easily be, on a different day: "Y'all abandoned the city for the suburbs and deprived the city of a tax base to help the poor." Between "white flight" and "colonizer/gentrifier", you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Same applies to livability: If you demand quality of life crimes be dealt with to make a city cleaner, you are guilty of not "embracing where we were and not trying to change it".
Your entire statement to me seems driven by emotion and nostalgia without thinking about the fact that there are low income children who have to grow up in these places. Maybe parents aren't thrilled with having their 10 year olds learn the valuable life lessons of "how to not get knifed by a junkie in an alleyway".
Sorry, but the whole comment reeks of luxury beliefs. I've personally (in DC) been mugged at gunpoint (they threw me onto the pavement in the process) and had a random guy jump out of his car to assault me because I walked in front of his car in heavy traffic (all cars stopped) to cross a street, and he viewed it as "disrespecting him".
Real, actual victims of violent crime don't think it's cute or have this nostalgia for squalor. Beliefs like that are luxuries for certain kinds of people who are insulated from the worst of it, one way or another. It's easy for a childless bohemian to have no problem with needles in parks, but for those of us raising future citizens, it's not fun.
So you think that "flee the black people" and "drive the black people out" are the only two options here? There are more things, Horatio.
Poverty and crime are not married.
My wife and I both grew up poor and working class. Living in trailers are in our life stories. You can be dog poor and still not be a junkie, still not mug others, still not assault people. This was understood widely in our upbringing and those we dealt with. People _did_ misbehave, but it was not "just what happens".
Presumption that poor areas must mean getting to deal with junkies, means dealing with violence, well, that is a morally bankrupt view. People don't have to do that. That is their choice. Improvement is possible.
Very disagree. It is not immoral or prejudicial to note the simple reality that, in aggregate, poverty and crime are correlated[0], and in part because poverty creates conditions where crime is more likely[1].
That doesn't mean that any particular person is doomed to crime because they're poor, or can't improve. Of course they can, and of course nobody should assume that a particular person is a criminal based on membership in a socioeconomic class (or any other class).
But it's just true that poverty and crime are correlated. There are confounding factors (police are more likely to arrest a poor person, and more likely to merely warn a rich person), but nothing suggests that crime is merely equally prevalent among poor and non-poor populations.
I applaud the compassion, and I agree that individuals bear the moral weight of doing the right thing, but let's not deny facts in service of those principles.
0. https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/28019/chapter/2118222... 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8
They 100% are.
The plural of anecdote is not data. Your story is nice, but the reality is poverty is heavily correlated with crime. And social nets address both at once.
letting poor people suffer because some poor people can improve their station in life through luck, hard work and a number of other extrenous factors is unethical.
Portugal has lower gdp than the US but it isn't poor internally. People spend less % on housing food etc than in the US.
Also having no guns means a lot of crime is less violent, not that there is less of it.
It means you do not have homeless camps in hollywood boulevard next to million dollar penthouses. The income inequality is smaller therefore the variance in income levels is smaller and therefore all prices are down.
Let me give you an example.
Country A is rich. The poorest person has 10$ the richest has 100000$
Country B is poor the poorest person has 1$ the richest person has 5$.
In both country Nestle sells water bottles, they use a formula to maximise profit based on average earnings. On country A a water bottle is 20$ in country B is 0.2$.
Despite the proportional poverty, a poor person in country B can buy 5 water bottles while a poor person on country A can buy 0.
> Source for "spend less % on housing, food" ?
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
On the most expensive city in Portugal and the only thing cheaper in SF is gasoline, something most people in portugal don't use as much as they walk everywhere.
> Poor in the US get food stamps
Getting vouchers for milk and beans is not helping people. Portugal for example does not have millions of people in jail for minor drug offenses. Portugal does not have medical bankruptcy. Portugal does not have homeless camps in every mayor city.
Also food banks are common everywhere, the only difference is they are usually much broaders and healthier than food stamps and come on top of unemplyment payments, health benefits, and council housing.
> I've been to Portugal
I was born in Spain a few decades ago, I am gonna take my 18 years there over your weekend abroad.
you realize salaries in SF are astronomically higher than in Portugal, right?
the income inequality is indeed smaller in Portugal, but that is a different issue, absolute numbers wise Portugal is clearly a lot poorer than US
US doesn't have millions of people in jail for minor drug offenses, where did you get this nonsense from?
> Your entire statement to me seems driven by emotion
> Sorry, but the whole comment reeks of luxury beliefs.
C'mon man. You don't know the person you are responding to and included multiple personal attacks in your response. There's a way to make your argument without making the person you are responding to your own personal hate-object.
That's a different situation from this one, so, sure, if that's something that happened and then you're complaining about the place you don't live anymore, sure, that's also a statement that could be made.
> Between "white flight" and "colonizer/gentrifier", you're damned if you do and damned if you don't
Not surprisingly, those aren't the only two options.
> Real, actual victims of violent crime don't think it's cute or have this nostalgia for squalor
I think you're confused if you think the GP's comment "It taught me compassion and empathy and how to avoid getting knifed by a junkie in the alleyway" was nostalgic for the getting knifed part.
> Not surprisingly, those aren't the only two options.
"white flight" == moving out of the area
"colonizer/gentrifier" == moving in to the area
The only remaining option is to never move.
white flight = moving out of city because of fear, cost, crappy schools, etc. is flight. A white person moving to the boondocks because they want to homestead or live off grid is not "flight".
gentrifier = higher income person/family moving into a city or neighborhood, raising the housing costs by doing so, causing the long time residents to leave because of said costs and changing the culture of said area because the old families don't live there anymore.
Schelling’s segregation model comes to mind in these moments but I never see that mentioned, strangely. Oh, the inconvenience of maths that explains things better than divisive and ignorant rhetoric!
Sadly, I think there is enough evidence that the game plan is to build classes of people that are constantly holding each other down. That is literally the point. :(
https://sfist.com/2017/02/28/the_10_most_infamous_san_franci...
I 100% agree. I lived 5 blocks uphill from the Tenderloin and would walk though the loin to go to Bourbon & Branch or while coming back from the theater late at night. I learned all three of those lessons as well. It was rare that I was scared but I was always hyper alert.
Its great nothing traumatic happened to you, but I’ve seen how much more of a target for harassment some of my friends are and I don’t blame them for being afraid.
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Uni...
there is no reason that SF has to be a lot less safe than Zurich. Zurich is not populated by aliens, people live in both places
It's political choices that make it the way it is.
The "mentality" here is one appropriate for the person and the circumstance. As you say, his neighbors weren't aliens, they were people. Compassion and understanding were worthwhile efforts. And they remain so.
>I loved the Tenderloin back then, even though it was terrifying. It was full of weirdos and loonies and junkies and poverty stricken artsy types like me, who had no power or desire in gentrification - we were just poor too. But we embraced where we were and didn't try to change it. The loin changed me far more than my presence changed it - for the better. It taught me compassion and empathy and how to avoid getting knifed by a junkie in the alleyway.
>But we embraced where we were and didn't try to change it.
Poor is fine. It's a hard life, but it's a state of being. Even being artsy and a little crazy; that's great. The rest of it though...? Why romanticize this? It's bad. We shouldn't romanticize bad. Learn your lessons, but let's want something better.
San Francisco’s old guard in a nutshell.
The OC has either survivor ship bias or a bad memory. I've never lived in SF but I've lived in Portland and work adjacent to mental health professionals and the stories that they have of people being victimized in the camps and shanty towns are tragic.
For everyone who learned to 'not get stabbed' (whatever that means), there are people who DO get stabbed, or sexually assaulted, or robbed of the little money they had.
It’s not reasonable even for the nouveaux riches of tech to expect to flip a city’s character in a decade.
I also didn't say anything about flipping a city's character in a decade. Whether it takes 1 decade, 2, 3 or 4 -- there is no reason to accept the idea that city just has to be unsafe and nothing can be done about it
Lack of Nazi gold to prop up a social net, which can later be defended tooth and nail with strong anti immigration policies while newer streams of illegal money such as mexican cartels are adquiered.
Maybe SF does not want money laundering for some of the worst people on the planet, to be its identity. But hey I guess the rolex watches and chocolate are pretty good.
It provided the original funding for many fo Zurich's public services.
> San Francisco is just as wealthy as Zurich
Kinda, but in a very different way. It requieres way more people, so it imports way more people. This makes the city more dynamic but also makes it harder to do sensible long term urban planning for example.
Also many services grew organically and are disfunctional such as the healthcare system in the US. That alone could fix many of SF problems, related to drug abuse (which is a healthcare problem not a crime one), medical related poverty and homelessness and mental illeness. With that alone, ignoring other solutions you would see a massive improvement in QoL in SF.
https://sfstandard.com/perspectives/perspective-why-your-cha...
Now it feels more like it can happen to anyone. I spent a few years in SF as a child 89-92. Have visited several times a year, every year, since 1992. It's definitely the most run down, dirty, and unpleasant it has ever been IMO. I have luckily never had anything stolen, but I for sure see more broken glass and more broken car windows too.
What leads you to conflate poverty with criminal activity, and proceed to victim-blame those who dare complain about criminal activity?
Data clearly shows a correlation between crime levels and average income in an area. Are we not mostly engineers used to working with data here? In fact, needing to "survive" is a common excuse used to justify the crimes committed in impoverished areas. Note that I said correlation, not causation. If someone has data that says otherwise, please provide it because I would be genuinely intrigued.
Isn't "correlation does not imply causality" already a household expression? If we are engineers why are we insisting in specious reasoning?
First and foremost, avoid alleyways, avoid junkies. It seems like simple advice and it is.
What I learned as a nerdy white kid living in TL was that there is a largely non-verbal communication system, a kind of thieves' cant (although, as I mentioned, it's largely non-verbal, almost like a sign language but with subtle facial expressions and body postures rather than specific signs. (Actual gangs do use specific hand signs to recognize each other.))
If you "know the score" you can just tell someone, e.g. "Hey, don't mug me." using this communication system and they will leave you alone. This happened to me. I was walking through the 'loin when a dude comes up off the wall and starts to fall in behind me. I caught the motion out of the corner of my eye, and I gave him the slightest shake of my head, "nah", and that was it. He fell back and posted up on the wall again, and it was over.
Just being aware of what's going on differentiates you from the clueless "mark". That's the main thing: you're part of the "in-group". You have heard of "woke"? This level of awareness of the nature of life on the street is part of what one is woke to, or not, eh? This cant would seem like telepathy to an unaware outsider.
So, I was able to tell my would-be mugger that, although I look and walk like a clueless tech nerd, I'm actually a resident who knows what's up, so please mug someone else? And, as neighbors do, he kindly preferred to look for someone wandering in from the nicer parts of downtown. A tech worker or tourist, eh?
(I saw those interactions too: Three "gentlemen" corner a fellow up against a wall, one of them displays an empty 40oz bottle, and an agreement of sorts quickly emerges to the effect that it would be much preferable for the victim to give up his wallet rather than receive the bottle to the head. They even gave him his wallet back afterwards. The whole thing took thirty seconds.)
There's also an element of stotting involved in what I'm saying, "an honest signal to predators that the stotting animal would be difficult to catch" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stotting ) Since I "know the score" I'm not going to panic or freeze up if this guy tries to rob me. There's a way to say with your body language, "I'm not going to be easy to rob."
If you don't have that naturally, for whatever reason, there is something called "adrenaline re-imprinting" self-defense courses. Without going into a long tangent about it, the essence is to re-program your adrenaline response to be coherent and defensive. If you haven't seen it, it's hard to imagine the intensity of a controlled adrenaline response. Even small, weak people can be extremely dangerous under the influence of adrenaline. Adrenaline is a hellofa drug. (I mean, in the course I took the instructor at one point has on one of those bear-proof suits, and it still seems like he's gonna get hurt. And the other people in my class were small women! They were destroying this guy.) Basically, the attacker would have to be literally psychotic to continue trying to attack someone in the throes of a controlled adrenaline response. Trying to approach someone in that state... it's like a force-field. There's something deep within you that is like "nope" when confronted with such a fury, and the effect gets stronger as you try to approach. It literally feels like a force-field. I have only had to use the training once, Thank God, and it stopped three guys in their tracks, literally. They were running up behind me, and I stopped and the adrenaline triggered and I spun around and did the thing (there's a posture and you shout "back off!") and they stopped in their tracks. I started a conversation with them and they were scared of me. As in I made a gesture and one of them jumped back a little. Anyway, the thing to search for is "adrenaline re-imprinting".
I like you Kragen, I hope it's not too weird to say that, so I hope this was helpful or at least interesting. Cheers!
Comments demonizing other people and/or other groups of people are the scourge of internet forums. If you make it "y'all", that's worse yet, as now the demonized group gets to select itself and feel personally attacked.
People often think that if we moderate comment X, we must care less about or even be endorsing comment Y, but that's not the case. We just see a more-or-less random sample of the comments. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at [email protected].
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
People always feel like the mods must be against them (and are depraved to boot) when their comments get moderated. It's a routine reaction and it's completely illusory. Comments that express this reaction are all pretty similar, no doubt because they have the same mechanism underlying them.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The idea that if comment X says one thing and Y says another and we reply to X but not Y, that means we're endorsing "violent police responses to the homeless", is... not valid. It's not possible for us to see everything, even in the same thread, let alone all threads.
If you see particularly egregious comments that haven't been moderated, you're welcome to point them out to us and we can take a look. [email protected] is the best way to do that.
The thread was full of people blaming the homeless for the murder before any facts were known and calling for a response. Not one or two comments, a thread full of them.
If that wasn't what you were saying, I'm sorry for misinterpreting you!
The people who "gave the poorest folks nowhere to go" were the ones who voted to prohibit the construction of anything but single-family houses[2] in 76% of the city[3].
[1] https://www.sfdph.org/dph/files/MCHdocs/Epi/Birth-Data-Summa...
[2] https://sbuss.substack.com/p/when-did-things-go-wrong-in-san....
I loved the Tenderloin back then, even though it was terrifying. It was full of weirdos and loonies and junkies and poverty stricken artsy types like me, who had no power or desire in gentrification - we were just poor too. But we embraced where we were and didn't try to change it. The loin changed me far more than my presence changed it - for the better. It taught me compassion and empathy and how to avoid getting knifed by a junkie in the alleyway.
Y'all colonized the poorest parts of the city and gave the poorest folks nowhere to go, and you still complain when they dare to pop up where you are. I hope all that authenticity and exposed brick in your offices and apartments are worth it.