One major aspect I want to touch on that bother me in the perspective you criticize.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

I also grew up in the south. Interestingly, I always got more harassment for that sort of phrasing from other southerners. Most folks just don't give a shit, oddly. And those that do are often holding themselves back by trying to hold down others.

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. :(

> 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."

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.

> Between "white flight" and "colonizer/gentrifier", you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

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.

I think you're saying the same thing with different words.

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.

I think you're using the term "inhabitants" loosely here. The US doesn't have much of a social safety net, which means that any city that attempts to build one may suddenly find that "its inhabitants" include the 330 million people living in other parts of the country who need help. Or who would just like some money and an opportunity to do meth and fentanyl and shoplift and commit property crime in a place with very little law enforcement. I personally would include that in the definition of "needing help." Any version of "help" that will help in SF will have to be coercive, which is another thing SF's political culture is having tremendous difficulty accepting.

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).

>Y'all colonized the poorest parts of the city and gave the poorest folks nowhere to go...

>One of the wealthiest cities in the world fails to look after its inhabitants...

These are the same thing.

Y'all could both be a little bit right on this, you know.

I agreed with the parent's sentiments initially. But then I saw your comment before the edit, where you had called this "uneducated loser mentality." I'm sad that you edited it, because you're also right.

>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.

It is political choices, but it's not primarily on a city level, or a year-to-year level. The problems in San Francisco are generations in the making and often national in cause. You might read Loewen's "Sundown Towns" for a good look at a key factor to understanding American cities.

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.

For the past hundred years or so, a lot of people moved to SF because it was nothing like Zurich.

It’s not reasonable even for the nouveaux riches of tech to expect to flip a city’s character in a decade.

> there is no reason that SF has to be a lot less safe than Zurich.

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.

I once was walking in downtown with a lady I was dating and a guy who looked homeless and was obviously very high snuck up on me and wrapped his arm around mine and started talking to me. I did not get scared, I just talked to him like he was my best friend. He said, your girlfriend is really pretty, and I said, "Yes, she is is!" and I asked whether he was having a nice day and wasn't the weather great and made small talk about various things. He released his grip on me eventually and walked away and my date didn't even realize, until I told her what happened later that there was any sort of danger. Street people are so used to people being utterly horrified of them that if you treat them like they are a normal human being, they'll be less likely to want to act violent toward you.

I've never felt unsafe in an alleyway in sf. but probably the same as any other city - don't be a dumbass, avoid the alleyways in shady parts of the city, esp at night.

Don't know the junkie.

I can't help but wonder why it's prudent to sweep in for a comment like that, but not any of the comments that have been associating homelessness with murder rates on an article apparently about a dispute between two tech workers. It's almost like the guidelines are catered not towards high-quality discussion so much as an aesthetic of high-quality discussion by protecting the emotions of a specific class of people who would get offended by that comment. Or should I be flagging comments that euphemistically mention the "homeless problem"?

The last thread was full of people advocating a violent police response to the homeless and this is the comment you choose to take a stand over?

Equating poor people with criminals is indeed quite discriminatory. It’s ironic to see that used in a statement from someone who believes themselves to be taking the moral high ground.

Oh please. I'm sure they are totally unrelated.

People love to invent boogiemen where they dehumaize groups of people as uncaring caricatures. It's much easier than confronting the hard problems and feels good.

I mean, if you want to go that route, the SFist has you covered, with this article on "The 10 Most Infamous San Francisco Murders Of The 20th Century"

https://sfist.com/2017/02/28/the_10_most_infamous_san_franci...

How safe you are mostly depends on your gender, size and frankly race. If you are a tall male your experience is simply not comparable to someone that is less able to fend off a physical confrontation.

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.

You're saying mentally ill and poor people have been moving from somewhere else in to SF in large numbers? Where do you get that idea from?

I lived in the Tenderloin for a bit after high school.

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!