Upper Market, North Beach, Hayes Valley, Valencia St, Mission Dolores, Polk Street, Upper Nob Hill, Haight Ashbury -- all fun locations.
I've lived near Dolores Park for the past 15 months now and have had a great experience. I've found community, made new friends, and have never felt unsafe whilst walking around at night.
We don't have highrise buildings or a thriving "downtown" like other urban cities, but we do have plenty of lively, energetic neighborhoods around the city and the best food & weather in the country.
I agree with the author that changes need to be made and that the homelessness problem is bad. But I think you can still have an overwhelmingly positive experience in the city if you pick one of the neighborhoods I mentioned above to live in.
It might sound like an overt policy but in reality it's just the easiest one without doing any real reform or dealing with any of the problems. Like all municipal housing/development policy in the last two decades.
Zoning rarely changes, what's does always change a) the natural expansion of economically productive downtown areas and b) the degree to how bad it is in those very high traffic areas while everyone pretends you can just easily not visit those areas and be fine (despite there being few options to work or build elsewhere).
- And the flagship company to take Ed Lee up on the offer was Twitter - a social media company
- Additionally adding to things is that Union Square butts up against the Tenderloin - making the misery very visible for tourists.
But then, as you note, SOMA is kinda bad to live in. Lots of homelessness, not a whole lot of services, everything shuts down outside of business hours.
Imagine believing SF proper has the best weather in the country
Your year-round weather isn't even as good as neighboring counties.
- someone who lived on the SF peninsula for years, and often regretted trading idyllic weather for a cold, damp dinner night in SF.
The South Bay and the far East Bay can get a little too hot for my taste, but plenty of people prefer that to year round fog/wind in much of SF.
SF is definitely not the best out of the entire coast, and if you consider its cost of living, the weather is trash for the cost. It's notoriously cold and wet for a substantial part of the year.
I made the same mistake moving to SF in 2002, until 2004. It was bad then -- and surprise, surprise, the places with the most availability are the least desirable.
The meme is that tech people are taking over SF. But it's also true that the city is crowded with old money, and new housing / new people starting in 2010 took some of the least desirable spots, including that part of 7th-8th and Mission.
I also biked, and a related thing I learned is you just have to get used to biking up and down hills. It helped my fitness a lot. If you bike in the low-lying areas, it's kind of a shitty experience too.
Now that trend has somewhat flipped. The US has deindustrialized and offshored most heavy industries. Stricter environmental laws have reduced pollution. And civil engineering measures have somewhat reduced flood risk. So, now waterfront residential areas have become expensive and fashionable.
This is just a general trend. We will still see exceptions in SF and other cities.
This is like 2 sq miles of the city, maybe... If you add in Golden Gate Park and Presidio - you're still only at 1/8th of the city being nice. That's not a great ratio.
Especially when the nice parts aren't all connected and you can't venture more than a few blocks until you're out of a nice area (unless you're in one of 2 parks).
If you show up to the city during a boom, you’re probably too focused on living your best life to see the reality of it.
Now, if only 10 or 20 million more people would get out of California, then maybe the population would be back to a reasonable level...
Everyone who can't tell the difference between CA and TX should really just move to TX...
But it doesn't automatically follow that a rough area is "bad" in the way it is in San Francisco. Plenty of cities in Australia, for example, have their share of upmarket and downmarket suburbs. But the lesser suburbs are rarely dangerous and their poor reputation is largely socio-economic, relativistic and/or historical prejudice.
A night out for the unaware can start with an early dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Hayes. You enjoy a performance of La Boheme at the opera, and afterwards walk across the street to look at the beautiful neoclassical architecture of City Hall lit up at night with colors of pride. You walk one more block looking for a nightcap and... What the fuck, why am I surrounded by tents, drug dealers, and someone seizing on the sidewalk from a fentanyl overdose?
I work remote and it's wild how SF people don't realize how insane they sound to others when they talk about what they deal with and try to downplay it as normal or not that bad.
There's just something wrong to me about the entire population of a city having to adjust what they do to cater to the small criminal population, like not being able to leave stuff in your car or your windows will be smashed and your stuff stolen.
That said, many areas of the South are among the most underrated parts of the country so I agree with you there.
It is most definitely not true
So why did I leave?
There were a few events that really upset me. 1) I almost stepped on a shit snake some human left outside my building. 2) A homeless person stopped in front of a mother and child to urinate. 3) The weather sucked; cold and hot.
I went there for the tech scene, but it was just too dirty for me to want to live there.
The only way buildings like Mission at Trinity or Soma Grande make any sense is if you drive in and out of your garage for the most part. For me the walk score of those places is close to zero since you are guaranteed to deal with shit (human feces and/or altercations) if you walk a block or two in any direction from those locations.
I've lived in SF for 29+ years all in lower Nob Hill. When I moved into my place the neighborhood was a little rougher. Over that time it's gotten more and more gentrified, but the Tenderloin/Civic Center area has been getting worse. From 2012 to 2021 I worked in Potrero Hill and commuted back and forth. It was a little too far to walk so I almost never did, but it was also a completely shitty walk since there was no good path that didn't go through the Tenderloin/Civic Center. There's no way I would consider living in that area.
The area thrives on misery. Many of the city's SROs and other services for the homeless are concentrated in the area. All the "non"-profits which benefit from homeless clients are based there. And Civic Center BART seems to be a great place to score drugs and for drug dealers to commute into the city for work.
SF either needs to go all in on a universal basic income, building housing, mental health services and decriminalization of drugs, OR they need to make it clear that shooting up, breaking into cars and shitting on the streets is not ok. Instead we have this half-assed in between approach where we give $1.6 Billion to over 700 different "community based organizations" to try to make the situation better, but instead it's just a big uncoordinated mess.
https://sfgov.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=11635453&GUID=55...
Quite often here, the US and silicon valley are presented as the paradise for tech people, but now it seems to me that it is a paradise only if you can afford a really wealthy area.
Here in Spain salaries can be terrible compared to the US, but even the more "dangerous" cities (like Barcelona or Madrid) are way safer than the SF described by the OP.
At the time I couldn't afford to live in the nice neighborhood. But even then, it's insane that all of that happens 400m away from Macy's, jewelery stores, expensive and fancy restaurants etc.
The value comes from colocation - there is a LOT of tech value here - and that makes the location expensive
it’s a bet that doesn’t pay off for everyone
Also, the conflicted areas of SF are not the whole Bay Area by a long shot
I’m guessing this person moved there for professional reasons if they didn’t even consider moving to any of the other dense parts of San Francisco.
The neighborhoods of San Francisco are: 1. Much more alive than downtown, 2. Safer, 3. Even more “dense” in certain areas given the decline in downtown foot traffic.
The real crux of the issue is that the major west coast cities are being tasked with dealing with a nationwide drug and mental health crisis and there just isn't the money to humanely handle the problem. So you end up with people who correctly say that locking people up in prisons for personal drug use is inhumane and doesn't address their problem, while at the same time other folks correctly point out that people should have access to a clean and safe city and not need to watch for needles and human shit.
The federal government needs to provide funding for the west coast states to build more drug treatment centers, funding to train treatment providers, and more funding for mental health services. There are anti-social people who don't belong in jail but can't be on the street, right now there is nowhere for them to go.
This is the lie told everywhere that the only real solution to affordable housing is gov spending billions on a small set of tenement buildings, that take a decade to build, and are 3x over budget. Instead of reforming municipal policies to reduce rampant NIMBYist roadblocks, rethinking zoning from the ground up, streamlining regulations to make it easier to follow and enforce the rules safely, etc etc.
None of those things require billions of dollars to be committed. Just heart, communication skills, and charisma. There's a mountain of capital and regular people ready to build new housing, lack of capital, or will, or lack of demand to build has never been the problem. To discover the root problem requires asking why it's so rare/expensive despite that reality and why it's so harder today than it was 100yrs ago.
I am pretty sure that _something_ could be done with even a small portion of that _yearly_ ingress of capital.
Of course, if one is the retributive sort, nothing grinds one’s spleen more than someone worse off getting something “they don’t deserve”.
I personally don’t understand why the some exceptionally wealthy billionaire in California doesn’t solve the homelessness problem themselves, expending some mere fraction of their net worth (i.e., the value of a couple bucks to the rest of us).
> My biggest problem with SF was simply not feeling physically safe [...] SF has a pretty low violent crime rate [...] Instead, the problem was that SF [has] thousands of people wandering around who are suffering from untreated substance abuse and/or severe mental illness
So... I guess the idea is that this is leaning extremely hard on "feeling". Author admits they're not unsafe. Author admits that their real issue is that they don't like being near people with drug habits or mental illness. But they still express it in the lede as "physical safety" anyway! Because that's how they "feel"?
Come on folks. Aren't techies like us supposed to be rationalists? Why are we lying to ourselves (and, in this blog post, others) about what we really want?
Sure, the author admits that violent crime rate is under control. But, implicit in his post, is the fact that this is only the case because residents adopt behavioral patterns that remove them from violent crime scenes.
Imagine you live in a neighborhood where walking on the right side of the street results in immediate decapitation. While it's true that you can simply always walk on the left side of the street and be 100% safe, most people would not call that a safe neighborhood.
But the same is true everywhere though. You think that Houston or St. Louis or wherever don't "adopt behavioral patterns" to make themselves feel safer too? Only SF residents are smart enough to make life in the wasteland possible?
No, that's silly. SF isn't unsafe, period. SF residents (specifically ones right here[1]) "feel" unsafe because of an out of control meme. And now it's leading this formerly rationalist and clear-thinking demographic into these ridiculous rhetorical holes.
Cities are cities. They've always been like this. If you don't like it that's fine, but please stop pretending that anything happening in SF is new, or unique, or special in any way. It's just what your microcommunity has decided to yell about this year.
[1] Which doesn't include me. I'm in Portland, having lived in SF previously and grown up in the urban northeast. Cities, again, are cities.
Cities don't have to be like this: by any standard, US cities are much less safe than those in the rest of the developed world. Where it comes to a head in San Francisco in particular is that everything is very heavily mixed together in close proximity, so commuting from a $2M townhouse to work a $300kpa job means you also pass through areas where people are literally dying in the street.
No, not nearly to the same extent.
Whether that's the case or not is actually besides my point.
My point is that OP isn't simply claiming that he "feels unsafe". He's likely claiming that he IS unsafe. And, the only reason his unsafe environment hasn't resulted in physical harm is due to his altered behavior.
That line of reasoning is cogent and rational, and therefore, your claims of emotionalism are largely uncalled for.
This is kind of funny to me considering I'd guess for the majority of America, 4 miles is remarkably close.
And you don't even need to be in shape anymore with e-bikes...
Edit: An idea that came to mind, someone run with this. Bike lockers would be an amazing feature that likely could curb a lot of the issues. Something with a secure lock built in (like biometric or complex pin), 360degree cameras, and an insurance policy. I'd have paid hourly for that service if I still lived in the city.
But of course those spots also mean avoiding poops, drug deals, a homeless person in the 1% group that assaults people, and other general shadiness. Generally fine for a huge man, much worse for a dainty woman.
Lately, with my observation that much of American life is getting much much worse. I often think about leaving America entirely, attempting to hold my breath a little longer to get what America most has to offer these days -- superior compensation/salary.
That being said I also have had a very minimal slice of living in America, for all I know there is some amazing pocket somewhere that I can have it all. But I have yet to find it in California or Texas.
Also, Philadelphia has some quite nice areas that are pretty affordable. And it's an easy train ride away from NYC.
You might have better luck in SLC or Denver.
IBM has tons of jobs in upstate NY - offices in Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse (not exactly a dream employer).
And remote jobs are always an option...
The nice parts of Denver are quite expensive. Detroit has much more to offer in terms of jobs than SLC.
IME there is a pretty large middle band between the extremes of urban and the boondocks where you can come really close to having it all. It's easiest to find if instead of shooting for "all" you make the concession of having to own and use a car a lot - it's an unfortunate tradeoff, but once you accept it, it becomes relatively easy to find places that check the other boxes: decent cost of living, lots of culture/arts opportunities, great food, lots of outdoor activities, good weather, good schools, good safety, good job market, real feeling of community, etc.
The following won't guarantee success and isn't the only method, but it yields lots of good results: take a list of the 50 largest U.S. cities. Cross off the top 15. Cross off any in FL or CA. Randomly pick a remaining city. On a map, find neighboring cities/towns that are 35-45 miles away from that city. For each that looks interesting, go look at their city website. How big is their public library? How many parks do they have? Do they have any sort of annual city history celebration or other big community event? What community service organizations seem most active? (the idea here is to eliminate any that are a soulless suburban sprawl) If you're able, go visit one and even get an airbnb for a couple of weeks and just live there to try it out.
[1]: reddit.com/r/germancitizenship
> much of American life is getting much much worse
This sentiment is real and shared by many people, but keep in mind that many of the things that may be getting worse off in this country are becoming even worse in other countries. In fact, the easiest way to feel better about life here may be just to stop reading the news, in the same way that you're not plugged into the news cycle of, say, Denmark.
There's a lot to see in California and Texas outside of whichever cities you may have lived in, and a lot more to see in the rest of the US outside of those states. I invite you to explore more of it before writing it off.
This is true at a surface level, but looking deeper at City services and obligations the situation is more complex than simply declaring numbers large. San Francisco also has a much larger population of immigrants from all over including other states.
> Second, and even worse, the people in charge including the mayor, the police leadership, and a majority of the Board of Supervisors (the legislative body for SF), really just don’t seem to care one bit about what’s happening. Sure, they will occasionally rant in public and promise to fix things ...
Don't seem to care apart from occasionally promising to fix things. This is classic San Francisco attitude. Difficult longstanding problems are clearly incompetence, disinterest, a conspiracy of corruption, or perhaps all of these. Records and meetings are typically fully public, but actually attending any of that is too much for a member of the public to bear. Maybe so, but then you also are skipping out on your responsibilities and potential to contribute to some kind of positive solution.
SF also has way fewer drug murders than cities I have lived in on the east coast
> Why didn’t you just move to a different part of SF?
> I wanted to live in a dense, central area and not in a single family house that’s 4 miles from downtown. Also, my neighborhood was perfectly nice when I moved in, and then got bad. What’s to prevent that from happening to other places in the city as well?
Obviously OP lived there (by choice) but one of the reasons many business visitors get a bad impression of SF is that they're probably staying and attending an event in, shall we say, not the greatest part of town.
The history of Detroit suggests that that can change very quickly.
My experience is now 10 years old so factor that in. Even then the Lower Haight was still very bad, its just that it wasn't quite as bad as so many other areas. I lived there, trust me. If automatic gunfire, seeing women beaten on the sidewalk by guys jumping out of cars to steal their phones/purses, people pissing everywhere in clear view and vagrants yelling at you trying to start shit sound "normal" to you then you will love the place.
Hayes Valley turned to poo in the time I was there or so it appeared to my eyes. I've been chased by drug addicts who looked like they had leprosy in Columbus area (curiously they operated as a pack with one of them running distraction while the others tried to come up from behind - organized such that we had to literally run from the bunch of them). Even then I didn't like SOMA in general and doubly so for Market street. Walking around in the mornings seeing the cars that had been broken into on the daily. Stepping over people on the sidewalks on my way home at night. Kicking a vagrant out of my girlfriends parking garage (Bay Street - Marina area - the Nice Part).
Want to sit at some out door place with a coffee and be left alone? Forget about that. There were people coming into coffee shops and beating people out of their laptops even. At the time I was a 220 lb male who spent much time in the gym and it was obvious. That didn't stop multiple lunatics from trying to start trouble with me. The BART? Forget about the BART. One lunatic accosted my girlfriend right in front of me and his day ended poorly (this didn't happen just once either).
Want a nice walk through Golden Gate Park - HA!!! Surrounded by the roughest looking bunch of vagrants you've ever seen such that there's no way in hell I'm walking in there. Try walking out of the Safeway grocery market at 2020 Market St sometime with a decent haul of supplies (they're waiting for you).
I suppose if you wanted to live in Cow Hollow/The Marina area and literally never leave it you might have a minimally invasive experience. Not "nothing" mind you, just less than other areas nearby.
A friend invited me to join her on a trip to The City in August and I gave it a hard pass.
I'm sure someone here will pipe up and say Im hyperbolizing here but this was my experience - no - this was a fraction of my experience. 10 years ago it was every bit as bad as this and I have every reason to believe it kept on getting worse after I threw in the towel. Im shocked the pain tolerance of the city has been so high that its just getting attention in the past few years.
Where is the OP moving to? What criteria will be (was) used to make the selection?
A dashboard of the stats and what is being done about it.
From the outside it seems blatantly obvious that it's simply a lack of policing.
I really don't get the animosity of the left-wingers about police, and the way everyone has to pussy-foot around these issues. No one is having issues with police if they aren't breaking the law. This view of the police is so distorted.
The unwavering KPI of every city should be: citizen safety. This is the basic human need, and it should override every other concern.
Here is the solution:
1. You are not allowed to setup a tent on the street. You must stay in housing provided by the government outside of the city in a cheap area. You will be given free transporation there.
2. If you are a repeat offender found to be sleeping on the street, then you will be arrested, and imprisoned.
3. A mental health disorder is not an excuse. If necessary, build a jail that is a mental health treatment center.
I don't get what is so hard about this.
Just make it clear: it's illegal to sleep on the street, loiter, do drugs on the street.
What is the worst thing that happens from this policy implemented fully?
yes, they are. that's why there's "animosity of the left-wingers about police."
> 1. You are not allowed to setup a tent on the street. You must stay in housing provided by the government outside of the city in a cheap area. You will be given free transporation there.
and what about the residents that already live in that "cheap area"? who pays for the construction of the housing - the people within the city limits or the people living in the cheaper area?
> 2. If you are a repeat offender found to be sleeping on the street, then you will be arrested, and imprisoned.
what if it's a family who lost their home? do you separate the children from their parents for the crime of being too poor?
> 3. A mental health disorder is not an excuse. If necessary, build a jail that is a mental health treatment center.
great - how long are you imprisoned if you have a mental health crisis?
> What is the worst thing that happens from this policy implemented fully?
abuse by law enforcement; imprisoning people who need mental health services, not to be locked up with actual criminals; the separation of families who have fallen on hard times; criminalization of poverty; short-sighted solutions which don't actually address the core issues.
The main thing is that OP then uses that to generalize about the state of the entire city. This makes it difficult to actually have a reasonable conversation about what is working and what isn’t in SF because everything reverts to the binary “sf is/isn’t a shithole” argument. In OPs case, it actually exposes the reality behind a lot of these “random tech blogger leaving SF” stories where they don’t actually know much about the city or appear to have much of a social life outside of tech that would expose them to other parts of the city. In SF there are tons of places to live that aren’t “single family homes 4 miles from downtown” - the city is 7x7 square miles.
The way it frames things is weird, though. Not to say SoMa and downtown aren't shitholes that will make you feel unsafe multiple times per day; they are. But most other neighborhoods have a much safer vibe, and many of them are literally a 10 minute bus ride to downtown. His pooh-poohing the idea of moving to a different neighborhood is just weird. (If he were complaining about the school system or something being disfunctional or cost of living being too high, then his critique of SF as a whole would make a lot more sense.)
He can't really take his experiences living a block from 6th Street and apply them to the whole of SF, and he must be aware of that, or be particularly clueless.
Is that 10-minute bus ride a pleasant experience on a daily basis? If you live in a quiet part of the city but must commute back and forth to downtown during which you run a non-negligible risk of a particular unpleasant encounter, then you don't gain a whole lot by being in that quiet part.
However, you do gain a whole lot living in a quiet area compared to living in the middle of the shitshow, and it's not close to comparable.
He could walk four blocks in any direction and have a dramatically safer and more enjoyable experience.
Now, if only 10 or 20 million more people would get out of California, then maybe the population would be back to a reasonable level...
Everyone who can't tell the difference between CA and TX should really just move to TX...
OP: stays , writes whole essay about obvious things everyone left for 4 years ago, leaves
> My biggest problem with SF was simply not feeling physically safe while walking down the street or sitting in a train. SF has a pretty low violent crime rate, at least by US standards, so I wasn’t worried about getting shot or robbed or anything like that.
> Instead, the problem was that SF had (and still has today), thousands of people wandering around who are suffering from untreated substance abuse and/or severe mental illness. The vast majority of these folks were completely harmless, but a small percentage were hostile, threatening, and, in some cases, violent.
> In multiple cases over the last few years, I was followed, screamed at, and threatened in broad daylight. Thankfully, nothing physically happened to me, but it’s a really jarring experience to have this happen. Each time I reported these incidents to the police, they never responded. I got the sense that as long as no one was physically harmed, they didn’t really care. Thus, there were no mechanisms in place to control, contain, or treat this behavior.
Take the <$950 theft being classified as misdemeanor, not crime plus general overload of the system means cops don't even bother.
So now you have a theft that isn't reported.
Crime goes down.
What hurts SF is a perfect environment for people to be homeless, and thus all the associated problems from homelessness. Rather than murder, rape, home invasion, etc it’s a host of lesser but still unpleasant things.
> they would seem defiant of the most common kind of testimonials of the quarter-million-plus people who have left the area.
Most people leave because it is too full/expensive. The city (and Bay Area) cycles in and out people, it always has. But an equilibrium is always reached where it is still expensive but not expensive enough to lose population.
The result was no one was investigating or prosecuting crimes anymore. Everyone predicted what would happen next is that the pundits, the news media, and the politicians would point to "see crime is actually trending downwards the numbers are going down." when in reality police were no longer as responsive, at the same time people would stop calling the police because the wait times would be too long and they know nothing would happen.
This is what's happening, and I will not be convinced otherwise. 2+2=4
As a thought experiment what would be the best way to seize the assets of downtown building owners or at least buy them in a metaphorical fire sale? Blockbusting! The background and history of the term is left as an exercise to the reader.
https://www.safehome.org/resources/crime-statistics-by-state...
