Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by babesh 1928 days ago
I was born in and grew up in SF. I still go once in awhile. SF got a lot worse.

I didn’t grow up with tents surrounding City Hall nor tents lining the sidewalk in the Tenderloin.

Go look at Polk Street in Nob Hill. Go look at Van Ness. Go look at the Castro. Those aren’t SOMA or the Tenderloin. I saw a smashed bus shelter right off Van Ness. I saw graffiti and garbage on the sidewalk in Nob Hill. There are multiple tents pitched right off the freeway off ramp in the Castro.

The problem of SF is not affordability. It is that its policies make it a honeypot for homeless. These people are in no shape at all to work. Think mental issues, drug abuse, etc...

These issues are societal and not limited to SF. Furthermore, SF’s policies don’t seem to be helping at all.

If you want to contain it, turn Salesforce tower into a homeless shelter and ban tents on sidewalks. Establish work programs to clean up street. Perhaps some of the people will turn around their lives.

The towns and cities on the Peninsula are probably laughing at SF. All the homeless are drawn to SF and have disappeared from their sidewalks.

Many towns on the Peninsula are not cool with homeless pitching tents on sidewalks. They get their tents taken down and are directed to homeless shelters.

SF seems ok with it, so all the homeless go there and pitch tents. Homeless elsewhere hear about this and head off to SF. SF politicians run on leftist agendas and then pour money into this endless pit.

1 comments

> The towns and cities on the Peninsula are probably laughing at SF. All the homeless are drawn to SF and have disappeared from their sidewalks.

Haha absolutely wrong. While not as bad as SF, homeless issues everywhere else in the Bay have also gotten much worse. Mountain View, San Jose, Fremont, Oakland, everywhere.

Nope. It seems better in Belmont, San Carlos, Burlingame, San Mateo, and Millbrae. Don’t notice the homeless hanging around CalTrain stops anymore. There used to be a few tents pitched along the tracks upper Peninsula. I don’t see those anymore. There is zero discussion of tents in social media mid Peninsula. Discussion is only focused on providing food and isolated cases of people losing jobs.
It may be worse in Mountain View or San Jose, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem worse in Fremont, at least the parts that I go to. Also, my relatives and friends who live there aren’t complaining. My friends who lived in SF were complaining loudly before they moved out.
Think homeless encampment in an empty lot right next door (not the Tenderloin nor SOMA).
You don’t have to believe me. Go check out videos on YouTube. Use your own eyes.

https://youtu.be/1tv0FjfGbUs https://youtu.be/HmOIQv0yu-U

Now search for other cities in the Bay. Go see what you find.

I quoted a specific line of yours that purported the rest of the Bay's homeless situation was improving, to the detriment of SF. Linking videos of increasing homeless in SF tells us nothing about the rest of the Bay's situation.

I don't need to "search" youtube videos of the rest of the Bay to get a more accurate picture. I guess I can't speak for that tiny population-slice of the peninsula you did mention, but for the rest I'm all over the rest of the Bay's towns constantly and saying homeless populations "have disappeared from their sidewalks" is quite the overstatement.

You also probably shouldn't scatter your replies across many different nested comments elsewhere?

The paragraph specified the Peninsula. None of the cities you mentioned are even on the Peninsula. San Jose, Fremont, Mountain View, Oakland. None of them are in the Peninsula.

You may be right about those cities that you mentioned but my statement did not apply to them. I don’t know enough about them. I have been to Oakland recently. It’s bad. I have also been to Fremont and Milpitas. The parts I have been to don’t look worse. But who knows.

I don’t know how to gauge the Bay as a whole. That encompasses a very large region that I don’t think many have a good grasp of. The areas you mention don’t even make up half the Bay Area in area yet you are so willing to denigrate what I saw.

You are right, I should have linked to videos of the other cities. I can’t find any for several of the cities on the Peninsula. I did find two on San Jose. One says that it is bad in a specific area and the other is a protest against sweeps of that area by the police.

https://youtu.be/HXq7cXR4r2U https://youtu.be/PGLCHhH5vxY

Sure I could've focused on explicitly the Peninsula like you originally mentioned, but 75% of the Peninsula is living in Redwood City, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, not the 4 adjacent tiny towns you mentioned + San Mateo.
So go add focus on those towns as well or go limit it to mid Peninsula.
Oakland doesn’t count. It has the same policies as SF and has gotten worse.
Check out the tents off I-880.