[ahuth]

SF certainly has its challenges. But in my 9 years of working in the financial district I never saw something like this.

Obviously others will have different experiences than me.

Point is, you can find crime and bad things in any city. San Francisco has work to do, but isn't the hell-hole people or the news make it out to be.

[fosk]

SF is a deeply challenging city, and you really appreciate this by traveling and visiting other cities. You are constantly on alert, in ways that simply you are not in other places despite the fact that there are “good and bad” parts of town everywhere else.

Perhaps caused by the unpredictability in SF of often finding “bad” in “good” parts of town, with unpredictable drug addict behavior on top, which adds to the unpredictability of the bad experiences.

Anecdotally, my family got assaulted with a hammer in a “good” part of town, while carrying our 6 months old in a stroller. The individual was visibly on drugs. There is no amount of “bad” in other cities that results in hammering and smashing the back window of a car - assaulting a young family and traumatizing a newborn - for nothing. It’s unwarranted violence, it wasn’t even a robbery. I travel 150k miles a year all over the world, including 3rd world countries, and I have only felt unsafe in San Francisco.

And I have a lot more examples like this one. A friend of mine got assaulted with a baseball bat in SoMa by an individual that wanted to steal their dog for drug money, for example.

The whole town is a social experiment where we put families and working individuals into a drug den and see what happens.

[JohnMakin]

These anecdotes aren’t unique to a city like SF though. I can find similar stories in my relatively small but dense suburb. The statistics just do not back up the claims that SF is uniquely dangerous or has worse problems than anywhere else of that size/density.

[fosk]

> These anecdotes aren’t unique to a city like SF though.

But they are, because this is city that has established a record $1B+/year budget to solve the problem, without setting up a rigorous process to be accountable on how that money is being spent, with corruption cases (and arrests) linked to the recipients of those public funds [1][2].

Quite unique, indeed.

[JohnMakin]

This speaks more to the inefficacy of the solution than the uniqueness of the problem to SF. Their problems are not unique, but as you pointed out, maybe the inefficacy of their solution is.

[Log_out_]

But what if you run out of air superiority and money to bribe those paying for this special party. And to have this is constant free adverisement for the right wingnuts..

[iancmceachern]

I live and have an engineering office in SOMA and I've had the exact opposite experience.

In 8 years living here my dog has been viciously attacked twice, we've had people attack us on the Embarcadero and around the sidewalks and parks in our neighborhood, and just yesterday I was lamenting that there was a time in my past where I wasn't comfortable around drug use. Now when I walk out of my office and see someone smoking whatever or I injecting whatever else it's just normal to me.

That's the problem in this city, living like this, all of us, normalizes all these things that shouldn't be.

[dijit]

Even when I was there for GDC one week this year there was a young black woman who was being detained for assaulting an asian lady.

Would be somewhat normal except she started attacking the officer, stripping off and screaming racist slurs. She was clearly on drugs- which gave pause to the seriously large amount of homelessness and drug use that seemed incredibly normalised on my short commute from Mission to the Moscone Centrr

[presentation]

For what it’s worth homeless people were having sex on the windows of our office, another guy blocked our door by passing out with a needle next to him, and someone was stabbed and killed at a restaurant on the same block as my office within half a year of me being there. I also got yelled racial slurs and others tried to provoke me to fight them regularly.

[ianhawes]

Thats odd because SF _has_ been the hell-hole people and the media have described it as in my own experiences.

It would seem to me that Chicago, NYC, LA do have "bad parts" but they're distinctly separate from the "good parts". San Francisco's bad parts and good parts have evidently merged.

I do not understand why people who live in SF have to effectively gaslight themselves into believing that the breakdown of certain basic tenants of society is part of the culture of their city.

[VancouverMan]

> I do not understand why people who live in SF have to effectively gaslight themselves into believing that the breakdown of certain basic tenants of society is part of the culture of their city.

That phenomenon isn't isolated to San Francisco, nor even to the US. The same mindset is also widespread in "progressive" Canadian cities like Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa, for example.

From what I can tell, one of the main pillars of the "progressive" ideology that's prevalent in such cities is that certain specific groups of people are declared to be "victims" or "disadvantaged", and these people are put on a pedestal and held in high esteem for some reason, no matter how awful they behave in public.

I suspect that most "progressives" inherently know that these sanctified people aren't the "victims" they're ideologically portrayed as being. Even if the "progressives" don't openly admit it, they themselves don't like dodging human feces on the sidewalk, nor the stench of urine emanating from building walls, nor used needles left in parks, nor addicts overdosing in bus shelters, nor smelly unwashed hobos sleeping on public transit, nor aggressive panhandlers demanding money from passersby, nor crucial retail stores closing due to rampant shoplifting, and so forth.

Yet, these "progressives" seem unwilling to admit that this main pillar of their ideology is fundamentally wrong. Perhaps they know that if they admit this, even to themselves, then the rest of their belief system will inevitably come crashing down because it, too, isn't built on reality.

[archagon]

Consider it an overcorrection to the sick and routine dehumanization of these individuals. I’ve actually seen people on this site say that they laugh at drug addicts on the street. If they could lock them in a dungeon and throw away the key, I’m sure they’d do it in a heartbeat.

[onepointsixC]

This has been a legitimate problem of progressivism which strongly holds it back from gaining more popularity. You cannot be for public transit and environmentalism while simultaneously being against punishing anti social behaviors on public transit. If public transport doesn’t feel safe to riders they will use personal transport instead. But the notion that some people may hold some responsibility for where they may be in life by their own decisions is so repulsive that instead no one can be held accountable for the most extreme behavior in broad day light. Liberals should be thankful that Conservatives have collectively tied an anchor around their necks to someone so broadly repulsive and criminal as Trump, as if there were simply a boring Conservative alternative elections would have been blowouts against them.

[ahuth]

As I said, everyone's experience has been different. Sorry you've had a bad experience in SF. This just hasn't been my experience (no gaslighting involved...)

[anon291]

I honestly think people like ahuth honestly don't see these sorts of things. I've found that a substantial portion of people who live in my lovely city of Portland for example, simply are not very good at observation, and will happily walk by incredibly dangerous situations and never notice. I've had to point out to my very progressive in-laws for example, needles in parks, drug deals in broad daylight, guns, etc, that they honestly just do not see. This complete lack of awareness is very common among a certain subset of residents, especially in cities, and probably explains why they vote the way they do.

I'm not sure how to go about teaching situational awareness, but I imagine voting patterns would change if people were aware at all.

[channel_t]

Portlander here since the late 90s. Downtown for much of it. I think most people are very aware, but just aren't really too concerned about it. Well, about drugs anyway. A certain degree of "live and let live" and just general anarchism is embedded into the DNA of the city. Everything going on in Portland today are the same things that have been going on in the city for decades, it's just become much more visceral and in your face over time as the American landscape has changed. Drugs are harder now. Resources are more constrained. Everything is more competitive. It's just not nearly as easy to get by. Guns are a different story, however. I think everyone of all stripes are pretty collectively worried about that. I don't know what the answer to all these problems are, but I think it comes from US society as a whole becoming more introspective about how we ended up here to begin with.

[plorkyeran]

Perhaps these situations just aren't as dangerous as you think? I can understand not wanting to see drug deals happening out in the open, but it's less of a threat to your personal safety than crossing a busy street.

[anon291]

Given the fact that I live happily in Portland, I think it's safe to say I don't find these situations necessarily dangerous. However, I'm aware they exist, which many of my neighbors are not.

Again, I do think voting patterns would change if people were simply aware of their surroundings.