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How bad is it to live in San Francisco?
Non-SFOite here. I’ve heard twice over the weekend how “bad and unlivable” San Francisco (proper) has become. Someone referred to it as a “failed city”, and “worse than LA”.
I’ve been to both cities and I’ve seen the tent cities in LA fashion district.
I’m curious to know if it truly had gotten that bad or if it’s just people being hyperbolic (like entire city level collapse).
I lived in downtown Oakland in 2021, so same region, but slightly different situation. The bay area just has a huge crime issue. It is not an issue of making sure you stay out of bad areas or don't go to secluded streets at night. I was attacked in broad daylight on Broadway in Oakland surrounded by people in front of the Marriot and Wells Fargo. My friend's mom was in the Berkely/Oakland hills, also in the middle of the day, where rich people have large fancy homes and was attacked and had her purse stolen.
Crime is a full time job for people over there. People in new luxury cars drive around all day smashing car windows to steal things. The police just don't show up to calls for hours. There's a general feeling of lawlessness and distrust in the bay that I haven't experienced even in other similarly sized metro areas.
There are so many guns that being shot is actually something I would think about. I was surprised that when I visited NYC, I never felt concerned for my safety. There are mentally ill people, homeless people, and weirdos there, but you can trust that most people are not carrying guns in NYC.
Normally, if you make enough money, you can insulate yourself from crime, but in the bay, it is not something anyone can completely escape.
Edit:
I also want to add that the problems in the bay area would not be "better" under a conservative government. The two major US political parties do not have the answer to the problems of the bay area. Similarly, the California Democratic Party and the New York Democratic Party are not the same groups with the same ideals. It's Californians that cause the problems in California and I say that as a California native and resident. California is controlled in large part by voters who happened to own property in the right place at the right time who want to keep their wealth and the status quo.
Yeah, I have a similar sentiment as well. I lived in the east bay for several years and I can attest that you can't really get away from the crime. My motorcycle was stolen a few months before I moved away, and I lived with a gated parking garage with it being parked on the top floor. Eventually it was located and abandoned in downtown SF.
Some parts of the city are fine, but that doesn't mean you won't at bare minimum get your car broken into at any part of the city. I think the times that I felt most unsafe was walking around Civic Center and the Tenderloin. I felt more safe in western Ukraine last October than I did in many parts of the city. Riding BART was always a mixed bag too. Some days were smooth and easy. Other days, you had people doing hard drugs and leaving their needles everywhere.
Living in the bay area was such a surreal experience. On the one hand, I had never seen more BMWs, Mercedes, Teslas, Audis, and other high end cars being driven around as well as so many multimillion dollar houses. On the other side was an equal amount of homeless encampments, crime, and other indicators of poverty.
I would say that SF is a failed city in the sense that people envision it to be this wonderful liberal and progressive paradise in the US when in reality it paints the perfect picture of a limousine liberal. I got the sense that the people there are socially liberal but fiscally conservative. If any policy cost the people stock options, housing value, or any other demonstrable loss of any value on their end, they would oppose it.
This is fairly true. Berkeley is a really bad example of this. A lot of multimillion dollar houses that have NIMBY signs in their front lawn. These signs are right alongside progressive signs like BLM, embrace love not hate, etc. And it's, like, NIMBYism is inherently exclusionary and by its very nature enforces a homogeneous, aging community. Just old liberals who got theirs and really don't see how their selfish nature harms communities and are unaware of how poor of an opinion younger liberals have of them.
I remember walking around Berkeley and I found a real estate office with charts taped up inside its windows that showed how their clients were getting great returns on their real estate investments and I couldn't help but think "I have non-engineer friends who are struggling to afford their one bedrooms."
A friend of mine returned from a trip to Rome a few weeks back and she was telling me when she got mugged in the middle of the day. She expressed to the local police how stupid she felt for letting that happen to herself as she'd been the one on the trip urging everyone to stay safe, keep an eye on their valuable, etc. The officer simply said "Ma'am, it's okay, our criminals have master degrees". Which I find to be a hilarious and surprisingly reassuring response from a police officer. Sounds like the criminals in SF/Oakland went to the same crime graduate school their Roman counterparts.
But anyway, why do you think it's like that? I'm hesitant to even suggest the answer is "more police", but are the police spread too thin currently? Are the housing and job situations so bad in that area that people aren't left with much choice but to turn to crime? As an east coaster in a fairly rural state, I appreciate a lot of the things California does for its citizens, but I just don't get why they haven't figured out a good, progressive solution to the crime and homelessness problems. If ever there were a state in the US poised to tackle those problems in a humane way once and for all, I feel like it's California.
I'm not sure if it's politically viable any more, but I do think people have a distorted view of the police problem in the US. On a per capita basis, the US is ranked #141th for number of police officers. That's right, #141. We're dramatically behind essentially all of Europe as well as the Asian Tigers in terms of both police numbers and spending per capita.
I think the police reform we need, in the model of those peers which have significantly better public safety and far less deaths from law enforcement, is more police and more elite police. Right now we don't have enough on a per capita basis, and they're also bottom of the barrel, and unfireable at that. The civilians we entrust the power to be armed should be well educated, well paid, and have major consequences for fuck-ups, which is how it works like everywhere else in the developed world.
All that aside, a major part of the poverty is just the absolute refusal to build more housing. A large part of SF is less dense than some suburbs, with zoning only allowing one story single family homes.
My first though was to wonder if this might be a classification issue: does this really count "police officers" in the strictest sense, and thus exclude things like sheriffs, jail and prison guards, marshals, and other law enforcement personnel? The answer appears to be at least somewhat yes, but to an unclear degree.
The wikipedia page for "List of countries by number of police officers" ranks the US at #101 with 242 police officers per 100k inhabitants. It also says that the worldwide median is 300 per 100k.
But the FBI page that wikipedia sources does seem to indicate that this is a somewhat narrow definition, though it's unclear by how much. The total 697,195 that the wikipedia page counts are explicitly "officers," while the total number of law enforcement employees is nearly 50% higher at 1,003,270.
So if we use the narrowest possible version of "police officer," the US has 80% of the median per capita number. If we use the broadest definition by counting all law enforcement employees, the US is at 116% of the median.
Unfortunately, I don't easily see a breakdown of the rest of those employee roles to know how many of them should reasonably be counted, much less see a version of that for every other nation to make sure that we're counting consistently. So I don't see an easy way to determine where in that 80%-116% range we are.
If you have some better or more detailed sources, I would love to see them.
As a lifelong Californian and Bay Area native, my view is this (and it may not be right): people have been living here their whole lives and are being pushed further and further away from where they like to spend time because of the boom in our tech towns. A lot of people can't afford to live where they work, nor get educated in the state because it's so expensive, but leaving is just as expensive (and going to school elsewhere almost guarantees out-of-state tuition, which is stupidly high). When there is no money to go around because of those who are hoarding it (the NIMBYs), those that don't have will learn to adapt. The high crime is the adaptation. Steal from the rich because there is no other way. The other thing that happens when there is not enough money to go around is kids get bored because they don't have anything to do (because it's too expensive). So what do kids do when they're bored and don't have anything to do or anywhere to go? They get into trouble.
I was that troublemaking teen who didn't have anywhere to go between school and dance rehearsal. I was left alone for hours at a time after school and I definitely wasn't doing homework.
I think these people were kids who didn't have anywhere to go or anything to do, and now they're adults who don't know anything else. Just stealing because they can. Breaking things because they can, and/or to get back at the rich who drove them out of their home.
edit: another thought I had while thinking on the NIMBY situation (which is a huge problem all over the greater Bay Area, not just SF): I remember a story where there was a plan in SF for affordable and low income housing to be built along with housing specifically for the homeless so they can get services near the water and the people living in the houses there threw an entire fit and campaigned until the project was canceled because how dare we try to lower their property values. This is the story of the entire bay area, but this was just the worst example of it. I'll look to see if I can find the article and edit again with the link.
I have a friend who works for BART and he regularly reports when trains are delayed due to crime in our Discord. There is a stabbing roughly every two weeks.
A few weeks ago, I saw someone tuck a gun in their pants in front of me at a BART station and I reported it. They apprehended the suspect but I did get to talk to an officer and he said that ghost guns are a huge problem and that they have caught kids as young as twelve who were packing.
One of the stations was closed because of a sideshow (where a bunch of people drive their cars into intersections and just start partying) that grew out of control and a car was lit on fire.
I use to live in SF, and was there a few months back to visit some friends that still do.
I mean, no, I won't comment on its relative positioning next to LA, but it's certainly not "unlivable". Believe it or not, there are plenty of people living there, and predominately wealthy at that.
That being said, it's not in great shape. There's a reason why SF is one of the few cities whose rent has gone down over the last few years, and it's certainly not because they've built more housing.
Crime is high. Mostly petty crime like theft. The thing about crime statistics is that it's really not felt that directly as an individual. A city having 2% higher crime is quite bad, but just mathematically as an individual it's unlikely that you directly experience that, y'know.
What matters more is how it changes behavior. You have to think about where you're going when you're at night, to avoid areas like the Tenderloin or honestly most of market street. There's a catch-22 where the public transit is pretty mid, to bad, but driving is also quite bad, with a lot of traffic, tiny and expensive parking, and a ridiculous amount of car breakins. Anyone who stays in the bay knows not to have anything visible in their car, or they'll soon learn anyway.
The city government has been frustrating, and it's definitely not partisan politics this time. Their refusal to allow for zoning reform, to the point where Newsom is yelling at them, is really dumb. Things like Prop F which has driven many employers just outside of city limits just seem counterproductive.
The city definitely smells awful, for what it's worth. And there is human poop occasionally, although if you're not in the Tenderloin it's really not that common.
I'd be interested in what you mean by this. If you're talking about feeling unsafe when riding transit, I wouldn't refute that as I think that's widely based on personal experiences/tolerances. But if you're talking about accessibility to places SF is at the top with NY in the US. Living in SF right now, I find the transit really good and use it to go everywhere. I'm actually selling my car this month because I never need to use in it the city.
No, I just think it's bad. I don't think it's particularly close to NY, and I think Chicago and Boston have better transit systems amongst the other places I've lived.
The most condensed version of my experience is what I call the Google Maps test. Take two random places in the city, and swap between the public transit and car tabs and see how much the delta is. It's quite dire in SF, and it's really an underestimate because anytime you have to transfer between MUNI and a bus or between a bus and a bus is an opportunity for fuckery to occur.
I mean if you happen to be traveling between somewhere on market and somewhere on mission it's fine I guess. Otherwise, it's hilarious that BART and every MUNI line goes through the same ass tunnel. MUNI is clean but slow, and there are just vast swathes of the city it does not go to. The buses are inconsistent, often delayed, or even worse, early.
If I had an appointment, say a doctor's appointment, I would frequently have to start more than a hour early to make sure I get there in time. FFS, the city is only 9 miles wide!
The only saving grace is that it is tiny, and Ubers aren't that expensive (compared to NY anyway). God I had to take a lot of Ubers.
Fair enough. I've never been to Chicago or Boston so I can't compare it to that (although I grew up in Tokyo but I don't think it's fair to compare US cities to major Asian/European cities lol).
I guess I don't think much about distance travel, just time spent on the MUNI or bus to get to where I need to. 90% of my trips are around 20 minutes, 5% are around 40 minutes, and very rarely do I hit the hour mark. The point being, the great thing about SF is that most of the time you don't need to travel far to get what you need (grocery, doctors, etc...), which is why SF's walk score is at the top of the charts. But if you're measure strictly on how fast per mile the transit travels in SF then I'd agree with you.
I live in Berlin and I constantly complain about the trains here until I visit the US and remember how absolutely dogshit public transport is there. Even the "good" cities are awful compared to almost anywhere in Europe. It's extremely depressing.
This is basically the story of public transportation in all of the places in the bay where I've lived. The best was Foster City, and even that was garbage, but there was a free shuttle that went around every once in a while in the early 2000's so if you missed the first bus, you could get that free shuttle. It was slow and made fewer stops, and was really not meant for anyone other than the elderly, but they would pick anyone up. Students were expected to take the city buses, and if you wanted to go to the mall in San Mateo or the Caltrain station across the street from it (a few miles away), you were on a bus ride that took almost an hour and was never on time, it would always be early or late and every time it left early, you had to wait almost an hour to get the next one.
I guess I'm the first one here to top-level comment that currently lives in San Francisco. It deserves some of the criticism it gets. As others have said, property crime is high all over the city. I wish I had any answers for this, but I think the problem is super complicated and I think the first real step towards a solution involves hiring/electing people who have a deep understanding of the city and the surrounding area.
I'm a grown man, so take this with whatever sized grain of salt is appropriate - but I do feel safe during the day in the vast majority of places in the city. There are only a handful of places where I would ever truly let my guard down, though. Being out at night requires a little more attentiveness but I'm still generally avoiding the places that I would be avoiding during the day.
My primary concern when I am out and about, especially by myself, is to avoid drawing attention to myself whenever possible. I take public transit to get to nearby stuff when I can, mostly to avoid having to think about parking. I have never felt unsafe on a bus, but I'm not a daily rider. BART I do not ride frequently enough to have an opinion that I think is worth sharing.
I really do like living in the city. There is cool stuff to do, cool and interesting people to meet, and at least for now, I am willing to pay the price premium to live here. Long term I don't see myself staying, but that's not because it's "a failed city". Honestly I'm not sure I would value the opinion on the subject of anyone who doesn't live here themselves.
I don't currently live in San Francisco, but I am a former resident and I visited two weeks ago to see some friends. It's certainly worse than it used to be before COVID and locals would probably say that it was even better in the early 2000s.
As for the reality of the city, there are indeed encampments in the sketchy parts of SF and there are many crazies/drug addicts screaming at people on the streets. There is a big problem with petty crime, theft and car break-ins. All that said, there are plenty of very fancy neighborhoods with multi-million dollar houses and gated communities both in SF proper and in the surrounding area.
I wouldn't want to live there now that I have a kid, but it is no more a "failed city" than anywhere else on the West Coast - San Diego, LA, Portland, Seattle and even Vancouver all have huge homeless problems (I've seen tent cities in all of those).
To answer your question - it is likely going to be judged "bad and unlivable" by the median American, but it is definitely not collapsing and some demographics such as students and young professionals could still enjoy the walkability, the parks, the bars and the beautiful nature.
I live in Oakland, and I love San Francisco and always have since I was a child coming to visit relatives in the Bay Area. It's weird, diverse, and filled with interesting people trying to change the world and move culture. I'm queer and a minority.
And I think San Francisco is a failed city.
I used to live in Amsterdam, so I've experienced a hyper-liberal, diverse, tolerant city that's also clean, safe, and has fantastic public transit. Amsterdam has its own problems, but it's way closer to the liberal utopia than SF is. It's living proof that the opposite of 'safe' isn't 'boring': a city can both be safe and vibrant. So I don't accept the argument that crime and disorder are inherent urban features.
Crime is palpable, despite what the stats say. Everyone I know has been victimized at one point or another. A friend got jumped and had their leg broken when he left a Folsom gay bar to walk home in SoMa. Another person in a gay pup group was also attacked and hospitalized several months ago.
I don't know if broken window theory is real or not, but it feels real to me: public disorder has devoured the downtown and feeds more public disorder. I often bike by UN Plaza and see crowds of men buy and sell drugs with impunity. Fentanyl flows through the city: there are on average 2 OD deaths every single day.
The city is progressive yet makes little progress. Its aging, home-owning liberal voters are like conservatives in trying to cling to a past they fondly remember but is in fact already gone as the world at large has changed and moved on. Neighborhoods look nearly the same way they do decades ago with few new buildings. Little new housing has been built.
It's a city that didn't want to see or embrace the challenges and possibilities of the future, but then that future arrived anyway and is now — and that collision, in my opinion, is what's behind many present problems.
I love SF. It's queer and interesting. I would lose my mind living in a suburb or a vanilla city like San Jose or Milwaukee. But it's hard to imagine a longterm future here.
As a counterpoint to thinking elsewhere is vanilla: I live in Mountain View and love San Jose. There are so many more parts to it than just Santana Row. The food scene in SJ is as good as SF, and in my opinion, more affordable.
Unsure where to put this next bit, but:
My best friend lives in SF so I visit her a lot. I try not to drive in or to the city because I hate driving in general, but I'll drive to see her. I also had grandparents and great-grandparents live in SF my whole life until they passed away, so I was in the city a lot growing up and have seen it change a ton since I was a kid. I have never liked being in the city because it's too much for me. It's too loud, it's too many hills, it's too many options and people.
I've personally never had issues with car break-ins or been mugged or even bothered by the homeless, but I know it happens. I just have been very lucky in my 32 years to never have that problem. I've even gone geocaching in the city with just one other friend, who also had family there and lived in the city for a few years. It's very much one of those things that if you give off tourist vibes, you're going to be targeted, I guess.
I still hate going to the city and will do everything I can to avoid going out when I visit my BFF if we can. Sometimes we will go to local places near her house or do something else in walking distance.
I would love for the government to be able to make some progress to help the city's inhabitants, housed and unhoused, find a tenable situation. I would love for the drug issues to go away, or be lessened. There is so much going on that it's impossible to tackle all of the city's issues at once. I think a huge start would be to rezone all of the now-empty corporate offices to be housing and have them renovated to be affordable and low-income housing, especially if there can be shops on the ground floor and potentially some social services also available in the building.
The fact someone created an app to track human feces in the city should tell you something. Most places you live do not have parking available, so you can drive in circles for an hour to find somewhere for your car. Now, that isn't the end of the world, but imagine you just went grocery shopping. That may not be a problem, but SF is very hilly. I have photos of me standing in on a street where I was leaning nearly 45 degrees to be vertical by gravity's standards. Now imagine carrying your groceries up or down that hill.
Next, even the cops don't stop at stop signs, so you are constantly on edge wondering when the next person will hit you. And another thing about parking, people will try to fit their cars into the smallest spots, so they'll bump the cars in front and behind so they know when to stop and change gears.
Don't get me wrong, the city has it's beautiful parts. My favorite being Fort Point under the Golden Gate Bridge. On the other hand, it can be incredibly fake. Almost every photo you see of someone at Alcatraz is them in front of a banner that they probably paid $50 for. It is a joke. I'd rather avoid the bridge toll and go visit some of the nicer areas of Oakland.
It has gotten worse, but IMO most of the problem isn't acute to SF.
Crime - Feels like post BLM, police departments in urban cities have gone on a silent strike. "If you are going to make them police the right way, then they aren't going to police at all." Criminals understand this and is taking advantage of the situation.
Car Theft - KIA boyz/cat converter theft/window breakin. Pretty sure you can find local news articles on this for just about every major city.
Drug problem - I think fentanyl is the "crack cocaine" of the present era and it's fueling the problems we see on the streets.
Homelessness - It's easy to point to the lack of housing (and the cost of housing) in SF, but the weather + access to homeless resources + clear attempts by other places to bus their homeless. Pretty common problem all along the west coast.
Mental Health - Pretty sure this is a national crisis.
All this to say that I'm in no way an apologist for the issues in SF. It's bad, locals are tired of it, and it doesn't seem like it's getting better anytime soon.
I've lived in Redwood City for 5 years now and have visited SF many times. I agree that the burbs are excellent - they're also some of the most NIMBY regions of the country and I'm not going to bother trying to buy a house there. But in Redwood City I'd only ever notice a handful of homeless people, and maybe only once in my time there did I notice one causing trouble in public.
I've never been in a situation where I felt unsafe in SF, though. I'm sure people get mugged but it's not a place known for violent crime. Basically as long as you only park your car in a garage you'll probably be fine. And if you live there without garage access you should just not own a car at all. It's actually a very walkable city so you can get away with that.
The city's a little grimy, but I don't think I've been to a major US city where that isn't the case. Overall I'd say that even with as many homeless people as there are it's not the homeless that are the major issue. The housed people are being driven out because the cost is unreasonable. And of course unreasonably expensive rental prices are one of the reasons for the city's homeless population.
uhhh.... seeing how bad the area is right next to them can you really blame them? I would be the most NIMBY person on the planet if I lived in the suburbs outside of SF.
I'm not sure that makes all that much sense? It's not like SF is some zoning free-for-all. It's the reverse, SF has incredibly restrictive zoning, the majority of SF is arguably zoned more harshly than the surrounding area, and is comprised of tiny, one story single family homes from the 1920s.
Yes, you can blame them. Their refusal to have more housing built is what's causing the problem in the first place. Their NIMBYism is the very root of the problem, and then they use the problem to argue that it's important that nothing change (for them.)
I recognize that their resistance to change is based on a system of retirement savings that requires significant amounts of people's assets be tied up in a house, and so their NIMBYism is defending their ability to retire, but it's hurting everyone for them to fight this battle, and I really don't see a way to change how Americans save for retirement.
I don’t understand how having large apartment buildings will turn Palo Alto into SF.
Maybe the rate is slightly lower but I've definitely had cars broken into in San Jose and Santa Clara.
The only time my car was vandalized in the 7 years (2015-2022) I lived in the Bay Area was at the Santa Clara CalTrain stop. Got off the train to find two of my tires had punctured sidewalls and were flat.
I attend a meetup every month in SF. The attendees for the most part are lower income (due to discrimination), so in a sense their complaints about livability should carry a lot of weight. That said, I’ve not heard one lick of the OP post from them.
SF is a big, populous city. Which means that claims of a failed city are kinda absurd because signs of a failed city like Detroit are not present at all there. The populace alone in SF and economic activity completely dismisses signs of a “failed city”.
I live in San Francisco right now and all I’ll add to the conversation is that it depends where you are in the city. There are portions of it that feel bad to be in, while there are other parts that are really nice. There are a lot of people who aren’t from SF who think all of SF is the bad parts but that’s simply not true.
About a month ago I was in Alamo Square (a park in SF) on a beautiful day getting free prints that the SF Parks Alliance was hosting. There were a ton of people having fun with dogs and kids running around. The person in front of me jokingly said “So this is the San Francisco hellscape that people keep mentioning”. I thought that was really funny.
To say SF isn’t struggling in some parts would be a lie, but it’s exhausting hearing people who don’t live here describe the entire city as a war zone.
I went with friends to the Mission District over Thanksgiving just before the pandemic and the BART station there is pretty dystopian. OTOH, my wife and I stayed int the Tenderknob to see live music performances and walked to the venues and restaurants and had a great time.
When we came back to pick up our dog at the kennel, the person there remarked that she had just moved out of SF. The only places she could afford to live were in pretty sketchy neighborhoods.
TL;DR AFAIK SF is patchy just like every other city. Problem is the nicest areas are expensive.
Oh ya the BART station in the Mission can get interesting sometimes lol
As always, I think it’s important to consider where the opinions are coming from. You have different perspectives from all walks of life, and you could be hearing from one extreme to the next.
As someone who’s lived in the SF bay area all her life, I wouldn’t call the city “unlivable,” “failed,” or near “collapse.” Homelessness, drugs, and crime exist like in any other big city. Because SF is smaller and denser, it’s on full display. I don’t blame SF for having to absorb a disproportionate amount of homelessness, and the difficulties in dealing with that.
As for day to day life, I’m sure I’m biased from growing up around it. I don’t flinch. I don’t walk on the streets fearing for my life, but I do worry about property crime. You just need to develop some street smarts, know where the bad areas are, the hot spots if you will, and plan accordingly. That being said, I would never live in SF long-term. It’s not a place I would settle down in. But I’m not condemning the city, you see. I view it as a me problem. I want space. I want nice things and in SF, it’s probably better to not have nice things. Also if you want kids, it gets expensive.
A lot of people forget that Red States often will send their homeless on Greyhound buses to be dumped in SF.
The City has a lot more homeless people proportionately than it should. And many of them aren’t even from California. But they’re here and pushing them back into the Red states just isn’t a position the public would take here at all.
A lot of what I would say has been said already, but I will say that the organized, large scale shoplifting feels worse than it used to. I wonder whether legalizing marijuana shook up the underground economy, leaving more people dependent on theft. The frequent catalytic converter thefts are new also.
We badly need mandatory inpatient mental health treatment for some people. We also need high density housing to bring rents down.
But I like San Francisco a lot. I'm not sure it's worse than New York or Miami or Chicago or New Orleans
San Francisco can be a difficult city to live in because the level of competition is higher there than just about anywhere in the world. It has the highest number of doctorates per capita in the country, as an interesting metric. A lot of people go and can't make it, and become bitter. It's sort of like people who go to Hollywood and become bitter because they couldn't get an acting role. Does this mean that Hollywood is bad? Not really.
There's also the thing where so many people just want that white picket fence and the suburban experience, which you cannot have there because it's so dense. So they spend 10 years working in industry, save a bunch of money, and buy a McMansion in Texas. That sort of person will also give you a bad time about San Francisco.
Expensive AF - yes. “Unlivable apocalypse” as Fox News would have you believe - no. Sure there are bad streets just as there are in any big city, it’s gets magnified greatly, but in general San Francisco is beautiful as it always has been.
My take is that the homeless activity is centered around the downtown. If you are going to a conference at the Moscone Center or the Union Square Hilton you will see a lot of it.
I think they are as harsh on homeless people in the residential areas as they are on anyone who tries to build housing, if you actually lived there you wouldn’t be surrounded by it 24-7. You wouldn’t be a victim of a “smash-and-grab” like tourists because you’d be in the habit of never leaving visible valuables in your car. A tourist, on the other hand, probably wouldn’t believe warnings about how quick it can happen until it does happen to them.
Remember almost all of San Francisco is zoned exclusively for single family houses. Concentration of the homeless is quite significant and quite dangerous to them in that somebody who has struggled with opioids is going be surrounded by fentanyl even if they are sheltered.
Remember that San Francisco has 1-day Prime shipping (unlike my “idyllic” rural area with 5-day shipping) so SF residents don’t ever have to go out and face it at a place like Westfield if they don’t want to.
I grew up all up and down the Peninsula, including that one city at the northern tip. I will say that it's always been a city, there were rough parts in the 90s! But that's not what we're talking about.
I don't know if San Francisco is a failed city or not, but it's certainly an unbalanced one. Of course it's unlivable for a lot of people, but not the people you're probably talking about. San Francisco lost artists, activists, small business owners, and a whole lot of diversity. People who knew the city intimately, who cared deeply about their home. This happened in a relatively short period of time. What effect do these losses have on a city? I think their departure changed the city.
I'm not trying to imply that this is a moral failing, karma for gentrification. Nor am I saying that all locals left, that people who moved here don't care, or that this is the source of San Francisco's problems.
But I think it's something worth thinking about. There's more I'd like to say, but it's a bit of a touchy subject for me. I'll leave with this scene from The Last Black Man in San Francisco:
"You don't get to hate San Francisco unless you love it."
I always like to point out that there really aren't many GOP cities. The largest in the US (Jacksonville, FL) just went democratic in the recent election, so Forth worth TX will be the 'largest' city the GOP has.
So in the top 30 largest... 2 will have a GOP mayor (neither in the top 10). Forth worth, TX (less than a million population) and Oklahoma City ( less than 700K...) compared to the top 10 which are at least a million each (NYC #1 with 8+ million).
Places w/ great climates like san francisco and Hawaii are attractive to homeless, and they are also doing great things with public parks and healthcare etc... so of course their more attractive than OK and TX.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mayors_of_the_50_largest_cities_in_the_United_States
The funny thing about those "arguments" is that anybody who's lived in both for extended periods will tell you that while small-town life has its charms, it's not perfectly peachy either.
My childhood was in a rural part of the country and though there's things I love about home, it's got problems just as severe as if not worse than what I've seen in west coast cities.
If you don’t mind sharing, what sort of problems specifically?
I might imagine drugs or alcohol, but I’m not too sure
Basically what Loire said in the sibling comment.
There's nothing for young people. No opportunity, no recreation, nothing. The best you can hope for is a minimum wage job at a big chain restaurant or maybe a job at a grocery store that intentionally tries to keep your hours down below the threshold for benefits and keep you dependent on them. Everything is run down, drug and alcohol abuse is rampant, and the population is increasingly elderly and/or disabled as the few remaining young leave for greener pastures. Drug addiction drives theft, with any house that's noticeably empty for even a few days being at high risk of break-in, and the cops don't want to do anything for fear of getting in over their heads (or because they're in on some of these shady operations themselves). It's bleak.
Change my mind? I've lived in both places and generally this has been true for me, increasingly so in the last 5 years.
I do feel the article you’ve linked is a bit misleading without further context, at least in headline alone. Within the article they go on to say
I can’t see the actual numbers because I don’t have access to JAMA these days, but it feels odd to lump both types of deaths together as “gun deaths”. Suicidal individuals have many options available to them, while homicide is made much easier with a firearm.
I have always agreed that it feels a bit odd and misleading, but studies have consistently shown that suicide is very often an impulsive decision and people are much more likely to commit suicide if they have a gun--that is, the people who shoot themselves are often unlikely to have killed themselves in another way. So the argument that guns make homicide much easier apply just the same to suicide.
That kind of research is one of the reasons I don't own a gun. I wouldn't want to make that kind of decision on a whim and I would feel horrible if someone I was close to killed themselves with my gun.
I do get annoyed how they lump suicide into gun deaths in statistics because when I look at regional gun deaths, I'm looking for how likely it is that I will be shot in the street.
It's an appropriate categorization, as they are both deaths that are both mediated and partially caused by guns.
We have hundreds of studies, spanning decades of research, all consistently finding that guns are a causal factor in suicide.
I see to your point that guns can be causal factors in suicides, but specifically when we are discussing the safety of neighborhoods It seems a bit disingenuous to cite that particular study as a reason that cities are safer than urban areas. When I am considering my families safety in a city, I am not interested in the number of gun deaths there, I am interested in the homicide rate involving guns.
Let's be clear: The largest city by total area in the lower 48 (about 870 square miles), not population (just over 950K people, according to the 2020 census).
I mean I wouldn't go that far. If I wanted to live in the Bay again, I would still pick SF, because it's the closest thing to fun urban in bay, and there's a lot of reasons you'd want to be in the Bay, from its unique and great weather, to jobs, to family.