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Comment by elgabogringo | Hacker News Reader

I live in the neighborhood that is profiled in the article. I am not surprised that blacks are leaving. I want to leave myself.

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The Fillmore has a long history of changing ethnic hands. Once upon a time it was a Japanese neighborhood. Once upon a time it was a Jewish neighborhood.

When people discuss the Fillmore and its history, that discussion tends to start at roughly 1945-1950 when there's just suddenly a black neighborhood. Like maybe it materialized out of the aether as a jazz center or something.

Are you saying that was a result of the Japanese internment camps?

The Fillmore became a black neighborhood directly after the Japanese population was interned. I think it's reasonable to think there's a link there.

I'd love to learn more.

Wikipedia is actually a pretty good jumping-off point here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fillmore_District,_San_Francis...

This country is like one crime after another . . .

But I guess the bright side is what a host to diversity a city can be.

Sometimes. The changeover from a Jewish neighborhood to a Japanese one was peaceful. The Fillmore has a more colorful history than many parts of SF.

Speaking of which, where'd the Jews move to? The SF jewish community feels a little sparse today. Maybe that's because SF Jews are strongly secular?

It moved a bit north into Pac Heights. There's still a significant community center there. As Jewish acceptance increased, the Jewish community of SF has dispersed.

This history of the Western Addition (including the Fillmore) — http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Western_Addition:_A_B... — suggests that three factors contributed to the growth of its black community after WWII:

(1) a sudden rise in SF's black population in the aftermath of WWII (from ~5K residents in 1940 to 43.5K in 1950)

(2) the Western Addition's already diverse racial makeup (relative to other neighborhoods at the time)

(3) the internment of Japanese Americans, which removed ~5K residents from the Western Addition virtually overnight.

What makes you want to leave?

Excessive human feces on sidewalks. Mentally ill on every block. People selling drugs up and down the street. Loud music played on the sidewalk into the evening. Very run-down grocery and convenience stores in the area. Drunks on the corners at night.

And that's just the neighborhood. You still have the generally crappy things about SF like how awful June/July are (cloudy, windy, and cold), how expensive it is, the fog.

Oh, I forgot to mention how drugs are sold all day long ("The Wire", corner-boy style) just catty-corner to the police station next to the McDonalds. Two people were shot there in January on the same day. Cars parked in the street are constantly broken into. Despite all the crime, I never see cops.

Whoa. What neighborhood do you live in? The article mentions a couple. That doesn't sound like San Francisco.

It sounds every bit like San Francisco to me. Even nice neighborhoods have problems with car break-ins.

I've been here over 5 years and can concur the Mission is a hotspot for broken car windows, stolen bikes, and muggings.

Clearly you haven't walked around SF very much... I've only been twice and I see it everywhere. The Tenderloin is probably the most concentrated.

I'm actually quite a walker and there are only a few neighborhoods that seem bad, the Tenderloin is one of them. Maybe it's cuz I'm from Detroit.

Really? Reading that description, I know it's the Fillmore.

Really? The Fillmore always struck me as a really nice place.

Go south of Turk along Fillmore sometime. At night. You'll see the McD's and the police station mentioned.

Yep. I lived a couple months in Tenderloin (little Saigon, to be specific) and the stories I could tell you. It wasn't uncommon to see people lighting up crack pipes in broad daylight, but I never did see anyone shooting H out in the open.

There was a closed building across the street, and most days a fence would sell stuff on a blanket in front it, with stuff they stole out of cars - or at least I assumed that's where he got them, because it was always CDs, travel mugs, umbrellas, jackets, etc. They're even on Google street view: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7835518,-122.4176013,3a,15.7...

I never had a problem with crime, probably because I'm a big guy and I never walked around after dark, but I knew people who were mugged nearby. I was paying $1350/mo for a (nice) room with a private bathroom.

I take it you live towards the Western Addition? That's something that's always seemed weird about SF to me -- there are all these little pockets where it's night and day difference a block or two apart.

It's like that in Detroit too. Robber Baron mansions surrounded by open fields and burnt-out shells of houses with bodies in them.

Now, yes. I live in Western Addition. Before I lived in the nice part of Soma by the Ballpark. There we still had the mentally ill and feces to some degree, but not the rest.

I went out to SF for a vacation and to check out if it made sense to move out there for job prospects, but the homelessness absolutely ruined it for me. Nobody ever seems to talk about it on HN for some reason, but it was the absolute most glaring part about SF.

Within walking distance of some pretty big named companies, I felt less safe than I do walking in Chicago. To make things even odder, it was in an area with fancy restaurants and folks in suits/dresses walking around. It was truly surreal. How can people have such strong blinders to those things?

It's hard to talk abot homelessness wihtout getting lampooned.

Most people choose to ignore it, thinking it's doing the homeless a favor.

In reality SF is actually very generous to the homeless, which is why they are here. Many, if not most, beg for money and can make quite a bit which is used to buy drugs (food is not hard to find in SF, for free).

I walk down a part of the civic center area almost daily and the drug dealer on one of the streets (who is there every day, same guy) is always doing business with the local homeless.

The vast majority of residents in SF want something done about the homeless situation, and they don't mind if the gloves come off. A couple of months ago _all_ the city's major newspapers coordinated a campaign to discuss and highlight the issue because they felt city officials weren't putting enough effort into devising solutions.

The root of the problem is IMO 1) a small minority of people who actively try to defend the homeless' "right" to live on the streets, and 2) who have concocted a ridiculous narrative about the homeless problem being caused by the so-called housing crisis. Because of #2, any effort by moderate politicians to enforce laws related to vagrancy and generally force homeless off the street and into assistance programs is cast by critics as being anti-housing.

If you want things to change, don't vote for politicians like Jane Kim, Aaron Peskin, and other figures who [usually opportunistically] perpetuate this braindead narrative. Donate as much money as you can to more moderate candidates.

For example, when Mayor Ed Lee wanted to break up an enormous homeless encampment, Jane Kim claimed the mayor was rousting homeless children, with the implication that their families had been kicked out of their apartments and rather than trying to re-house them the mayor was punishing them. It was totally opportunistic--Kim was just trying to get free airtime to improve her name recognition for her Senate bid. It was also 100% BS.

To paraphrase The Onion,

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only City Where This Regularly Happens

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