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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

This is very interesting. A friend of mine who lived on Frederick St, just a few blocks up the hill from Haight, said that crime was much lower on her block. Her theory was that bad guys didn't like to climb hills. And in fact there seems to be a correlation between altitude and crime rate.

There are probably other reasons too. E.g. that the hills are fancier neighborhoods.

But her explanation makes sense. If you're walking around looking for someone to rob, why walk up steep hills?

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There's also fewer homeless people the higher the altitude.

If you're walking around outside all day, and have no particular place to go, and are possibly pushing around a shopping cart full of stuff, it makes sense that you would tend to gravitate to areas with lower potential energy.

its true. I've never seen a shopping cart on Half Dome.

I lived on Beulah, one of the flat streets between Cole and Haight. There were countless bums from GGP & haight street milling about my block, which was considered "Cole Valley", a relatively yuppie neighborhood. My apartment was burglarized and my TV was stolen. I moved up to Stanyan and Rivoli, considered to be the same neighborhood, but straight up a very steep hill, and never saw another human soul again.

Interesting. Maybe crime actually does flow downhill to some extent? It would be interesting to see if there's a correlation between crime rate and relative elevation.

Completely different city but with lots of hills (seven to be precise): Lisbon. The most dangerous areas are near the top of the hills in places like Bairro Alto, Sé, Alfama, while the main bottom of the hill, Baixa, is much better.

I believe Lisbon has a very low crime rate (for european standards) and my theory for more crime happening on the higher streets is pretty simple: on the bottom the streets are really big and there's lot of space while the streets on the top of the hills are really small so easier to be seen by the police when you're doing something evil.

I like thinking about these kind of relations though!

In Brazil (and probably elsewhere in South America), real estate values go down (and thus crime goes up) the higher you go on the hills. Basically, this is because walking up and down the hills is arduous and sucks, and thus people try to avoid living on the hills if they possibly can. Thus you end up with favelas.

If everyone had cars, or public transit, you would probably see better property values on hills, like you do in SF.

I lived near there - at Clayton and Ashbury - for a year. Not once did I see any homeless people. There is no way of getting up to that location without hitting at least a block of 15% grade. But the hill did not demarcate the homeless population - it appeared to be Frederick, which is a block further south than Beulah away from Haight.

I had two theories: leaving Golden Gate Park, you end up on Frederick street; going north gets you to Haight St which is a wonderful place to panhandle, going south gets you nowhere. The other theory is that it would have gone further south (maybe a few more blocks to Parnassus), but the Cole/Carl intersection was nice enough, and full of enough families, to push people south the second they get off of the N-Judah.

My parents have lived in the same apartment, above the UCSF Parnassus campus near the end of 5th Ave, for decades. It requires climbing multiple steep hills and/or stairs, it ends in a cul-de-sac, and like many buildings in the city, you have to climb stairs yet again to reach the door - the first floor is ground level in the back, but above the carport in the front.

Since the hillside is forested, we get plenty of traffic from wildlife, but I can only think of maybe once or twice that any homeless person has dared ventured through to collect cans. Despite this I'm told that there WAS a burglary, but it must have been in the 70s, because following that the management put bars over the first floor windows, which have existed for my entire lifetime.

Have you seen the one that plots crimes as if they were elevation? http://dougmccune.com/blog/2010/06/05/if-san-francisco-crime...

Very cool. Apparently prostitution is strikingly localized (which makes sense). It also seems that Hunters Point doesn't have much/any crime represented there either, yet it seems like people think of it as a very high crime area. I wonder why.

> ...yet it seems like people think of it as a very high crime area. I wonder why.

from wikipedia:

"Bayview-Hunters Point is predominantly African-American. The neighborhood has a population of 20,322 and is roughly 60% African-American, the highest concentration of that ethnic group in San Francisco."

The article on the community is quite lengthy and interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayview-Hunters_Point,_San_Fran...

I've never lived in San Francisco and don't know whether this community has a bad rep. because it's mostly black or if it really is as crime-ridden as its reputation.

I think we can all agree that this kind of data analysis is really important though, to understand where we live and shape public policy.

Sampling bias. The more people who visit a high-crime area, the more crime is likely to occur.

That and the gentrification resulting from UCSF's push into the area...

Those are awesome pictures. It's interesting to see how crimes "fall" downhill from a center.

Interesting theory. This might also be what gives the Tenderloin its' northern boundary somewhere around Post St, as Nob Hill starts rising more sharply north of there.

Shit rolls downhill.

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