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Comment by almost_usual | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in a pretty dangerous city and have been robbed at gunpoint. San Francisco is _not_ a dangerous city and the problems it has pales in comparison to many cities in the United States, especially in the rust belt. Are there homeless people? Yeah. Is the city trying to address it? I honestly think so, it's not a simple problem to solve.

I don't understand how this post caused so many knee jerk reactions to homelessness and housing etc. I swear you bring up _anything_ related to San Francisco and it triggers people. If you hate the city so much how can you stand living there?

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Clearly, people are living there to pursue their careers. Many can't stand it for long and leave after a few years. I know some of these people.

There is no excuse for a city with the per-capita wealth of San Francisco to suck as bad as it does, and "overzealous law enforcement" is not even on the list of problems the place actually has.

When a basic level of order is not being maintained, hand-wringing about a hypothetical police state falls flat with members of the public, some of whom are thinking fuck it, moving to Singapore sounds nice right about now.

I’m amazed at how much power this city body is.

There used to be an easy solution to this: vote for change. The problem, in my opinion, is that San Francisco has passed the political event horizon of single party rule. There is a monopoly government with no hope for competition and a huge welfare state that keeps the machine moving along. This won’t stop until they run out of other people’s money or Roombas are sophisticated enough to clean up streets. Of course, they’ll ban those too.

Just because your city is more dangerous doesn't mean that SF isn't. I've had friends robbed right outside their apartments, acquaintances' teeth smashed in by thieves in broad daylight, and I've even personally apprehended a shoplifter running through one of the main streets next to Union Square. Nowhere else in America have I seen these problems, let alone the buckets of human waste on the streets and guys shooting up right next to the local Best Buy.

In what major city did you grow up in where robberies don't exist or shoplifting isn't a thing?

Is there an approved list of major cities where we have collectively decided that this behavior is just "okay" and "normal"? I'm growing a little tired of this mantra that because we can point to some place that indeed has it worse (or way worse) than SF/Seattle/LA wherever that it's not a problem or we're wrong to thing it is.

What I'm getting at is you live in a city, not a college town. Cities have large populations which means some of the citizens are anti-social and derelict. It all comes with the price of living in a city (especially in the United States).

Yeah and I get that that's your point, but it's not immediately clear to me that size is the problem. But we don't have these problems in e.g. Singapore or Tokyo - cities that are several orders of magnitude larger than SF or most cities in the US. It seems weirdly fatalistic to shrug our shoulders and say "meh" about this problem.

You’re talking about major cities not even located in the US. The US has a very different history than either of those places and tons of systemic social issues caused from decisions made in our history. It’s like comparing apples and oranges.

So we should willingly accept drastically more dangerous living conditions than other major cities? If we know that safe places like that exist then why don't we try to emulate it?

I live in one of those cities mentioned and while it has its own problems like any place does, it's quite remarkable how safe it is. You'd have no problem walking alone down some shady alleys as long as you mind your own business.

Alright, go and convince the citizens of a major US metro to emulate it. Good luck.

What cities don’t have fentanyl overdose issues. Let’s forget about it, other cities are worse.

New York. Having lived in both NY and SF, New York is so much better re: the homeless.

Also Tokyo seems pretty great, but I haven't lived there.

Tokyo is not located in the US. New York used to be a war zone for most of its existence and fairly recently (2000s) has become much safer but could easily fall back to old ways.

New York becoming much safer is proof that San Francisco could do the same, but doesn't for whatever reason. There's practically no police presence in SF unlike NYC where you can barely go one block without seeing NYPD.

I was raised in a capital city in a southern state, lived in a rural part of another southern state, now live in upstate NY and frequently go to the city. Obviously I'd hear about robberies and shoplifting, but nowhere in America have I been as close to the crimes as I have in SF.

Some numbers if you want them: https://www.californiacitynews.org/2018/10/what%E2%80%99s-ca... https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/02/16/property-...

I've lived here for 15 years and the situation has grown vastly worse in the last 2-3 years. To those of us who have lived in _this_ city for a long time, what we are seeing is a full blown crisis that needs to be priority number one, two, three and four - at least until we get things moving in the right direction.

According to this it's getting safer.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Homicides-fall-acr...

My roommate was stabbed on 6th and Folsom at 8PM.

He was in the hospital for quite some time.

Another guy I know was shot 3 times when someone tried to rob him & he ran. He almost lost his ability to walk.

It's a dangerous city.

Compare homicides with San Francisco and any major metro of similar size and San Francisco will show it's not that dangerous. It might appear dangerous because the middle class and upper-middle class are not sheltered from everything here but it isn't that dangerous compared to most other cities.

There were 42 homicides in San Francisco (2018).

https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/09/bay-area-homicides-20...

There were 184 homicides in Memphis last year (2018), Memphis has roughly 200,000 less people than San Francisco

https://dailymemphian.com/article/2253/Memphis-homicides-up-...

There were 156 homicides in Indianapolis last year (2018), Indianapolis has roughly the same population as San Francisco

https://www.theindychannel.com/news/local-news/indianapolis/...

There were 200 homicides in Kansas City (2018), Kansas City is roughly 1/2 the population of San Francisco

https://www.kcur.org/post/kansas-city-homicides-2018#stream/...

If you look at St. Louis and Baltimore you'll realize there are places of similar or smaller population with much more crime

There were 186 homicides in St. Louis (2018), St. Louis is roughly 1/3 the population of San Francisco

https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/crime/homicides-in-the-cit...

San Francisco compared to the rest of the United States is relatively safe and the entire Bay Area is actually getting safer including San Francisco (58 homicides in 2016).

https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Homicides-fall-acr...

Because there are no other crimes than homicides...

I successfully ran from an armed robber in SF at around ~7PM. I spotted his gun from ~15 feet and pulled my friend into traffic to run away. Others have been shot and killed on the same block. My co-worker was robbed with a gun inside the Caltrain station in the early evening.

Lived all over Los Angeles for over a decade and never even witnessed an armed robbery, let alone experienced one. Never had my car or house broken into either.

SF is overrun with dangerous heroin needles, human shit on the streets, burglary, and armed robbery. It's just pathetic and the amount of denial about it is enough to make you think some of the residents are insane.

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