> You're lucky (and not that I want to intentionally bring up this card, but I bet you're a burly caucasian male).
Stop this. I'm a non-burly non-caucasian male and this (being mugged, robbed, or undergoing physical violence) has never happened to me even once. Maybe you're unlucky? Drawing from your personal anecdotes gets tiring.
> I've witnessed multiple retail theft incidents. I've been spat on, literally out of nowhere.
I've seen this in SF. I've also seen it in LA, Dallas, Houston, Salt Lake City, and Chicago. I've seen it in NYC also, but not in Manhattan. The difference is that in most other big cities in the US, everyone drives around everywhere, so you're insulated from the folks on the street, or you clearly know which neighborhoods to avoid.
> A coworker had his garage broken into and a bike stolen. Another mentioned a friend whose backpack was snatched. (All asians)
A garage is race-blind, come on. I've lived in a house full of East Asians in the Sunset and this never happened to me. I lived in SOMA with caucasians and this happened to me (well us, nothing of mine was stolen).
I think what you're seeing is that SF is physically a lot less class-segregated than other US cities and that folks drive around here a lot less than they do in other cities. In LA, the crazies mostly hang around Skid Row and the Arts District and if you spend most of your life outside these places (or in a car, as Angelenos are won't to do) you'll never encounter them. In Chicago if you stick to the Loop and downtown. you'll only see gleaming apartments. In Houston, Austin, and much of Salt Lake City (and honestly almost everyone in LA), most everyone just zooms around in a car and only interacts with the homeless or panhandlers as they drive around. As such most affluent folks know to avoid low-income or run-down neighborhoods and so never really interact with the homeless.
In SF you can walk down Valencia between 17th and 22nd and it'll look shiny and fancy, like something out of a promotional poster about "Modern Living". Then you walk a block over to Guerrero and you'll see someone with scabs all over lying on the street naked. You walk down 7th or 8th and see fancy new cafes, but then you walk down 6th and see folks shooting up in broad daylight. Some of this is SF's more tolerant atmosphere for the mentally-ill homeless; in other cities they just get harassed until they accumulate in a part of town that doesn't have the residents, police funding, or political capital to push them out.
I'm not saying SF is a bed of roses and I do think the police here need to take a much harder line on property crime, but I think a lot of the negative experiences here are motivated by SF's lack of physical segregation and its walking-first culture. America has historically just relegated the poor and homeless to the streets and used cars to literally and figuratively zoom away from them. Now that cities are coming back into vogue, the US will have to confront the fact that it never fixed its poverty problem but just shoved it out of sight.