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When talking to someone native to the area I would often times mention that I was taken aback by the amount of homelessness and open drug use in the streets of San Francisco. (This was pre-pandemic.)

They seemed puzzled, as if I came from a small town and wasn't used to life in a big city. I've moved to SF from NYC. Several times I would get a variation of "isn't it the same in New York?" from them. It's not, it doesn't even get close to SF. Mid-pandemic NYC at 2am felt safer than pre-pandemic SF on a Monday morning.

This is my experience as well as someone who lived in NYC for >10 years.

For example, I was living downtown during Sandy and my area lost power for 4 days. The police were there to deter looting and property crime. Every hour or so, a police cruiser drive down my street with lights on but no siren checking for crime.

I'd walk home at 3-4am and feel completely safe. This was in Manhattan and I realize the outer boroughs are, at least in part, a different story.

I once had a car alarm go off outside my window at 2:30am early Sunday. While deciding what to do I called 311 after about 10 minutes. While talking to them a police car rolled up and officers broke into the car and disabled the alarm. I went out and talked to them and said they'd respond to any unattended car alarm, which was defined as an alarm that had been going off for more than 10 minutes.

And here's a big one: lower income people are infinitely better off in NYC than SF IMO. While Subway coverage isn't complete in the outer boroughs, lower income people aren't typically burdened by the costs of car ownership and having to drive 4+ hours a day to get to and from work (unlike, say, the people who drive the tech giant buses [1]).

It confused me why so many self-described liberals didn't see or didn't want to see the misery in their own city, caused by policies they supported to turned a blind eye to.

[1]: https://abcnews.go.com/US/bus-drivers-working-alongside-sili...

>Several times I would get a variation of "isn't it the same in New York?" from them. It's not, it doesn't even get close to SF.

Don't forget SF's omnipresent smell of urine!

(My theory is that the lack of rain in California (not because of drought, but in general) is part of what makes the situation worse than in NYC.)

I don’t think the people living on the streets of the tenderloin are there because of housing prices.

They’re there because of drug and mental health issues.

In Europe, they’re not tolerant of drug use on the streets. Even in cities where it’s decriminalized.

On the flip side, in countries with mass poverty issues and mass homelessness - the slums aren’t necessarily a place of rampant and constant drug usage. (You still see grinding poverty and families on the street, but it’s different)

> In Europe, they’re not tolerant of drug use on the streets. Even in cities where it’s decriminalized.

Ehm Berlin and Frankfurt are pretty much Europe and there's open drug use and selling on "sanctuary districts", same as San Francisco. On Frankfurt it's more blatant because it's right by the train station, but a little bit more nuanced than in SF because they have "safe drug use houses" so people don't do it in the sidewalk.

You can't look at tolerance for open drug use in isolation. It's part of a complete system that includes a social safety net, access to medical care, treatment for mental health issues and the initial conditions that cause people to become drug dependent in the first place.

Europe understands that people are entitled to and deserve a basic standard of living. It largely explains why the EU has expanded eastwards into former Soviet bloc countries where people are much poorer. The EU as a whole takes an economic hit for that but it's an undeniable good for those poorer members.

Whereas in the US, people seem to be stuck in a 19th century "every man for himself" frontier cosplay.

[deleted]

Are you talking about the Marshall plan and the Cold War or something?

What would the mechanism be of Europe’s disintegration if the US pulled out of the EU today?

Huh? Go to the downtown east side of Vancouver and it’s as bad if not worse than SF. And all those folks have free healthcare, plenty of social services and even clean injection sites.

That didn’t solve the problem in the least. It certainly reduces harm, but not drug use.

I'm pretty sure homelessness would go down significantly if housing was available. Drug and mental issues are significant but they're more easily treatable of people are housed, and it's easier to help more people with housing if housing costs to pay/subsidize isn't sky high. And if we build a LOT more prices will go down.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/homelessness-housing

I’m all for a monstrous building spree in places like SF. It’ll solve a lot of problems.

But - at the risk of sounding callous - why would someone down and out on the streets of the Tenderloin think, even if they completely sober up and clean themselves up, that it’s a long-term sustainable option to live in one of the highest cost of living cities in the world.

Not sure about the Tenderloin specifically, but often the causality is the reverse of what you suggest: people develop mental health and drug issues due to the pressures they face after becoming homeless.

Nope. You lose your family, friends and home after falling deep into drug abuse. You have it backwards.

There's no reason for people to put up with crime and squalor while we are waiting to fix the income inequality and housing affordability issues. Things were bad before COVID but not this bad. We could work to get them back to pre-COVID bad if there was enough political will.

Most neighborhoods are not the mission or tenderloin. I work in a rough part of SF, but live in a neighborhood a few miles away that is both one of the more affordable and doesn't see much homelessness. This is not to excuse any ignorance, but to say that SF can be both wonderful and terrible at the same time; just not in the same place.

> You simply can't walk down the Mission or anywhere near the Tenderloin and not see open drug use, drug dealing, homelessness and crime.

The Tenderloin was like that in the 1990s. Same with SOMA, the Lower Haight, 6th and Market, and other parts of the city as well but those were places I frequented often enough to have seen it myself.

I lived in SOMA in the summer of '94, and it was pretty clean. The Tenderloin was bad, and the Lower Haight wasn't great, but neither of those places had tent cities and human poop.

I worked in central SOMA from 1995-2002. In the 90s, the most prominent neighborhood fixture was the homeless shelter at 6th and Bryant, and there most certainly were homeless around there and human poop in the alleys along 6th, it was notoriously stanky. The northeast end of SOMA wasn't as ripe, though.

Things changed after the first DotCom boom and the advent of Pac Bell Park.

I mean.. my simple but privileged answer is that I avoid the handful of bad neighborhoods. I have no idea why anyone would choose to live in the Mission and certainly not the Tenderloin unless that was the only place they could afford, in which case I'd probably not live in SF. My friends who love SF are the ones who can afford to ignore/avoid the ugly side of it.

It's like a very nice living room but with two porta-potty in the middle of it. Sure you can walk around it but why.

Because it's... not like that at all.

> If it were up to me, I'd also get rid of the "are you a felon?" question that permanently excludes you from many jobs...

This is already illegal in California - banned as of 2018 under the California Fair Chance Act. Through companies can still conduct background checks after extending offers.

A lot of people in power don't live in the Tenderloin. I mean, take District Attorney Chesa Boudin. He lives in the Outer Sunset, which is a super exclusionary suburby part of the city that's safe.

I used to live in the Outer Sunset around 48th and Judah. You didn't walk into Golden Gate Park after dark, because it just wasn't safe. The 7/11 a few blocks away saw its share of drug deals and troubled people living homeless. I liked the Outer Sunset because it was a relatively cheap place to live compared to most of the city. "Super exclusionary" doesn't seem like what I experienced there.

https://www.zumper.com/blog/affordable-san-francisco-neighbo...

There aren't very many 1-bedroom apartments for rent in the Outer Sunset - it is mostly single-family homes - so Zumper data on 1-bedrooms is not really relevant here. Also, the apartments there are largely older builds (they are super nimby out there).

> You didn't walk into Golden Gate Park after dark, because it just wasn't safe.

This is laughably inaccurate. There are plenty of runners and recreational cyclists at night in that part of Golden Gate Park. Even more so now that they re-opened Great Highway to cars on weekdays. And if you think the 7/11 next to the Indian pizza place is shady - wow. You'll see far more shady stuff, in broad daylight, inside the Target at 4th and Mission on any afternoon. Which is why they cut hours down and only open at 9am and close by 6pm for their SF locations.

Perhaps you left San Francisco a long time ago. Today the Outer Sunset has a median home price around $1.8M, and is the safest neighborhood in the city that isn't at the top of a hill.

I'm not particularly interested in playing "my anecdotal data is better than yours," so I won't. Mostly I just wanted to counter the implication that Boudin was living in some sort of magical oasis, because he's not.

I will point out that "isn't at the top of a hill" is not actually much of a distinction when you're talking about San Francisco. If there's one thing the city isn't short on, it's hills.

NIMBY is correct. The neighborhoods are highly resistant to new construction.

It's not anecdotal that the Outer Sunset has lower crime than pretty much anywhere else in the city. This is clear from the crime data - not an anecdote.

> I will point out that "isn't at the top of a hill" is not actually much of a distinction when you're talking about San Francisco.

What?

How does Haight-Ashbury compare to Ashbury Heights, Corona Heights, or Cole Valley? How does the Mission compare to Bernal Heights or Noe Valley, or even Potrero Hill? How does the Fillmore compare to Pac Heights? How does the Bayview compare to Portola, even?

Again, take a look at the crime data. There are some exceptions in the stats (eg. Twin Peaks - but largely because of tourists getting their car broken into at the viewpoint) but by and large, top of a hill = less crime.

When you say ”the safest neighborhood in the city that isn't at the top of a hill,” you’re not eliminating a lot of neighborhoods. A relatively high percentage of SF neighborhoods are on hills; it’s a hilly city.

My overall point here is that the Outer Sunset isn’t a super exclusionary neighborhood. You get that kind of rhetoric up here in Seattle, too: people like to imply that anyone with a progressive approach to crime must not live someplace that’s affected by crime. It’s usually untrue.

> and not see open drug use, drug dealing, homelessness and crime.

One of these is not like the others.

> I'm actually shocked at how often they'll tell me how amazing SF is. Like where do they live? Do they go out?

I live in the Dogpatch and it is amazing here, ditto for most of Potrero Hill. I do occasionally see a small number of homeless people about, but nothing particularly threatening, and I don't see trash and needles and whatnot everywhere. I go out nearly daily. I stay closer to home these days, since there's plenty to do in my neighborhood, and I feel like I've gotten a bit more insular since the pandemic began.

And yeah, when I do venture out farther for dinners & drinks, well... it depends. Parts of the Mission have gotten really bad (they've been bad for many years, but have been getting worse). Parts of North Beach aren't great. Ten years ago I would cut through the Tenderloin on foot when walking places, but I would definitely not do that today, especially after dark. I used to live in Soma, and it got pretty bad there too. I felt unsafe at times, and that's part of why I moved. (And I didn't even live in the worst areas around mid-Market.)

But consider places like the (inner) Sunset, Richmond, Lower Pac Heights, Bernal, Glen Park, Balboa Park, most of Japantown. They're... fine? A lot of these neighborhoods have reputations for being sleepy, but if you're content to make a night just at one restaurant followed by one bar, you can have a great time. If you want to do a bar crawl or see some serious nightlife, sure, you're going to have to go to the Mission, Nob Hill, Haight, Lower Haight, North Beach, Marina, the south-of-Geary Divis corridor, etc., and yeah, some of those places can feel varying degrees of unsafe at times, depending on where you are. That's definitely a problem that needs to be addressed.

But this narrative that SF is just chock full of homeless people shooting up, with spent needles, trash, and human shit on the streets and sidewalks everywhere... no, that's just not my experience over the 11+ years I've lived here. No neighborhood is perfect, but these particular problems are nowhere near as widespread as some people make it sound.

> I'm against the culture of mass incarceration but not prosecuting thefts below $950 isn't the answer. [...] There's no simple answer here. There are lots of contributing factors. But pretty high on that list is income inequality and housing unaffordability.

I'm in full agreement with you here. I think some of the crime is driven by opportunism (if the cops won't even investigate, there's low risk), but a lot is driven by desperation and feelings of powerlessness. We need to get everyone in secure housing, get people with mental health and/or addiction issues the help they need, and somehow let people feel financially secure enough without having to work 3 jobs and 100 hours a week.

I think its because a lot of new apartments and Twitter went up straight in the roughest part of town in the early 2010's under Ed Lee's plan to clean up the Market street Tenderloin area (which is probably not a bad idea long term).

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/11/04/san-francisco-m...

This put the new well to-do Twitter techies in constant daily contact with the original "residents" who were/are down and out on their luck where as before the original "residents" had that end of Market to themselves. The Twitter techies were then very likely to make a big deal about it on social media.

It also probably tore down a significant number of SRO units.