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Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

There are many extremely awful things that have been normalized in SF that are not normal in most (all?) large American cities. For example:

Mentally ill people in high-traffic areas that openly use drugs and defecate on the sidewalk.

High chance of having your car window smashed and car contents stolen.

Retail stores putting ever more items behind lock and key.

Women feeling unsafe walking alone in many areas of the city after dark.

Public parks full of criminal element that make walking through it a high-stress, high-alert situation.

All of this results in a high level of general anxiety and makes it an unpleasant place to live or even visit. Anyone who still lives in SF, I feel extremely bad that this is your life. It’s extremely sad.

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Do you live there?

This is a genuine question; I'm trying to separate possible FUD from the truth here. I lived in NYC 20 years ago, and you're not describing anything different.

I lived in SF for almost a decade, until about 2017. OP is not exaggerating. I just made a post where I outlined some (not all!) of the things that actually happened to me, and they're pretty much a recitation of OP's list.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34039215

I lived there (apt at 5th and Mission and office near the Caltrain station) until a few years ago and many friends still do (although quite a few have left). All OP's comments seem reasonable.

I live nearby and try to avoid going there because it’s that awful.

LOL of course he doesn’t.

> Public parks full of criminal element that make walking through it a high-stress, high-alert situation

This one is especially laughable, nothing could be further from the truth

I currently live in SF and have lived in NYC. In all honesty it's not all that different. I think the main difference is the weather and number of shelter beds. There are many times a year when being outdoors in NYC isn't possible, so they have more shelter beds and more use of those beds. In SF that dynamic doesn't exist. Other than that, it's the same in my experience.

> In all honesty it's not all that different.

Also lived in both. It's absolutely different, but it depends on the neighborhood. I'd say that SF's average level of horribleness (when I left in 2017) was about the same as the bad parts of Harlem or the Bronx, or the area around Penn Station / PABT. But sure, if you go to the burb/bougie parts of SF, like West Portal, or even Pac Heights, then it's very different from SOMA or Civic Center. Just like SoHo is very different from East Harlem.

But it's gaslighting to pretend that the two are equivalent. New York is unquestionably better, overall (for starters, the police in NYC will typically actually do something when property crimes are being committed in the open air, which is more than I can say for SF.)

I would be very happy to see SF pass a law providing the same right to shelter that New York City has.

The only thing I would disagree with is feeling unsafe in public parks.

New Yorker here too. Finally got to see the fabled valley last year and spent 2 days walking SF.

Parts of it are just like NYC before the cleanup to turn it into a tourist destination. Chinatown and area around it absolutely reminded of late 80s/early 90s in NY. Has that vibe.

Parts of it -- here is looking at you Pacific Heights -- are just completely off the scale amazing. I would move in a heartbeat to PH if I could afford it, crime be damned. (Looked pretty damn safe too, btw.)

tldr; it ain't a "shithole" if you are rich (like everywhere else). far from it.

Three of these things are pretty normal in big cities --- having your car broken into (it was unbelievably bad back in the days where car stereos were valuable), having the soap locked up at the Walgreens, and feeling unsafe after dark.

But the other ones, having lived in San Francisco for a couple years and visited semifrequently afterwards, do feel sort of distinctively west coast.

Certainly the reported normalization of daylight retail store robberies seems pretty abnormal!

Later

Oh, my god, people, yes, I am referring to what’s normal in North America, not Europe. I assumed that was obvious but, whatever, I’m not here to defame Antwerp.

> Three of these things are pretty normal in big cities --- having your car broken into (it was unbelievably bad back in the days where car stereos were valuable), having the soap locked up at the Walgreens, and feeling unsafe after dark.

At least here in Antwerp this is not normal at all, even though there is apparently a pretty big mafia who like making grenades explode.

In fact, I can't recall visiting any city, even in other countries, where this is considered "normal".

GP said American cities….

Sorry, most of these are not normal in big cities in the developed world, e.g. Scandinavian countries or Western European countries (I only have personal experience with these outside the US).

Definitely not normal in southern Europe either.

I have never visited a city where any of that is normal, at least here in Europe.

You're being down-voted for some odd reason. This response is very accurate with regards to the types of crime that happen in most major cities.

EDIT: Having read the additional comments I understand that the perspective is those in US cities versus other locations in the world. The crime being described is common in major US cities.

--most major "American" cities.

Context is important...for example in Tokyo this would be highly unusual.

My suspicion with Japan is that they commit large numbers of their population -- who would be homeless -- into shadowy psychiatric hospitals. Which I think is worse.

I've never experienced this once in Texas cities like Austin or DFW. Neither have any of my friends. Less experienced with Houston, and it's generally less safe, but never a problem in the weeks I've spent there either. I was worried Austin was on the cusp of such problems a year or two ago when the mayor implemented SF style policies, but those have been rolled back and things are mostly back to normal.

Austin is extremely safe and barely even qualifies as a "large" city. Outside of downtown DFW is like a huge extended suburb, and listen to the way residents there talk about their downtown. Houston is a much better comparison and does deal with similar problems.

> I was worried Austin was on the cusp of such problems a year or two ago when the mayor implemented SF style policies

Extreme eye rolling here...

> Extreme eye rolling here...

Every underpass was filled with tent cities and trash. Downtown was covered with urine and there were protests that got out of control. Very little of that now.

Maybe if you watch the news rather than leaving your house, this is what you would think.

The encampments just got moved, they still exist. The cops left behind a ton of garbage too that was otherwise mostly handled by the homeless when the city was distributing garbage bags. Protests never got serious here at all, so curious what gave you that impression.

I do live here. I don't watch local news, I'm telling you my own observations, which may differ from your part of town. I don't live downtown, but my friends that do did observe protests turning violent on their block(localized,not in mass) and that's why they no longer live downtown.

There are many areas of DFW that are not safe. Perhaps if you don't leave Preston Hollow, Highland Park or Mckinney.. But, there are many parts of the city that I wouldn't want to be on a Friday night (and definitely not my wife and kids). I lived in a decent area and there were frquent break-ins on North East Dallas. Had a double homicide down the street about a month before we relocated to Europe. But, you can keep telling everyone how friendly it is. I know better.

Outside of the US these are absolutely not normal in big cities.

My wife's empty car was broken into five times in 5 years in SF (we stopped replacing the stereo finally), the license plate stolen once.

Sounds exactly like Seattle. Ever since Police powers have been taken away. Crime has drastically gone up.

I grew up here and when nobody knew about Seattle. It was a awesome place to live. Now, not such a good place. You add yearly 1+ month of forest fire smoke to the mix. It doesn't leave to much left.

What are you talking about?

Even according to SPD’s own crime reporting dashboard[0], incidents have not gone up drastically in the last two years like you are implying, and this year’s numbers look like they are trending back down to 2018 levels. Seattle’s issues also certainly didn’t start two years ago, anyone who has lived here has known about things like 3rd being extremely sketchy. Hell, even back in 2011 that was a thing. It’s certainly far from new. Problems have certainly gotten worse in the last two years but let’s not sit here and pretend the city was roses and unicorns before 2020.

And how, exactly is it Seattle resident’s fault that there’s smoke now?

[0]: https://www.seattle.gov/police/information-and-data/crime-da...

As mentioned, many of these are very common in other large cities (EDIT: fine, in the US). I'm going to call out this one because its frequently mentioned and seems harder to tackle than the other problems:

> Mentally ill people in high-traffic areas that openly use drugs and defecate on the sidewalk.

What is the solution to this? Round them up and put them in jail? Bus them to another city? Forcibly enroll them at a mental health facility? Improving housing costs somehow? Free housing for the homeless? Maybe walk-in drug clinics?

Some of these solutions sound inhumane. Others appear to be politically impossible at the scale needed. So what's the solution and why are the people who live there against it?

> What is the solution to this

Many other large cities handle this well, so it seems to pretend there aren't solutions? I've spent recent time in London, New York, and Bangkok -- as well as a number of smaller cities -- and there's nothing like what I saw in SF.

New York paid for bus,train, and plane tickets for homeless to make them someone else’s problem.

https://nypost.com/2019/10/26/nyc-homeless-initiative-sends-...

Would not file this under “handling it well”

“The Special One-Time Assistance (SOTA) program provides one year’s full rent up-front for eligible Department of Homeless Services (DHS) clients to move within or outside New York City.”

So, NYC gives homeless people a year of rent anywhere those people think they’ll be able to make it work, including NYC. And the program seems to save the city money.

According to this the SOTA program requires the income to make rental payments beyond the one year: https://www.nyc.gov/site/hra/help/sota.page

“SOTA is only provided to households whom DSS has determined will likely have the future ability to pay the rent once they no longer have the SOTA grant to cover their rent.”

That sounds like a very high bar for people in the situation of needing rent coverage and especially if they have mental illness and/or drug addiction. Note that busing people to another city appears to be a separate program.

So, from what I've heard when I was 'visiting' tenderloin: there used to be a lot of vets who came in SF after the Vietnam war (heard that from a Vietnam veteran btw, so it might be a bit of a perception bias), and they basically were accepted. This brought more vets/homeless, and with them drugs to 'treat' PTSD, and this started a feedback loop.

SF-Stockholm Syndrome

We are the boiled frog. Most here seem to think this sort of thing is normal now.

Which public parks are full of criminal element?

It is truly awful that one of the most powerful centers of wealth generation in the world also cultivates an environment where people can have nothing and be treated as less than human because of it, then be personally blamed for their reaction to that state. We should not have normalized that.

"You will own nothing and be happy." - WEF

when did you live in San Francisco?

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