That’s ridiculous. I lived there 2014-2019 and it was delightful. Certainly many bad problems that weren’t getting fixed but ray to day life for most people wasn’t anything like the horror show it’s made out to be.
5 car break-ins 2 bottles thrown to me 1 mugged, wallet gone Chased with an axe
These things happened at SoMa, which is objectively known to be a "nicer" neighborhood. The Tenderloin area definitely experiences worse. Surely everyone that has walked Market St or taken the train has seen things uncommon in most other urban American cities.
I struggle to understand how in SF we've gotten accustomed to downplaying these experiences.
and more recently i've seen crazy shit go down (or the aftermath, like broken glass everywhere) every time i visit friends. the western more suburban parts of the city are much better.
sf has basically been broken since the gold rush. seems to me the primary goal these days is to make enough money to insulate yourself from this stuff as much as possible, or just leave.
i'm having a really hard time reconciling 4 years in sf with thinking soma is one of the nicer parts of the city.
Lots of other areas are nice, but it's honestly very difficult to say SoMa, as a whole, was ever nice.
And to be clear, I usually find the "these cities are shitholes" rhetoric overblown. But SoMa has been, and will likely continue to be, shit.
What? After the Tenderloin, SoMA is absolutely the worst neighborhood for interactions with crazy people. What on Earth gave you the impression that it's "objectively known to be nice"? IMO it's the single worst neighborhood in the city; at least the Tenderloin has history and some great commerce.
SoMA varies a LOT by exact location (at a per-block level) and changes with time of day, time of year, and has changed in cycles over the years. The area where this incident happened was historically one of the safer parts of SoMA, but not the safest, pre-Covid; I don't know how much worse it's gotten but directionally worse.
When I lived in TL (136 Taylor) I had someone brandish a firearm at me, witnessed two murders (in one incident), a bunch of people fighting other people, public drug use, etc., but SoMA is where more people I know personally were assaulted (partially because they're more likely to be walking around there...). I had a few non-consensual interactions which luckily stopped short of escalating too far, and a few times had to abort trips to an office, store, etc. to avoid stuff.
TL at least had better food.
I avoid them because there’s much elsewhere. It’s not that I’m explicitly avoiding, but my interests are often in other parts of the city.
Got chased into the street twice, and had someone smear their blood on my jacket another time. I watched people eat morsels out of the gutter, defecate in public, scurried away from cars getting broken into and my Bart station was an open air drug market at 8am. I watched drugged out people wander into traffic, just to see other passersbys scream at the police for interfering. I’ve been to the poorest countries in the world and have never seen anything like the Tenderloin.
Ya’ll can keep SF.