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Comment by rainy59 | Hacker News Reader

SF is very very good at marketing itself

Crime was pretty crazy during dot com days, just tolerated more. Maritime Park next to the Hyatt / Embarcadero was always hip deep in homeless people at night. Very scary. Even worse when the freeway was still there. Market always had overly bright lights at night and looked like a sci fi dystopia. Absolutely no one wanted to be in SOMA at night which is a real problem for a startup working late hours. Hence small startups preferred renting private homes in Menlo Park etc. (Silicon Valley HBO)

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I remember about 20 years ago going to a conference at the Moscone Center and as I was busy I let someone book my hotel for me.

Got to the airport and the taxi driver said "Do you really want to go there?" - which was a bad sign and things just got worse when I got to the hotel and noticed that my room had 3 huge sliding bolts on the door.... I was told by the receptionist NOT to walk directly along Geary (I think) to get to the hotel but go two blocks north first and then cut back down.

Being an idiot I ignored this advice one night and got the fright of my life!

This was in a hotel that was a fairly short walk from Union Square.

I think I know the hotel you're talking about. It's still like that in 2023 on Geary St west of Taylor St.

I had a look on Google maps and I honestly can't say which hotel it was - I didn't spend much time hanging around outside looking at it!

My partner, not knowing the city, was about to book a hotel in this area but felt the vibes of the neighborhood and got the hell out of there.

In 2006, for my first visit to SF, I booked a room in a hotel near Union Square. I was awakened around 2 a.m. by a group of crazed homeless people screaming like sopranos. The concert went on for 2 hours. Coming from a European country, the very cowardly (by governments and much of the public) accepted "culture" of homelessness surprised me in no small measure.

Buddy here just skipped past the distinction about anti-social criminals and conflated homelessness with it, much to contradict the parent post.

I mean, this is limited to small part of the city, you see techies complaining about it now because this is where we built new housing.

SF caused new housing to be built there precisely because those areas are dangerous neighborhoods where few NIMBY neighbors protest housing. Even then housing still get blocked all the time.

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