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Comment by PM_me_your_math | Hacker News Reader

Speaking from experience, if you go walking the Bronx Concourse at 2am, you are getting robbed at gun point.

A big difference between SF (and Portland for that matter) and other US cities seems to be that there is no clear line between "the good parts" of town and "the bad parts". You know the Bronx Concourse is bad, but in SF it's less clear which part isn't bad. Even 14 years ago I had friends visit from LA who walked 1 or 2 blocks in the wrong direction from Union Square and felt unsafe enough that they walked into a store and called a taxi to not have to walk "back to safety".

Is that really true?

If you're in the Tenderloin, Civic Center area, parts of the Mission or SoMA, then sure, you know you're in a dodgy area. But I'm pretty sure that if you're in Forest Hills, West Portal, Lake Merced, or the Presidio, you'll feel pretty safe, and crime maps seem to bear that out. I'll take my preschoolers alone to visit friends in the city on public transportation - I drive to Forest Hills, park in the neighborhood, muni to the Castro. Never had a problem.

I think that what gets tourists to SF is that areas you'd expect would be safe are actually bad. Normally you'd expect that major shopping districts like Union Square, or the city government like Civic Center, would be safe. In SF they're right next to the Tenderloin, which is a cesspit of filth and addicts. And gentrified vs. dodgy areas in SF are very close together, like walking two blocks toward Valencia and Guerrero in the Mission is dramatically different from walking two blocks in the opposite direction to Van Ness and Folsom, or being on the north side of Potrero is dramatically different from wandering the south side.

In New York City, crime almost never spills out of the local "tenderloins" (projects, bad neighborhoods, etc.). For example, I recently lived about 5 blocks over from a housing project in Manhattan that had fairly high crime. At [x]th avenue and [y]th street, crime was very high because it was right next to the project. At [x]th avenue and [y + 1]th street, there was almost never a violent crime. When there was a murder on [x + 1]th avenue and [y + 4]th street, it was major local news. In SF, crime actually does spill out of the Tenderloin into areas that are major tourist centers, so it blurs the lines a lot if you are used to NYC.

There's some truth to this - I was talking to a friend about potentially moving to an apartment at [X] Street. They were aghast, hoping that I wasn't talking about [X] Street and [Y] Avenue, since its pretty bad at night. When I told them its [Y+3] Avenue, they were relieved and said that's a pretty nice area.

Eh I lived in tenderloin for a couple years and would often walk around alone past midnight to make a snack run or go to the gym. Definitely sketchy but never felt unsafe.

I have no delusions though, I would not consider any part of the city as truly safe, the metric being I'd be ok with my wife walking around alone.

You sound like Kara Swisher who lived in SF years ago and pretends nothing has changed since then.

I just said I don't consider any part of the city safe enough to let my wife walk around at night alone. Contrast that to any major city in say Japan, where I'd let my kids walk around alone at night.

Kara Swisher is a self-involved imbecile, please don't compare me to her.

This is just 100% wrong.

Much of SFs homeless population and crime is concentrated around the Tenderloin and SOMA areas with downtown also being relevant. You can use something like the Citizen app to get a rough geographic understanding.

This is an important topic but so many clueless individuals (not OP, in general) decide to comment anyways.

this is definitely not true of SF...its very obvious for anyone walking around when you are in a good or bad part (parts of SOMA/Tenderloin/Civic Center/Western Addition). Most other parts of the, including where this crime happened, feel completely safe (and statistically are very safe).

There are a lot of places in the world where "nothing good happens after 2 AM..."

That's not a fair comparison. This murder was FiDi-adjacent. Pre-pandemic, I wouldn't have been worried in that neighborhood. No idea these days.

[flagged]

Please don't use HN for ideological flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My apologies.

I am working on my self-control.

Thanks. Me too.

[flagged]

I’m not going to pretend anything is a simple obvious cause/effect — but in the case of SF, you’d be hard pressed to find a city that bends over backwards more with social policies. So I’m curious why unlike the Europe comparison, SF and LA are some of the worst places here in terms of people still mired in poverty and also doing crime. I think plenty of people really are helped by those policies and move on in their lives, but also that plenty of others take advantage of the “liberal guilt” atmosphere, which makes administering punishment very uncomfortable, to do lots of crimes. I see it as an unintended consequence.

And officially, I guess I don’t mind it. I left SF, and if the current residents are happy with the current results, they’re free to continue.

>you’d be hard pressed to find a city that bends over backwards more with social policies

That really doesn't mesh together with the extremely restrictive building code that makes housing crisis so much worse.

Are you saying people breaking into cars and stabbing people are doing so because they can afford say, $1800 in rent but can’t find a place under $2900? Because if the city could drive rents down that far across the board by encouraging new home construction, I would consider that a wildly successful outcome. But even then I don’t think it would change almost anything about the crime and homelessness problems.

I think the criminals are mostly either desperate addicts who have no chance at turning it around unless they had serious help with their illnesses, or, just callous criminals who could change but prefer doing crime to working. And it doesn’t even take that many — especially of that second group — to make everybody miserable.

Edit: just want to clarify: I am absolutely in favor of a “build, build, build, build, build” housing policy. Despite everything I said, it would still make lots of things better including improving density, making transit make sense.

I am saying that this is of course a complex issue with many driving forces behind it, but housing crisis is definitively a major part of it.

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I would argue half a thousand of other comments blaming abstract "liberals" for known shortfalls of US policy is the more logical recipient of this remark.

Sure, it comes thick and fast from all sides - but it's also the case that everyone always feels like the other side started it and did worse; and that the mods are scolding the other side less than it deserves.

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