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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

I used to live at 8th/Mission, I have felt the difference you speak of and still I could never live there again. There is a cold, passive hostility there that you don't feel in other places.

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I don't think the parent is arguing for SF, but for A place where tech is highly concentrated. I moved away from SF in 2013 and miss the tech focus all the time. I feel like I moved away from the center of the earth. I loved my time in SF, but likewise cannot imagine moving back due to all the problems around crime and crazy prizes due to NIMBYism. I'd love to live in a place like SF in the late 00s/early10s though.

Yes, it really was very good in that era. And even walking alone through the TL didn’t actually feel unsafe. I wouldn’t do that now.

That was also the last great opportunity to buy a home there too.

I didn't feel safe in SF until maybe the mid-late 90s. SF was seriously a violent place until the tech boom. China Basin, where the ballpark is now, was one of the worst parts of the city.

A "safe" SF only existed for about 20 years total.

San Francisco is safer (in terms of violent crime rate) today than it was at any time in the 1990s. (It also went up from the late 1990s to the mid-00s, so if you only started feeling safe in the late 1990s, that was probably your personal circumstances, not the actual safety of the city.)

Fair enough. I don't think it's that unsafe now either. It just felt like it had a lot more rough edges when I was younger, but that could've been due to differences in experiences as I got older.

"Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown"

To correct my ambiguous post, my experience was early '00s to late '10s. I can't speak for the 90s.

> I‘d love to live in a place like SF in the late 00s/early10s though.

The recent increase in violent crime in SF is still lower than any period in the 00s or 10s except the three-year window from 2009-2011.

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