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Comment by marstall | Hacker News Reader

I lived in SF in the late '90s and saw many of the same things people have been posting about here lately .

Tweakers on every corner in the Tenderloin, intense/overwhelming-at-times homeless presence in the blocks near Mission and lower Market ... latino gangs operating in the blocks south of 14th ...

I heard gunshots fired in my neighborhood (24th street) on two occasions.

Anybody here experienced SF then and now? Is it really worse now?

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Born and raised here. It is different (of course no city stays exactly the same over three decades). It feels like it is more concentrated now. Back then, there were a lot more areas in the city (and in the Bay) where one would be a little on guard. A lot of those places have gentrified to the point where they are much nicer than they used to be. But the hotspots have gotten a lot worse. On balance, I think more of the bay area population is safer and has a higher quality of life than in the 90s. But if you are near those hotspots, it seems like things are a lot worse than they use to be. This is probably why this topic is so muddy. It is pretty easy to generate a click bait headline about how bad things are by focusing on those few hotspots, but it is a lot harder to convey the more broad QOL improvements that the average resident is likely experiencing. This also explains why there hasn't been some sort of massive exodus, because most residents are not impacted by these issues.

Spot on, this is my experience as well. A lot of the once-sketchy parts of Berkeley, Oakland, East Palo Alto, etc. have gentrified and become safer since the 70s and 80s. Part of that has been big shifts in racial makeup and socioeconomics. Starting in the mid-late 90s tech began to really dominate Bay Area employment, bringing in a lot of new (well-paid) people and forcing out many others.

i visited a lot in the 90s, lived there from 2006-2008 in pac heights/fillmore, and still visit frequently.

i think the difference now is that it's creeping into the 'nice' areas like pac heights, financial district, and russian hill, knob hill, north beach, etc.

like, seeing shattered glass all over downtown is new. massive tent cities is new.

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