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Comment by randunel | Hacker News Reader

Has San Francisco become that bad? My father lives in the city, but I've never heard him complain about the state of things.

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IDK about living there, it's been ~6-7yrs since I last did, but San Francisco can be quite shocking to tourists/new arrivals (this article is about hotel stays which is a combo of tourists and business travelers). I remember feeling that when I first visited and the first thing I saw coming out of BART from the Airport was someone openly pissing next to the subway entrance, which contrasted weirdly with the beautiful views. I wrote it off at first until I saw it happen multiple times that week, then later just some guy sitting next to hit wall with his dick out. Later that same visit the girl I was with was robbed and the police never showed up after 3hrs waiting (apparently not a high priority).

Then there's the garbage and generally griminess of it. People are claiming it's gotten worse since then, which I can't personally attest to.

It's not like being a tourist/visitor in Manhattan or Austin/San Antonio or Chicago.

Maybe I'm biased having grown up in Toronto which is clean/safe.

Last time I've been to SF was in 2015, I get out of the BART train at Market St. early afternoon, and on the corridor to the exits there are 2 people, one lying on the floor, another shooting heroin. Out of the station, going to cross Market St. to grab something to eat, someone stops behind me while I'm waiting for the traffic light on the zebra crossing and start to scream, loud as I'd never heard someone scream in my life. Two days later I ended up inadvertently walking by Tenderloin and got fucking harassed to the point where I paced very briskly out of there.

> It's not like being a tourist/visitor in Manhattan

On this same trip some 2 weeks later I arrived in NYC, got to Jamaica Station from JFK to catch the metro, going upstairs on the elevators I take a round for the next flight of escalators and there's someone squatting close to the railing, taking a shit, naked, right there while dozens of people are passing by. Later in Manhattan I'm staying in Hell's Kitchen, very close to PABT, a guy tries to mug me when I'm going to a 7-11, I get away from the attempt just to get to a corner store and see a fight breaking out...

Just giving some anecdotes of just one of the trips I made to the USA, I had many other odd encounters during other trips, I have never experienced much of that (apart from the mugging when I still lived in Brazil) in other parts of the world I've lived at or traveled to.

What does “that bad” even mean? Like in some kind of relative sense, people still live there and go about their lives. Some of the things that made it a popular and pleasant city are intact. In an absolute sense, if you were to compare SF with Zurich, you would conclude that it’s a lawless mad max anarchy.

The article paints a pretty gloomy picture:

> The city’s lodging business has been squeezed by crime and other quality-of-life issues that have kept many convention bookers away.

> concerns over public safety are prompting groups and associations to shift their business to markets like Las Vegas

and the links [0], [1] in the article are even worse

> There has been an exodus of retailers and other businesses from the mid-Market Street area of downtown amid rampant public drug use and homelessness.

> “We try to call security, but they are usually busy. So we just let them do what they want.”

[0] https://archive.is/C6FPb [1] https://archive.is/pG5oN

Obviously geography and climate don’t change. But saying people still go about their daily lives doesn’t describe much. People in Kiev go about their daily lives and so did people in Mogadishu. It doesn’t mean newcomers would find it inviting.

Even comparing SF with Oklahoma City you would also conclude it’s a lawless mad mad anarchy.

I mean, you could say that of practically anywhere compared to Zurich.

Comparing Lausanne to Zurich might be more apt, but it is still true.

Compared to basically any modern city in Europe or Asia, yes. Downtown SF feels completely different - dirty, much less safe, homeless people and drugs everywhere.

It's not even close.

Note, I'm only talking about downtown SF, not the wider Bay Area.

No. It got bleak during the pandemic, but it has bounced back nicely. The real estate and hospitality sectors took major haircuts after a long run of unbounded exuberance and they want everyone to know that it is somebody’s fault. The city has problems but the only one that has really gotten worse in the past 2 years is the real estate prices going down.

*edit, the Magnitude of problems is as high as ever but the derivative is not. For people who don’t live in the city there are some pretty nasty things and nasty areas, but you get used to this things are not that different from where they were 5 years ago.

I was there in May. It’s actually probably better than the last time I was there, which was admittedly almost 20 years ago. But now, yeah, just normal stuff that anyone who lives in even a smaller city is used to.

A lot of techies moved here and ruined everything. No matter how many thousands of these types of posts make it to the top of HN, they won't leave. It's maddening.

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