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Comment by shsachdev | Hacker News Reader

Downtown SF (and especially OP's neighborhood of 7th/8th Mission Street) is not the place to be. It's a bit like complaining about LA and living right near downtown.

Upper Market, North Beach, Hayes Valley, Valencia St, Mission Dolores, Polk Street, Upper Nob Hill, Haight Ashbury -- all fun locations.

I've lived near Dolores Park for the past 15 months now and have had a great experience. I've found community, made new friends, and have never felt unsafe whilst walking around at night.

We don't have highrise buildings or a thriving "downtown" like other urban cities, but we do have plenty of lively, energetic neighborhoods around the city and the best food & weather in the country.

I agree with the author that changes need to be made and that the homelessness problem is bad. But I think you can still have an overwhelmingly positive experience in the city if you pick one of the neighborhoods I mentioned above to live in.

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Yeah he picked probably among the worst neighborhoods to live in. I have noticed this is a recurring pattern among single male tech friends I have to move to Soma due to office proximity and then end up hating the city.

People move to SOMA because the apartments are both close to their office and easily accessible online. Finding apartments in the rest of the city can be something of an adventure.

But then, as you note, SOMA is kinda bad to live in. Lots of homelessness, not a whole lot of services, everything shuts down outside of business hours.

it's probably a pattern because the city government allowed more housing construction there than anywhere else.

If you feel uncomfortable around homeless people, there are plenty of other areas that the city allows housing construction, like the Dogpatch area without large homeless populations. I would not necessarily recommend that area either, but it is a tradeoff.

Alot of this is due to the policy decisions of Ed Lee(ex SF mayor). He authorized tax breaks for a bevy of tech companies to operate in the tenderloin tax free(for a few years). The reason for this was to revitalize a blighted neighborhood with an infusion of highly paid tech workers. This is turn lead to a huge amount of tech employees moving to one of the worst areas in SF. Sf for sure is falling apart but I did spend some time recently in the sunset and things seemed pretty normal over there - at least in broad daylight, but everywhere else I visited was not great at all.

Two other related points:

- And the flagship company to take Ed Lee up on the offer was Twitter - a social media company

- Additionally adding to things is that Union Square butts up against the Tenderloin - making the misery very visible for tourists.

Zoning laws basically make this the reality in every major city's downtown area. They aren't allowing offices or building new multistory buildings in the safe NIMBY areas of cities.

It might sound like an overt policy but in reality it's just the easiest one without doing any real reform or dealing with any of the problems. Like all municipal housing/development policy in the last two decades.

Zoning rarely changes, what's does always change a) the natural expansion of economically productive downtown areas and b) the degree to how bad it is in those very high traffic areas while everyone pretends you can just easily not visit those areas and be fine (despite there being few options to work or build elsewhere).

Bad zoning policy is probably the largest driver of most things that are killing cities -- it encourages wealth disparity, bad land use, increased emissions, and concentration of crime. Unfortunately, wealth is a driver of bad zoning policy, so it's a bit hard to get out from under it -- and some of the examples of "fixing" zoning are equally terrible, e.g. Houston's complete lack of zoning and incredible sprawl.

> the best food & weather in the country

Imagine believing SF proper has the best weather in the country

Your year-round weather isn't even as good as neighboring counties.

- someone who lived on the SF peninsula for years, and often regretted trading idyllic weather for a cold, damp dinner night in SF.

You're trading off some pretty hot days for some cold, damp days. I'd probably choose SF in general for the weather and certainly on the scale of the country as a whole, SF is pretty good.

On the scale of the whole country the entire west coast is "pretty good".

SF is definitely not the best out of the entire coast, and if you consider its cost of living, the weather is trash for the cost. It's notoriously cold and wet for a substantial part of the year.

I like SF weather overall, but the Bay Area as a whole generally has fantastic weather. Despite being an SF resident, personally I'd say the peninsula (south of SF) and the most of the East Bay have better weather than SF.

The South Bay and the far East Bay can get a little too hot for my taste, but plenty of people prefer that to year round fog/wind in much of SF.

I've definitely been in SF when "the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco" applied. That said, I'm generally not a fan of heat.

Yeah it's way nicer to live up the hill a little, basically anywhere up a hill. The low-lying areas have "gravity" that attract bad things.

I made the same mistake moving to SF in 2002, until 2004. It was bad then -- and surprise, surprise, the places with the most availability are the least desirable.

The meme is that tech people are taking over SF. But it's also true that the city is crowded with old money, and new housing / new people starting in 2010 took some of the least desirable spots, including that part of 7th-8th and Mission.

I also biked, and a related thing I learned is you just have to get used to biking up and down hills. It helped my fitness a lot. If you bike in the low-lying areas, it's kind of a shitty experience too.

The only city where I haven’t found the “hill effect” to be true is Pittsburgh. It seems every hilltop area there is quite bad.

In Brazil, the favelas are up on the hills. Unclear why it's this way in some places, but the opposite in others

In many US cities, low lying areas near water (rivers, large lakes, oceans) were often used as cargo ports. Factories and other industrial facilities were then built nearby which made it easier to obtain raw materials and ship out finished products. And naturally low wage, blue collar workers tended to live near those jobs. Such areas were also at greater risk of flooding, and suffered more from air, water, and noise pollution. So, affluent people tended to build homes on higher ground away from the dirty waterfronts.

Now that trend has somewhat flipped. The US has deindustrialized and offshored most heavy industries. Stricter environmental laws have reduced pollution. And civil engineering measures have somewhat reduced flood risk. So, now waterfront residential areas have become expensive and fashionable.

This is just a general trend. We will still see exceptions in SF and other cities.

Two good examples of the flip are the Ferry Building in SF and Chelsea Market in Manhattan. Those used to be big industrial / shipping / cargo buildings but now sell upscale food :)

It's kind of funny how you see the same economic patterns play out in different cities over hundreds of years

Another pattern is that train stations and big US post offices are often in the oldest parts of town, and I think they have started to move over the years. That real estate is often extremely valuable, so the govt or business finds something else to do with it

> Upper Market, North Beach, Hayes Valley, Valencia St, Mission Dolores, Polk Street, Upper Nob Hill, Haight Ashbury -- all fun locations.

This is like 2 sq miles of the city, maybe... If you add in Golden Gate Park and Presidio - you're still only at 1/8th of the city being nice. That's not a great ratio.

Especially when the nice parts aren't all connected and you can't venture more than a few blocks until you're out of a nice area (unless you're in one of 2 parks).

The Mission District alone is almost 2 square miles. Add in a couple more decent neighborhoods (particularly the Sunset and the Richmond), and you're probably at half of SF's 49 square miles.

Are we claiming the Mission is nice? Because it's really not, even the nicer parts worsened pre, during, post pandemic.

It's much nicer than soma in my opinion and there are basically only two drug dealing/prostitution corridors along shotwell area and capp.

The Norteńo and Sureńo gangs had running machine gun battles in the Outer and South Mission just a decade ago, until the Feds took them down using the gang enhancements so decried by progressives like Chesa Boudin.

At some point, nice is subjective. And Mission definitely has some sketch spots. But Castro, Eureka, Noe border it and are even nicer; then there's Hayes and the Haight and Alamo Square; head west on Haight and you get to Cole Valley and the Inner Sunset; north of Haight you'd hit a few patchy blocks on Fillmore but then come to Japantown, Pac Heights, the Marina. And that list is not even close to exhaustive: the point is that there are large contiguous areas that are nice, walkable, and safe.

But all of those places have a lot of bums accosting people and shouting, tents right along main walkways, poop in the streets, etc.

Can confirm that particular stretch of Mission has been like that for at least forty years I’ve been around to witness it.

If you show up to the city during a boom, you’re probably too focused on living your best life to see the reality of it.

It used to be the place of low-innovation. But Covid destroyed the South Park soma tech scene, with this moving remote. However the high-tech work remains vibrant in Silicon Valley, because well moving a r&d lab isn’t trivial or work easily doable which can be done at home.

Yea, don't let the door hit on the way out...

Now, if only 10 or 20 million more people would get out of California, then maybe the population would be back to a reasonable level...

Everyone who can't tell the difference between CA and TX should really just move to TX...

What a city where you need to be careful about which neighbourhood to live in.

Don’t all big cities have bad neighborhoods?

SF is weird in that one block can be pretty nice, and a walk a few minutes in the wrong direction can put you in the middle of skid row. It is a rapid and jarring transition.

A night out for the unaware can start with an early dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Hayes. You enjoy a performance of La Boheme at the opera, and afterwards walk across the street to look at the beautiful neoclassical architecture of City Hall lit up at night with colors of pride. You walk one more block looking for a nightcap and... What the fuck, why am I surrounded by tents, drug dealers, and someone seizing on the sidewalk from a fentanyl overdose?

Absolutely not. All cities have rougher areas, because cities need workers that are only paid enough to live in affordable hosing and affordable housing inevitably clumps together.

But it doesn't automatically follow that a rough area is "bad" in the way it is in San Francisco. Plenty of cities in Australia, for example, have their share of upmarket and downmarket suburbs. But the lesser suburbs are rarely dangerous and their poor reputation is largely socio-economic, relativistic and/or historical prejudice.

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