SF Declared Dead, Full of Drugs and Homeless, Multiple Times in Last 50 Years

Things have really changed in downtown SF in a way that is totally different than in the past. Walking ~3 blocks in broad daylight I saw people openly injecting themselves with drugs, people having sex right on the sidewalk, numerous people passed out (or dead?) laying flat across the sidewalk with other people ignoring them and stepping around them, hundreds of piles of human feces, and a lot of mentally ill people aggressively confronting strangers. I was in the area near the recently shut down Whole foods, and couldn't find a place to use a restroom even as a paying customer- nearly all of the businesses were shut down or boarded up. I finally found a public library with restrooms, and there were guards posted inside every restroom in attempt to curb drug use.

The situation is dehumanizing and terrifying, and nothing like when I visited the same area 20 years ago.

There is a very interesting comment near the bottom:

> As someone who moved here in 1992 from Washington, DC, the current drug crisis reminds me of the crack cocaine crisis, lots of petty theft and a sense of menace with drug addled people on the streets. The big difference between the earlier waves of homelessness is perhaps the tents. The only place anyone would pitch a tent during the Willie Brown era was in Golden Gate Part (Brown famously wanted to fly helicopters with infrared cameras to find all the encampments and remove them.) Tents are very in your face and perhaps that's one reason that people see homelessness as worse today than in past times, even though the numbers tell a different story.

Lots of other great comments from older residents that give perspective of San Francisco of different eras.

Fun article, but note that there is such a thing as a long term trend. The fact that people have been pointing out a trend for a long time doesn't mean it's not real.

I visited SF recently for the first time in several years. Hardly a scientific sampling, but I did revisit some exact locations that I had been to before.

Overall it seemed cleaner and safer than it had been in the past (2019?). There were even more kids.

Funny the article limits it to 50 years, might be good to go back a bit further.

From 1950 (775,000) to 1980 (678,000) San Francisco's population dropped by 13%.

I'm not arguing SF is on the same trend now, but there is no reason why it couldn't happen again.

That said, I've noticed some changes with the new DA and a lot more police presence in the downtown core to try and stem some of the worst issue (casual shoplifting), so maybe things will get better.

SF was where the Dirty Harry movies were shot. By the standards of the time, SF was gritty and lawless. The movies poke at the luxury beliefs of the elites and what that was doing to SF. However, it got turned around to some extent so that by the early 2000s it was a top place to visit. Many conventions chose it as a destination.

I recall going with a group to Java One and we were all excited to get to SF and the conference.

But it's been on a decidedly downward trend since then, under one party rule. There's no way I'd go to a conference there now, or for any other reason.

You know things are going well when you have to yell at the internet that your not dead.

Every single mechanism suggested (and has been used successfully in many other cities all over the world) to curb the trajectory SF is on is outright refused for either idealogical or political reasons. This is literally a problem of their own making.

If the state of California legalized FAFO to include lethal force for self-defense, a vast majority of these problems would go away overnight.

Is this about the upcoming Bell riots?

who cares about SF. It's a little square at the top left of the bay. Silicon Valley is distinctly the south bay and San Jose. nothing important has ever happened in san francisco. Salesforce? Come on. If it wants to be a pile of feces, let it. I don't want to hear about it.