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So I mean… Gotham City might be a meme, and it might be not entirely accurate, but it’s for sure a mood people are feeling in the City.
But even then, SF wasn't Gotham City, and it's also not now.
SF suffers from specific issues: political corruption (Ed Lee's administration is responsible for so much of SF's current blight), homelessness, and theft. Those problems are the same as every city in the US right now, even the conservative ones. We need to solve them, for sure.
But alluding to Gotham City and memeing about a billionaire with anger issues and a penchant for beating up homeless people to swoop in is how we get people spraying homeless encampments with bear mace. Not really effective.
The Mission might be doing a bit better compared to 20 years ago, but three things: 1) neighborhoods concentrated around Market Street feel a lot worse, like the feeling in the TL spreading both northeast to the Embarcadero and southwest towards the Castro worse. 2) The City today is different than the City 20 years ago, as in who is living here and in the workforce is different. People retire, their sheltered kids that barely knew anything except the street outside their door and the route to school grew up and started living on their own with a bunch of roommates or whatever (if they moved out, plenty of them haven’t, a lot of my old schoolmates aren’t doing so great) and people moved in, like a lot of people moved in between 2000 and 2020 and you can see it on the Census. 3) Depending on where you were in the City ten years ago, things were definitely looking on the up and up. Mid-Market was never exactly great, but when new construction was going up and new businesses were entering the area, it felt a lot better than it does now. Now it feels like it’s as bad or worse than 20 years ago, and as I covered in point 2, not everybody here is either going to remember or have been here 20 years ago.
EDIT: Meant to include another point but I forgot. Another major difference between now and basically anywhere 20 years ago too is that 20 years ago, little 0.3MP camera phones were starting to just barely come onto the market. Nowadays everybody has a 4K camera that can capture CD-quality audio so you can hear in HiFi the guy screaming in the background while playing back your vacation in SF. There has been a substantial shift both in the resolution in which we can capture information that’s leagues above what you would have heard from friends at the Office who lived in different neighborhoods and the sheer low latency bandwidth with which we can transmit it.
You can just about doomscroll SF car break-in TikToks as your 9-5 if that’s your jam.
Fitting, given that the best description of Gavin Newsom (former SF mayor, now CA governor) that I've heard is that he looks like the mayor of Gotham City.
Today, on my way walking home, I hear at an intersection, "flick, flick, flick". I look around, and I see three separate individuals have lit their lighters, and are taking drags from glass pipes.
They weren't even in one group co-smoking, it was legitimately a poisson variable that sampled to n=3 in that 5 second interval at that spot.