Lego latest retailer to leave troubled San Francisco Centre
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
He interviews drug users, a social media anti-drug "influencer", a police officer, a band of retail thieves and car "splashers", an HIV-positive trans woman who is only off the street because of the SRO program, and various other residents of The Tenderloin[1]
It was very interesting. Andrew shares some of his and other's takes on why it's the way it is.
[0]https://youtu.be/URfCwT3UQy4?si=5UaMusK3QwCLV46y
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenderloin,_San_Francisco
I have been there a couple of times in the past before the pandemic and it did not look worst than any other big downtown in USA to me (another interesting topic for an European living in the USA btw), in the video… holly it looks bad. Is it that the video is made in a sensationalist way or is it as bad as it seems to be?
But it's pretty obvious he's not cherrypicking from weeks of footage across the whole city. It's really very bad in certain areas.
What he is showing does not seem to be a threat for personal safety to me but I think it definitely shows some cracks in the system.
But thanks for bringing the point though because I think real estate shows the huge inequality that exists in places like SF, it is interesting to listen to the testimonies from both videos and their thoughts about it.
I live in northern europe, in Germany, so our bar is high, quality of life is good, but i'm no snowflake prude, around Market Street in San Francisco is simply disgraceful.
I witnessed on every trip passers by being harassed sexually by mentally unstable, or drug abusing people. I was offered to buy a stolen gun in broad daylight a block over from the Twitter building. I saw a gang of people storm a hair salon on Market St. and attack the occupants, spilling out into a 10 person brawl on the street. I've seen people jumping turnstyles and being assaulted by police/security personnel.
It's a really desperate situation.
I think seeing western European countries, and more specifically northern ones, should make the Americans ask themselves if something is wrong here. And probably these should be deeper than "how is it possible this happens in the richest country in the world" that I have heard so many times.
People generally do not behave as criminals when they have reasonable opportunities to spend their energy in return for a livable wage and relatively comfortable, safe housing. And there are many, many examples of zones in the US where there is effectively no economic opportunity nor safe housing opportunities.
That said, lack of police presence and especially lack of penalties does seem to encourage bad behavior (amongst people who find bad behavior as their best economic activity). The laws and policing have to keep up with the times and situation. Obviously SF cannot solve California's (or the US's) income disparity problem. So even if it were to up the police presence and make stiffer penalties, it wouldn't have the infrastructure to process and imprison the large numbers of people (coming from other cities) who are committing crimes there.
Therefore, it takes a more holistic approach and a number of years to reverse these negative trends. And given the state of US polities, I don't see any real chance for progress for some times (at least until a whole generation of voters die off).
Meanwhile, if you look closely at Europe, you'll notice that politics is shifting and income inequality is increasing. Basically many European states are gradually following the US model. We know where that will lead them.
Rubber hoses and a free ride to the city limits don’t require infrastructure and were an effective solution for decades before progressives took power.
One might ask why all these companies moved into SF, especially into areas known to have more "progressive" leadership, but that's a different topic.
As for rubber hoses, that would be met by large numbers of angry people - many of whom would arm themselves in some way (including guns). Would you then propose just firing live ammunition into crowds as a solution? These types of solutions are like cutting off a limb because of a skin rash; usually that's not the right answer. If you think street drug people are bad for business, just imagine frequent street gun battles.
And driving the people to the city limits and dumping them? We already have evidence that the more organized property criminals are driving in from outside the city. Obviously they can't afford to live in the city anyway.
It would be expected to encounter such people in the biggest city (Berlin), but I also saw it in half a dozen other cities I spent some time in. It was very confronting and very uncomfortable as I would have compassion on mentally ill or otherwise "hard luck" people, but in some cases there was real risk of aggression. At the very least, I couldn't wait (for a train) outside a station because of the very loud yelling (at invisible enemies) that some of the people would do.
I asked a couple of Germans about this situation, and they said that while there are social services and mental health services available, the state seems to have a problem keeping up with the mentally unstable people. The people will get some time in help but then scatter to the wind, revert to their drug use, and turn up outside a station somewhere (where they will remain, day after day, for some period of time).
I wonder why this seems to be much more of a problem in Germany compared to NL. Perhaps it's just a matter of population scale? General way of life and social services aren't so different between the neighboring countries.
The bad parts are extremely bad— like, apocalypse level bad. You obviously never go to them, but being a small city some destinations put you near them, or have you drive through them.
It’s sad, and certainly feels way past the point of no return. I only lived in SF for about 12 years, but even that was enough time to see at least part of the change. At the time I moved there, you still avoided the TL, but the area around civic center at least didn’t feel like a war zone.
Was never mugged, robbed, threatened, etc. You have to actively avoid people and places, and get lucky too I guess. Never lived in the rougher parts of town, but visited them. Never make eye contact with crazy people, strategically cross the street, enter shops, etc.
Again though, you just don’t go to the bad parts, like any city, and it’s benign. At least it was before I left (not because of “the crime”, other unrelated reasons).
So idk, yes it is as bad as people say, but also it isn’t at all. The news is about cherry-picking what gets clicks, and that’s rage bait.
And, honestly, the SF of 12 years ago was already greatly degraded compared to the SF a decade or so before then.
From a May 2023 article on the decline of the city <http://web.archive.org/web/20230510153958/https://www.curbed...>:
>A note to my fellow San Franciscians: I’m sorry. I know. There’s always some story in the East Coast press about how our city is dying. San Franciscians hate—HATE—these pieces. You’re a stooge and a traitor for writing one. When I set out reporting, I wanted to write a debunking-the-doom piece myself. Yet to live in San Francisco right now, to watch its streets, is to realize that no one will catch you if you fall. In the first three months of 2023, 200 San Franciscans OD’d, up 41 percent from last year. “It’s like a wasteland,” the guard said when I asked how San Francisco looked to him. “It’s like the only way to describe it. It’s like a video game — like made-up shit. Have you ever played Fallout?”
>I shook my head.
>“There’s this thing in the game called feral ghouls, and they’re like rotted. They’re like zombies.” There’s only so much pain a person can take before you disintegrate, grow paranoid, or turn numb. “I go home and play with my wife, and we’re like, ‘Ah, hahahaha, this is SF.’”
I found it notable that no one in the Reddit discussion <https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/13dvrjs/san_franci...> mentioned the Fallout comparison despite the fact that, well, this is Reddit. I think it hit too hard.
>but being a small city some destinations put you near them
Yes, this is something that people don't understand. The SF Bay area is as large as any other major metro area, but San Francisco is tiny, at 7 miles by 7 miles. More to the point, the place where most business happens and where most tourists go is right next to the Tenderloin. The only place I can think of in Manhattan that is kind of like this is the Upper East Side at 96th Street, and tourists just don't go there often (and Spanish Harlem isn't that bad, anyway).
>I only lived in SF for about 12 years, but even that was enough time to see at least part of the change. At the time I moved there, you still avoided the TL, but the area around civic center at least didn’t feel like a war zone.
>Was never mugged, robbed, threatened, etc.
Same for me on all counts. But were I a woman my experience would surely have been different.
Though, of course, the level of human misery is still deplorable.
Yes: avoid the TL at night. No: the city as a whole isn’t Mad Max with a guarantee that you’ll be assaulted and your car will be broken into.
I guess here’s what’s overblown: that SF is significantly worse than other large cities in the U.S. ever since Covid. Have you been to certain areas of downtown in Seattle? It’s pretty comparable. Andrew touches on this in the video but essentially when tech workers moved to cheaper cities in America, they left these huge downtowns empty. And what’s going to fill those in? Drugs, unhoused people who used to work in those buildings, etc.
We have tons of single focus retail and the LEGO store does bonkers business.
In the past 10 years there’s been an explosion in single focus retail as developers have built these sort of outdoor mall/fake main street retail hubs that only have stuff like lulu lemon and lego and Sephora and stuff. I haven’t seen a department store built in years.
These shopping districts are extremely packed all the time with wealthy yuppies and spawn and whatnot.
Of course, the private and city cops would probably execute you (or put you on a bus to somewhere) if you littered, much less did drugs, or pooped, or brandished a weapon. Shoplifting a stick of gum would probably result in swat team activation.
Real life is complex and macro social trends can have multiple contributing causes.
Maybe parents don't like taking their kids to them though?
I'm especially thinking about the difference between European cities and US ones where the difference in scale of the issue is notable.
The Swiss “solved” the issue by cracking down on pain killer issuance (like we did in the US) but also by sealing their borders off to drug smuggling to a degree that is impossible in the US. Zurich ~10 years ago looked a lot more like San Francisco than you’d think.
As long as the scary part of any city is where you go to buy, use, and not be arrested for using, that’s where the scary part of the city will be - it’s a self sustaining sadness loop. As far as I know there is no fix besides removing access to the drugs, and for better or worse, that’s not possible in the US. The only “solution” is police crackdowns, which doesn’t cure addiction.
The real “freedom is slavery” argument isn’t too many choices in the grocery store: it’s the ability to choose heroin a couple times when you’re sad and stupid and young.
Without strong renter protections federally, states are left to implement measure that prevent homelessness, results vary. Even city by city, a renter's rights can vary wildly.
SF is a unique case, specifically because of the political corruption and absolute money printer that the homeless "problem" creates. SF spends millions of dollars in "aid" which means it mostly ends up getting passed through 4 or 5 non profits and only 1/1000 of the money raised via taxes is actually getting to the people who need it.
our country is huge—why restrict oneself to living in extremely dense population concentrations?
In review, your two glib panaceas of moving somewhere cold or moving somewhere less dense are hopelessly inadequate.