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Comment by ambarp2 | Hacker News Reader

My solution to this was to sell my home and leave San Francisco after living there 19 years. The moment I had a baby on the way, it no longer became tenable for me to deal with the lack of cleanliness or safety on the streets.

The irony is that I moved to Mexico City. It’s a far safer place than San Francisco.

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That’s pretty debatable and entirely depends on how you define safety. I live in cdmx btw.

Just for the record, CDMX has a crime rate of over 50,000 per 100,000 residents, meaning that there’s one crime for every two residents each year. SF’s crime rate is about 6,000 per 100,000 - so about eight times safer. CDMX might feel safer than SF to you, but it is unequivocally much, much more dangerous.

When the housing crisis there reaches its breaking point (driven by gentrifying transplants), we’ll see if even the feeling lasts.

Mexico City is absolutely enormous. I don’t know for sure, but I’m betting crime rates city-wide don’t tell the whole story.

The same is true with San Francisco, even if it isn’t as big. We could cherry pick compare the best neighborhood of Mexico City against the worst neighborhood of SF to falsify a claim that Mexico City is safer than San Francisco.

Sure, and all cities of all sizes have crime hotspots, but even the rich transplant epicenter, Roma, has a crime rate of about 8 per 100 [1]. That’s well above the SF average, which itself is skewed by a few high-crime outliers like the Tenderloin.

[1]: https://hoyodecrimen.com/en/sectores-map/

Someone in SF with a $2M home can buy something pretty significantly away from the crime areas of Mexico City, and probably has a remote salary that can afford private gun toting security.

When my friend got robbed in SF the police didnt even show up for 2hrs and the owner of the bar I was at laughed at the idea of calling the police like they'd care. I highly doubt crime statistics reflect how bad it really is. Besides most of the worst of SF is the dirtiness and petty crime that police care even less about. Come out of the subway and see a homeless guy urinating right in front of the steps without even turning away is not something people are calling the police over but is a typical day-to-day experience.

OK, but the police in Mexico City are corrupt, abusive, and untrusted by the public, so the stats there are likely at least as skewed. You think people there are calling the cops when they get robbed? There’s a neighborhood a few blocks from the presidential palace (and tourist center) that the cops don’t even enter. SF has issues, but this thread was contrasting it with CDMX, and my point is that that’s ridiculous.

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