Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

The article really wants to blame reducing automobile traffic, but I really think you could make Market St. a combined speedway / parking lot (whatever it is that car drivers think is ideal) and it wouldn't bring business back. Remote work dominates what happened to our cities. Same-day online shopping delivery is what most people do instead of physically going to stores. So I don't think anyone is surprised that downtowns are mostly empty office buildings, that's the only thing the space can be used for economically, and even that doesn't work anymore.

I spend a decent amount of time in SF and don't find it particularly unsafe (for a 40-ish woman). Definitely a little subjectively more sketchy than most places I frequent in NYC, but there just isn't any reason to be there, so nobody is there. That is kind of how that stuff goes.

People always seem to make things about crime, but I think overreaction is what killed retail. I went to Safeway to buy some toothpast and I had to have an employee pick out the toothpaste and escort me to the front of the store to buy it. I wanted to buy more stuff, but the employee didn't seem that interested in obliging that, so I just got everything else on Amazon and made a note to not visit again. That's why retail is dead. It's not bike lanes. It's not crime. It's that it sucks.

I've been doing Doordash on an e-bike in the city over the last year and a half. The toothpaste is locked up because groups of people were just going into stores with garbage bags, filling them, and walking out. I saw three in one day once. It was really chronic for a little while. Prop 36 passed and criminalized that kind of group theft, and then it all but stopped early this year, but retail hasn't caught up to this fact yet, and probably wont ever.

I think pretty much everyone agrees though that peoples habits have just changed with work from home. The cost of having to wait on an employee has been externalized to people shopping for a living in batch orders, and those people don't mind waiting given that we're only paid for minutes that we're actively on an order (Prop 22).

So yeah, retails not completely dead, just serves a different audience now.

That matches my impressions. Narratives on crime seem to lag reality pretty severely. I first visited SF back in the 1990s, when I don't think its reputation was much different from other big cities, and saw neighborhoods that looked really grim. The Tenderloin then lived up to its reputation now. Even I, as a naive adventurous guy in my twenties, had the sense to be scared in some places. I went back twenty-five years later expecting it to be much worse, having heard so many things about it going to shit, and instead found it much better.

As for basic toiletries being locked up, I've encountered that in other big cities, too. I had to find a Target employee to liberate dandruff shampoo for me in Brooklyn, and while I was wandering the aisles looking for someone, it did occur to me that Amazon could deliver to my hotel.

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