Goodbye, San Francisco

Can confirm that particular stretch of Mission has been like that for at least forty years I’ve been around to witness it.

If you show up to the city during a boom, you’re probably too focused on living your best life to see the reality of it.

You're trading off some pretty hot days for some cold, damp days. I'd probably choose SF in general for the weather and certainly on the scale of the country as a whole, SF is pretty good.

> But, implicit in his post, is the fact that this is only the case because residents adopt behavioral patterns that remove them from violent crime scenes.

But the same is true everywhere though. You think that Houston or St. Louis or wherever don't "adopt behavioral patterns" to make themselves feel safer too? Only SF residents are smart enough to make life in the wasteland possible?

No, that's silly. SF isn't unsafe, period. SF residents (specifically ones right here[1]) "feel" unsafe because of an out of control meme. And now it's leading this formerly rationalist and clear-thinking demographic into these ridiculous rhetorical holes.

Cities are cities. They've always been like this. If you don't like it that's fine, but please stop pretending that anything happening in SF is new, or unique, or special in any way. It's just what your microcommunity has decided to yell about this year.

[1] Which doesn't include me. I'm in Portland, having lived in SF previously and grown up in the urban northeast. Cities, again, are cities.

TL;DR - SF proper was a dumpster fire 10 years ago - I have no idea why its taken people so long to catch on to the fact. OP's story tracks 100%.

My experience is now 10 years old so factor that in. Even then the Lower Haight was still very bad, its just that it wasn't quite as bad as so many other areas. I lived there, trust me. If automatic gunfire, seeing women beaten on the sidewalk by guys jumping out of cars to steal their phones/purses, people pissing everywhere in clear view and vagrants yelling at you trying to start shit sound "normal" to you then you will love the place.

Hayes Valley turned to poo in the time I was there or so it appeared to my eyes. I've been chased by drug addicts who looked like they had leprosy in Columbus area (curiously they operated as a pack with one of them running distraction while the others tried to come up from behind - organized such that we had to literally run from the bunch of them). Even then I didn't like SOMA in general and doubly so for Market street. Walking around in the mornings seeing the cars that had been broken into on the daily. Stepping over people on the sidewalks on my way home at night. Kicking a vagrant out of my girlfriends parking garage (Bay Street - Marina area - the Nice Part).

Want to sit at some out door place with a coffee and be left alone? Forget about that. There were people coming into coffee shops and beating people out of their laptops even. At the time I was a 220 lb male who spent much time in the gym and it was obvious. That didn't stop multiple lunatics from trying to start trouble with me. The BART? Forget about the BART. One lunatic accosted my girlfriend right in front of me and his day ended poorly (this didn't happen just once either).

Want a nice walk through Golden Gate Park - HA!!! Surrounded by the roughest looking bunch of vagrants you've ever seen such that there's no way in hell I'm walking in there. Try walking out of the Safeway grocery market at 2020 Market St sometime with a decent haul of supplies (they're waiting for you).

I suppose if you wanted to live in Cow Hollow/The Marina area and literally never leave it you might have a minimally invasive experience. Not "nothing" mind you, just less than other areas nearby.

A friend invited me to join her on a trip to The City in August and I gave it a hard pass.

I'm sure someone here will pipe up and say Im hyperbolizing here but this was my experience - no - this was a fraction of my experience. 10 years ago it was every bit as bad as this and I have every reason to believe it kept on getting worse after I threw in the towel. Im shocked the pain tolerance of the city has been so high that its just getting attention in the past few years.

They moved to Mission between 7th and 8th and realized that it was full of people with substance and mental issues. It's kinda like moving into a block with a lot of bars or nightclubs and then complaining about the noise at night. Just because some real estate developers have built some nice-ish condos on that block does not mean that the zombies which hang out in the neighborhood are going to go away. UN Plaza in civic center and the first block of 7th have been a bit of a hell hole for many years.

The only way buildings like Mission at Trinity or Soma Grande make any sense is if you drive in and out of your garage for the most part. For me the walk score of those places is close to zero since you are guaranteed to deal with shit (human feces and/or altercations) if you walk a block or two in any direction from those locations.

I've lived in SF for 29+ years all in lower Nob Hill. When I moved into my place the neighborhood was a little rougher. Over that time it's gotten more and more gentrified, but the Tenderloin/Civic Center area has been getting worse. From 2012 to 2021 I worked in Potrero Hill and commuted back and forth. It was a little too far to walk so I almost never did, but it was also a completely shitty walk since there was no good path that didn't go through the Tenderloin/Civic Center. There's no way I would consider living in that area.

The area thrives on misery. Many of the city's SROs and other services for the homeless are concentrated in the area. All the "non"-profits which benefit from homeless clients are based there. And Civic Center BART seems to be a great place to score drugs and for drug dealers to commute into the city for work.

SF either needs to go all in on a universal basic income, building housing, mental health services and decriminalization of drugs, OR they need to make it clear that shooting up, breaking into cars and shitting on the streets is not ok. Instead we have this half-assed in between approach where we give $1.6 Billion to over 700 different "community based organizations" to try to make the situation better, but instead it's just a big uncoordinated mess.

https://sfgov.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=11635453&GUID=55...