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Goodbye, San Francisco

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Re: Goodbye, San Francisco

#91

Post by amanaplanacanal »

yohannparis wrote: post #72
shsachdev wrote: post #37

Downtown SF (and especially OP's neighborhood of 7th/8th Mission Street) is not the place to be. It's a bit like complaining about LA and living right near downtown. Upper Market, North Beach, Hayes Valley, Valencia St, Mission Dolores, Polk Street, Upper Nob Hill, Haight Ashbury -- all fun locations. I've lived near Dolores Park for the past 15 months now and have had a great experience. I've found community, made n…

What a city where you need to be careful about which neighbourhood to live in.

Don’t all big cities have bad neighborhoods?

Re: Goodbye, San Francisco

#92

Post by ghaff »

whimsicalism wrote: post #12
hudon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is addressed at the end of the article. > Why didn’t you just move to a different part of SF? > I wanted to live in a dense, central area and not in a single family house that’s 4 miles from downtown. Also, my neighborhood was perfectly nice when I moved in, and then got bad. What’s to prevent that from happening to other places in the city as well?

Lower haight is dense and fewer than 2 miles from downtown. I dont perceive the area OP is describing as one I would expect to be free from drug crime even four years ago, whereas I do have that expectation for this region of SF.

The area the OP is discussing is basically a couple blocks from the Civic Center. That's been a pretty sketchy area for pretty much as long as I can remember.

Obviously OP lived there (by choice) but one of the reasons many business visitors get a bad impression of SF is that they're probably staying and attending an event in, shall we say, not the greatest part of town.

Re: Goodbye, San Francisco

#93

Post by scarmig »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #80
shsachdev wrote: post #37

Downtown SF (and especially OP's neighborhood of 7th/8th Mission Street) is not the place to be. It's a bit like complaining about LA and living right near downtown. Upper Market, North Beach, Hayes Valley, Valencia St, Mission Dolores, Polk Street, Upper Nob Hill, Haight Ashbury -- all fun locations. I've lived near Dolores Park for the past 15 months now and have had a great experience. I've found community, made n…

> Upper Market, North Beach, Hayes Valley, Valencia St, Mission Dolores, Polk Street, Upper Nob Hill, Haight Ashbury -- all fun locations. This is like 2 sq miles of the city, maybe... If you add in Golden Gate Park and Presidio - you're still only at 1/8th of the city being nice. That's not a great ratio. Especially when the nice parts aren't all connected and you can't venture more than a few blocks until you're ou…

The Mission District alone is almost 2 square miles. Add in a couple more decent neighborhoods (particularly the Sunset and the Richmond), and you're probably at half of SF's 49 square miles.

Re: Goodbye, San Francisco

#94

Post by likpok »

whimsicalism wrote: post #57
shsachdev wrote: post #37

Downtown SF (and especially OP's neighborhood of 7th/8th Mission Street) is not the place to be. It's a bit like complaining about LA and living right near downtown. Upper Market, North Beach, Hayes Valley, Valencia St, Mission Dolores, Polk Street, Upper Nob Hill, Haight Ashbury -- all fun locations. I've lived near Dolores Park for the past 15 months now and have had a great experience. I've found community, made n…

Yeah he picked probably among the worst neighborhoods to live in. I have noticed this is a recurring pattern among single male tech friends I have to move to Soma due to office proximity and then end up hating the city.

People move to SOMA because the apartments are both close to their office and easily accessible online. Finding apartments in the rest of the city can be something of an adventure.

But then, as you note, SOMA is kinda bad to live in. Lots of homelessness, not a whole lot of services, everything shuts down outside of business hours.

Re: Goodbye, San Francisco

#95

Post by jmccaf »

ajross wrote: post #60

Unbelievable how embedded this meme is in our community. The article has to call it out explicitly right at the top, admit it's a fallacy, and then just... plows ahead anyway: > My biggest problem with SF was simply not feeling physically safe [...] SF has a pretty low violent crime rate [...] Instead, the problem was that SF [has] thousands of people wandering around who are suffering from untreated substance abuse…

Also, in my learning 'street smarts' as an adult , one lesson tougher people including my wife have taught me , is to trust your gut instincts if you are in a neighborhood or situation and you feel unsafe.

Re: Goodbye, San Francisco

#96

Post by lotsofpulp »

thebooktocome wrote: post #82
lotsofpulp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a non federal level, imprisoning people and hence goading them elsewhere is the only solution. No city/county/state has the resources to be able to offer healthcare or housing. Freedom of movement across the country means net benefit recipients would move in, and net payers into the system would move out.

Imprisonment is far more expensive than housing. SLC ran a pilot program years ago proving the concept. Of course, if one is the retributive sort, nothing grinds one’s spleen more than someone worse off getting something “they don’t deserve”. I personally don’t understand why the some exceptionally wealthy billionaire in California doesn’t solve the homelessness problem themselves, expending some mere fraction of the…

Imprisonment is to keep people moving along, or deter them from coming.

Housing is more expensive because of the opposite, it incentives everyone to come get it.

On a federal level, housing and healthcare might be cheaper than imprisonment. But what is even cheaper (in the short run) is ignoring it altogether.

>I personally don’t understand why the some exceptionally wealthy billionaire in California doesn’t solve the homelessness problem themselves, expending some mere fraction of their net worth (i.e., the value of a couple bucks to the rest of us).

Because the problem is far more expensive than any single billionaire or even group of billionaires entire net worth. Even if they could handle just California's population. there are 290M people in the rest of the country, and a significant portion who would not mind coming to California for free housing.

Re: Goodbye, San Francisco

#97

Post by pengaru »

shsachdev wrote: post #37

Downtown SF (and especially OP's neighborhood of 7th/8th Mission Street) is not the place to be. It's a bit like complaining about LA and living right near downtown. Upper Market, North Beach, Hayes Valley, Valencia St, Mission Dolores, Polk Street, Upper Nob Hill, Haight Ashbury -- all fun locations. I've lived near Dolores Park for the past 15 months now and have had a great experience. I've found community, made n…

> the best food & weather in the country

Imagine believing SF proper has the best weather in the country

Your year-round weather isn't even as good as neighboring counties.

- someone who lived on the SF peninsula for years, and often regretted trading idyllic weather for a cold, damp dinner night in SF.

Re: Goodbye, San Francisco

#98

Post by realo »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #54
rossdavidh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on. In most previous decades, the city government (no matter the party) would have been able to take whatever action (probably more $$ for police and more enforcement) seemed appropriate to the problem, and that would be a non-partisan issue. Now even admitting that there is an actual issue seems to be a partisan stance.

On a non federal level, imprisoning people and hence goading them elsewhere is the only solution. No city/county/state has the resources to be able to offer healthcare or housing. Freedom of movement across the country means net benefit recipients would move in, and net payers into the system would move out.

Well... OP does mention that SF has an operating budget of 14 billion dollars per year...

I am pretty sure that _something_ could be done with even a small portion of that _yearly_ ingress of capital.

Re: Goodbye, San Francisco

#100

Post by chubot »

shsachdev wrote: post #37

Downtown SF (and especially OP's neighborhood of 7th/8th Mission Street) is not the place to be. It's a bit like complaining about LA and living right near downtown. Upper Market, North Beach, Hayes Valley, Valencia St, Mission Dolores, Polk Street, Upper Nob Hill, Haight Ashbury -- all fun locations. I've lived near Dolores Park for the past 15 months now and have had a great experience. I've found community, made n…

Yeah it's way nicer to live up the hill a little, basically anywhere up a hill. The low-lying areas have "gravity" that attract bad things.

I made the same mistake moving to SF in 2002, until 2004. It was bad then -- and surprise, surprise, the places with the most availability are the least desirable.

The meme is that tech people are taking over SF. But it's also true that the city is crowded with old money, and new housing / new people starting in 2010 took some of the least desirable spots, including that part of 7th-8th and Mission.

I also biked, and a related thing I learned is you just have to get used to biking up and down hills. It helped my fitness a lot. If you bike in the low-lying areas, it's kind of a shitty experience too.

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