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Both cities have a large proportion of drug problems, homelessness, panhandlers, etc etc...to those who've spent time in both cities, which sketchy district is more of an eyesore/ visually-problematic/ intimidating to you?
P.S. visit Google Images and type in each neighborhood and see the resulting images represented by each
Both cities have a large proportion of drug problems, homelessness, panhandlers, etc etc...to those who've spent time in both cities, which sketchy district is more of an eyesore/ visually-problematic/ intimidating to you?
P.S. visit Google Images and type in each neighborhood and see the resulting images represented by each
This is an odd thread. I don't know about Downtown Eastside, but the Tenderloin has more going for it than being sketchy... a lot more.
Certainly violent crime is more likely in Tenderloin district (SF in general)..but Vancouver's DT Eastside is pretty nasty too (more of an eyesore than anything though, agreed Tenderloin is more than "sketchy")
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I walked through the Tenderloin (unintentionally) and noticed all of two sketchy blocks then it transitioned back to just fine again. Some bum tried to sell me a labtop on the street, it was in a plastic Safeway grocery bag.
Canadian cities don't really have comparable ghettos to US cities however Vancouver's DTE is definitely uglier and sketchier than anywhere else I've seen in Canada, worse than E. Ste Catherine in Montreal. Seems like where a lot of Canada's castaway druggie youth ends up.
I walked through the Tenderloin (unintentionally) and noticed all of two sketchy blocks then it transitioned back to just fine again. .
If your only experience with the TL is the one time you walked through unintentionally, than you most likely did not see all of it, let alone all of the sketchy parts of it. There's more than two blocks of "sketchy-ness", is what I'm saying.
And to answer the OP, the DT Eastside and Tenderloin have some similarities for sure, but I would guess that the TL is quite a bit more dangerous in terms of violent crime. On some years the tenderloin has had as many murders as the entire city of Vancouver. The TL even had more murders in 2007 than the city of Vancouver had in 2010 (13 for the TL, which has a population of 25,000, compared to 9 for Vancouver, which has a population of 600,000).
Tenderloin is one of the coolest neighborhoods in the city if you like actual city stuff and not just going to touristy areas driving in from lily white suburbs. Yes there are more than several bad blocks where homeless are lined up... but... eh? Not sure what you are getting at.
Tenderloin is one of the coolest neighborhoods in the city if you like actual city stuff and not just going to touristy areas driving in from lily white suburbs. Yes there are more than several bad blocks where homeless are lined up... but... eh? Not sure what you are getting at.
He said there was only two blocks of sketchy stuff, but he's wrong, so I corrected him. That's what i'm "getting at".
I never said the tenderloin doesn't have an upside, as it most certainly does. But the OP is specifically asking what's the most "problematic/intimidating"...not which area has the best restaurants/is most urban/has the largest immigrant population/best dive bars/best public transport, or anything like that.
edit: also, what's with the "lily white suburbs" remark? Half of SF's suburbs are even less white than SF is...not to mention there are tons of non-touristy hoods in SF besides the tenderloin. Hell, the TL is kind of touristy itself if only for the fact that it's in the middle of downtown (seriously, it's between Union Square, Market street, Nob Hill, and Civic Center). It's not exactly a tourist destination, but tourists wander through it all the time.
no need to get defensive, I was actually defending the TL myself. Lily white suburbs is nothing to do with demographic, pretty common termed to group certain suburbanites from anywhere who might be "shocked" at seeing the realities of city life.
Both the Tenderloin and Downtown Eastside are pretty small. Almost every West Coast city seems to have a little low-rent neighborhood full of SRO hotels and homeless shelters on the edge of the central downtown. Portland has Old Town/Chinatown, Seattle has some areas around Pioneer Square and on one side of Belltown, Los Angeles has Skid Row on the edge of downtown, and I think San Diego has a small part of downtown similar to these.
I stayed on the edge of the Tenderloin(Hotel Phoenix) last month, walked through it both during the day and at night--I've also had friends who lived on the northern edge of it(the so-called Tendernob). You're surrounded by areas with a lot of street traffic on all sides for the most part(Union Square, Market Street, Civic Center, Polk Gulch)... Yeah, there's a lot of winos and crackheads and hookers on certain street corners, but there's also working class Vietnamese immigrants. But the worst part of the Tenderloin you can walk through in a few blocks and end up in a different neighborhood. I mean the touristy hotels of Union Square on the eastside of the TLoin basically blend right into the eastern part of the neighborhood. The best part about the Tenderloin is the great ethnic affordable ethnic restaurants--it's nice to have great Vietnamese, Indian, Pakistani, and Burmese food served in low-key restaurants close to downtown. There's also good dive bars--and newer trendier bars all around the Tenderloin. It's rarely felt that intimidating, as I've never had any homeless people in the Tenderloin do anything more than ask me for change.
The Downtown Eastside has felt even more packed in when I've walked through it to Chinatown or to Gastown. It seems even more concentrated and even smaller than the Tenderloin in some ways. I mean, I've seen huge crowds outside the shelters(which I see in Portland every day) and I've walked by the park set aside for heroin addicts. But, it's pretty much an area that you go two blocks north, you're in Gastown, two blocks east you're in Chinatown(which seems to be pretty safe when there's people milling about it). It's low-rent sketch and druggies and it's sort of depressing, but there's new businesses slowly opening on the edges of it as well.
The thing about these types of neighborhoods is that both cities could easily transform these areas into redeveloped urban renewal zones pretty quickly if they really desired to. But when the rest of the downtown hoods have been gentrified and redeveloped into shiny new condos and boutiques, there's going to be one spot that contains the have-nots. They're basically subsidized by the city in some ways(low-rent apartments and homeless shelters), maybe as a way to just keep a lot of the down-and-out concentrated in one location. I know Vancouver's been accused of pushing homeless and prostitutes out of other parts of the city--back in the 80s and 90s they moved a lot of prostitution out of the gentrifying West End and during the Olympics there was similar criticism.
But everyone knows where drugs can be scored or sex is for sale. But, I mean if I can walk through a neighborhood and spot drug deals going on, then it shouldn't be too hard for the police to as well and make some arrests. But I think there's kind of an unspoken agreement between the police and criminals ... It's a little more acceptable to have prostitution and druggies packed in a small rundown neighborhood instead of spread all over the downtown area or in more desirable residential neighborhoods. I hear that in Portland all the time--when people talk about cleaning up Old Town or decentralizing the concentration of homeless shelters and methadone clinics downtown, people would just complain when those services were moved to more stable residential neighborhoods.
Last edited by Deezus; 12-20-2011 at 12:55 PM..
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