Scary San Francisco (Walnut Creek, Walnut: crime rate, townhouse, safe area)

[NYSD1995]

Originally Posted by HockeyMac18

Many cities that have "cleaned themselves up" and "gotten rid of the homeless" didn't really solve homelessness. Usually, they just swept it under the rug or moved it somewhere else, and in many cases questionable tactics were used. But, really, this is an issue of visibility. In SF, the homeless tend to be in places where most normal people spend time. In many other cities, the homeless are pushed to fringe areas our of sight. Don't pretend they don't exist, though.

Question: is the city's job to 'fix homelessness'? Or is this really about managing the city? If you have a high concentration of drug addicts, homeless, SRO's, marginal businesses, and drug dealing you have a true public safety and health problem. Most of that was solved in large cities 20-30 years ago. That it continues to flourish in San Francisco is a liability to the city and to public safety. Managing the impact of people is an essential function of any city, despite the social / cultural reason that creates the problem.

And to the last poster's point - it's mostly about criminals, not 'the homeless'. In my opinion this area, this culture, and this issue is not about truly homeless people. This is about a combination of the criminal issue of open drug dealing and the gang activity that supports and enables it, and the public health issue of mentally ill / drug addicted people concentrated into a single area. These are things a city can respond to if it chooses.

It would seem that from a practical perspective, those other cities who swept the problem under the rug, were much more successful than the city of San Francisco has been in solving the fundamental problem of why people are homeless. I don't believe NYC, LA solved the problem of homelessness, but they've clearly shown they can solve some of the problems that homelessness creates, or at least minimize them.

I would think that crackdowns in the TL work, it's a tiny little area in the context of most major cities. Say what you may about Guliani but the reality is he cracked down hard and it did change how people behaved in a real way. My guess is that SFPD can't afford to run suppression on that area, and given the CA state budget, that ship may have sailed permanently.

[hsw]

A fairly irrelevant part of a commie city....potholes/bumpy rds in upscale pts of SF are far more relevant to most taxpayers than self-created, chronic problems of slums everywhere

Yuppies who live in SF largely live in new condo towers in FinDt or in houses in PacHts....and drive to offices in SV along Bway/Embarc to access 280 and blitz to SV (and the few financiers who work in FinDt drive the few blks from their undgd garage at home to garages under those office towers)

Essentially no useful bars/restaurants are in slums...and much like LA, any decent restaurant/bar in SF has valet parking in front (and have apps like uber for those commies from NYC who can't drive self)

Confusing UnionSq/Mission/cable cars/Moscone, etc with daily lives of productive taxpayers in SV is as absurd as assuming an affluent hedgie/retiree in BH cares about daily life/crime nr Disneyland or DodgerStad or EastLA or VanNuys....or that people from 15CPW/UES know/care much abt TimesSq or Bronx or Newark or Qns or subways, etc....same concept...

Prob far greater daily risk to one's personal safety exists in yuppie Manhattan where one relies on walking or cabs/limos w/generally inept drivers and unsafe, old cars vs driving self around town in car of own choice as in SF/LA (or rest of US outside primitive Manhattan)

[NYSD1995]

Originally Posted by hsw

Confusing UnionSq/Mission/cable cars/Moscone, etc with daily lives of productive taxpayers in SV is as absurd as assuming an affluent hedgie/retiree in BH cares about daily life/crime nr Disneyland or DodgerStad or EastLA or VanNuys....or that people from 15CPW/UES know/care much abt TimesSq or Bronx or Newark or Qns or subways, etc....same concept...

My guess is that most productive taxpayers don't last long in San Francisco. Where does Benioff live... Pac Heights? No kids, right?

[rkwalton]

The Benioffs are helping: Benioffs pitch in to help homeless. However, it's one family's mission to fix the mess that is the Tenderloin? Until that area, the institutions in it and the city as a whole cares, it's going to stay the way it is and I'm not going to hold my breath for the rest of the city to care.

[NorCal Dude]

Rudy was a turd nugget. Even his own daughter would not support his presidential run. That in and of itself, should tell you something.

When that African immigrant got lit up with 40 something bullets for pulling out his ID, most New Yorkers considered it collateral damage. Yea some innocent dude got lit up, but look at the stats, crime is down. People in the bay don't think like that (thank god).

Let's look at Mayor Bloomberg, he has more misdemeanor marijuana arrests than the three previous NYC mayors combined. And 90% of these people arrested were black and latino.

No thanks, you can keep that nonsense in New York where it belongs. California jails are already filled to the max, no need to fill them with wastoid druggies or young pot heads. And no thanks to costly police lawsuits, to which the tax payer gets hosed.

San Francisco is the real deal. There is real poverty there. And people don't seem to big on sweeping things under the rug, much less kicking the can down the road. That went out with Reagan.

[Hard8]

Originally Posted by hsw

Essentially no useful bars/restaurants are in slums...and much like LA, any decent restaurant/bar in SF has valet parking in front (and have apps like uber for those commies from NYC who can't drive self)

You obviously live in a much different dimension of San Francisco than I do. A bar with valet parking sounds like a bar I want to avoid.

[NYSD1995]

Originally Posted by City Dwells

San Francisco is hardly scary and nothing will happen to you walking through the TL. Also HSW is a troll with aspergers ignore anything he/she says.

Getting an hsw reply in a thread is a badge of honor, like being parodied by Mad Magazine.

[ttocs99]

Originally Posted by Sassberto

Was up at Dreamforce this weekend. Walked up from the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the civic center through the fringe of the TL to our hotel up on Nob Hill through the absolute scariest open air drug and prostitution market I've ever seen. Literally walked through a pack of gangster drug dealers mobbing up the sidewalk. Made NYC in the 80's look tame by comparison.

What's going on in SF? Is this just tolerated culturally or is the city too strapped to get a handle on it?

Umm, no. I lived in NYC through the 80's, and you MIGHT be overstating your experience. Trust me, NYC in the 80's was possibly the most dangerous place in America in quite some time. Times Square was insane, Harlem and Spanish Harlem were probably the worst places to be if you were a minority (white person). It was pretty much a death wish to be in that area if you weren't African American (in Harlem) and Latino (Spanish Harlem). Not that I have a problem with either ethnic group, just that the few bad apples made it incredibly unsafe for non residents, not of those ethnic groups, in those areas. Certain areas of Queens and Brooklyn, became war zones once the crack epidemic took over. People hired to protect law abiding citizens (Cops), were targets of drug gangs. I remember some famous Cop murders in the 80's. I remember the murder number reaching more than 2,000 murders a year.

Now me personally, being young (at that time), and relatively of decent size (5'11" 185), maybe I was naive, but I really didn't feel threatened, THOUGH I saw some insane things happen back in those days. I was lucky enough to not have been a victim of any crime.

Living in SF, I never felt afraid (from 1999-2006), having lived in NYC during it's worst time. Now in NY, crime is way down, and a much safer city. In fact, it ranks near SF as far as low crime in a large city.

[sav858]

Originally Posted by ttocs99

Living in SF, I never felt afraid (from 1999-2006), having lived in NYC during it's worst time. Now in NY, crime is way down, and a much safer city. In fact, it ranks near SF as far as low crime in a large city.

NYC has a lower crime rate than SF and has for a while now. I've never seen SF make the list for Top 10 Safest Big Cities in America like NY and even LA have.

[City Dwells]

Originally Posted by sav858

NYC has a lower crime rate than SF and has for a while now. I've never seen SF make the list for Top 10 Safest Big Cities in America like NY and even LA have.

Misleading stat. Brooklyn alone is far more dangerous than sf and three times the size. NYC has slums bigger than half the city.