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 new friends, and have never felt unsafe whilst walking around at night.

We don't have highrise buildings or a thriving "downtown" like other urban cities, but we do have plenty of lively, energetic neighborhoods around the city and the best food & weather in the country.

I agree with the author that changes need to be made and that the homelessness problem is bad. But I think you can still have an overwhelmingly positive experience in the city if you pick one of the neighborhoods I mentioned above to live in.

I work remote and it's wild how SF people don't realize how insane they sound to others when they talk about what they deal with and try to downplay it as normal or not that bad.

There's just something wrong to me about the entire population of a city having to adjust what they do to cater to the small criminal population, like not being able to leave stuff in your car or your windows will be smashed and your stuff stolen.

So why did I leave?

There were a few events that really upset me. 1) I almost stepped on a shit snake some human left outside my building. 2) A homeless person stopped in front of a mother and child to urinate. 3) The weather sucked; cold and hot.

I went there for the tech scene, but it was just too dirty for me to want to live there.

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...

Quite often here, the US and silicon valley are presented as the paradise for tech people, but now it seems to me that it is a paradise only if you can afford a really wealthy area.

Here in Spain salaries can be terrible compared to the US, but even the more "dangerous" cities (like Barcelona or Madrid) are way safer than the SF described by the OP.

I’m guessing this person moved there for professional reasons if they didn’t even consider moving to any of the other dense parts of San Francisco.

The neighborhoods of San Francisco are: 1. Much more alive than downtown, 2. Safer, 3. Even more “dense” in certain areas given the decline in downtown foot traffic.

> 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 and/or severe mental illness

So... I guess the idea is that this is leaning extremely hard on "feeling". Author admits they're not unsafe. Author admits that their real issue is that they don't like being near people with drug habits or mental illness. But they still express it in the lede as "physical safety" anyway! Because that's how they "feel"?

Come on folks. Aren't techies like us supposed to be rationalists? Why are we lying to ourselves (and, in this blog post, others) about what we really want?

This is kind of funny to me considering I'd guess for the majority of America, 4 miles is remarkably close.

Lately, with my observation that much of American life is getting much much worse. I often think about leaving America entirely, attempting to hold my breath a little longer to get what America most has to offer these days -- superior compensation/salary.

That being said I also have had a very minimal slice of living in America, for all I know there is some amazing pocket somewhere that I can have it all. But I have yet to find it in California or Texas.

This is true at a surface level, but looking deeper at City services and obligations the situation is more complex than simply declaring numbers large. San Francisco also has a much larger population of immigrants from all over including other states.

> Second, and even worse, the people in charge including the mayor, the police leadership, and a majority of the Board of Supervisors (the legislative body for SF), really just don’t seem to care one bit about what’s happening. Sure, they will occasionally rant in public and promise to fix things ...

Don't seem to care apart from occasionally promising to fix things. This is classic San Francisco attitude. Difficult longstanding problems are clearly incompetence, disinterest, a conspiracy of corruption, or perhaps all of these. Records and meetings are typically fully public, but actually attending any of that is too much for a member of the public to bear. Maybe so, but then you also are skipping out on your responsibilities and potential to contribute to some kind of positive solution.

SF also has way fewer drug murders than cities I have lived in on the east coast

Where is the OP moving to? What criteria will be (was) used to make the selection?

A dashboard of the stats and what is being done about it.

From the outside it seems blatantly obvious that it's simply a lack of policing.

I really don't get the animosity of the left-wingers about police, and the way everyone has to pussy-foot around these issues. No one is having issues with police if they aren't breaking the law. This view of the police is so distorted.

The unwavering KPI of every city should be: citizen safety. This is the basic human need, and it should override every other concern.

Here is the solution:

1. You are not allowed to setup a tent on the street. You must stay in housing provided by the government outside of the city in a cheap area. You will be given free transporation there.

2. If you are a repeat offender found to be sleeping on the street, then you will be arrested, and imprisoned.

3. A mental health disorder is not an excuse. If necessary, build a jail that is a mental health treatment center.

I don't get what is so hard about this.

Just make it clear: it's illegal to sleep on the street, loiter, do drugs on the street.

What is the worst thing that happens from this policy implemented fully?

Now, if only 10 or 20 million more people would get out of California, then maybe the population would be back to a reasonable level...

Everyone who can't tell the difference between CA and TX should really just move to TX...

That said, many areas of the South are among the most underrated parts of the country so I agree with you there.

Sure, the author admits that violent crime rate is under control. 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.

Imagine you live in a neighborhood where walking on the right side of the street results in immediate decapitation. While it's true that you can simply always walk on the left side of the street and be 100% safe, most people would not call that a safe neighborhood.

Also, Philadelphia has some quite nice areas that are pretty affordable. And it's an easy train ride away from NYC.

IME there is a pretty large middle band between the extremes of urban and the boondocks where you can come really close to having it all. It's easiest to find if instead of shooting for "all" you make the concession of having to own and use a car a lot - it's an unfortunate tradeoff, but once you accept it, it becomes relatively easy to find places that check the other boxes: decent cost of living, lots of culture/arts opportunities, great food, lots of outdoor activities, good weather, good schools, good safety, good job market, real feeling of community, etc.

The following won't guarantee success and isn't the only method, but it yields lots of good results: take a list of the 50 largest U.S. cities. Cross off the top 15. Cross off any in FL or CA. Randomly pick a remaining city. On a map, find neighboring cities/towns that are 35-45 miles away from that city. For each that looks interesting, go look at their city website. How big is their public library? How many parks do they have? Do they have any sort of annual city history celebration or other big community event? What community service organizations seem most active? (the idea here is to eliminate any that are a soulless suburban sprawl) If you're able, go visit one and even get an airbnb for a couple of weeks and just live there to try it out.

[1]: reddit.com/r/germancitizenship

> much of American life is getting much much worse

This sentiment is real and shared by many people, but keep in mind that many of the things that may be getting worse off in this country are becoming even worse in other countries. In fact, the easiest way to feel better about life here may be just to stop reading the news, in the same way that you're not plugged into the news cycle of, say, Denmark.

There's a lot to see in California and Texas outside of whichever cities you may have lived in, and a lot more to see in the rest of the US outside of those states. I invite you to explore more of it before writing it off.

The main thing is that OP then uses that to generalize about the state of the entire city. This makes it difficult to actually have a reasonable conversation about what is working and what isn’t in SF because everything reverts to the binary “sf is/isn’t a shithole” argument. In OPs case, it actually exposes the reality behind a lot of these “random tech blogger leaving SF” stories where they don’t actually know much about the city or appear to have much of a social life outside of tech that would expose them to other parts of the city. In SF there are tons of places to live that aren’t “single family homes 4 miles from downtown” - the city is 7x7 square miles.

The way it frames things is weird, though. Not to say SoMa and downtown aren't shitholes that will make you feel unsafe multiple times per day; they are. But most other neighborhoods have a much safer vibe, and many of them are literally a 10 minute bus ride to downtown. His pooh-poohing the idea of moving to a different neighborhood is just weird. (If he were complaining about the school system or something being disfunctional or cost of living being too high, then his critique of SF as a whole would make a lot more sense.)

He can't really take his experiences living a block from 6th Street and apply them to the whole of SF, and he must be aware of that, or be particularly clueless.

He could walk four blocks in any direction and have a dramatically safer and more enjoyable experience.

If you were an exceptionally wealthy billionaire, how would you solve it? Especially considering that the obvious approach of "build housing" is largely illegal.

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.