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Is San Francisco really that bad?

Huss - are you actually Rip Van Winkle, who just work up after a century of sleep? I could rattle off ten times that number of things without a milligram of exaggeration. They didn't all happen in the immediate vicinity of my workplace; the young assistant tragedies occurred in welfare neighborhoods where that kind of thing is actually commonplace due to a constant gang presence. The workplace itself was, and still is, in a very uppity safe area by day, but quite unsafe at night after all the businesses shut down and and the workers have gone home, including the cops. That's when the ghouls, rapists, and druggies start wandering around. And I didn't say the handball guy got beaten up after playing handball. It was after attending a tux and tie event in downtown SF near the Civic Center.

But growing up in the mountains, the Reservations were even more violent. And now there's the meth freaks, White Supremacists, and Cartel grow operations, sometimes including opium poppies. So unless someone wants to win the Darwin Award, they need to have a head on their shoulders pretty much anywhere these days.

I will say, that for the SF Bay Area having the most extensive open space and park system peripheral to any large urban area of the nation, there is almost no crime in those large open spaces except for occasional parking lot break-ins; and the greatest risk past there would be due to using a red darkcloth over your view camera in a pasture with an irritable bull in it.

As per Oakland, and its bad reputation, you need to realize that over half of the City, particularly up in the hills, is quite wealthy and lovely. There is a tremendous restaurant scene too, and a huge tech presence overlapping from the Berkeley-Emeryville nexus, which is in fact the Biotech and Pharmaceutical R&D capital of the whole world. Lots of Geeky computer R&D too. So just like all the other major Bay Area cities, it just depends where you are, and what time of day.
 
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Back to SF (not Oakland) and more evidence that crime is strongly in the direction of Property, rather than against People...in today's newspaper was a story about one neighborhood called Cow Hollow, in which 17 vehicles had their windows smashed and items stolen from them. One of the cars even had a sign visible that there was NOTHING INSIDE, not even the glove box...but the window was smashed and glove box and console storage opened.
You might or might not be held up for your camera, but this illustrates that parked vehicles are frequent targets.
Or your catalytic convertor might be missing...there is a pro market for the rare metals inside. (The politicians forgot about that fact when they made resale of catalytic convertors illegal recently.)
 
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Richard Man said:
My problem is actually how some people so casually made fun of being "murder" - I guess they thought by not saying "murdered", they are like the Bevis and Butthead "hur hur, ha ha, I was murder, hur"
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I have repeatedly stated I was murdered lots of times through out this thread.

The reality is that you need to be aware of your surroundings whether you are in a big city, or in a small town. And the crime statistics have shown that there are many other cities in the US that are less safe than SF.

Be scared, stay home, die on your couch. That’s living.

But but my friend got killed. That’s awful and I’m sorry. Now figure out how you are going to live your life. But don’t act surprised if others want to live their lives in a different way.
 
Yea, you do you, but you are still not as funny as you think. Don't make light of someone's situation or how they want to live their life. No one is dying on the couch. My friend has been photographing for over 40+ years, up and down the coast.



 

actually I am. Bummer for your friend, but I‘m not going to sit scared. San Fran is awesome and I can’t wait to go back.
 
Huss said:
actually I am. Bummer for your friend, but I‘m not going to sit scared. San Fran is awesome and I can’t wait to go back.
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Me too - but only when situation improves. I photographed a lot at SF, and Oakland. I did a whole series on Occupy on both coasts.
 
The days of peace and love are long gone. I couldn't understand what had really happened to the city until I saw it w/ my own eyes. Same w/ Portland, it's such a mess and very crime ridden now. My wife (coming from Hawaii) was shocked by the scenes playing out on S.F.'s Tenderloin streets. Said it reminded her of pages out of Dante's Inferno, but the biggest city in Hawaii is nothing like big cities on the mainland.

It's such a changed place, really a shame. The people that are changing things are in general not from S.F., both on the low and high ends, they're from someplace else. Doesn't matter where they're from though, it is what it is. Even back in the 80's you had to be aware on the streets.

One guy around 1985 kept pestering me to give him a cigarette even though I told him repeatedly that I didn't smoke. Finally had to go into a store to get away from him, and when I told them why I was there they acted like they just wanted me to leave, it happened so much on Market Street btwn 5th and 7th. The guy continued to scream at me from the sidewalk for a long time. A week later I read in the newspaper that a psychiatrist had been stabbed to death in his office by one of his patients because he wouldn't give him a cigarette. I always wondered if it was the same guy.

Gallery owner who hosed homeless woman in San Francisco arrested

Collier Gwin is charged with battery after being filmed spraying a woman with a hose in San Francisco.
www.bbc.com
 
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Just to show that no one is "dying on the couch", this other friend travels all over the world, including lugging profoto lights and his then H6 to Mongolia, and he has given workshops all over the world, from Thailand, to Africa, has this response to our mutual friend's loss. He lives in the Bay Area and have gallery shows in SF and elsewhere


 
Huss said:
Grew up where?
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Grew up in Richmond near the Iron Triangle (1960s-1980s). Had relatives in SF so was constantly visiting. Seems to me the gist of this thread is, SF is as bad as any other city, and you had better keep your wits about you in any city these days. Just last week I was shooting graffiti in a "safe" neighbor hood in Albuquerque, with a 1938 Ikonta folder. A street crazy began yelling at me from a block away, "you can't do that on my turf!" and started wobbling in my direction, shaking his fists. I hopped on my bike and rode away.
 
I just drive around the Iron Triangle rather than through it. It's a lot faster anyway; a lot less stoplights. Same goes for the bad sections of Oakland. Unfortunately, it's still in some of those areas many manufacturing and blue-collar businesses need to be, because so much of the rest has been gentrified to the point of being vastly too expensive except for the tech companies and the development monopolies of the mega-rich. Art colonies are at the bottom of the totem pole, generally in decrepit fire-risk buildings in bad neighborhoods.

But Oakland has its amenities, including one of the best museum complexes in the West, housing what is probably the finest collection of classic vintage West Coast photography in the world. And at the edge of Richmond is the probably the highest tech optical fabricator in the world, at least as far as astronomical and military applications are concerned (nothing all or us combined could remotely afford). The extent of R&D and actual tech manufacture all around here is stunning. Plus the big nuke labs. Lots of very highly educated people.

And the Natl Park system has all kinds of interesting historical restoration going on. John Muir's mansion is right around the corner about 15 minutes away from me. Just wish the trails above his mansion weren't so muddy right now.
 
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  • jtk
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Tom Taylor said:
Read the Comments
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All the comments completely ignore the fact that Meta is doing that to save costs. They just fired 11,000 people!
You think they are going to keep giant offices all over the place? If you read the actual article, they are closing offices all over the world and leaning into the remote work model.
This has nothing to do with transients, crime etc.

Like all yahoo stories open for comments, you get the usual agenda driven suspects posting.
 
Things are in flux in downtown SF for a number of reasons. Once the pandemic protocol was put in place allowing many employees to work from home, many firms realized they could save a lot of lease money downsizing their downtown space itself. But now, some are starting to complain that the level of work from home isn't quite up to par, so want most employees to return to the office. All this has had a domino effect, especially on restaurants, which were already struggling due to prior pandemic shutdowns. But, hopefully without tempting a political debate, a lot of this was the fault of the city to begin with for allowing nearly all the ordinary kind of downtown businesses to be driven out by the extreme rise in lease rates due to the invasion of far lucrative legal and tech corporations taking over, with almost no zoning protection for the former traditional diversity of businesses.

Cumulatively, all of this, along with a decrease of tourism due to the pandemic itself, sharply reduced the city budget along with its staffing. Things got run down and petty crime soon got out of control. Stayed tuned. They're fully aware of the problem, and are trying various solutions. It would be unfair to think that once these problems arise, they can't be remediated to an extent. SF desperately wants its tourism industry back to full health.
 
Having said what I did, I'm probably going to SF Chinatown this weekend for Chinese New Year.
 
SF Chinatown is a lot safer than the Oakland version at the moment. It's always had terrible internal crime issues, much more so than anything a tourist might be aware of, or need to themselves fear. But being crowded, it's better small-camera territory than tripod realistic. Chinese New Years events tend to be well monitored for public safety, just like sports events. Just don't have a diamond encrusted special edition Leica hanging around your neck.
 

I don't see how tech and legal firms push out restaurants or how zoning would matter. They need a different kinds of spaces. Also, with these firms bringing employees back, restaurants should start to do better.
 
Big tech is being pushed by investors to become more profitable and much of that is tied to layoffs and remote work. Department stores and malls are being chipped away at by online shopping. The next big boom will be repurposing these empty spaces into residential housing. By changing office space to residential, it will help in the revitalization of core areas of cities like San Francisco. Nothing is going to change anytime soon but it will start happening.
 

That is exactly it. There are so many vacant office buildings in LA (for example) and yet so little available housing. My old place of work is one of them - and they are not going back to their fancy Century City offices as they realized that basically the remote work model meant their employees are paying for their work spaces!
Convert that stuff into residential properties.
 
None of that downtown SF office space is ever going to be ordinary "residential" space. Plenty of deluxe high-rise condos are going up, but look at the prices. Even the "median" SF income of around 250K can afford em. SF would also have to untie a lot of self-imposed knots to do that. That I do have inside knowledge of. Then you've got the fact that the streets of SF were engineered way back when to be downright un-inviting to automobile use, yet for decades, the downtown has been heavily dependent on a commuter workforce. Across the Bay Bridge, much of the East Bay is also getting highly gentrified in some section, leaving the rest basically abandoned.

But there are plenty of bright spots too, with certain neighborhoods turning around into fashionable, yet not exclusive of the working middle class, or even hard-working immigrants. Lots of things are in flux. But any wise city planning policy shouldn't put all their eggs in one basket, even if tech is the most profitable sector in the world. People still need their cars fixed and places to eat, or to relax in a real bookstore, which SF once had plenty of, but are now as scarce as polka-dotted polar bears. Chinatown has survived because its a key tourist draw.

But for restaurants and Chinese groceries, the "little Chinatowns" on both sides of GG Park are better.
 
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Alan Edward Klein said:
I don't see how tech and legal firms push out restaurants or how zoning would matter. They need a different kinds of spaces. Also, with these firms bringing employees back, restaurants should start to do better.
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Tech business can be a two-edge sword
  • more workers working in offices means that workers go out to patronize local business (dry cleaners, florists, sundry items)
  • more workers working in office means that they go to local coffee shops and lunch locations, and out to socialize after work before heading home
  • more workers working in offices whose employers provide free or subsidized lunches on site for employess will often not go out for lunch, and fewer workers in offices but working from home means a dearth of business for small business located nearby the empty offices
SF Financial area is alsmost a ghost town by day, and a dangerous ghost town by night.
 
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