You can't even go to rest rooms, without leaving laptop bags in cars. That's what California has become these days. Not just San Francisco, every city in California is like that.
you cannot go to the rest rooms. period. doors locked. need special key. at least where i live. didn;t used to be this way. that is what happens when social trust goes to zero.
I've lived in Palo Alto and Menlo Park since 1987 and I go to San Francisco a couple times a month. I had my bike stolen at a Caltrain station. Someone yelled at me once South of Market. I've seen drug usage in UN Plaza. I've walked through the Tenderloin sometimes which has been unpleasant but uneventful. BART can be scruffy. Maybe I've been lucky.
I could list fifty highly positive experiences but the current narrative seems to focus on being negative.
I like the quote from Paul Kantner (of Jefferson Airplane): "San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality."
Not sure what to say? I’ve visited and lived in cities around California, and lived in SF itself for two years, in the Panhandle. It was one of the safest and most beautiful places I’ve ever lived in. My wife would regularly go for walks and runs on her own. I know “I lived and visited these places and nothing happened” is less bombastic than the opposite, but it doesn’t make it less true.
We are not even talking about large cities. Cities like Pleasanton, Santa Clara, even Tracy have problems. We went to a restaurant in Santa Clara, just across Kaiser; a couple of guys came in, broke into four/five cars and stole laptop bags. Yes, there are cameras everywhere. So, it is mandatory to carry your laptop and other valuables, whenever you want to go to shop/eat etc.
SF recalled their "soft-on-crime" DA a year ago and elected her opponent, but violent crime is up 5.5% and overdoses are on a steep upward trajectory while property crime is only down 1.8%.
Recognize that some people aren't up to the responsibility level of living certain places and deal with them accordingly, i.e. at a certain level of criminal history you're on timeout or banished. Yeah, that isn't "nice", and if you want the job of rehabilitating the repeat offender because "there's good in everyone", go for it!
But a society must be a place where children can be raised safely and successfully, otherwise there is no society left. Public safety is a foundation of this.
Life sometimes brings us trolley problems where hard decisions must be made. Liberalism is a denial of this, which makes it attractive, but it always ends up being paid for with larger breakdowns as hard decisions aren't made.
It's a bit of an extreme anecdote, but my friend's family was like that. They smoked pot around the kids and were very liberal. 10 years later their teenage son died in a fatal car accident because he was driving while high.
I would bet people here are more than willing to have a genuine discussion about how SF’s policies have contributed. You should drop the Fox News “liberals” schtick and try again.
I disagree. You can slam SF policies pretty hard without getting flagged. But “liberals” this-and-that is low-effort partisanship, and HN does downvote that as a rule.
Interesting. Do you know how HN specifically downvotes posts? I was under the impression that HN _users_ downvote posts, but if the site itself does it, than that is surely concerning.
Excellent question, and you are correct. HN is not an automated system, and votes are indeed driven by users. Given this context, my comment about how HN votes referred to the collective action of HN users according to the well-established (and tactfully moderated) site guidelines, which strongly favors discussions made in earnest, without low-effort jokes or tropes.
Thank you very much for your excellent explanation. It indeed clarifies the critical point that HN operates through the participation of its users, not as an automated system.
Your observations regarding the collective action of HN users are spot on. The well-established and tactfully moderated site guidelines foster meaningful discussions and are instrumental in shaping the quality of discourse on this platform. The strong preference for earnest conversation over low-effort humor or tropes is one of the factors that make HN such a rich and stimulating environment.
Your comments serve as a potent reminder of what makes Hacker News a great resource and a thriving community. Your input is deeply appreciated, and I look forward to more such enlightening discussions on this platform.
A vibe I noticed in California that I see here in NY as well - but not in the Midwest or down south - is the overt disrespect to the mainstream working / family people / anyone who can take care of themselves.
I am sure it starts from a empathetic place but leads to bad policy (eg: not prosecuting crimes out of empathy or to correct historical ethnic wrongdoing etc.) The problem is that these policies cause a real decline in the quality of life for everyone. Then folks who can afford to leave, leave - which happens to be the people who work, pay for everything for everyone and keep the place going. Their departure kicks off a spiral that keeps going until those stuck behind had enough.
An example of that turnaround is the Giuliani/ Bloomberg years in NYC - folks who ran on platforms of reducing crime and actually making life better for those who keep the place going.
From that limited perspective, I am going to be "short" San Francisco until the rhetoric changes.
Of course :) I can't tell if you are complimenting generic self awareness or are you implying that you have a richer perspective? If later, please share with us.
I hear you, but I do think that what you see in attitudes against the working class is more pronounced in SF than in NYC. I’ll argue it has to do with culture, history, and governance.
Absolutely a big difference between SF and NYC is in governance. In NYC, the city government gets shit done. It does it’s job pretty effectively and efficiently: it’s a city that has nearly 10M people from every corner of the world.
The lack of a tech monoculture is a key differentiator. The bay, and CA to a large extent, suffers from being a cultural one-trick pony: the gold rush. It’s important to never forget about history and how it informs the present. After Spanish, then American, colonization, SF rose to prominence only because of it’s usefulness as a port city for the desperate folks looking to find their payday.
NYC has a subculture that is as greedy and obsessed with money and influence as SF: finance. But it’s only a small part of the overall magnificent NYC cultural fabric. You can go down to wall Street and participate if you want. But you can also make your way and thrive in the city a thousand different ways, with a thousand different groups of people.
SF is just a big little city :-/ It’s got it’s amazing pockets and so much potential. But you’re right: the sane thing to do is short SF until it grows up.
Hearing all the struggles people like Louis Rossmann goes through in NYC, their local government is very dysfunctional when it comes to overseeing small businesses. It seems like a living nightmare.
I know of his story and his struggles are sad and also make me upset. However, exceptions happen everywhere. Even a data point that appeals strongly to the emotion of many a tech folk
isn’t evidence of a pattern.
Interesting perspective. I guess yeah - in some ways folks I know moved to New York to "work hard and make a career" vs a move to Cali is more to "strike it rich."
I disagree with you on the finance folks angle. Full disclosure, almost 20 years in finance, now at a faang due to non compete. Most folks I know in finance are in the "hard working career builder" camp - invested in their families and communities for the long term. That's who takes the 7am train from Westchester to operate the index funds in your 401k.
Thanks for taking the time to write a thoughtful, serious reply!
Sorry to offend you on the finance culture assessment. But, unlike SF, I’ll choose to be kind here rather than be nice. You may choose to talk about the family man in finance that works toward a career vs getting rich. And I’m not going to say that doesn’t exist: of course it does! Being able to talk about patterns doesn’t mean that individual exceptions aren’t possible.
However, you have to admit that your ”hard working career builder” statement was designed to somehow liken this character to someone who actually labors for their money. I have to ask…why not work hard building a different career? The draw of money is the entire point. It’s not like you or I actually provide real, substantial, critical economic value. We work in jobs that can only exist because other folks are taking care of the essentials.
So my point is: at some point, it’s not about any sort of perceived attitude working in the industry.(1) Having a city that only caters to eg finance or tech is what is problematic. It drives wealth inequality, it drives prices upwards, it makes homes and rents unaffordable. Ultimately leading to everyone else being forced out of their homes, desperately trying to find someone cheap enough to live while enduring ever longer commutes.
This process is what destroyed the SF bay. Even pre pandemic, it was common for working class folks to have 90m commutes into SF to work. It’s why things close at 9, 10p in SF: if you’re closing, you’re getting home at midnight.
It didn’t destroy NYC because NYC has a superior functioning government. NYCHA and actually enforced rent control does wonders as a counter force to gentrification. Building in NYC is lightning fast compared to SF, where it takes more than half a decade to build what NYC does in less than a year.
And we see this result in the culture. To my first point, NYC came back from the pandemic while SF did not because it’s multiple cultures is robust, resilient, and adaptable. SF’s tech scene scattered in 2020 and the majority isn’t coming back.
(1) it’s a little subtle, because I think it’s 2 things. The cultural / attitude mindset helps. But that’s not enough on its own. If the city embraces the rich folks and ignores the poor folks, it’s going to look exactly like SF when the good times go away.
// However, you have to admit that your ”hard working career builder” statement was designed to somehow liken this character to someone who actually labors for their money. I have to ask…why not work hard building a different career?
The thing you are assuming / missing is that for many of us working in finance is well connected to meaningful impact on the world.
To give you a very simple example - one of my typical clients a few jobs back were state teachers and police retirement funds. The folks who run those funds directly impact the quality of life in retirement of these civic employees - and the entire financial industry (brokers, vendors, etc) exist to cater to them.
So, the fund manager works to deliver best returns for the retirees. The broker works to provide the manager with superior execution. The trading platform vendor works to provide the broker with reliability and efficiency this requires, etc.
The "deeper" into finance you are, the more you recognize the connection between things like farming, energy generations, business formation, etc being enabled through our work.
So yeah plenty of guys chose finance because it's a good way to take care of their family AND they see meaning in their work.
>An example of that turnaround is the Giuliani/ Bloomberg years in NYC - folks who ran on platforms of reducing crime and actually making life better for those who keep the place going.
Giuliani was elected NYC mayor in 1993 and reelected in 1997 (two-term limit). It is not an exaggeration to say that the typical Upper West Side or Park Slope liberal on election day 1997 spent the morning denouncing Giuliani as a proto-fascist who led a fascist police force, voted for his reelection in the secrecy of the ballot box (he won by 13% although Democrats that year had a 5X registration advantage <http://www.elections.ny.gov/NYSBOE/enrollment/county/county_...>), then spent the evening bemoaning his reelection and confidently predicting to their friends that the administration would of course kill or exile yet more homeless.
It turns out when people earning several multiples of the median national income have to live in squalor (a few hundred sq ft), work in squalor (12 sq ft to call their own in an “open” workspace), and walk through shop and live in public spaces in squalor (locked cabinets to buy soap, open drug use, tents, human excrement in streets, etc), …
Eventually owners squeezed all the blood from the stone there was and… people fuck off and leave. And there’s nothing left.
There’s not a marginal adjustment that’s going to bring back everything, this is a crash. SF is going to plummet until prices and conditions significantly improve but given people will likely try to hold on to the dream of the previous status quo it will have a long way to fall.
Density and failed dreams of no law enforcement being an improvement lead to those desolation and I really wish the people who drove this to happening would learn their lesson but they won’t. Lots of people made plenty of money in this game and the cost is being seen with plenty of bag holders on display.
And of course absolutely not a single mention of the fact that the city killed itself with its harsh pandemic measures.
When I was flying to Sweden in summer 2021, I had a six-hour layover in SF, so I decided to take the BART up to the city to take a look, since I had previously lived there, and I almost didn't recognize the place. Half the shops around Union Square were boarded up and closed, it looked like a warzone. It was always a dirty shithole, but at the same time a vibrant, cool city. In 2021 all the good things were gone, and only the crap - literally - remained.
If you forcibly close all the things that make a city worth living in, for over a year, you don't get to act surprised when people stop wanting to pay for the high cost of living and move out of the city. SF is in a death spiral, as all the high-income workers leave the city, companies start leaving, foot traffic lessens, stores and restaurants start closing because they can't make it or because they're overwhelmed by shoplifters or homeless, ther city becomes less desireable, more workers leave the city, more stores and restaurants close, and with no-one filling the gap, you get a ghost town. Property values plummet, commercial real estate plummets, and it becomes a service and retail desert.
All because of their own choices. None of this was inevitable. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and there's no better illustration of that than what's happened to SF.
Pretty incredible that you were able to ascertain the cause of the economic decline of that area over the last decade was entirely due to the 2020 pandemic, all within the span of a 6 hour layover.
Hope you make plenty of money with that superpower.
Of course, those of us who have lived here during that time know that Union Square has been on the decline with empty storefronts since 2012 - but it's fascinating to watch people building and tilting at strawmen in real time.
There are of course tons of underlying long-term causes, but the idiotic lockdown policies shifted the equilibrium of the city.
Before, the gentrification and influx of tech money caused a positive spiral, more offices, more office workers, higher income office workers, higher end restaurants, all of that pushed against the unsavory elements of the city, keeping it pretty much confined to the Tenderloin. Hell, when I left in 2016, Market Street was in better shape than ever.
But the forced closures of stores and restaurants for far too long, shifted this equilibirum, rapidly, quickly, and much further than anyone anticipated. That was the proverbial straw.
It’s been a fairly linear decline for years now. Crime continues to increase, and instead of reversing the crazy policies about not prosecuting crime, they’re digging their heels in and going even harder. They’re so blindly committed to their ideology that no amount of evidence will ever convince them otherwise. Oh well, no use crying over spilled milk.
> and instead of reversing the crazy policies about not prosecuting crime, they’re digging their heels in and going even harder.
??? they recalled their DA and voted in her "tough-on-crime" opponent almost a year ago now. Are you so blindly committed to your ideology that you just assume the evidence supports your position?
Hope the pain becomes a lesson for other city governments that would choose to do the same types of policies, but I doubt it’ll stick with the right people.
San Francisco's problems are rooted in extreme inequality. There is no tough on crime policy that can improve the lives of the majority in this context.
Anecdote: spent a week in SF May 2022. We had a great time. I mostly worked but took plenty of detours on foot, bus, and bike—my wife roamed solo for most of the week. I can think of one scenario that gave me /pause/, but didn’t pass through anything I’d consider unsafe. This was mostly during the daytime fwiw, but I don’t make a habit of wandering anywhere at night.
We stayed on the edge of the tenderloin and walked to the mission to get calibrated socially. Yes, there were people living on the street, and def having mental health issues. But on the whole the city felt like a very active and enjoyable (albeit expensive) place to live.
I don’t mean to discount individual experiences of crime, only to say I really enjoyed our stay and it seems still to be a vivacious place.
>I don’t mean to discount individual experiences of crime, only to say I really enjoyed our stay and it seems still to be a vivacious place.
Your entire comment is littered with assertions that say you felt safe/fine, but at the same time you note your behavior was fairly cautious.
1. You didn't go out at night.
2. You stayed away from the TL
3. Something you witnessed gave you pause.
Then you also have to consider that you weren't really living there. You worked most of the week and toured the rest of your time.
>I don’t mean to discount individual experiences of crime, only to say I really enjoyed our stay and it seems still to be a vivacious place.
You put the idea that negative experiences are individual and not systemic. As if being a victim of a crime is an "individual experience" and not a pervasive element of the area.
You’re somewhat right, I didn’t wander into unfamiliar areas by myself at night, but I don’t do that at home either. I spent a good deal of time out past sundown, just not meandering out of curiosity.
I tried to make it clear that I specifically did walk around/through the tenderloin.
And yes, there was one street—in the week we spent there commuting, going out, visiting w/ friends—that I noted I’d avoid in future.
I didn’t mean to assert that crime in SF is a small set of isolated incidents. My hope was to share my own positive experience but avoid sounding dismissive of the real pains experienced by individuals.
52 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadI could list fifty highly positive experiences but the current narrative seems to focus on being negative.
I like the quote from Paul Kantner (of Jefferson Airplane): "San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality."
You can totally leave your bag in the car and it'll most likely be fine in Santa Barbara, Pleasanton, Livermore, Truckee, ... (outside tourist areas).
As others said, it's about social cohesion of which there is little, especially in large cities but more and more small towns as well.
https://missionlocal.org/2023/06/one-year-after-recall-viole...
Enforce rules.
Recognize that some people aren't up to the responsibility level of living certain places and deal with them accordingly, i.e. at a certain level of criminal history you're on timeout or banished. Yeah, that isn't "nice", and if you want the job of rehabilitating the repeat offender because "there's good in everyone", go for it!
But a society must be a place where children can be raised safely and successfully, otherwise there is no society left. Public safety is a foundation of this.
Life sometimes brings us trolley problems where hard decisions must be made. Liberalism is a denial of this, which makes it attractive, but it always ends up being paid for with larger breakdowns as hard decisions aren't made.
https://www.abebooks.com/9780698106758/Liberal-parents-radic...
Your observations regarding the collective action of HN users are spot on. The well-established and tactfully moderated site guidelines foster meaningful discussions and are instrumental in shaping the quality of discourse on this platform. The strong preference for earnest conversation over low-effort humor or tropes is one of the factors that make HN such a rich and stimulating environment.
Your comments serve as a potent reminder of what makes Hacker News a great resource and a thriving community. Your input is deeply appreciated, and I look forward to more such enlightening discussions on this platform.
I am sure it starts from a empathetic place but leads to bad policy (eg: not prosecuting crimes out of empathy or to correct historical ethnic wrongdoing etc.) The problem is that these policies cause a real decline in the quality of life for everyone. Then folks who can afford to leave, leave - which happens to be the people who work, pay for everything for everyone and keep the place going. Their departure kicks off a spiral that keeps going until those stuck behind had enough.
An example of that turnaround is the Giuliani/ Bloomberg years in NYC - folks who ran on platforms of reducing crime and actually making life better for those who keep the place going.
From that limited perspective, I am going to be "short" San Francisco until the rhetoric changes.
Absolutely a big difference between SF and NYC is in governance. In NYC, the city government gets shit done. It does it’s job pretty effectively and efficiently: it’s a city that has nearly 10M people from every corner of the world.
The lack of a tech monoculture is a key differentiator. The bay, and CA to a large extent, suffers from being a cultural one-trick pony: the gold rush. It’s important to never forget about history and how it informs the present. After Spanish, then American, colonization, SF rose to prominence only because of it’s usefulness as a port city for the desperate folks looking to find their payday.
NYC has a subculture that is as greedy and obsessed with money and influence as SF: finance. But it’s only a small part of the overall magnificent NYC cultural fabric. You can go down to wall Street and participate if you want. But you can also make your way and thrive in the city a thousand different ways, with a thousand different groups of people.
SF is just a big little city :-/ It’s got it’s amazing pockets and so much potential. But you’re right: the sane thing to do is short SF until it grows up.
Fine I guess if you work for a large corporation.
I disagree with you on the finance folks angle. Full disclosure, almost 20 years in finance, now at a faang due to non compete. Most folks I know in finance are in the "hard working career builder" camp - invested in their families and communities for the long term. That's who takes the 7am train from Westchester to operate the index funds in your 401k.
Sorry to offend you on the finance culture assessment. But, unlike SF, I’ll choose to be kind here rather than be nice. You may choose to talk about the family man in finance that works toward a career vs getting rich. And I’m not going to say that doesn’t exist: of course it does! Being able to talk about patterns doesn’t mean that individual exceptions aren’t possible.
However, you have to admit that your ”hard working career builder” statement was designed to somehow liken this character to someone who actually labors for their money. I have to ask…why not work hard building a different career? The draw of money is the entire point. It’s not like you or I actually provide real, substantial, critical economic value. We work in jobs that can only exist because other folks are taking care of the essentials.
So my point is: at some point, it’s not about any sort of perceived attitude working in the industry.(1) Having a city that only caters to eg finance or tech is what is problematic. It drives wealth inequality, it drives prices upwards, it makes homes and rents unaffordable. Ultimately leading to everyone else being forced out of their homes, desperately trying to find someone cheap enough to live while enduring ever longer commutes.
This process is what destroyed the SF bay. Even pre pandemic, it was common for working class folks to have 90m commutes into SF to work. It’s why things close at 9, 10p in SF: if you’re closing, you’re getting home at midnight.
It didn’t destroy NYC because NYC has a superior functioning government. NYCHA and actually enforced rent control does wonders as a counter force to gentrification. Building in NYC is lightning fast compared to SF, where it takes more than half a decade to build what NYC does in less than a year.
And we see this result in the culture. To my first point, NYC came back from the pandemic while SF did not because it’s multiple cultures is robust, resilient, and adaptable. SF’s tech scene scattered in 2020 and the majority isn’t coming back.
(1) it’s a little subtle, because I think it’s 2 things. The cultural / attitude mindset helps. But that’s not enough on its own. If the city embraces the rich folks and ignores the poor folks, it’s going to look exactly like SF when the good times go away.
The thing you are assuming / missing is that for many of us working in finance is well connected to meaningful impact on the world.
To give you a very simple example - one of my typical clients a few jobs back were state teachers and police retirement funds. The folks who run those funds directly impact the quality of life in retirement of these civic employees - and the entire financial industry (brokers, vendors, etc) exist to cater to them.
So, the fund manager works to deliver best returns for the retirees. The broker works to provide the manager with superior execution. The trading platform vendor works to provide the broker with reliability and efficiency this requires, etc.
The "deeper" into finance you are, the more you recognize the connection between things like farming, energy generations, business formation, etc being enabled through our work.
So yeah plenty of guys chose finance because it's a good way to take care of their family AND they see meaning in their work.
Giuliani was elected NYC mayor in 1993 and reelected in 1997 (two-term limit). It is not an exaggeration to say that the typical Upper West Side or Park Slope liberal on election day 1997 spent the morning denouncing Giuliani as a proto-fascist who led a fascist police force, voted for his reelection in the secrecy of the ballot box (he won by 13% although Democrats that year had a 5X registration advantage <http://www.elections.ny.gov/NYSBOE/enrollment/county/county_...>), then spent the evening bemoaning his reelection and confidently predicting to their friends that the administration would of course kill or exile yet more homeless.
Eventually owners squeezed all the blood from the stone there was and… people fuck off and leave. And there’s nothing left.
There’s not a marginal adjustment that’s going to bring back everything, this is a crash. SF is going to plummet until prices and conditions significantly improve but given people will likely try to hold on to the dream of the previous status quo it will have a long way to fall.
Density and failed dreams of no law enforcement being an improvement lead to those desolation and I really wish the people who drove this to happening would learn their lesson but they won’t. Lots of people made plenty of money in this game and the cost is being seen with plenty of bag holders on display.
When I was flying to Sweden in summer 2021, I had a six-hour layover in SF, so I decided to take the BART up to the city to take a look, since I had previously lived there, and I almost didn't recognize the place. Half the shops around Union Square were boarded up and closed, it looked like a warzone. It was always a dirty shithole, but at the same time a vibrant, cool city. In 2021 all the good things were gone, and only the crap - literally - remained.
If you forcibly close all the things that make a city worth living in, for over a year, you don't get to act surprised when people stop wanting to pay for the high cost of living and move out of the city. SF is in a death spiral, as all the high-income workers leave the city, companies start leaving, foot traffic lessens, stores and restaurants start closing because they can't make it or because they're overwhelmed by shoplifters or homeless, ther city becomes less desireable, more workers leave the city, more stores and restaurants close, and with no-one filling the gap, you get a ghost town. Property values plummet, commercial real estate plummets, and it becomes a service and retail desert.
All because of their own choices. None of this was inevitable. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and there's no better illustration of that than what's happened to SF.
Hope you make plenty of money with that superpower.
Of course, those of us who have lived here during that time know that Union Square has been on the decline with empty storefronts since 2012 - but it's fascinating to watch people building and tilting at strawmen in real time.
Before, the gentrification and influx of tech money caused a positive spiral, more offices, more office workers, higher income office workers, higher end restaurants, all of that pushed against the unsavory elements of the city, keeping it pretty much confined to the Tenderloin. Hell, when I left in 2016, Market Street was in better shape than ever.
But the forced closures of stores and restaurants for far too long, shifted this equilibirum, rapidly, quickly, and much further than anyone anticipated. That was the proverbial straw.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
??? they recalled their DA and voted in her "tough-on-crime" opponent almost a year ago now. Are you so blindly committed to your ideology that you just assume the evidence supports your position?
We stayed on the edge of the tenderloin and walked to the mission to get calibrated socially. Yes, there were people living on the street, and def having mental health issues. But on the whole the city felt like a very active and enjoyable (albeit expensive) place to live.
I don’t mean to discount individual experiences of crime, only to say I really enjoyed our stay and it seems still to be a vivacious place.
Your entire comment is littered with assertions that say you felt safe/fine, but at the same time you note your behavior was fairly cautious.
1. You didn't go out at night.
2. You stayed away from the TL
3. Something you witnessed gave you pause.
Then you also have to consider that you weren't really living there. You worked most of the week and toured the rest of your time.
>I don’t mean to discount individual experiences of crime, only to say I really enjoyed our stay and it seems still to be a vivacious place.
You put the idea that negative experiences are individual and not systemic. As if being a victim of a crime is an "individual experience" and not a pervasive element of the area.
I tried to make it clear that I specifically did walk around/through the tenderloin.
And yes, there was one street—in the week we spent there commuting, going out, visiting w/ friends—that I noted I’d avoid in future.
I didn’t mean to assert that crime in SF is a small set of isolated incidents. My hope was to share my own positive experience but avoid sounding dismissive of the real pains experienced by individuals.