I was in SF two weeks ago, it had been about 5 years since I was there last. I can say I was shocked. I stayed at the Ritz Carlton, and there were homeless drug addicts out front around the clock. Not just one or two, but a lot.
You could walk the sidewalk and more cars than you could count had the windows broken out of them from thieves. We had dinner at Brenda's French Soul Food where we witnessed an armed robbery. We called 911 a dozen times. The police never showed up. One in my party was told by the dispatcher unless there is an injury, they may not come.
I'm not going back until this is fixed. I'm not sure how it gets fixed.
I'm trying to understand San Francisco's response to this kind of situation.
Is it one of the following?
(a) The citizens and leaders have a clear plan in place, and they're waiting for it to bear fruit.
(b) The citizens and leaders don't have a plan in place, but they have some other reason to believe the problem will sort itself out.
(c) They're paralyzed, because nobody can identify a plan that seems effective and politically acceptable.
(d) They don't consider the problem so significant that major action is needed.
(e) (something else)
Caveat: I'm sure this account is accurate, but I've also heard counterpoints that only small regions of SF are like this. So as an outsider I don't really have a clear picture about the situation.
The root of the problem is the electorate (not the leaders, who are downstream from the electorate), and that problem mainly falls under category A. They, the voters, have this idea that more social services, more compassion and understanding and more tolerance for the minor sorts of crime like vandalism and shoplifting will eventually bear fruit and cause the crime rate to drop. The failure of the plan to deliver the promised results is explained away as a matter of needing more time, more funding, more reforms... The plan hasn't failed; people failed the plan.
And of course there is a lot of D, people denying there's a problem at all. The "this is fine" response.
It's really multiple problems at once. In fact I'd argue the homeless problem is a symptom of a larger problem, which is the economic death of that area. The core problem is that it's too big to be solved effectively in the short term, by a single leader or law, so this will have to play out over the long term.
Still, one aspect of this does seem easily solved: in Westfield's case, having a bigger police presence. If they had to name a reason why they went out of business, it would be that, not enough police & too much crime. That seems like part of the problem: the police are not responsive, and since police performance is kind of a thing that straddles right/left divisions & powerful constituencies, it's not like one person can easily solve it. There are laws on the books to stop crime, and the DA can do something after suspects are caught, but if the police are missing in action at the places where crimes are happening, not investigating and not making arrests, they will continue.
The larger problem is the death of downtown due to: crime, falling tourism, and the rise of remote work. I personally don't think pushing on the 'crime' lever - especially not by just installing another DA - will be enough to stop it. The problem of remote work leading to falling vacancy rates, leading to an empty downtown, leading to a rising crime and homelessness problem, hasn't been addressed by any of the contemplated solutions, not seriously imho.
Long term, I think downtown will need to be rezoned to be more residential, and the combination of more foot traffic (mostly that) supporting more businesses, and the people & businesses softening the edges of the crime & homelessness problem, will eventually improve the situation. But turning office space into residential space is a huge ask, and even today many people will say it's impossible. It will be years until those downtown office space owners accept this, years more before City Hall can find acceptable ways to rezone that area, more years for the work to be completed, and still more years before people start moving in.
So we might see a turnaround starting in, say, a decade. I wouldn't hope for too much until then.
The predictable response to this noble but naïve compassion will be an inhumane crackdown. People respond predictable to insecurity, and it’s not Patrick Henryesque. You can already start to see frustration turning into de-humanisation in these discussions, as one side pleads pragmatism (and at its extremes, cruelty) while calls for compassion (and at its extreme, labels everyone a fascist).
We are far from that. San Francisco remains a AAA issuer. But if receipts crash, deficits bulge and services get cut while the administration debates reparations, that’s how you get regrettable policy. There is still time for people to meet in the middle and find humane but productive solutions that don’t involve sloshing billions through useless NGOs.
Businesses are already leaving, tax revenue will crash harder once more businesses and residents leave, then only the grandfathered Prop 13 recipients paying $5k/yr on a property worth $5m right now will remain. It’ll get a lot worse before it gets better. Once all the value is destroyed, developers will swoop in and turn derelict neighborhoods into luxury apartments, the coffee shops will come back, and we’ll be back on the gentrification cycle once more.
> Once all the value is destroyed, developers will swoop in and turn derelict neighborhoods into luxury apartments, the coffee shops will come back, and we’ll be back on the gentrification cycle once more
Then everything is fine. It’s just a question of time horizons. I disagree with this determinism. But if you hold it, the present is fine.
It’s relevant in that reparation supporters have cited reparations as an answer to the homeless problem. ’m not sure how it would work in practice: would social workers distribute $5M checks to Black homeless people while leaving the White ones laying next to them on the street?
At any rate, the larger point is that SF’s out-of-touch political elites need to work on real solutions rather than engage in performative politics.
It’s in the mould of San Francisco’s education board busying themselves with renaming schools while schools remained closed [1]. Is it an issue? Sure. Is it the pressing issue for San Francisco? No.
There are multiple leadership issues, but ultimately there is no single fix.
The mayor has little power in SF compared to other cities. My understanding is the Board of Supervisors is more distributed than a typical City Council.
Housing: A single person in SF has managed to thwart 1/3 of all building development (source: some anti-NIMBY transparency website), which means NiMBYs have an extraordinarily strong Heckler’s veto. Very little development means supply for dwellings stays far below demand. Rent control ordinance from 1979 has meant that market rate units cost 3x what rent controlled units cost. Tenants in Cali and SF have very strong rights compared to landlords, so people aren’t rushing to invest in SF rental properties.
Crime: The state changed the thresholds between misdemeanors and felonies about 8 years ago and most people blame SF for something that a majority of Cali voters did.
As far as I can tell, the SFPD is sitting on its hands. As much as they complain about being short staffed, my larger city is nearby and has far fewer officers per resident and still manages to answer more calls. I never understood the argument that officers are slow walking because criminals would be back on the street without the prosecutor pressing charges. The patrol officer doesn’t know or care. This is more likely a “blue flu” thing where police are punishing people for their government’s liberal policies.
SF suffers from lots of “bridge and tunnel” criminals. The area around Oakland and Vallejo (across the Bay Bridge) is where lots of the thieves and shooters come from. People don’t tour the East Bay like they do SF and the affluent are more likely to live in SF, so the criminals go to where the money is.
Coordinated thief gangs for catalytic converters, store-mob thieves, car theft rings, etc are mostly issues that can’t be solved by SFPD — they all require multi-jurisdiction task forces.
Post-pandemic: SF had some of the harshest lockdown policies in the US and there was no policy push to reopen and announce the reopening. The jails were overcrowded during COVID and the Sheriff Department (staffs the jails) is very understaffed, so there were lots of incentives to keep jails from filling up.
SF’s city government spends more per capita than pretty much everywhere else in the US on social projects. They vastly overspend on homeless mitigation, health clinics, public bathrooms, etc. It seems to me there is no political consensus in the city for a single plan.
"In California, a misdemeanor, by definition, is a criminal offense for which the maximum penalty is no more than 364 days in county jail and a fine of not more than $1,000.00."
I think that 364 days in the county jail is more than enough to deter people from shoplifting, etc. So the problem isn't the penalty; the problem is that the laws aren't enforced.
I also don’t have big issues with the felony/misdemeanor transition, but the cop in my family does.
> The problem is that the laws aren’t enforced
I would argue that legal punishments only work well when they are consistent and swift. The US legal system has failed on both accounts. Violent crime closure rates are abysmal, and the end of that funnel is just that someone was charged, not the right person being convicted.
In practice, the IS legal system depends on leaning hard on anyone who might be a criminal (especially with bail bonds, the slow time to trial, the failure of public defenders to handle their caseload competently, and the overwhelming dependency on plea bargaining — which was unethical in this country until after the Civil War).
Also, saying “the laws aren’t being enforced” seems naïve to who isn’t enforcing the laws and why.
> Rent control ordinance from 1979 has meant that market rate units cost 3x what rent controlled units cost.
Point of order: Without those rent control ordinances, all units would cost right around the current market rate. The thing driving costs is failure to build to meet demand.
> Tenants in Cali and SF have very strong rights compared to landlords, so people aren’t rushing to invest in SF rental properties.
Another point of order: The NIMBYs are the primary reason people aren't rushing to develop residential rental buildings in SF. Or, if you were referring to the fact that oh so many rentals are massively overdue for essential repairs, then that's a combination of
* Because your renter is almost certainly already renting the best place they can afford, and because it's almost certain that nothing cheaper will appear on the market, you -as a landlord- have no incentive to do more than the legal minimum.
* Because Prop 13 fixes your property value reassessment at something tiny (like 2% per year) until your property changes hands, and because any major improvements to that property are assessed at their current market rate, and then added in to your tax assessment, you -as a landlord- are __seriously__ disincentivized to improve your property.
They can’t fix anything in SF because then it would ruin the aesthetic of ticky tacky faded pastel colored wall-to-wall vinyl sided two story houses with those single-car-garages-with-uselessly-steep-driveway-angles. At least the people who bought those for $60k back in the 60s get to pay about 1/20th of what the next owner would in property taxes so they can stay to witness the city crumble around them. Don’t want to mess up the feel of the neighborhood, you know.
Partially because some of the lots in the area are flat-rate $30-50 and street parking is free or much much lower cost. IMO governments shouldn’t allow private companies to ruin parking downtown like this — cities need to operate their own parking garages with the same rates as street parking in my opinion.
I live in the neighborhood, and have for more than a decade. I fairly-frequently walk by Brenda's, and also walk through many other parts of the Tenderloin and into Union Square, and through the waterfront.
On bad days, I have seen single-digit numbers of cars with smashed windows. On typical days, I see zero. Your report just doesn't jive with my on-the-ground experience, whether past or present.
If you were in town for some big event of some sort, I guess you should consider the possibility that folks associated with the event decided to turn hooligan and smash shit.
We walked from the Ritz to the Opera House, and I can't tell you how many windows on cars were smashed. Maybe you've lived there so long you're blind to it.
> Maybe you've lived there so long you're blind to it.
I assure you that I'm very much not blind to it.
I'm super angry about how the city governors refuses to suppress the anti-housing faction, and lines their pockets at most every opportunity. But I'm definitely not blind to the folks living in the streets and their regular goings-on.
And while I'm angry about what the government is failing to do, I'm not _shocked_ and/or _appalled_ by what's happening on the streets. In my personal experience, I've found that folks who are shocked and/or deeply offended by a thing tend to remember the thing as being far more extreme than it actually was. shrug
Not _shocked_ and/or _appalled_ by people literally dying of overdoses in the streets. Photo-albums strewn in the street when a burglar decided it was worthless and ditched it? A family purely distraught - the father sitting on the curb crying with his family when he discovered their U-haul was looted during their overnight stay at a hotel it was parked in? Stealing a dog from an old man who left it tied up outside a store for a moment. Stealing a ~10 year-old's small pink bicycle in front of unSafeway as the family went in to buy snacks and water for their bike ride, to find it gone when they came out. A man... entertaining himself while glairing intently at children in front of the Union Square McDonalds?
These, and infinitely other unmentionable things (including a myriad of stories that involve myself as the victim, many of them worse than above): absolutely a daily occurrence for me in the TL.
What is your bar for "shocking"? I believe you are blind.
I'll let you sort out the politics, but where I live, we don't see any of that. No one should have to worry about that stuff. This is a serious concern. Disease outbreaks occur because of these conditions.
Something that really puzzled me about the homeless was many of them would be standing but bent over with their hands on the ground, and head between their knees. WTF is with that?
Yep. Housing the homeless and providing the medical and psychological care they need is the humane thing to do. The _inhumane_ thing to do is to simply move them out of the way so that rich tourists don't have to see them. (This is sometimes what the SFPD is ordered to do, and it boils my blood every time they do it.)
> Disease outbreaks occur because of these conditions.
You might be surprised at the medical outreach work that happens in the city. You'd do your psyche a bit of a favor by learning about the support programs in the city, maybe.
> ...many of them would be standing but bent over with their hands on the ground, and head between their knees.
Some are high. Some are physically damaged.
Next time you're in town, you should _really_ talk to some of these folks. (edit: And by "these" folks, I don't mean "the folks who are clearly high out of their gourd", but I mean "the folks who are out on street living a normal life... just without a roof over their heads") The majority of them are actually quite pleasant people who are fun to chat with.
You seem like a pleasant person. Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't think I will be returning anytime soon. You guys have a level of problems I want to stay far away from. Sometimes to be humane, you have to be inhumane.
You guys do have some great restaurants. I hope you're able to keep them.
Let me put it in terms that Gene Roddenberry would have explained. He emphasized it in his work. You might have heard about it. Star Trek. "The needs of the many, out way the needs of a few, or the one."
When you're more interested in the humanity, and dignity of those afflicted (the few) than those not afflicted (the many) then you're going to continue to generate more afflicted. You have to stop the problem at the source.
That means: Cutting off the drug supply. Enforcing laws. Everything you most likely despise. You only care about those that are on those streets.
You have to make it harder to become homeless, than it is to be a successful functioning member of society.
Jobs are not the problem. There are jobs everywhere. In one of my businesses, I needed truck drivers. I can't find them because hardly anyone can pass a drug test. I will pay for them to get their CDL, if they're drug free. It's not happening. I sponsored 3 people from India to drive trucks for me. They work 6 hour days, make $35 an hour, with route bonuses, and benefits.
I have a software company (or had), where we did DoD projects. It is next to impossible to find anyone that can pass a background check for a security clearance with the FBI. Why? Drugs.
I had another software company that was in the Casino Gaming space. It was difficult to get people licensed. Why? Drugs.
There is opportunity for everyone, bad decisions put you in the street. Then people like you and I have coddled these people, and give them enough to get by, so they don't want to return to being a functioning members of society. Anything else, they steal or commit another crime to get more drugs.
I have spoken to many of these people. Your presumption shows your character. I have donated more money to this problem than you will make in your life. Money is not fixing the issue. I have stopped supporting many alcoves. We keep creating more, and more that end up needing help. The majority of the problem revolves around drugs.
Drugs cause mental issues. This is a fact. People don't want to work. They want drugs.
So, I will not be returning to SF. I will not fund the business I was there to invest in. Keep going with your idealism. The universes own laws will eventually catch up with you, as history shows us every time.
For the life of me I cannot understand why we tolerate antisocial behaviour in our public spaces. The difference in experience between Market Street and most streets in Berlin or Kyoto is astounding.
Forced relocation to care communities (which would need to be built) is the only move I see. Food, Shelter, Waste disposal, etc. The idea of a group of homeless people being able to set up a camp wherever they want, when everything else in society needs to go through planning permission is insane.
> That means: Cutting off the drug supply. Enforcing laws. Everything you most likely despise.
Speaking about presumptions that show one's character...
> Money is not fixing the issue. ... You have to make it harder to become homeless, than it is to be a successful functioning member of society. ... Jobs are not the problem.
On this we agree, very, very, very strongly. Jobs are not the problem. A lack of money for homeless assistance (and "assistance") programs is not the problem. (In fact, there's certainly way too much money thrown at those sorts of programs.) Based on what I've observed over the years here in San Francisco, for the situation in San Francisco, lack of housing is the problem.
As I said upthread:
> Housing the homeless and providing the medical and psychological care they need is the humane thing to do.
When you can't find housing because there is no housing to be had, and when it's tough as shit to hold down a job because you don't have a solid place to sleep, to clean your clothes, to safely store your alarm clock that's gonna wake you up for tomorrow's shift, etc, etc, then you have one of those "self-perpetuating cycles" that leaves you jobless and homeless.
> That means: Cutting off the drug supply.
That's effectively impossible. We can't even do this inside our prisons. If their child is determined, parents usually cannot do this inside their own homes. I guarantee you that even Singapore has drugs and drug use within its borders.
> Enforcing laws.
Yep. We're a nation of laws, and all laws should be enforced at all times. I very strongly believe this... to an extreme degree.
However, you do need to think about a few key points:
1) You can't extract money from someone who doesn't have an income to garnish or assets to confiscate. This renders fines and other monetary penalties largely ineffective.
2) The obvious alternative to fines is prison time. Because our prisons aren't built to rehabilitate, if you're tossing folks back into the very same situation they came out from, once released from prison they're going to be right back in prison in short order... because nothing about their life changed, except for the fact that they got an unpleasant roof over their head and three square meals for a little while.
2a) In practice, that boils down to "We have decided to house the homeless in prisons, rather than in houses.". Most (all?) of the time, that's _way_ more expensive than, like, housing folks in houses and hooking them up with a rehabilitation program so that it's -as you said- "harder to become homeless, than it is to be a successful functioning member of society".
2b) Our prisons have finite space, and are typically substantially overfull. It's better to have free space for new violent offenders (and other substantial threats to public safety) than to cram them 110% full by cramming in nearly every homeless person.
> There is opportunity for everyone, bad decisions put you in the street.
Bad decisions, but also bad luck. Sometimes bad shit happens to decent folks, and sometimes something comes along and absolutely wrecks you... wrecks you so bad that if you don't have really solid friends (or generations of accumulated wealth) to help you out, you're absolutely going to lose everything you have because you're rendered totally useless for a very, very long time.
> [I can't find truckers, or TS/SCI-ready employees because "everyone's" smoking weed and the regulations haven't caught up with the fact that weed is legal now in 75% of the US.]
I mean, this is self-explanatory.
Not too long ago, it was the case that you couldn't get TS/SCI if you were openly homosexual. The requirements for high-end clearance tend to lag substantially behind what's acceptable in the wider world. It's also a goddamn shame that weed stays in one's system for so very long after its psychoactive effects are gone. It makes testing for "Was this guy doing hazardous work while under the influence?" very tough... so tough that absolute prohibition is the easiest way to deal with it. It'd be super cool if we could build more sensitive tests, but that probably won't happen until FedGov drops the charade and de-schedules weed.
"You honestly, really think all those people just sat down one day and decided to be homesless Because they’d be coddled?!"
Strictly speaking this is simply a straw man via oversimplification (as is nearly the entirety of this post and the others I've seen from bbor in this thread)...
But I've seen this _variety_ of straw man so often that I want to break it out into a specific fallacy on its own.
Not sure what to call it but the "Oh, so you think X decided one day just Y?"
"Oh so you think Elizabeth Holmes just sat down one day and decided _I'm going to scam billions out of investors and risk lives and pretend I made a blood testing machine_"?
"Who sees this advertisement for Tide and just decides _I'm going to buy Tide because I saw this advertisement?"
"Oh so you think I listen to Andrew Tate one day and now suddenly I'm abusing women?"
"Oh, so you think I'm going to do heroin one time and suddenly I'm going to be homeless and addicted?"
No. We're the culmination of dozens, hundreds, thousands of behaviors (with genetic and environmental influences) that create a trend.
So, err, I'll entertain your bad-faith rhetorical question and answer: no, nobody thinks anyone "sat down one day and decided to be homesless [sic] because they'd be coddled." San Francisco (on behalf of the voters, you and I) have created thousands of tiny incentive structures that maximizes the pain people experiencing homelessness, drug addiction, and mental illness, while simultaneously maximizing the negative impact to the housed, because you believe everyone who is housed deserves to be the victim of assaults, burglaries and all the other fun because they aren't supporting your policies.
Let me guess: housing-first? Certainly their drug addictions and mental illnesses will instantly vanish with a free house in the most expensive real-estate in the country? Anything short of this, well, they can stay on the street and find comfort in stealing things to fund their heroin/fentanyl self-medication.
Thanks for taking the time to read and respond :) Always appreciate a dialogue.
the others I've seen from bbor in this thread
I think we can both agree that using the word "bbor" in the context of this conversation is kinda funny.
fallacy
"Figure of speech"
Oh so you think I listen to Andrew Tate one day and now suddenly I'm abusing women?
Probably?
thousands of tiny incentive structures
Like... feeding them? Giving them shelter so they're less likely to die of exposure, and because people hate when they sleep within sight?
you believe everyone who is housed deserves to be the victim of assaults... because they aren't supporting your policies.
You literally spent the last 75% of your comment talking about the Strawman Fallacy and then...
To be explicit here: Ok, you win, no one decides to be homeless in literally one single moment, all of life is the culmination of decisions and life events, totally agree with you. The rest of my comment was about how fucking awful it is to be homeless. Which you would agree, no? I cited some insane statistic elsewhere here about them being almost 20 times more likely to be the victim of a violent crime, and 9 times more likely to be sexually assaulted.
I guess you don't have to work if you live on the streets, but I can't believe anyone would argue that they're "coddled". The only reason people would prefer homelessness is if they've been beaten down by the system to ridiculous degree, e.g. felons; what are they supposed to do after serving their time, considering it's way harder to find housing or employment in an economy that's already brutally hard? [1][2][3][4][5] From there, consider people who have suffered abuse, drug addiction, mental health issues, and just plain shit luck. Do they deserve whatever psychotic/violent shit "be tougher on the homeless" implies?
This is really the gist of it: what should we do?
Yes, my plan is housing first, on top of fixing our insane, unprecedented level of inequality (except for the Gilded Age, which hopefully we agree was a Very Very Bad Time). I think the idea expressed above that we just need to... beat them up more..? and that will fix the problem is heartless beyond belief. Curious to hear your thoughts!
Reich states that 95% of economic gains following the economic recovery which began in 2009 went to the top 1% of Americans
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the wealth held by billionaires in the U.S. increased by 70%... "the steepest increase in global billionaires’ share of wealth on record."
As of late 2022... 735 billionaires collectively possessed more wealth than the bottom half of U.S. households ($4.5 trillion and $4.1 trillion respectively). *The top 1% held a total of $43.45 trillion*.
It's not a figure of speech. It's a very deliberate attempt at deeply mischaracterizing the position in an attempt to make it appear absurd. "Oh yeah, that's right, who would ever wake up one day and decide to be homeless? What an idiot who would think that!"
That's not how it works. You think you're being funny. You can't keep it together enough here to even genuinely engage. In case anyone else is reading, no, one exposure to Andrew Tate's toxicity is not what causes one to become misogynistic. It's an entire society and repeated exposure to his ideas, and ideas like his that cause it. It is not one exposure to a Tide advertisement that makes somebody sit down and say, "hey I should go buy Tide because of this advertisement!"
Not like feeding them and giving them shelter. Remember, you don't want to give shelter. You, and your ilk, the vocal faction of SF politics, will accept nothing short of housing first.
I obviously believe it is awful to be homeless. You say I straw manned you - tell me, am I wrong? Do you support anything short of housing first?
If, say, the voting public doesn't want to give everyone 1000sqft in the heart of San Francisco, but is in favor of sheltering and forced drug rehabilitation and mental health facilities coupled with enforcing laws. You're telling me that you would not prefer the current state?
My thoughts are your (presumed) preference of status que over a compromise that doesn't cause maximum suffering for all is the worst of all worlds. You're the "Bernie or Bust"er of the unhoused. You're the person who would rather have Trump than Biden, if you can't have Bernie.
"Well, if I can't give everyone a free house in San Francisco, and change the distribution of wealth, I'd rather people suffer and die in the streets (via decriminalizing everything, and being anti-shelter), because then at least the taxpayers will also suffer the consequences of it, and then maybe things will change."
Not OP, but if someone is on the street openly using drugs and defecating on the sidewalk, those are crimes. They can be addressed through therapy or community support or jail. But they need to be addressed, even if the person in question would prefer they not be.
I can't recall the last time I saw a single thief-smashed car window where I live. If the occasional single digit breakage is no big deal then maybe you've gotten used to it?
it happens... I live in a nice suburb of seattle. someone smashed the side window of my mini to get into an empty grocery bag about 3 months back. we barely have package thiefs. Shit happens.
> On bad days, I have seen single-digit numbers of cars with smashed windows
I lived in New York for ten years, and can count on two hands the number of smashed car windows I’ve seen. In every case except one, there was someone nearby calling the police; in that one it was me.
I live in a downtown district of a mid size city: it is not normal to see a freshly smashed car window with any frequency whatsoever. You may have normalized this for yourself - your response seems to validate the person you’re disagreeing with.
The vast, vast majority of districts in the US respond to every single 911 call reporting anything of consequence.
Maybe there are still "a lot" of places where that's not true, but I think that phrasing misrepresents the state of policing in the US.
Many things scale favorably in larger cities: people served/foot of water & power lines, street maintenance, etc. But adequate policing seems to scale at a flat or maybe even inverse rate: the tighter people are packed the more police presence per person is needed to keep the "peace" constant and crime solve rates low.
(Admittedly, the above is at best anecdata from having lived in many larger and small cities in the US and abroad.)
My first time in SF was when I attended JavaOne 2007, because Java was still kind of exciting back then. Did what I'm used to in new cities - walk in a random direction to find something interesting. Two minutes later I felt like I was in The Wire.
In my personal experience, as someone who has lived here for more than a decade, I see regular auto patrols going through the neighborhoods, as well as occasional foot patrols whose purpose seems to be to talk to some of the folks in the area and get a sense of what has been going on lately.
This isn't shit you're going to see if you're just passing through... you've gotta stick around and pay attention.
I invite you to discover the wide world of existing literature and research that demonstrates solid links between regular neighborhood mounted and foot patrols and reduction in violent and property crime.
Also: Your original claim was "People are going to buy and sell drugs, sex, & etc. It's better to have that out in the open where police can keep an eye on and discourage violence."
Not: "solid links between regular neighborhood mounted and foot patrols and reduction in violent and property"
I don't know where you're from, so I don't know how the police operate in your area. I'm a life-long USian. Everywhere I've lived in the US, the police absolutely do not perform regular patrols inside of people's homes.
I can tell you from experience that if you don't have the drug deals happening out in the open, then the vast majority of them are going to happen in someone's home.
As I mentioned, it's _way_ easier to keep an eye on things when you can funnel it to a relatively small, open area so you can just drive by and see it, than it is to go knocking on a couple-hundred (or even couple-thousand) doors across an entire metro area.
And no, I'm not flagging your comments. I don't believe I've flagged any comments on this site, ever. If I disagree sufficiently strongly with a statement, I engage in discussion, as I have here and elsewhere.
Was the same for me in TL back in 2013. 3 homeless in the street next to a jerrycan in fire and a random cart on the road. I thought this type of stuff were just in movies to make stuff dramatic or maybe in Detroit but not there. I went from Powell to this and I was stunned for a few seconds. I knew about this street and that it was to be avoided but didn’t know where it was. Certainly I didn’t except it to be so close from city center. But that was part of the charm of SF.
Now it’s a mess though. It is not charming anymore at the level it is right now. I went back around Covid and it was crazy surreal.
I live in the county with the highest median household income in the country. 3 out of 5 anchor store locations at the local mall sit empty and national retailers are continuously leaving. Some are being replaced by lower end stores which could never have afforded a mall location 10 or even 5 years ago, but many locations remain empty. The mall is slowly dying and the owner is looking to redevelop it.
I have to admit I'm not sure what the point of your comment is in this context. Are you implying that even though Loudoun County has the highest median income in the country it might still not be able to support a mall because the wealth is concentrated and a large number live in poverty? If so, I can assure you that is not the case. Loudoun County has the 6th lowest poverty rate of US counties at 3.4%. It should be a great location for a mall yet the mall is still not doing well.
> I'm not sure what the point of your comment is in this context
Median household income is a poor proxy for a mall’s revenue driver: aggregate proximate disposable income. One can maintain lofty median incomes while peripherialising disposable income through higher median costs of living.
(Side note: I spent a hot minute in childhood in McClean. The food in Leesburg might have triggered my inner gourmande. Forgot that until just now—thank you.)
Would have never guessed that since the original comment didn't mention disposable income but only a statement about median income hiding gut wrenching poverty. Loudoun County has the 3rd highest average household disposable income and a low poverty rate, so again should be a great location for a mall but isn't. While some malls are succeeding, Tysons Corner Mall and Tysons Galleria in Northern Virginia for example, many more are struggling and many have already died. Some of this is due to the shrinking of their traditional tenants, national retail chains, but is also due to those same potential tenants choosing to relocate existing stores and open new stores in non-mall locations.
> the original comment didn't mention disposable income
It was pointing out that the chosen isn’t the signal it’s being positioned as.
> Loudoun County has the 3rd highest average household disposable income and a low poverty rate, so again should be a great location for a mall
Source? (Purely for curiosity.) Averages don’t matter. Aggregates do. If I am a county of one, even with tremendous disposable income, a good location for a mall I do not make.
Malls are absolutely in structural decline. But pointing to median and average metrics is misleading, though not in an uncommon way.
"An analysis by The Standard shows that 45 stores, or 46% of the mall’s 97 pre-pandemic retailers, have closed since 2020. While 21 new stores have opened in the past three years."
So -46 existing stores and +21 new stores for total of -25 stores (down about 25% from pre-pandemic). Losing Nordstrom doesn't help.
The property managers are walking away from the mall, so there doesn't seem to be much confidence wrt profitability of the mall, esp. given rising interest rates.
The data from police does not reflect what businesses are reporting. This may be due to reclassification of crimes. Also police do not respond to theft any longer.
The area near the mall was pretty uninviting even before the guidelines to ignore theft under $1000 came into effect. Aggressive people high on drugs, exposed needles, and human feces were pretty much the norm, despite all the wealth that flowed into SF due to its growth. Everyone either was or personally knew at least one victim of a car break-in or bicycle theft.
The government ignored all those issues because it didn't stop people from visiting SF, setting up businesses there and buying real estate there.
Things got worse during the pandemic. City turned into a ghost town. The shoplifting went into high gear, and the density of tents around downtown went up even more.
Still the city didn't do anything. I bet they thought, "oh, this pandemic will be over soon and all the working from home will end along with it".
This is the correct answer. I (and many others) used to work near there. That mall wasn’t very useful and located on the edge of Union Square and a rough neighborhood. Reduce foot traffic from office dwellers by 50% and you basically kill Union Square retail. Drop tourism by however much that’s fallen and that’s the end of your mall. The dystopian takes are overblown, but the city needs a plan for a world with fewer people working along Market Street.
Worse yet, the DA and supes were on board with not prosecuting crimes, so the police stopped arresting people since they'd be out on the street in a short time anyway. People would claim people are poor and don't have money and SF is expensive to that absolves their crimes --the thing is poor people, by and large, are not thieves. The thieves are professional crews. And then, criticism of a DA not prosecuting crime, you know, their job, was met with accusations of being "right-wing," and it still is, though fewer people believe that take anymore. A new supe, who believes in prosecuting crime, Joel Engardio, is, at times, accused of being right wing, despite being a normal democrat. It's nuts.
These are linked. Most of Downtown SF's desirability was you can work there and make a lot of money. When you could suddenly work other places for the same money, the main reason to go was gone. SF's pandemic policies exacerbated this by further driving certain people away from the city. Without office workers to put pressure on the city to keep the area safe-ish (or at least hide what's going on), the TL spread.
And now, even if people return to the office, there's no reason for it to be in SF.
I believe the main reason is that particular neighborhood in San Francisco is dangerous now. In short, certain areas of San Francisco have escalated from being merely uninviting to dangerously unsafe.
Like recent story from good morning America: they got scared going downtown at 4am. What a cry babies..
Obviously foot traffic is important to retail success, but retail success is important to vibrance. And crime is important to both retail success and foot traffic.
The Westfield Mall is very close to the Financial District.
Nearly _everything_ in the Financial District was open _only_ during regular business hours -- those businesses were there to only cater to the folks working in FiDi and noone else. Outside of business hours (and during many business holidays) that district was dead, dead, dead.
I wonder how much outside-of-work-hours spillover there was from FiDi office workers to businesses immediately adjacent to FiDi, and also wonder if those adjacent businesses have been significantly impacted now that oh so many people are no longer working inside those offices.
The Westfield Mall was right off a BART stop, so it was a fairly convenient place to go shop in SF if you didn't have a car. It was also near the flagship stores around Union Square, which is the main hotel district and another destination shopping spot. So the mall (at least when I used to go there) would be pretty busy even on weekends or evenings when the financial district was dead silent.
Oh yeah, it is definitely in a really good location. Being right next to BART is usually super good for foot traffic... and being very close to Union Square is (was?) also super good.
And yeah, like four years ago the Westfield Mall had _way_ more foot traffic than it had the few times I visited like four or six months ago.
I was just wondering out loud about the effects of the loss of the workers in FiDi.
They're not mutually exclusive. I for one moved out during lockdowns because of the crime (and hygiene issues). I would have stayed otherwise, regardless of WFH or not.
Westfield Mall lost business when Sony gave up on the Metreon and that was converted to a Target store in 2012. Target was just more useful, although rather bleak.
Westfield has a Bloomingdales, which was mostly used as a walk-through route between the parking garage on Mission and the rest of the mall. Bloomingdales was a traditional downtown department store, with fine china and such, stuff nobody goes downtown to buy any more. Certainly not since the pandemic. "Designer clothing, shoes, handbags, and more" says their web site.
They have to put something similar to pigeon spikes on all furniture which would kind of defeat the purpose of having floor samples.
The only way this could work is if they charged people a refundable entrance fee of like $1000 or something. Otherwise I could see it turning into a squatted living space with druggies hanging out getting in the way of potential customers. Or posing health risks to customers (needles in cushions, unsanitary personal hygiene, etc.)
> The only way this could work is if they charged people a refundable entrance fee of like $1000 or something.
I guess you'll be shocked to hear that shops with furnishings inside of them (including, but not limited to the Macy's department store) have been operating for decades without installing anti-homeless spikes on the floor samples, _or_ charging an entrance fee.
Having a human posted at the entrance whose job is to bounce away hobos is (based on my personal, first-hand observations) more than sufficiently effective.
Nordstrom's is moving out, so is Anthropologie... but that's beside the point. IKEA's layouts are notoriously labyrinthine, the perfect kind where "associates" cannot scan to see what's going on a whole floor with a glance.
> IKEA's layouts are labyrinthine, the perfect kind where "associates" cannot scan to see what's going on a whole floor with a glance.
You (intentionally?) missed the part where hobos get bounced out at the front door.
You've also pretty clearly not been in either of the Macy's buildings. [0] They, -too- (just like the other large department stores that have been operating in the area for decades) are so large that the employees on the floor cannot see what's going on across the entire floor with a glance.
[0] Well, they _used_ to have two. Since a year or two ago, they closed their menswear building and consolidated in a single building.
Great, now you want them to be exposed to accusations and claims of discrimination, nice!
This issue is a new issue --it's not decades long. It's only become an issue since intersection of prop 47 with SF governance. This is why companies are only beginning to pull out now.
Unbelievably, SF already had loitering and vagrancy laws on the books, but the panhandle had to have a new more specific ordinance to address druggies blocking doorway entrances etc (the sit/lie law), of course, in typical fashion, it could only be enforced after a written warning and after a second it became a misdemeanor...
It's just easier and better to find a place that's friendlier to business.
SF has been in a commercial decline for a whole bunch of reasons.
Despite that, front-door bouncers have continued to be -as far as I could tell, as a customer of these establishments- more-or-less totally effective at keeping hobos out.
In related news, an ABC reporter for Good Morning America recently revealed on air that he was told not to report live from the location of this mall because it wouldn't be safe.
"But it is worth mentioning that we are not at Union Square or the Westfield Mall this morning because we have been advised it is simply too dangerous to be there at this hour"
That seems insane, it’s not a dangerous neighborhood?? Unhoused people are (sometimes) mentally ill, not murderers. And why would they attack a news crew?? Baseless fear mongering
> Unhoused people are (sometimes) mentally ill, not murderers.
It is true that the mentally ill are overwhelmingly not dangerous. But as the number of mentally ill people in one place goes up, so do your odds of encountering that minority of mentally ill who are aggressive. In most of the world, you might see one mentally ill person in a day and they are harmless. In parts of California, sometimes it feels like you see a dozen mentally ill homeless in a day, and one of them is berating passersby or worse.
San Diego County data from 2021 showed that member of the homeless population there were murdered at 19 times the rate of the non-homeless population, and were 27 times more likely to be subjected to attempted murder—as well as 12 times more likely to be assaulted and nine times more likely to be sexually assaulted.
Damn it sucks to not have a house. Maybe crime rates are high among those communities not because they’re all crazy people waiting to stab random passerby (“or worse”), but instead because the conditions are mind numbing and brutal and scary and psyche-destroying in a way few recognize. The solution is to of course… what, beat them? Jail them? For how long? Forever?
You seem to assume from your interlocutors here hostility and hate towards the homeless. Me, I simply wish there was better housing policies and better mental-health care available to the US population, such as is found in plenty of other developed countries. A mentally ill person who gets the anti-psychotic medications and psychiatric consultations he or she should, is much less likely to trouble other people in the street.
Hey fair enough, I guess "I'm too scared to walk in my city" and "I want their lives to be improved" are not mutually exclusive opinions. I don't agree with the former, but definitely was out of line by reading intent into your comment without justification.
Please accept my apologies and thanks for the level-headed response
Not to split hairs, but the murder of a pregnant (Asian) woman in Seattle’s Belltown by a mentally ill unhoused person indicates that they can be murderers as well. We are pretty shocked as a community, there is a protest going on right now actually.
Yes, the guy was well known to act violently but was mostly harmless until he wasn’t (the police dealt with him many times, but didn’t make an arrest until he killed someone p). This is the same area where that poor girl who worked at Amazon got her head bashed in a coupe of years ago by some crazy guy in supportive housing. The streets aren’t really safe these days, and it isn’t just “fear mongering”.
Sorry, emotions are running pretty high right now. If you made this comment at her vigil, it wouldn’t have ended well I think.
> If you made this comment at her vigil, it wouldn’t have ended well I think.
We're not at her vigil, nor are we talking specifically about it.
It makes the already-shitty life of the homeless even worse when folks paint them as crazed murderers. It is -in truth- no better than asserting that any other broad group (whether you group based on ethnic, racial, state-of-origin, or any number of other overly-broad categories) are crazed murders.
Every single death is a tragedy. I very sincerely believe that, and will be angry at myself until my dying day that I did nothing to help try to fix death.
However, it does the living no good to dehumanize an entire group by saying "Oh, well they're a member of $BROAD_GROUP, so they're murderers. Better stay away.".
Seattle doesn’t have a high murder rate, much of the killing is homeless on homeless, yes, when drugs are involved things get violent. Other people take note, however, when the violence starts affecting other people. Nothing new there.
The sad fact is that this person was already committing crimes, was already considered violent, but our system in place gives them a free pass unless it comes out to homicide. No, don’t dehumanize the homeless, but yes, hold them to the same standards as everyone else. You commit a crime, you get arrested and go to jail; then maybe it doesn’t have to get to murder for the system to take action.
When I think of dangerous street people, I don't think guns. I think knives. The times I've been threatened by street people, they showed me or made reference to knives. A gun seems like an expensive liability to such a person, which could be sold or traded for a substantial amount of drugs but could get them into a lot of trouble if they were caught with it. A knife though is worth basically nothing and won't get them into very much trouble if they're caught with it either. So a low rate of shootings doesn't give me much consolation. I'm more interested in the rate of stabbings and beatings, robberies and assaults... violent crime generally not specifically those done with guns. Why even single out one particular kind of weapon if you're trying to reassure somebody that a neighborhood is safe? That's weird, particularly since the people who are cause for concern are unlikely to have that kind of weapon in the first place.
"Too dangerous" obviously includes robberies and assaults, but you've neatly excluded those to narrow the focus of the conversation to murder. Where is this idea coming from, that violent crime doesn't count unless somebody is murdered (or specifically shot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36374483)?
This attitude exemplifies the problem; that all manner of crime should tolerated from homeless unless they shoot or murder somebody. Only then does it rise to your concern. And in the case of tlogan's comment that I just linked to, even somebody getting stabbed to death doesn't count because they weren't shot. This is how you get situations as described by seanmcdirmid here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36374451 Crazy guy known to be violent is tolerated by local authorities because he hasn't yet killed anybody. No big deal until he murders somebody, only then do people care. This is why the electorate of these cities is the root of the problem, because the electorate don't give a shit about the crime until somebody gets killed.
Please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
You broke the site guidelines badly and repeatedly in this thread. Please don't do that again. Fortunately it doesn't look like you've been in the habit of doing it before, so it should be easy to fix.
Ooo good one I used a term you don’t like so you zinged me. Heavily zinged. When oh when will I leave a comment convincing people like you that sometimes other people deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (Secret answer: never)
Weird. From time to time, I stomp around that part of the neighborhood late at night and also early in the morning and I disagree with this assessment.
Whenever I hear shit like this that doesn't mesh with my on-the-ground assessment, I have to wonder if there's an ulterior motive, and what that might be.
Is someone trying to get Federal funding for policing in the city? Is a group of someones trying to trigger some "I don't have to pay to break my lease because conditions around my business are 'obviously too terrible'" clause so that leaving the city is much, much cheaper? Is someone trying to prevent folks from airing yet more footage of folks sleeping on and doing drugs on the street? Something else?
SF is simply a failed city. Anyone who supports it right now is delusional from living there or has never actually been there. I was there many years ago and felt unsafe with the literal tent encampments on a normal street, human feces everywhere, needles, etc. can’t imagine how bad it is now
Valley Fair is doing "well enough" to have customers pay for parking after 2 hours, and charging employees to park there as well at the rate of ~$10 a day.
Nobody's going to want to watch two hours of Snake Plissken searching around town for the President, only to find him sitting in a coffee shop eating avocado toast.
You could walk the sidewalk and more cars than you could count had the windows broken out of them from thieves. We had dinner at Brenda's French Soul Food where we witnessed an armed robbery. We called 911 a dozen times. The police never showed up. One in my party was told by the dispatcher unless there is an injury, they may not come.
I'm not going back until this is fixed. I'm not sure how it gets fixed.