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Comment by twright0 | Hacker News Reader

> you won't get stabbed anywhere in SF (so live in the sketchy area it'll get nicer each year)

This is flatly untrue and bad advice - there are absolutely areas of San Francisco where you run the risk of being the victim of physical violence. Some people will be comfortable living in that kind of environment but many won't, and suggesting that all of San Francisco is uniformly safe is irresponsible.

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Is there really? For a long time I've lived in an area (East Hastings in Vancouver) that people say is similarly "sketchy", but from what I can see, it's not dangerous to passersby—it's instead that there's a lower class involved in drugs and sex work, and they sometimes attack each other (i.e. people they know, who they have a grudge against.) They don't go around attacking random strangers.

I've walked through East Hasting. It's much safer than some parts of SF.

Out of curiosity, what areas would you say this to be true? Not denying there are dangerous areas, but I've only lived in SF for 2 years and haven't lived in many neighborhoods (1 year near the SoMissPo underpass and another near UCSF mission bay). The only one that comes off as dangerous at night to me would be the tenderloin or perhaps mid-market (although the latter is quickly becoming more and more expensive).

Tenderloin, the Mission (yes really), every neighborhood around the former Candlestick like Bayview/HP (which the startup crowd forgets is SF because they never go there). I grew up in a rough part of Detroit and am comfortable in all of them, but they are objectively dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.

You run the risk of getting stabbed anywhere in the world. While the risk may be higher than average in certain parts of SF (eg Tenderloin) it's still not that high.

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