Kraken shuts down global headquarters because ‘San Francisco is not safe’ | Hacker News Reader

Kraken shuts down global headquarters because ‘San Francisco is not safe’

cointelegraph.com

222 pointstlogan323 comments

My theory is San Francisco evangelists have Stockholm syndrome. I stayed on Market St. last summer: Saw two car break-ins before I even got a chance to park at the hotel, got harassed by tweakers every time I stepped outside, watched 3 shoplifters waltz out the door while talking to a disenchanted police officer at the Target, caught a man shooting up on the steps of the federal building ... but I didn't see any human biowaste so I guess I should be thankful.

I've lived in rough neighborhoods before but even I was clutching my pearls! I can handle gangsters and cold shoulders, but this is another breed of degenerate. They're like zombies, slowly losing humanity!

The caveat being I met many kind folks too, homeless or otherwise.

[edit: I now remember I actually did see human biowaste.]

Somebody broke the passenger window of my car to unlock it and steal my stuff while I was sitting in the driver's seat talking on the cell phone, in Langton alley next to Brainwash. But that was decades ago. It's always been like that. Just get their attention and politely ask them to go away and steal somebody else's stuff.

Edit: I was being sarcastic, role playing an evangelist with Stockholm Syndrome, and was actually quite impolite to him, once I finally managed to get his attention!

Edit 2: Once I was lucky enough to observe the iconic green Art Nouveau neon sign of HOTEL ESSEX in the Tenderloin when just the right letters were burnt out to spell "HOT SEX".

Hotel Essex, at the corner of Ellis St. and Larkin St., in The Tenderloin, San Francisco.

https://gedris.org/node/327.html

Close but no cigar:

https://nl.pinterest.com/pin/479000110337911544/

Up from the deep: The Tenderloin

https://upfromthedeep.wordpress.com/uptown-tenderloin/commen...

>Hotel Essex. 684 Ellis Street. Hotel with 128 rooms and seventy-two baths. Architects: Righetti and Headman. 1912.

>Though unique amid the surrounding architecture, the Art Nouveau-inspired facade of the Essex was nevertheless crafted to blend in by its designer, James Francis Dunn. The hotel’s neon blade sign is especially fine. Now owned by the Community Housing Partnership, the Essex began undergoing renovation late in 2006.

>Night-Sign---Essex

>By the end of April 2008, its renovation was complete. The paint job is unfortunately garish and unbecoming, but the new marquee and restored blade sign are spectacular, although it seems the latter may still have some electrical problems. Even so, the corner of Ellis and Larkin is utterly transformed after dark by the torrid glow of neon.

This is exactly what I'm talking about: In my city we reserve good manners for those who aren't commiting crimes upon us!

Maybe you didn't venture out much, but you should realize that is _mostly_ exclusive to market street. One street of a thousand. Yes it occasionally happens elsewhere like any city, but Market and especially the tenderloin are infamous for the drug use and depravity.

Why people keep staying there instead of the hundreds of other and safer hotel locations? Maybe hotels need better regulated ratings to take into account the surrounding area.

Problem: most iconic and central street in SF has rampant problems.

Solution: go elsewhere and add regulations to hotel rating about the surrounding area??

I'm sorry, but that is one of the most defeatist options I've ever heard

Open to how you'd solve it. Fill up the overfilled jails and hospitals? Can't force people unless it's a 5150. You literally cannot stop what is happening without going full militarized police and how is that better?

Best thing you can do as a tourist is know where you are. It's no different than unsafe areas of Mexico and LA? You gonna stay near skid row?

SF weather and wealth is going to attract homeless and drugs, and unless you want to break the law to stop it, adapting is the next best thing.

Actually NVM it's just easier to shit on SF and act like everyone there is an idiot and the solution is simple.

There is nothing like Market Street anywhere near the city center of NYC, as far as I know.

The Bowery can be even worse then Market Street at times. There have been a couple of serial killers targeting rough sleepers over the last few years. The day to day experience of the Bowery is much safer than Market Street though because NYPD aggressively targets the area.

in SFs dry season, my friend just leaves his windows open because his car got broken into so many times. Since hes left the window open he doesn't think his car got touched.

Same with Seattle. It’s better to just leave your car unlocked if you don’t want your windows broken. Sadly even if you leave a sign that nothing is inside and car is unlocked they still break the windows.

> Sadly even if you leave a sign that nothing is inside and car is unlocked they still break the windows.

Leaving the sign leads people who might be considering theft to believe that (1) there is something inside that you are trying to protect, and (2) the car is locked and wasting time trying to open the locked door will set off an alarm and reduce the chance of them getting the thing you are trying to protect before being noticed. So, yes, of course it has that effect.

These guys aren’t afraid of alarms one bit or getting caught. They want the change sitting in your cars cup holder but would gladly take a night in jail instead.

> My theory is San Francisco evangelists have Stockholm syndrome

There do seem to be a whole lot of people around CA with outright delusional ideas about Scandinavian cultures and policy choices. For all their much vaunted "socialism" (with Scandinavian characteristics) Stockholm is a lot less dysfunctional than San Francisco.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

I don’t think the parent is referring to Stockholm (the city), but rather Stockholm Syndrome, the psychological phenomenon.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

I'm not sure if I missed a joke, but Stockholm syndrome is about hostages rather than governmental policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

TIL there's a Helsinki syndrome: https://www.scandinaviastandard.com/what-is-helsinki-syndrom...

TIL the London and Lima syndrome from the second link.

Yes it got really bad during the pandemic. It’s as if the upper classes clearing out of downtown back to the burbs, avenues, and condos created a vacuum that all the other elements of the city filled. They were always there but more hidden. Now they’re in the open because nothing’s pushing back.

With all the shuttered businesses, downtown is basically dead right now. Whole blocks of nothing.

But the tide is shifting. Traffic is back, farmers market is packed, morning sidewalks are full of commuters. A few mor months and it will only be as bad as it was a few years ago.

Farmers markets and lively cafes don’t solve homelessness or drug addiction. Like you say, they just become easier to ignore.

Similar experience in Seattle. I lived in the Capitol Hill neighborhood for 11 years and left in 2012. I went back to visit a few years ago and it looked like the homeless population had doubled or tripled in the time since. And it was already bad when I lived there.

These cities seem to have a lot of fundamental societal problems and they have no idea whatsoever how to solve them.

Surprisingly it turns out that if you subsidize homelessness you get more homelessness.

This. When you feed bears, you get problem bears.

The National Parks system knows this, but cities like SF and Seattle do not.

So your suggestion is to return the homeless people to their natural habitat in the woods, so they can forage for berries as nature intended?

> This. When you feed bears, you get problem bears.

> The National Parks system knows this, but cities like SF and Seattle do not.

It should be noted that homeless people are people, not animals.

Also, don't park systems kill "problem bears" (e.g. https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/waterton-lakes-national-park-staf...)?

tablespoon says >It should be noted that homeless people are people, not animals.<

It should be noted that people are animals too.

> It should be noted that people are animals too.

I think you knew what I meant.

Holy cow. I thought the parent comment was gross, but this really out-did it.

How is homelessness subsidized?

Seattle has, until recently, tolerated encampments on public property. The city council spends great chunks of money on outreach nonprofits that have dubious effectiveness (there are organizations doing good/effective work, to be clear).

The Seattle Police Department is woefully understaffed and has given up on responding to many quality of life and public order calls. In addition to drug use, car prowls, etc there is a thriving shoplifting-fencing business going on in spots throughout downtown. Enforcement has been very limited, so the problem has gotten out of hand. I have no clue why the Target near Pike Place remains open - they must be locked in their lease.

In the mid-2000s when I lived there the city had a policy of not actively disrupting homeless encampments. There was a very well-known encampment located under the I-5 overpass just south of downtown called "The Jungle" [0]. SPD was prohibited from clearing it out and was only authorized to respond to reports of violent crimes. Not theft, drugs, prostitution, public inebriation, etc.

Occasionally, it seemed maybe once per year, they would actually get a task force to go sweep it out. But that was mostly only in response to outrage from residents of the adjacent Beacon Hill neighborhood. And then they would go back to ignoring it. And a month later the whole camp was back.

This is just one anecdotal example of Seattle's long history of indifference, even tolerance, of "shanty towns" and homeless camps. I don't know how it is now, but King County in general used to be littered with these things and people just seemed to think it was normal.

It is absolutely _not_ normal.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle_(Seattle)

It almost seems like a certain personality of people are drawn toward comfortable places with free food and no law enforcement.

Shocking, isn't it? All of the well-adjusted, professional people I know prefer uncomfortable places, expensive food, and overzealous law enforcement.

Seriously though, I can't imagine what point you're trying to make here, other than to share a deep insensitivity to other people's suffering.

I think it's pretty obvious what point he is trying to make.

I lived in Hoboken, NJ for nearly five years and had some friends who volunteered at the homeless shelter through church that entire time. The homeless there had pretty good access to food, water, shelter, and drugs (mostly cigarettes and alcohol but I'm sure others). At some point there was talk of a program to move some of the chronically homeless into government housing; when asked if they wanted to participate nearly all of them said no.

Think about that. In a city with very little housing where students and young families are clamoring to make rent payments, and the temperature in the winter gets below zero, they were offered free housing (on taxpayer dime) and turned it down. They actively preferred to be homeless.

Why? Maybe there were too many carrots being given out, and not enough threatening with sticks. (Mind you, the sticks do not have to be cops and jail, although those are pretty big sticks. Forced rehab sounds pretty good.)

Did someone ask why they didn’t want to move into government housing? Because this is a known issue and it’s not because the homeless aren’t being punished enough. People are afraid to be split from their community, don’t want to be forced to leave if something goes wrong, or don’t want to move to an area far away from the resources they need for their daily lives [0].

0: https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/v74y3j/this-is-why-homel...

Hoboken NJ is only one square mile, so those factors don't really apply.

Also the link you provided is about why they don't want to move to shelters. GP is talking about people who are in shelters but do not want to move to permanent housing.

Fair enough. Here [0] is a survey of the homeless population in Hudson County. Last page shows pretty much everyone wanted housing help. But it doesn’t specifically ask about permanent housing, so I might need to keep digging to get a clearer picture.

0: https://cdn.monarchhousing.org/wp-content/uploads/njcounts20...

1. If someone asked for the reason I don't know it.

1.5. Full disclosure, "shelter" was probably the wrong word because I don't think anyone was sleeping at the church. There were definitely some people eating multiple meals a day there, though. So I don't know if you would call that temporary housing. That makes it even wierder (to me) that they would refuse permanent housing.

2. "Punished" might not quite be the right word here. I remember there was a guy - I think his name was Don - who was very mentally ill and very scary. Well over 6 feet tall and looking absolutely wild, he would roam the streets shouting incoherently at people, usually women. He interacted with one of my friends at the shelter so often they were on a first name basis and several times he would just approach our group screaming at him. He had little sense of his surroundings and would often wander right into oncoming traffic, it was a miracle he live through my time at college.

Whether you think scooping Don up and sticking him in a mental hospital is "saving" him or "punishing him" depends on your worldview, but I lean towards thinking that Don's situation wasn't good for him or anyone else and that someone should have done something. And give his nature, I would expect that to require force...

> "shelter" was probably the wrong word because I don't think anyone was sleeping at the church

I assume you're referring to the former church at 3rd + Bloomfield? AFAIK it's legitimately a shelter with 50 beds. The building was still an active church until 5-10 years ago so maybe it wasn't fully a shelter before then, not sure.

> he would roam the streets shouting incoherently at people, usually women

Sadly there are multiple people here who fit this description! My guess would be either Nicky or Chuey, as these guys are well-known in town -- they've been doing this for over a decade. But especially since the pandemic, a few additional unhinged shouty guys have appeared.

I don't know what the solution is. Clearly the local government doesn't know either, because I've personally seen them arrest one of these guys quite a few times, usually when he gets particularly riled up or violent. He's always back though, sometimes in just a few days.

Feels like most people want a ethical system for guiding people like this out of the street and to a place that is safe and healthy for them and their community. This is impossible when you need to argue over who’s gonna pay for it.

So instead, poor systems are put in place, forcing the police to deal with these situations using the few tools they have at hand, including arrest, sweeps, etc.

It costs a massive amount to keep arresting and releasing these same people, on a weekly or monthly basis, year after year. Funding isn't necessarily the issue... the problem is the lack of any clear alternative.

Concretely, what ethical solution do you propose in the situation of a violent schizophrenic who refuses to take their medication, or a violent meth addict who won't stay clean? These people want to remain in their local community, but their community isn't large enough to have specialized facilities for their problems. And even if such facilities were local and taxpayer-funded, these people repeatedly refuse to remain in any voluntary treatment facility anyway. So what do you do, even if you had unlimited funding?

I agree funding isn’t the issue. The issue is the constant arguing over whose fiscal responsibility it is, causing the funds to be poorly used.

As for an ethical solution, I can’t say concretely in either of the cases you’ve listed because they are hypotheticals with no actual human details. Therein lies one of the biggest issues: social services do not scale easily. The only solution I’ve seen work is to get more professionals out and solving each case, one by one, according to their specific needs. This costs a fortune, but I guess we agree money isn’t a problem.

Surprisingly it turns out that if you don't build homes, you get more homelessness.

The chronically homeless are incapable of benefiting from affordable housing because that's not why they're homeless in the first place. It's pretty much always mental health, drug and alcohol addiction.

If that were the case we wouldn't see the chronically homeless all disproportionately clustered around areas where housing costs have exploded, and it's not just because of money spent on services there.

The homeless are always going to flock to where the people with money are.

It does seem counterintuitive, but when your local economy is shit (i.e. panhandling in ghettos), you're going to emigrate somewhere with more opportunity.

That does not explain SF's homelessness.

>> 70% of people homeless in San Francisco in 2019 reported becoming homeless while living in San Francisco: 22% came from another county within California, and 8% came from another state.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_San_Fran...

This has been my experience. Most "normal" people will just move somewhere else. They're not going to stay homeless in SF when they can move 100 miles away and live in a safe town with a roof over their head.

To a close approximation, all of the "rough" homeless (i.e. the ones you see on the street) are mentally ill or addicts, not people down on their luck who cannot afford to rent or buy a home.

most use to be

Most people with drug addiction or other mental illnesses have no problem keeping a roof over their head in other parts of the US. 20% of Americans experience mental illness any given year.

Amazon Moves Workers From a Seattle Office in Crime-Hit Area

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-11/amazon-sh...

Amazon is moving from Seattle to Bellevue over the next few years. 13 skyscraper buildings are going up in Bellevue for Amazon. The tallest building on the eastside will be Amazon's new building in Bellevue.

They do know how to "solve" them, they just don't agree on the true problem in the first place, due to different value systems.

I worked for a company in SF from 2017 until 2019. Then a Seattle based company. SF was bad then, around the edge of Chinatown and the financial district. But I'm from NY, so I can deal with that. Generally. The mentally ill screaming at walls and other random people was a bit much though.

Seattle had aggressive people on the street. This didn't worry me so much, though they had many of them. Again, more than a few mentally ill.

I recall SF from the late 90s/mid 2000s. It was nice then. As was Seattle. Something happened.

Similar things happened in NYC, after Bloomburg left.

Its not hard to find the policy proximate causes that rendered these once great cities into steaming sh!tholes with rampant crime. My question is, when will people move beyond their political tribalism and virtue signalling and start addressing the core issues?

FWIW, I live near Detroit MI USA. It is on a long slow recovery from decades of terrible policy, horrible and criminal politicians. It is showing signs of growth and recovery. Cost of living is low. Crime is falling.

All it took was jailing some pols, electing competent (non-ideologue) management, and forming public-private partnerships. It may take another 20 years or so before its really showing what it could be. But its changing.

And as someone who has lived in the area for 30+ years, you kinda root for Detroit. It was destroyed by grifters and ideologues, by bad and corrupt management, and many other things. But it has character. It has a presence. And you like to go to the Science Museum (my wife used to be director of education there), and the programs at the universities. And the parks (yes, really). And the restaurants.

I hope, one day, that SF, Seattle, NYC, and others can elect competent non-ideologue management, sweep out the grifters, implementing good policy, and help hasten the rebuilding of these once great cities. But then again, this also requires doing the same at the state level. Here in Michigan we had a pro-growth governor and traded down to an ideologue. That person doesn't look likely to remain in office, so here's hoping we don't get yet another grifter.

A mix of stockholm syndrome, aggressive gaslighting, denial. It's not just SoMa or the Tenderloin either. These are some of the recent local reports on Chinatown:

Shop Owners Forced to Take Extra Precautions as Thieves Hit SF Chinatown Businesses

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSwlSQf0LkA

San Francisco Chinatown Camera Shop Owners Fight Back Against Smash-and-Grab Robbery

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idy30hxat7M

Community Group Hands Out Pepper Spray To San Francisco Chinatown Businesses

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNsc3j1-d1I

Volunteer Foot Patrols In SF's Chinatown After Shop Owners Fight Off Robbers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTPYhey3ea4

Yet we keep hearing that this isn't happening. Things are fine. It's exaggerated. Even in this very thread. I can't help but think of this quote, "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

I am constantly gaslit about this on r/sanfrancisco.

People say “the data” show that crime is actually decreasing! It’s bizarre because the data I’m collecting with my very own eyes is staggeringly contradictory. The amount of crime I witness daily is heartbreaking and sometimes frightening.

I understand the knee jerk response, which is to defend your home, but the moment I propose the data are being manipulated/spun, I’m called a conspiracy theorist. There’s a concerning lack of curiosity, critical thinking, and skepticism when it comes to this topic.

The only explanation I have for the discrepancy is the normalization of crime. We have gotten so accustomed to theft, assault, drug use, public camping, illegal immigration, and property damage that we no longer count these as crimes. I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy. I’m saying our standard of living has shifted down dramatically and we have adjusted our metrics down, too.

It seems like a categorical error to compare illegal immigration to theft, assault, and property damage.

Crime is crime.

I doubt if it's immigrants committing the vast majority of these petty crimes and pooping in the street. Fix the 80% problem first.

I am not saying they are committing the assaults, theft, etc. I’m saying that it is illegal to be in the US without documentation. It is also illegal to get forged or stolen documents and work.

There’s a theory called the Normalization of Deviance [1] which I think offers a pretty good explanation even though it was originally used to describe a spiral of tolerance for unethical behavior in corporations. The principle makes sense in social constructs too.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance

Is it because from be isn't being reported?

Yeah, that’s what I’m suggesting when I talk about the normalization of crime. I have been victim of about a dozen crimes since moving here 2 years ago, but only reported 3. At a certain point it just became a hassle with no upside other than helping compstat collect better data. Talk to any San Franciscan about crime and you’ll realize that people have become so accustomed to it. I think that there’s very little reporting for that reason, so the stats don’t reflect the reality. Additionally, many crimes have effectively been decriminalized here, so I think that has totally skewed the stats when compared to other cities with stronger enforcement.

I’m really not sure, it’s an emotional subject, especially after the home invasion, but I feel entitled to be skeptical and angry about how dysfunctional the government is here.

>I am constantly gaslit about this on r/sanfrancisco.

The mods and too many of the members believe that discussing actual crime would make San Francisco look bad in the eyes of "Trump supporters"/"Rethuglicans", so must be suppressed. (Check out the subreddit's rules sometime.)

> My theory is San Francisco evangelists have Stockholm syndrome

This is true of everybody who takes a position first and finds arguments for it second. Their position is irrational to begin with. It's the same thing with baltimore: people defend it up and down as an amazing city, when in my opinion it's a nightmare of a place to live. SF sounds similar in that regard. The worst part is when people eventually get fed up and leave, their stockholm syndrome will cause them to repeat the mistakes that made their previous place so bad to begin with.

It seems funny that there's many downvotes to responses in these threads. It's like people don't want to acknowledge how messed up SF has been, and how unsafe it has become, so they're just downvoting folks.

It used to be that I'd even gotten my roof rack stolen off the top of my car. Then without much to steal during the pandemic, and with drug use off the charts, things just became unsafe. People I knew started carry mace. There was a firearm homicide in the Civic Center station (yes, really, in the station). You have to be absolutely crazy to go back to the office right now.

I lived there 10 years ago. Back then it was bad but manageable. I used to park my motorcycle on the street and once a month it would barely start. It was because someone busted off the top of my spark plug to use as a crack pipe.

My wife and I just visited, the parts that were bad parts are worse, and the nice parts still seemed fine.

Although it's sorta not in line with the HN rules to introduce downvotes as a conversation topic, I'll just say that mere observation of the problems in SF used to face way more downvoting. I was not a popular guy years ago when I was honest about why I promptly left SF after finishing school there. Now I get upvoted when I talk about SF because it's all out in the open so much that mainstream news articles discuss the crime, the urban decay, the feces, the drug use in broad daylight, the homelessness, etc.

Those left who are still apologizing for SF have either never experienced anything else or are in denial.

Trust me, it breaks my heart the extent to which SF has let itself go. As bad as it was a decade ago, there was still a lot to like about it and it was a fun place to be as a young guy. I criticize SF because I want to love it, not because I hate it.

As much as there's also a lot to criticize about places like New York and Los Angeles (my hometown), they really have nothing on San Francisco in terms of social issues. Yeah, LA probably has the largest homeless encampments, but in my whole life I've rarely or never have seen what can be seen in SF. SF is the only city in America I've been to so far that's featured drug use in public parks during broad daylight, huge packs of rats running around, fentanyl zombies that actually resemble fictional zombies, elevators covered in urine, poop smeared on walkways and walls, gutters overflowing with rotten restaurant food, gangs spraying graffiti with bystanders around and no fear of being caught, and of course public displays of nudity (and occasionally other distasteful displays).

It's really amazing what the human mind can be conditioned to accept. We can become accustomed to anything.

> gangs spraying graffiti with bystanders around and no fear of being caught

For the record, they do try to crack down on those. I witnessed a couple of pissed off cops coming down on some kids doing graffiti at Battery Crosby last month.

The nudity thing seems mostly tied to some pockets of the LGBTQ+ community, my impression is that people generally don't want to criticize it out of respect for freedom of expression for those communities.

The drug abuse and rampant theft in broad daylight though are definitely disturbing though, for sure.

> but in my whole life I've rarely or never have seen what can be seen in SF.

I was wondering if that had to do with the profit chain of helping the homeless. The city spent $1.1B on homeless for year 2021-2022. I'd assume many people want the government to spend like that: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-has-an-unpre...

There was a video going around recently of Kensington Avenue in Philadelphia with a lot of fentanyl zombies.

It seems funny that there's many downvotes to responses in these threads.

Says the top reply to the top comment of the thread.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Basing your experience in SF on what happens on Market Street is like going to LA and basing your experience on visiting Skid Row. The vast majority of the city is just not like that. If you run into resistance from people who live here when recounting experiences like this, it’s probably because your statement is one that doesn’t pass the smell test, it seems plainly like you’re being willfully misleading. Next time you come to SF, I recommend reading a travel guide and staying somewhere that isn’t Market Street. Public transit is good enough that you can do that, your experience will be much more enjoyable.

Where in San Franscisco is not like that? Just on Monday we had a carjacking (with gun) on 8th Ave and Lincoln. In fucking sunset…

That’s awful. I hope they find the perpetrators and they are punished. The Sunset District is not an unsafe place by any metric. I’ve walked every inch of it, it’s quiet and pretty much a suburb within the city. The crime rates are low as well. I think crime could always be lower, but painting one of the safest neighborhoods in SF as being unsafe because crime happens at all is not a fair characterization.

Every American city has rough parts (some more than others, including SF). There are definitely some very miserable and dangerous parts of San Francisco: Tenderloin, SOMA, Civic Center. But as someone who has lived here a while, I think this narrative that it's nothing but homelessness and crime is misguided. If you go West of Van Ness, there are so many beautiful and lively neighborhoods. Haight Ashbury, Hayes Valley, North of Panhandle, Pacific Heights, Japantown, Castro, Golden Gate Park, Inner/Outer Sunset, Inner/Outer Richmond, etc. The problem is that tourists mostly see the bad parts, probably because they're most accessible by public transit. The northern-most Caltrain stop is not in a nice area for example. There's a reason it's so enormously expensive to live here: demand.

Yes. It’s honestly a shame that the most trafficked parts of SF are the most dangerous, I’ve always thought that the narratives about crime were overwhelmingly because of this.

Golden Gate Park? Only if you have something against intact car windows.

But isn't it the parts that the tourists go to that set the tone for outside perceptions?

It's got a chilling effect (I don't take mass transit to Downtown Denver, and I pay for my son to park on-campus at Metro, specifically due to similar crime happening on the light rail systems.)

Ehh... i live by the panhandle, and many of the common concerns are present here as well. People are just used to the idea of never leaving anything in their car, ever, and that smashed windows are just part of the costs of owning a car. I call 311 to report used needles laying on the sidewalk multiple times a year.

My gf lives near Castro, and she got her rear window smashed (nothing stolen because nothing in the car), and had to clean up a pile of human shit on her lower stoop, both this year alone.

I love SF, but I'm not one of those people who pretends this is normal. This biggest misconception is danger. It's a very safe city, that said, the anti-social behavior is really, really totally unbelievable to me. Only comparable to other west coast cities really.

Meh, my own anecdote is I visit all the time and it's lovely. I feel like these sorts of things are just right wing never actually lived their rage bait.

Translation: Everyone else's anecdotes don't match mine so they've never 'actually' lived there and whoever disagrees with my anecdote is 'just right wing'.

I mean, you would have to refute the sources in some of the comments about the increasing crime in San Francisco then. [0] [1] [2] [3] If you think they are 'wrong' that is.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30958359

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30958414

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30958418

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30958554

So the only link with actual data and not clickbait youtube or anecdotes was the link with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities... and rather than look at that link they still just said it "felt bad". It's crime rate is no worse than a place like Arizona, where I live.

If you think about it critically, it's similar to the manufactured panic around bail reform in New York.

The data shows it is working, but the police / entrenched folks are putting a lot of propaganda / money into reversing it.

There are always going to be loud folks proclaiming the end of times, especially when things change. And especially when there's money involved (policing has boatloads of cash involved, they don't want to see things change).

Anecdotal, of course, but my wife used to wander around downtown and SOMA when she would accompany me on business trips circa 2011-12 to SF. When I went back in 2019-20 after not having been there for 5+ years, I was shocked. I did my best to avoid being outside my hotel, and had my wife come with me on those trips, I would have stayed outside the city and commuted in.

On a single trip from my hotel about 4 blocks away to our offices, I saw a guy tweaked out unconscious against a parking meter with the needle still in his leg, was accosted by a mentally ill dude trying to get me to take dope to a guy on the next block, saw a pretty obvious pimp give a stack of money to a young girl who should have been in school to run it somewhere, and two open drug deals happening literally right on Market by the Westfield Mall. I also saw a couple of tent encampments, folks starving on the street, and an incredibly long line for food at a soup kitchen. I was so...perturbed? Upset? by the whole experience that I kind of lost it in the bathroom when I got to work. The amount of human suffering one can witness in a 15 minute timespan there is just...galling.

I don't think folks who live in SF have Stockholm Syndrome as much as it just becomes part of the scenery in some weird disconnected way. When I brought all that up to folks at work, they were like, "Oh yeah that's just how it is here" and dismissed it. I remember seeing two of my co-workers sipping coffee looking out the window of our expensive, air-conditioned office surrounded by pricey furniture and motivational posters, pointing out the various tweakers and drug dealers who were harassing folks trying to get food from the shelter nearby. It was just a snapshot of a mindset of disconnection about it that I still don't really understand.

I guess at some point you just have to shut your brain off to the horror you're witnessing in real time or you will eventually snap, but I just couldn't do it. I asked on my next trip to stay at a much closer hotel, and when I left that company, if I'm honest, that was a not-inconsequential part of why.

I had more or less the same experience when it was Covid. The streets were empty nobody outside, with everything of what you said happening. Plus all the stores closed and tagged on their wood protection things. It was surreal. The 4-5 « normal » guys I saw weren’t even looking normal with this scene. They were in perfect suits talking at the top of some perfect white marble stairs at the entrance of some federal building. It’s was really looking black and white. Or maybe just black.

> Stockholm syndrome.

Stockholm syndrome is a fake condition invented on the spot, with no supporting scientific evidence or other basis, by the person most responsible for a particular incident of excessive police violence unnecessarily endangering hostages to leverage misogyny to discredit criticism of that event.

It being cited by advocates of increased violent policing as an explanation as to why the people who would be subject of that policy don’t support it is…perfectly on-brand.

This is a good point. I tried to use it in the more popular sense of "becoming over-accommodating to forces that are inherently against your interests," but there is an interesting psychological lens to view that argument from.

My one point of contention is that I didn't advocate for more violence, or even policing. I didn't advocate for anything at all! The comment was meant to frame the underlying topic without proposing a solution.

Sad as it is, I'm not optimistic that this problem will be solved any time soon, as long as people in SF (and in CA in general) believe that every social issue is purely a moral problem. You point out that SF is not safe? You're an oppressor, or worse in some people's mind: you're the Right. You are saying looting is bad? Oh, that's the worst offense, for you're now a white supremacist. You link increasing crime rate to lenient law enforcement? You're a racist. Note I'm not saying leniency is necessarily the cause of the higher crime right. Instead, I'm saying the discussion gets shut down so we don't make progress.

Everything seems to get framed morally instead of economically. By economically I don't mean with classism or monetarily, but game theoretic cause and effect. All proposals must be found to be overwhelmingly righteous before they can be analyzed for being effective.

>Sad as it is, I'm not optimistic that this problem will be solved any time soon

That should scare people more than anything. Right/left/center/up/down doesn't matter, I don't know anyone from any "side" that genuinely believes things are improving or will improve.

Whatever.

I was in the city all last weekend, in a hotel right on market street, and we walked everywhere (ferry building, chase center, SFDC) and it was safe, pleasant and delightful.

I live just outside the city and have for 12 years and while there is plenty of room for improvement, it’s always a joy to be there.

I love cities and I love SF in particular.

This is a little like saying LA is terrible because you stayed on Skid Row…

The in your face human suffering is awful but things are a lot less bad in other parts of the city. SF has a similar proportion of homeless people as other big cities but with no right to shelter (as in NY) far too few shelter beds are provided.

SF is fairly safe by American standards with a homicide rate half that of the country as a whole.

To the down voters, yeah the SF homicide rate is high for a developed country, but thank goodness it’s only half as bad as the US as a whole. If you plan to stay in the US where do you plan to move to that’s actually safer?

Well, where I live in the US, the homicide rate is way less than half of SF, I have never been accosted by a tweaker, never seen a carjacking, never seen or heard of a mugging, closest homeless/panhandling person I have ever seen was about 5 miles away (friendly and polite dude), and perhaps most importantly the only crap I see on the sidewalks tends to be avian in nature.

Where do you live? There is of course a lot of crime nearby me in SF but it's pretty dense so its spread across a large number of people so my personal risk is low. (There's maybe a million people in a 5 mile radius.)

Sadly most of the country has even weaker gun control so doesn't enjoy the relative safety of living somewhere like San Francisco where there are only four times the number of homicides compared to the UK/France/Germany. (4.5 homicides per 100k in SF vs 6.3 homicides in the US and 0.8-1.2 homicides per 100k in UK/France/Germany.)

Edit: Fixed SF crime rate to use full year figures since Wikipedia incorrectly links to half year figures.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

I choose not to disclose my location on HN, but will say it’s on the rural outskirts of a larger metro area with a multi million population. There are areas within the metro with higher crime, but no where near SF.

I would argue that our lack of stricter gun control laws is why we are safer here. Almost everyone I know is armed in their home, and at least 33% of folks I know concealed carry. I realize that here on HN that statement will likely get me downvoted, but there is a reality to the preventative nature that being able to provide deadly defense to crime that I have experienced.

Strange then that the states with laxer gun laws have more homicides.

I’d have to see a reputable source on that statistic. The sense I get is places like Chicago, NY, Baltimore, other larger urban centers have some pretty strict firearms laws and still tend to have high homicide rates. Do those skew the numbers for the state?

As an example: Illinois may have lax state laws, but Chicago has strict gun laws, and lots of homicides. If you removed Chicago from Illinois statistics, how would that affect the state’s statistics

While a little more dangerous than SF, at 5.5 homicides per 100k NYC is still safer than the US as a whole.

Chicago is bad at 18.26 homicides per 100k. I guess citywide controls have limited impact if people can just drive out to the burbs to buy a gun.

SoMa has been this bad for a while, so any new company moving in can read headlines and know what they’re getting themselves into. Looking at Krakens job postings they’ve adapted the remote first work culture. Sounds like Powell is just trying to make some noise on his way out of town to attract attention to his company…

Yeah you'd have to be an idiot to not know about SOMA's issues. Most of San Francisco is infinitely safer than Paris for example.

It was sketchy 25 years ago... things have moved a few blocks here or there.

"I'm shocked to find gambling in this establishment!"

SOMA's issues were already rampant 10+ years ago when I had an office at 9th and Howard, and Twitter was moving in. That it's gotten so much worse is, indeed, a strike against the city.

Plenty of the rest of town is just fine.. but out of towners may not understand that because there are shocking displays all over. And, frankly, there are definitely parts of town I won't park on the street anymore.

The government decided to convert a high value oceanfront property surrounded by residential apartments into a homeless shelter in SOMA - with access to spouse and pet care. The residents protested against it, got accused of NIMBYism, and were forced upon it anyways by admins that live predominantly on the West side.

The whole neighborhood cannot be parked in, and right next week had multiple cases of assault that went uninvestigated.

I’d put them on the same level…I feel equally unsafe in the sketch parts of Paris and SF. I speak both French and English fwiw.

Right? I remember years ago when I lived in SF, body parts turned up in suitcases outside of Twitter's offices. Why is this a surprise that cities are dangerous places?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/01/29/san-francisco...

edit: I'm sorry everyone is taking my statement to mean that all cities are places where out of control crime happens (which I think is making a presumption about crime in SF). If you believe your city is a safe place or safer than SF great. But that doesn't make your city not a place where plenty of danger is to be found.

Not all cities are… things like that don’t happen in my city

No one has ever been brutally murdered in your city? I'd love to know the name...

Anywhere with lots of people will have murders, that should be pretty obvious. If you choose a population outside of cities of the same size, there will be murders there too.

This is just learned helplessness. Out of control violent crime is not an inevitable part of city life. It doesn’t have to be this way at all. Feel free to compare the violent crime rates in my city (Singapore) to San Francisco.

Out of control violent crime is not an inevitable part of SF life either, but it seems like that's the presumption about what the situation is in SF.

Moreover, I didn't say anything about crime or crime rates, I said cities are dangerous places. As in there's danger in cities, which I don't think is a false or disagreeable statement. I mean, you take Singapore as an example, Singapore has a sex trafficking problem. Literally my friend's mom just went there, and her favorite story was about all the American guys she met taking sex holidays.

> As in there's danger in cities, which I don't think is a false or disagreeable statement.

If this is truly what you're saying then why say it at all? What value do you feel it contributes to the conversation?

Yes, there is danger in cities. Sometimes it rains in small towns. Restaurants serve food, some of which is good and some bad. All equally useless statements.

Mainly I was just concurring with the parent and throwing out that it seems absurd to complain about danger when you're moving out given the kinds of things that neighborhood had been known for. The bit at the end was mostly a quip to punctuate the linked story, so sorry everyone took that as some grand thesis on the relative safety between rural and urban environments, or some dig at progressive cities or something. I don't know what sensibilities I stepped on.

> I didn't say anything about crime or crime rates, I said cities are dangerous places. As in there's danger in cities

You said:

> No one has ever been brutally murdered in your city?

You are aware that murder is a crime, right? You are aware that you’re participating in a discussion about violent crime?

> “We shut down Kraken’s global headquarters on Market Street in San Francisco after numerous employees were attacked, harassed and robbed on their way to and from the office.”

Violent crime rates are an extremely reasonable measure of danger in a city.

> Literally my friend's mom just went there, and her favorite story was about all the American guys she met there taking sex holidays.

This is an extremely unlikely story. Singapore during the pandemic has been a difficult place to go for any kind of holiday. Tourism to Singapore essentially disappeared over the past two years. And for sex tourism specifically, venues that would ordinarily host that sort of thing are closed. You literally couldn’t even buy an alcoholic drink in a bar past 10:30pm for the past two years, give or take a week. Nightlife venues like clubs aren’t going to reopen properly for another couple of weeks. Are there some people flouting the law? Of course there will be. But nobody would choose Singapore for sex tourism at the moment given the restrictions on nightlife.

I can’t help but note that the first section of the Wikipedia page on crime in Singapore mentions sex trafficking. If you weren’t aware of the local situation regarding pandemic restrictions, I can see why you might think that “all the Americans on sex holidays” is a vivid and plausible story to suggest that Singapore is a dangerous place. But I’m sorry, it’s just not.

> This is an extremely unlikely story.

I'm glad you love your city and all, but whether or not you find my story unlikely you're not really denying the thrust of it. That the issue is a prominent feature on Wikipedia seems to bolster my argument and prove that it's a problem, I'm not sure why you brought that up as it doesn't help your position.

Anyway, as far as the story in question, it covers violent crimes as well as drug use, harassment, public sanitation issues, mental health, as well as just homelessness in general, not all of which are violent or crimes. Lumping all of this into "out of control violent crime" really throws the issue out of context.

It's also true that violent crime rates are an extremely reasonable measure of danger in a city, but in so far as we're talking about cities, they also show that violent crime does in fact concentrate there, and they also hide dangers which are not crimes or are not reported. For example, the crime of rape is committed at much higher rates than it's reported, so if we were to look at the stats of a place with a high rate of rape, we might conclude there is a low rate of rape based on low figures. So while they are reasonable they are not the full picture and can in fact be misleading.

Murders happen, but no body parts in suitcases in front of offices...

Excuse me? Not all cities are dangerous places at all!

heck, I feel safer walking around tel aviv, even with yesterdays events, than I did just walking from the SFPL main branch to the Metreon.

> Why is this a surprise that cities are dangerous places? https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/01/29/san-francisco...

Except they aren't. Western European cities are incredibly safe.

And yet the only place I was ever mugged was Lisbon, even having lived in SF on Haight for years and worked on 2nd street.

My friends and I were attacked by a gang on New Years completely unprovoked in Paris in 2000, which is also where my dad had to fend off another hoard of people trying to rob him while on crutches 10 years before that.

Well, Paris has changed a lot. I believe it's a rapidly degenerating city.

Your weirdly specific anecdote doesn't really contradict the data on safety across western cities.

My original claim was that cities are dangerous places. This relatively anodyne claim was met with claims that not all cities are dangerous (a false statement; show me any city and I'll show you where to find plenty of danger), which doesn't refute anything I said, let alone bring up any data. In fact, they characterize their argument as "incredible", so I don't know how I'm supposed to take that. Like, if you're telling me something is incredible but you don't back that up with any credible data, what am I supposed to say? It seems like we're all going with our personal experience here as 0 data have been brought up or offered by anyone.

If anyone wants to offer some data about the safety of western cities in Europe, I'll show you some data that demonstrates they are dangerous. The only thing we'll be quibbling over is degrees of danger and how much one city is more dangerous than another, but again that doesn't refute a single thing I said in my original post, which was just to say that cities are dangerous. Which if you are upset about the usage of the word "are" in this context, then change it to "can be" to make you feel better.

Aren't you a lot more likely to get mugged when you're a tourist than when you're in the city you live in?

Nonsense.

Highest murders per capita are far higher in smaller towns. You're much more likely to get shot by a drunk angry husband anywhere in Wyoming than NYC.

San Francisco is a fcking mess — mostly by decision, it appears — but "cities are dangerous places" is just silly.

Fruits of an experiment in progressivism driven by the DA.

I once had a break-in and laptop stolen, tried to call the cops and to my alarm no one answered. Called another number and was told to call 911, again no answer. Filed an online report, no follow up.

1 week later, car broken in again in a parking lot with surveillance camera.

yeah cops suck what does that have to do with the topic at hand?

You don’t think there might be a connection between rampant crime and ineffective policing?

There certainly is a connection but not necessarily the one you’re suggesting. “I called the cops and they didn’t show up therefore progressive justice policies are bad” is quite a leap. Can’t it also be that cops are just jerks, who largely don’t live in the city, who are happy to collect the paychecks and watch the city fall apart because they are personally invested in the political narrative?

There are plenty of videos floating around out there of cops refusing to take reports on break-ins and robberies and even assaults. It’s really odd to me that anyone on a site like this would take the side of the armed authoritarian gang in this debate.

I suspect the person you are responding to is also invested in a certain political narrative.

People complain about progressive polices, but from what progressive candidates lol

The left is powerless, we got trounced in the last election cycle and none of our policies, even popular ones like weed legalization, has been implemented.

If anything conservative policies are more widely implemented, and are what is failing.

The current model of policing is a failure in many ways, and now it can't even keep the peace anymore, it's pathetic. But who is going to evict your grandma so a real estate company can but hey house and sell it without the police?

While it might be true nationally that left policies aren’t being implemented, it’s not true on the West Coast. Just as one example, in Portland where I live, all drugs were decriminalized in personal user amounts beginning in February 2021, in response to a ballot measure. In Seattle, one of the candidates for the city attorney’s office during this last election had previously tweeted “Eat shit” to the SPD’s benign holiday greeting, and she still secured a healthy chunk of the vote. At least one of Seattle’s city council members is a socialist and regularly advocates for seizing private housing to redistribute.

To be super precise the council member you're referring to, Kshama Sawant, is technically a self-avowed Trotskyist. If a Trotskyist can be elected to city government it's pretty fair to say the left is "winning" in that particular city. When you dust off your history books and think about Trotsky's "Permanent Revolution" for a bit, suddenly a lot of the policies that actively make people more miserable start to make more sense.

Could you elaborate on how the theory of permanent revolution is showing up? I’m curious.

nobody picking up 911 isn't 'cops suck', it's 'systemic failure of emergency handling and law enforcement'

What do your anecdotes have to do with progressivism?

CA is one of the most “progressive” states. SF is one of the most “progressive” cities in a progressive state. Chesa is one of the most “progressive” DAs in a progressive city in a progressive state.

Progressives have complete control of the legislation and the enforcement and this is the result of their policies in action.

SF is placed in a difficult position due to its extremely high cost of living in a small area. It does not matter what policies SF put into place, there will still be people on the streets: "63% said an inability to afford rent was the primary culprit; 11% of unhoused San Franciscans actually had jobs."[0]

[0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Edito...

The rampant drug crisis isn’t helping, it is a mental health and drug crisis causing homelessness more than a lack of housing. They say they are following “The Portugal model” but they are not. Portugal does not tolerate open drug use or openly being high/aggressive.

There is also a housing crisis but I am not sympathetic. SF just refuses to build buildings, everything gets mired in “affordable housing” debates. Build houses and skyscrapers until the prices go down and then build a couple more. Simple supply and demand.

Additionally SFs budget has doubled in a decade. They do less with more than practically any other city.

You are very bad at numerical thinking. Higher crime rate per capita does not mean higher crime rate, does not mean higher possibility to get attacked.

> more likely to get shot by a drunk angry husband anywhere in Wyoming than NYC

That is an oddly specific circumstance of murder, sounds like it may skew the statistics.

> You're much more likely to get shot by a drunk angry husband anywhere in Wyoming than NYC.

Let's look at violent crime statistics[1].

Wyoming is one of the safest states in the country. New York (as a state), has 50% more violent crimes per capita. New York City has 100% more.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

This isn't true. It basically breaks down like this:

* Property crimes are much higher in cities than anywhere else

* Violent crime rates are highest in cities, but the difference isn't as stark (though still pretty big)

Source: https://twitter.com/RyanRadia/status/1461904766238404611

But even this is too kind to cities, because while the average rate of crime in cities varies a lot from neighborhood to neighborhood and city to city, all the most dangerous places in the country are in cities.

There is no rural area with a sustained 60+ per 100k homicide rate, but you'll find that in North St. Louis.

Source: https://twitter.com/RyanRadia/status/1510472732089241603

Similarly, when you're in the Tenderloin in San Francisco you are in one of the most dangerous places in the country. There is no rural area that even remotely compares.

FBI seems to have murder data for 2019.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

According to those tables the state of Wyoming had a murder rate of 3.4 per 100k and New York city had a murder rate of 3.8 per 100k. It doesn't seem right to me that "You're much more likely to get shot" in Wyoming versus NYC. I think, based on the data, that you're slightly more likely to get shot in NYC. Furthermore, in the last couple years murders have substantially increased in NYC.

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/stats/crime-statistics/histor...

Check trimbo's reply below for the stats, but this assertion is simply not true. Wyoming's rate of violent crime per 100k population was 234 last year (8th lowest among US states) compared to rates of 538 for New York City and 715 for San Francisco. I have spent much of my life living and working in Wyoming/Bay Area and these stats seem to match my perception of each place. I know violence existed in Wyoming, but it was shocking when something like a murder happened. In big cities, the social fabric is different and individual events get lost in a sea of statistics.

It's easy (for either side) to rely on stereotypes about places we haven't spent much time, but the statistics (as well as my lived experience) tell a different story than the one you are trying to spin. Admittedly, in both places the worst of the crime is experienced by people who are lower on the socio-economic ladder, especially if they can't afford a place to live. It just turns out there is a higher concentration of those folks (for a variety of reasons: cost of living, availability of services, etc...) in cities than rural towns.

> Why is this a surprise that cities are dangerous places?

US cities. Toronto, for its faults, is a large city which is very safe. Unless you’re a gangster.

I bet I could walk around Jane/Finch on my phone and have better personal security than the nice area of many US cities.

It’s sad that you can’t solve the problem as a nation, because IMO cities are the figureheads of a civilization. Look at Detroit. The Rome of High Modernity 70 years ago, now a rotten husk.

Your amended comment now boils down to a tautology: "Danger varies but is never zero." Yeah, welcome to Planet Earth.

Your original comment was a straw-man attempt to dismiss all criticism of SF's crime as risible naiveté.

So what are you actually saying?

> Your original comment was a straw-man attempt to dismiss all criticism of SF's crime as risible naiveté. So what are you actually saying?

Talk about a straw man! I didn't dismiss all criticisms of SF's crime (where did I do so?), I dismissed this specific criticism of SF's crime, pointing at their risible naivete for seemingly completely disregarding the history of violence in the neighborhood that they moved into. If body parts had been found in suitcases next door, and you still choose to move in, you can't cite crime as a reason you feel the neighborhood has gone to hell. All I was really doing was agreeing with the parent and pointing out the general tone of the neighborhood. So sorry I offended everyone with my quip.

Here are some crime stats for the top 100 US cities from 2019:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...

SF had similar crime rates to Miami, Corpus Cristi, TX, Mesa, AZ, Austin, TX and Chesapeake, VA.

And about 1/3 the crime rate of the worst cities: Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis and Memphis.

Of course, individual neighborhoods and streets might be highly variable.

But as far as the 100 biggest cities go, SF seems slightly worse than average. I counted 38 cities with worse crime rates and 4 that didn’t fully report. So putting it somewhere around 39th or 43rd on the highest crime rates for the 100 biggest cities.

The UCR is not really great data for ranking cities.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

There are unquestionably different attitudes towards crime, enforcement, and reporting when comparing SF to other cities.

Good points. I don’t know of anyone has done the kind of deep analysis they’re advocating for though.

As a broad brush, I still think it’s fair to say in 2019 SF was around the middle of the pack for the top 100 cities in terms of reported crime per 100k known people.

Everyone knows that crime stats are very misleading because

1) The DA is simply not prosecuting lots of crime, and downgrading many prosecutions (felonies prosecuted as misdemeanors or not at all), and

2) Due to above and a general perception that most crimes aren’t prosecuted, dramatically fewer reports are filed at all

What’s a better metric?

Anecdata and eye witness reporting can be misleading too.

Crime is systematically underreported in SF compared to other cities, except for murder I’d guess.

How do you know this?

That is overall crime rate. If you look at the things random people are most likely going to be impacted by like property crimes you will see that SF is near or at the top. Also in many cities there are the areas where violent crime is high, but it is primarily gang violence back and forth with each other. These are weighed in the overall statistics.

For someone walking to work, getting their property taken, and aggressive harassment that is not reported in crime statistics makes them feel unsafe. The quality of life issues that SF has and are not in official crime statistics are what are making people feel that their city is a dump and they loathe walking down these streets. Human excrement, aggressive pan handlers, petty larceny through the roof, and pervasive open drug use.

It's notoriously difficult to make region-to-region comparisons using city crime data, so much so that the FBI explicitly warns against it on their crime-reporting website. [0]

The problem is that things change a lot from neighborhood to neighborhood -- the worst neighborhoods for crime are much worse than the best neighborhoods for crime. Second, municipal boundaries are mostly historical accidents; cities don't stop at their borders. Some cities draw their borders to include almost their entire surrounding region; others (like San Francisco) include a very tiny portion of their region. Depending on where the crime in the region happens to be, this can make a big difference. Why is Brooklyn part of NYC, but Jersey isn't? Why is Oakland not part of San Francisco, but Queens is part of NYC? Why are all the old inner-ring suburbs in Chicago a part of Chicago-proper, while none of the old inner-ring suburbs of St. Louis are part of St. Louis-proper?

These are just historical accidents that don't matter much if you're a human being walking around, but they have huge impacts on how statistics are compiled in each region.

So, OK, say you solve that problem by only looking at MSAs or "urbanized areas" so that you can normalize the comparison between "cities." That solves the problem, right?

Does it?

You still have the issue that you might be comparing one region with a relatively high rate of crime spread across its entire footprint to another city that has sky-high rates of crime in 5 neighborhoods and is relatively safe everywhere else. Which city has "higher" crime? Can you tell just by looking at its region-wide per-capita crime rates? Is that even a question statistics can answer, or is it philosophy? (See: the old joke about Bill Gates walking into a coffeeshop and drastically raising the average income of everybody inside.)

It's a hard problem.

[0] I see now that someone else already posted the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30958622

Yes, agreed that it's a hard problem, bordering on philosophy. Feeling safe, is a unique individual experience that won't show up in the data.

But in response to the claim from the article that "SF is not safe", I don't know a better way to analyze the claim that crime stats, even though it's imperfect for all the reasons you mentioned.

Sounds like they're trying to find a legal loophole to break a very expensive 10 year lease

Crime is as much a perception thing to individuals as much as real stats:

“We shut down Kraken’s global headquarters on Market Street in San Francisco after numerous employees were attacked, harassed and robbed on their way to and from the office.”

(they also mention business partners robbed)

I'm sure it doesn't take many of those incidents to make a really bad impression.

It wouldn't take many for me either.

I've lived in Sao Paulo (a city with notoriously high crime rates) for ~18 years, Toronto for another ~16 and San Francisco for ~5. Out of the three, San Francisco is the one where I personally witnessed the most number of crimes, ranging from theft, to destruction of property to assault/harassment (and I personally was the victim in a few instances). The frequency of hearing about crimes experienced by people around me is also highest in SF (I'm measuring both per year and absolute number of incidents)

So, sure, it's not as bad as having drugs-related gunshots fired at your general direction or getting your shoes robbed at gunpoint, but it kinda speaks volumes that I feel it's more appropriate to compare SF more closely to Sao Paulo than Toronto...

I've had a couple of shootings outside of my apartment building [0], other than that Toronto is the safest city I've lived in, second only to Singapore.

[0] - https://www.toronto.com/news/young-man-shot-to-death-at-yong...

attacked, harassed and robbed on their way to and from the office

I cannot imagine how pissed-off I would be if I went through the hell of living in a major, congested, city with an insane cost of living and had to put up with also being exposed to dangers like that.

Which explain the mass migration out of the city. San Francisco is going to be a massive learnings of a pooched opportunity for economic prosperity and innovation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/sypaol/oc_...

Haven't locals been trying to drive off the tech crowd for a few decades now?

Note that this is a pretty useless visualization. The dots are just shown traveling at a constant speed with a little randomization (note how it takes until halfway through the video for dots to start showing up in the Northeast -- the travel difference of CA->NY vs CA->TX is not measured in years unless these folks are walking).

In addition, the visualization makes it look like some mass exodus, but for the time frame covered, California grew in population (until 2021, where there was a whopping... .46% population loss -- the decimal place is not an error, it is less than 1%).

>San Francisco is going to be a massive learnings of a pooched opportunity for economic prosperity and innovation.

Does anyone actually expect the people responsible for this scenario to _learn_ from their mistakes?

I feel like we both know they'll just blame something else and move on to ruin another location.

I was having a related discussion with my wife a few days ago after we drove into downtown Portland. People who live in the city full time may not see the changes evolving around them if it does not happen suddenly, but if you are from outside the city and drive in only occasionally, the changes are astounding. I am tempted to say that the city government has clearly failed. But I hear stories about other cities experiencing similar things in the last couple years, so ... what's going on? The amount of graffiti everywhere has skyrocketed, homeless tents and camps, broken down RVs surrounded by trash littering the sides of the roads, and no sign that the city is actually doing anything about it. No social workers, no clean up crews, not even police.

I also wonder if the shift towards remote work is only going to exacerbate the problem in the near term. Restaurants and retail are leaving the urban core because many of their customers were office workers who no longer leave home.

> what's going on?

My guess is that we are seeing the psychological responses to massive inequality. People have realized that they're trapped in a system they have little control over and are falling behind economically. For some this manifests as what we saw in China as the "Lay Flat" movement, but others are more willing to be aggressive.

For myself, the political situation of the last half decade has more or less led me to believe that law in the US is essentially meaningless; it's applied capriciously if at all and it seems that others have had this realization.

Just my pet theory.

I agree it is a psychological issue, but have a polar opposite conclusion.

What we are seeing is the result of general disillusionment in our social systems coupled with moral post-modernism.

People have become so obsessed with the flaws in our economic, social, and legal system that they accept anarchy and mob rule. The worst cases in our current system are widely publicized, and not viewed as an area for improvement but reason for abandonment . The whole system of government is not seen as a slow march towards progress, but an inherently racist institution which serves primarily to oppress.

under such a world view, criminals are the victims, and and those trying to improve the existing systems are villains.

> that they accept anarchy and mob rule

Back this up with anything? Every modern polling shows the public wants more public services, not less.

SF is a ground zero test bed for policy making. Other cities will learn from their mistakes and hopefully all of us will benefit. I think we can just agree decriminalizing and not prosecuting "petty theft" is just a disaster.

People just don't learn. We've known that it was important to keep petty crime in control since NYC's "No Broken Windows" policies of the 1990s.

AFAIK there's not much causal evidence for supporting NYCs "No Broken Window" policies effect. Phasing out of lead has more explanatory power.

> We’ve known that it was important to keep petty crime in control since NYC’s “No Broken Windows” policies of the 1990s.

Actually, it is clear that that local policy either did nothing at all but was simply adopted at the right time to be given local credit for broader demographic (e.g., population bulge aging out of the main crime-driving age band), economic, and environmental (e.g., lead exposure) factors, or it was so successful that it somehow managed to effect places outside of New York across the country that didn’t adopt similar policies.

The "people don't learn" phrasing is particularly amusing, since the disagreement seems to be between those who "learned" once and those who "learned" twice (leaving aside whether what was "learned" in either case was right or wrong).

Living in a place where you see crime and decay all around you, but the data doesn’t back up what you see with your eyes, you really start to question the quality of the data and the conclusions built on top of it.

> it somehow managed to effect places outside of New York across the country that didn’t adopt similar policies.

I definitely remember "tough on crime" being nationally popular (not just in NYC) in both parties through the '90s. Even if it wasn't called "broken windows policing".

Obviously some of the Bratton/Giuliani policies were specifically tailored to NYC and not really applicable elsewhere (no need to crack down on subway fare evasion in Houston for example) but the general sentiment of "the police should aggressively enforce all laws and lock all criminals up" was extremely popular.

This is not to say that any of this was right, or good, or just, or why crime fell or whatever. But it was definitely popular in the '90s outside of NYC.

There's a reason punishments are necessary, even if they might seem harsh.

Yes. As a resident of SF I was curious, accepting, and optimistic of our policy experiments in the following:

1. Effectively decriminalizing all drugs

2. Focus on harm reduction instead of police enforcement to reduce drug problems

3. Bureaucracy free disbursement of cash aid to those who need it

4. Decarceration and jail avoidance as a method of preventing structural employer discrimination of people with records from ruining peoples lives

It didn't work. The city is a mess in all of the ways that the harshest critics of these policies predicted. It wasn't hard to predict, but the vision of equitable, punishment-free utopia beguiled the population and led them to mayhem.

We need to reverse course, yet the most vocal proponents are doubling down on their failed agenda.

This is probably the most disappointing thing about being on the left in the U.S. - we’re supposed to be the people who “believe science” and “trust the data”, but I’ve never once seen advocates for this policy or that reverse course when it’s obvious that policy is a failure. Instead, they seem to head straight for the No True Scotsman fallacy. It didn’t work, but only because we didn’t really commit to it. Next time we’ll do it twice as hard and spend three times as much doing it. And if it does work then, it’s because of capitalism. Or white supremacy. Or the patriarchy. If we just fix those, it’ll definitely work. And if not, it’s only because we didn’t really fix those things right because the master’s tools can’t tear down the master’s house.

From what I heard the idea was "hand out fines instead of jail time for petty theft". What happened instead was "you can commit petty theft in broad daylight and nobody will care". The former policy sounds like an idea that might work with heavy enforcement, while the latter shouldn't even be worth discussing as a viable strategy. I think the real lesson is how SF somehow still ended up with the latter.

I know this thread is long already but I can give my personal perspective as someone who has lived and worked in SF for the past 5 years. I completely understand their decision. I've lived in some bad places but SF is a different kind of bad. The average person's exposure to the bad parts is impossible to avoid and feels higher than other cities (despite whatever the stats might say).

The longer I stay the more nervous I get walking around the city even in broad daylight and "safe" areas. Family members have visited and had their phones snatched right out of their hands, homeless grab my bags, harassed everywhere, had my (and friends) cars broken into, and gunshots right outside my home. Witnessed all kinds of crazy things on my short walk from muni station to my office including avoiding the infamous poop, throw up, pee, needles, and broken glass. My partner's coworker was robbed at gunpoint then pistol whipped in the head like in a movie, had to stay in the hospital and has a bad scar now (wish I was making this up).

One time a lady was spreading poop all over the walls and our office door handle so I couldn't open the door. Another day someone spread, what seemed like, lard all over the sidewalk so people would trip. Homeless blocking traffic throwing and shouting things at cars. Saw so many of my favorite places to eat windows smashed and broken into over and over. I'd pickup something quick from Walgreens and see someone grabbing a bunch of things then walk out, even with a 24/7 security guard. It feels so futile seeing so much crime and nothing being done.

I love some of the food and exploring the city but the high costs combined with my growing uneasiness just make it not worth it anymore. I've recently been working from home and been a lot more relaxed (although home breakins are on the rise).

This website seems relevant: https://poopscoop.io/

(A real-time map of sidewalk poop in SF)

Most of these are animal feces which, needless to say, is a lot less offensive.

Why is it less offensive? I've seen some dogs that leave a larger pile than I do. Is it because imagining a dog relieve itself on the street is less offensive than imagining a human doing it?

The danger to your personal health of poop is approximately proportional to how close that animal is to you on the family tree.

So human poop is worst, and insect/reptile/fish poop isn't really a worry.

The "ewwwwe" factor pretty much matches up with that, and I'm sure an element of that is evolutionary.

> Is it because imagining a dog relieve itself on the street is less offensive than imagining a human doing it?

Yes? How is it not?

I'm offended by the pet owner that doesn't clean up after their animal.

I'm offended by the city for not providing for its citizens with proper facilities and treating them like animals.

I am equally offended. That's how it is not to me.

> Why is it less offensive?

Human faeces is more disgusting to us than animal faeces because the bacteria, parasites and toxins it contains are the ones most dangerous to us and we've evolved a strong aversion reaction to them, in particular to the smell of e coli in human waste.

Other animals with other gut biomes eliminate different micro organisms which are less "tailored" to humans and evoke a less dramatic response.

In general, animals with omnivorous diets similar to humans (notably dogs) will have faeces more like our own, but I think you would still find yourself instinctually reacting more strongly to stepping in human shit than dog

Does SF have a problem with stray dogs or most dogs have owners?

I've never seen a loose stray. SF has a relatively high rate of dog ownership and there are inconsiderate dog owners (to the extent that I see people putting up signs in front of their houses asking others to not leave dog poop by the sidewalk tree)

Totally agree that most of it is animal poop from slacking dog owners. Poop in SF gets a bad rap because SF311 has very open data polices and they misinterpret these reports as being all human feces. NYC collects the same sort of crowdsourced reports from citizens, including feces, but they don't release the data in bulk in a way that lets you zero in on just the feces.

Though its partially SF Gov's fault since for a long time the SF311 data export actually called these reports "human waste/feces" despite most of them being dog poo. I reported this to them and they fixed it but that doesn't stop people with an agenda from pretending its a map of human poop.

The pictures on that web site are pretty small. Not living someplace with a lot of human feces in public (that I know of), is it really easy to tell human poop from dog poop? A lot of those look like dog poop to me from when I used to own a golden retriever.

Also, there's a couple of mentions of "totters." I think they reference the little white plastic bags in the pictures. I'm not familiar with that term. Do social service agencies give "totter" bags to homeless people to poop in?

It's definitely mostly dog poop! I actually find myself telling this to people a lot. Perhaps I should make that more clear.

SF seems pretty insane these days. It makes NYC (even post covid) look like Disneyland.

Key word: "seems".

Any evaluation vs. historical crime levels (especially violent crime levels) will reveal that this is little more than a blip. Yes, the Tenderloin is a complete mess. Yes, it's true that the DA is experimenting with measures that are different from the usual mass-incarceration approach. Yes, this is causing some issues.

The rest of SF is extremely safe by any reasonable standards.

Violent crime levels as reported by the police departments who are allegedly ignoring all the crime, or are you getting your data from some other source?

Violent crime rates overall are well correlated with murder rates. Murder is pretty hard to ignore and rather unlikely to not be reported.

It is not clear to me that correlation would hold if there were dramatic changes to the reporting and enforcement of non-murder crimes. (And that's assuming that murders are in fact being reported at the same rate, and not being misclassified by police as "accidental deaths" or something.)

SFPD is not ignoring crime; they are vastly understaffed, as a result of London Breed's "defund the police" move in 2020.

They do not have the resources to respond to all crime anymore. They have to do triage with the depleted resources they have available. They only have enough officers on duty to respond to the most serious violent crimes (and sometimes, not even that.) Everything else is tier 2.

The SFPD has not been “defunded”.

> For the proposed 2021-22 budget, the San Francisco Police Department’s allocation will decrease by $6 million, from about $668 million to $661 million. Those cuts can nearly all be attributed to decreased demand for police at the airport. However, in the following fiscal year, the city projects the police budget will increase once again to $689 million. That’s close to the police budget’s all-time high of $692 million in FY 2019-20. By way of comparison, in FY 2010-11, the police budget weighed in at $445 million.

https://www.sfweekly.com/news/is-san-francisco-re-funding-th...

On the contrary; London Breed cut the SFPD budget by $120 million in 2020[1].

They are nearly 50% below "fully staffed" officer levels. Ask any SFPD officer about this, or call a station. They're generally happy to complain and tell you all about it.

[1] https://nypost.com/2021/12/15/behind-london-breeds-defund-th... and numerous other sources; Google it.

No, that did not happen. Please read the link I posted.

The sworn force level in SF is higher than in some recent years. The SFPD has gone on a tacit strike because they are a right-wing gang who are trying to overthrow the district attorney.

> do not have the resources to respond to all crime anymore.

This is bullshit. That's their job, to respond to crimes. What else are they doing with their resources?? They have resources enough to try to do the job, they just don't care enough to actually do it.

If you have n officers working at a given time, and there are (some number larger than n) crimes happening in different locations, you can only physically respond to at most n of all the different crimes.

Are people even bothering to report muggings and similar crimes in SF anymore?

Are they bothering in NYC? Nope.

I've been in both places recently and currently live in NYC. We may have to agree to disagree because to me, the difference is pretty stark.

If they need to use insurance (say, on a phone) or are getting credit cards stolen in these incidents, then they probably are. Or passports, drivers licenses, et c.

You don't report most crimes to the police because you expect them to solve them, anyway, because they won't even try, even if you can practically hand them all the evidence they need. That's true almost everywhere, not just SF. They're too busy with infractions that let them levy fines or confiscate lots of expensive stuff.

You do it to check bureaucratic checkboxes with private entities that you'll need to deal with to fix various related problems.

I lived in NYC post covid. Trust me, it's no Disneyland.

I lived in NYC post covid. Trust me, it's no Disneyland.

I lived in NYC in the 70's. Trust me, comparatively, even post-COVID, NYC is still Disneyland.

NYC from the 70s is in the grips of a revival.

Not great but not bad. Definitely elevated risks downtown past midnight in areas that used to very safe despite looking grungy, the anti-Asian hate crimes are awful to watch, def saw crack smoked on a subway platform under a jacket once or four times, and Harolds Square/Penn Station is.. not great.

However, staying vigilant in the key subway stations on the around midtown seems to cover most of the feelings of risk.

editing - hopefully not coming off as dismissive of the legit very concerning crimes that have happened. It feels like the bad stuff that deviates from the norm is really bad vs crime in similar contexts/places in the 2010s, but beyond that never felt unsafe but perhaps a higher requirement for street smarts that didn't feel as important in 2010s NYC Disneyland for wealthy folks.

I am skeptical that the claims made are accurate. I am sure that there is crime in San Francisco, however, SF is a large city, and it doesn't add up to me that a large company would completely move out of an entire city over the issue of crime.

It sounds like a clumsy PR play tbh.

What about when Amazon does it in Seattle? [0]

[Q] https://seattlemedium.com/amazon-relocates-workers-due-to-cr...

Seattle has a similar crime and drug problem.

Exactly, I dont think this is a clumsy PR play as the OP suggested. All big cities are experiencing increase in homelessness, crime and violence, drug use. You see it in Austin, Denver, SF, Seattle, LA, Chicago. Many of these cities were already bad and are getting worse, but others used to be 'good' cities and are now moving into thunderdome territory.

The city I live in has been an ongoing target of this kind of "thunderdome" rhetoric, and while there are well-known problem areas, the reality is nowhere near as bad as it's made out to be.

With regard to things getting worse over the past couple years, I'm not sure what people were expecting to happen when sky high rents intersected with a global pandemic, especially in places where there's not much of a safety net.

There's two things happening. There's a "{{YOUR_CITY}} is dying" narrative that is constantly being pushed by far-right-owned media companies. It has been going on for years. (see https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/24/fac...).

And that narrative is now having some success. It is getting people to apply a confirmation bias such that they perceive their city as crime-infested.

Meanwhile, crime statistics in many (most? all?) of these cities are actually down or flat. And compared on a per-capita basis look like even weaker support for that narrative.

I dont think its being pushed by far right or far left, I see both sides complaining about it which means there is factual evidence and experience to prove it a real issue.

Crime is up in a lot of cities, example of a recent study in Denver, sure it depends on what you measure and how, but that is how statistics work:

- While Colorado’s rates for homicide, aggravated assault and motor vehicle theft rose by more than 10% in 2020 over the average of the prior three years, rates for rape, larceny, robbery and burglary stayed relatively level or declined.

- Increases in aggravated assaults — which include shootings and stabbings — and motor vehicle thefts are the biggest drivers of increased rates statewide of violent crime and property crime.

- Colorado’s communities are not a monolith. Trends in the state’s largest cities differ from each other, as do those in medium-sized towns. Colorado’s 2020 violent crime rate was the highest it’s been since 1995, but is lower than it was between 1985 and 1995. The state’s 2020 property crime rate was the highest recorded since 2008, but is less than half the rate recorded in the mid-1980s.

- While Colorado’s violent crime rate jumped 10% between 2019 and 2020 — the largest single-year increase since 1990 — that increase came as part of a six-year upward trend. The state’s violent crime rate increased by 8% year-over-year in 2016, 2017 and 2018.

I'm skeptical when percentages are named because I remember seeing one study like this where it was like, "homicides are up 10%" and then when I looked, there were 10 homicides last year and 11 the next.

For sure that is why I said "sure it depends on what you measure and how, but that is how statistics work". But it was a pretty comprehensive study. Crime is still up. You can travel to any of these cities and notice a visible difference. Going to SF, Austin and Denver from trips several years ago to this year was noticeably different. From tent cities, trash, drugs, crime and the general voice from the locals.

I’m sure everyone knows it but it’s in almost all cities that had a very prominent defund the police movement. In Seattle and other Washington cities like Olympia they just don’t have a police force that is capable or even allowed to act. In Olympia for example a homeless person constantly goes to the same area and pisses and shits on the sidewalk. He stood in front of a glass window of a salon and shit in front of everyone and the business called the police only to be told that because they were just a tenant at the shopping center that the police would not come out. They made a rule (I dont know if law) that only the property owner can call the police now, and becaus the person shitting wasn’t inside the store, the property owner had to make the call. Like seriously? Property owners are banding together to hire essentially a private police force to patrol now because the government won’t police. Apparently only the businesses care about safety because the city councils do nothing and voters dont change anything.

> it’s in almost all cities that had a very prominent defund the police movement. In Seattle and other Washington cities like Olympia they just don’t have a police force that is capable or even allowed to act.

Or police are actively making the cities worse places to live as a way of punishing people with these attitudes.

I guess we'll find out when departments slip up and put into writing policies that were previously said behind closed doors.

> In Seattle and other Washington cities like Olympia they just don’t have a police force that is capable or even allowed to act.

You may want to check into this a bit more. As with anything it's much more complicated than that. For example, have the Seattle "police" been defunded? In late 2020, the Seattle City Council cut less than $10M off the specific police budget, with funds specifically allocated for adding 125 officers. Meanwhile they budgeted $100M MORE for additional community safety initiatives (see https://crosscut.com/news/2020/11/seattle-cuts-doesnt-defund...).

Every time there was discussion of anything like "police reform" the past two years in Seattle, the Seattle Times ran an article with a headline like "Seattle City Council defunds police" and you would read the article and find that nothing had even changed, but that the council had just issued a statement of support for the idea of reform.

This is the kind of spin/propaganda that is happening.

It’s not that the police actually get defunded but that doesn’t help, it’s the general attitude of cities that supported the defund movement. Every law and decision made by these places encourages being soft on crime and criminals regardless of what they do with the budget. You could hire 125 more officers but tie their hands together so they can’t prosecute crime under $900 in damage or can’t charge criminals for possession of drugs unless they consumed them. Both of which Washington now reflects. All of the small crime just leads to people graduating to larger crime more often. We’re seeing a horrible uptick in all kinds of crime here.

Very hard to attract workers to come to a city where they have to walk through needles and poop to get to the office. Or after they’ve been attacked by a mentally ill pan handler. It’s not an easy thing to solve, otherwise the city would have thrown money at the problem.

If you’re on the fence about going remote, the crime hassles could push you over the top in a way that wouldn’t pre-COVID.

> Very hard to attract workers to come to a city where they have to walk through needles and poop to get to the office. Or after they’ve been attacked by a mentally ill pan handler.

Are we ignoring the past 20 years of startups and major tech companies attracting high level of talent to SF? Because pre pandemic it was very, very easy to attract workers, very expensive workers, to move to SF despite all of its issues. Every few years we’d have these discussions, and yet major startups and FAANGs would keep hiring there.

I think remote is an issue for SF, but it is also worth pointing out that remote work is extremely popular outside SF too. $CORP is really struggling to get on site workers across a variety of cities where satellite offices exist, and not just CA cities either. My feel is that this is a general cultural change across the industry, and maybe SF is a bit more affected because it’s so much more expensive than other metro areas.

My guess is that like a ton of other tech companies, they were either losing staff to remote jobs, or having a hard time justifying having an office when a large percentage of their work force didn’t come in, and this is how they decided to spin the PR.

I rejected a fairly good FAANG offer because they required me moving to SF. That was 2019, but I still rejected it after watching some bikers driving through and filming the city on YouTube.

I stopped a Google interview halfway through in 2012 because they would only consider junior engineers in NYC and Mountain View, and I didn’t want to leave Chicago. But I don’t think our one off experiences make a trend. Facebook and Google alone hired and kept a ton of talent in SF pre pandemic, never mind the countless non FAANG companies there. Not everyone obviously, but a gob smacking number of engineers lived in the Bay Area.

Pre-COVID, the benefits of suffering downtown outweighed the detriments:

1. It wasn't as bad before. Some areas were, but the zone of insanity has grown and worse behavior is being tolerated now.

2. There was a lot more people around which made the problems less visually severe

3. There was a lively "scene". Events, experiences, dinners, whatever. Stuff was happening all the time for techies.

Now it's a lot less vibrant. SF's insistence on masks, tests, and vaccines to the very end guaranteed that normal social behavior wouldn't come back. And, surprise, it didn't! All of the people who live for that stuff and organize it... moved away!

On top of that, SF was drunk on power and money in 2019 and implemented all manner of taxes to punish tech companies. Well, the tech companies now have their options and they aren't choosing the jurisdiction that hates them.

I don't expect that SF will return to its peak 2019 level of hegemony at any point prior to a political and social revolution in the town.

It got worse during the pandemic. All policing stopped and downtown became a free for all. When I moved to San Francisco in 2016, I constantly had to reassure others it’s not as bad as the media makes it out to be. Now it is worse than media reports. I had someone threaten to stab me with a pencil when commuting to downtown at 9 AM. I had someone detached from reality and naked yell they wanted to kill me at 1 PM across the street from Salesforce Park. My home was broken into with my bike stolen and the cops told me there was nothing they can do. Then politicians tell you that there is no crime problem and you are just bigoted.

My eyes were opened when I went to Manhattan last summer and found it way safer and nicer than San Francisco. Finally getting out.

It really is that bad.

3 changes:

1) The city worsened.

2) Companies got better at working remote.

3) The pool of talent outside the Bay Area grew as folks skipped town.

>Are we ignoring the past 20 years of startups and major tech companies attracting high level of talent to SF? Because pre pandemic it was very, very easy to attract workers, very expensive workers, to move to SF despite all of its issues. Every few years we’d have these discussions, and yet major startups and FAANGs would keep hiring there.

I don't think this is the straw that broke the camel's back, but costs have only gone up for residents and employers, while benefits to being SF based have generally decreased.

>my guess is that like a ton of other tech companies, they were either losing staff to remote jobs, or having a hard time justifying having an office when a large percentage of their work force didn’t come in, and this is how they decided to spin the PR.

I imagine this specific case is a conflux of all the issues. If the office was a pretty 5 minute walk from cheap housing, I doubt they would be having trouble getting in-office workers.

> I imagine this specific case is a conflux of all the issues.

That’s a much more nuanced way of putting it, I agree completely.

I can confirm, having lived in San Francisco for many years: street conditions were never great, but over the past two years, they have gotten far worse than ever before. Street-level crime is rampant now throughout the city, and particularly in the largely abandoned downtown area where Kraken's offices are.

San Francisco is not a large city at all. It's 7 miles by 7 miles. There are not a lot of areas where you can rent a single office large enough to hold all of Kraken's employees, and most of those are in what is now a high crime area downtown and in SOMA.

It's also still very expensive to rent compared to other nearby cities and suburbs (somehow), and has extra payroll taxes levied on large employers.

I'm not surprised at all that yet another large tech company is abandoning the city. There are many other areas, even nearby, that are far cheaper and where employees can come to work every day without fearing for their lives.

SF is not a particularly large city relative to other major cities. It's not even the biggest city in the Bay Area (San Jose). Geographically, it's very small, just 7x7, and the amount of space where one can rent office space (especially a significant amount for a growing company) is a small fraction of that.

I'd be really surprised if you told me you live in SF. Getting screamed at as you're walking through the Financial District during working hours on a weekday is commonplace. Feces is commonplace. Maybe you've heard of the Tenderloin and how bad it is? That's almost adjacent to the FiDi.

Add to the fact that these things, plus the move towards WFH coupled with insane housing costs, are driving large numbers of workers out of SF, and why wouldn't a company move out? They'd probably put up with the crime if they still had to be there in order to attract top-tier talent, but once the talent leaves, there's no point in staying, enduring harrassment and the smell of urine and feces, and paying sky-high rents.

Why is there so much denialism in this thread?

Because people would rather stay in a defeatist or learned helplessness attitude than look at the root of the problem. That is, until they get mugged walking to work or have their car broken in to.

>That is, until they get mugged walking to work or have their car broken in to.

Some people will still be blind even after something like that.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/seth-rogen-flamed-dismis...

Is there a fundamental truth you know that is being denied? I commute to Market St weekly and my own experience is that the city is emptier and less vibrant but not unsafe for workers going on about their daily lives. Poop and homelessness are plenty, sure, but that's sort of always been the case and not a new phenomenon. Am I now participating in denialism by sharing my own experience? How does your experience in SF look like?

This has not always been the case, it is a new phenomenon. It was not like this is the 90s or early 2000s

because they've bought property in SF

correct.

It's hilarious to see really

Because, in certain peoples' minds, anything that makes San Francisco look bad means that "Trumpists"/"alt right"/"Rethuglicans" have won. The attitude is infinitely more widespread on Reddit and Twitter, of course, but it's here too.

"There are applications to track human waste" - build some public toilets.

Put a porta potty in every block.

They are: https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/02/02/bart-reopens-bathroom...

"All 10 underground restrooms closed after 9/11 are slated to reopen by 2026"

Why on earth will it take 4 years?

Probably supply chain issues with the needed bidet upgrades.

As a point of reference, Paris has around 420 Sanisettes (single-occupant self-cleaning public restrooms). Paris has about twice as many inhabitants, but half as many homeless people, so if anything Paris should need fewer public bathrooms than SF. If SF has too few now adding another 10 over the next four years won't come close to solving the problem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanisette

Nice, and it's a pity about the loss of Pissoirs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pissoir

I visited SF last july and it was crazy.I stayed at a hotel near Powell st. After 6 pm there was no one in the streets only homeless.

Walking near the museum of modern art there was this guy hitting the air and saying things to everyone who walks by.

That part of SF is scary af and I'm from Mexico so I know how to deal with scary areas. The issue here is this people are on hard drugs, so you have no idea how they're going to react.

Pd: sorry if I made some grammar mistakes

Mexican dude here as well. The last time I visited SF I was assaulted by some random dirty homeless drug addict: I was waiting my wife outside of a Sephora near Market Street drinking some bottled water, when suddenly a huge dude (I'm a small Mexican, 1.67m) stands extremely close to my side and starts shouting shit to me. I could not understand what he was saying, and it was evident he was disturbed. After about a minute of him shouting at me I got to grasp something about "water", I guessed that he wanted my bottle of water, so I gave it to him and walked to the Sephora shop.

It reminded me of here in Mexico, because all people passing by were just getting away from both of us, and nobody did anything.

I haven't returned to SF and don't plan to return if I can prevent it.

Pro-tip for HNers which journalists don’t seem to understand yet: if you see a company using 548 Market St as a mailing address, that is almost certainly their EarthClassMail serviced inbox, not their actual office address.

(This is entirely legitimate, and common for companies big and small. Cryptocurrency companies don’t want anyone breaking into their office to grab crypto or attempt to strongarm staff into reversing e.g. a risk or compliance decision. Many companies are similar. VaccinateCA used the same address on all our paperwork so that anti-vaxxers didn’t show up at the WFH offices of organizers. And you don’t even need a reason for doing this; the convenience of it is very high. Decoupling mailing address from physical locations will save you so, so much pain in a few years when you inevitably move offices and realize there are 100+ organizations that need to have an accurate address on file.)

I thought this address looked familiar, it is! EarthClassMail is an incredibly useful service and I recommend it entirely, used it for a small thing I ran a while back.

cool service - bookmarking this. I notice they do not have locations in all major cities though (missing Austin, TX).

That means they have to deal with all kind of crazy people. Scapegoat-as-a-service is unironically a great idea

I used to live in SF during the mid 2010s. I feel like that was the last time it was truly habitable, although even then there were rumblings of rising crime. I personally witnessed several crimes ranging from arson, purse snatches, bike thefts, car break ins…

Nowadays the city is a complete shit hole. No one with money should be there by choice, no company should establish a headquarters there. It is a failure of government policies that have turned the city into what it is; a festering den of mentally degenerated homeless people, drug addicts, predatory sexual deviants, illegal aliens, gangsters and thieves. For me the killing of Kate Steinle is what marks the end of the glory days of SF and the beginning of its decline into ruin.

I will always remember the city for the pleasant, hopeful place it used to be, and hope to one day find a home like that again.

It is interesting if these events happened on company property, Federal OSHA laws would be involved since it is illegal to ignore unsafe work conditions - including violence and harassment on the job.

If a municipal government can not make it safe for your employees to come to and from work, you have an ethical duty as a business to protect your employees and not support that government with continued operation in their jurisdiction.

There are plenty of municipal governments that have solved the problem of safe travel on public rights of way, in fact the majority of local governments have solved this problem.

I was in SF yesterday for the first time in about eight years. I can't say I witnessed crimes, but I will say that the homelessness problem is much, much worse than I remember. It's hard to see any of these problems changing without it becoming cheaper to live in the city, and without more housing, I don't know how that's a possibility.

I see a lot of people talking about how people are homeless because of addiction or mental health problems, and there are certainly people who are homeless because of those reasons. That being said, homelessness seems to track much more closely with housing availability than social policies[0]. SF is such a beautiful city — it's sad to see all this abject poverty throughout it.

0: https://www.sightline.org/2022/03/16/homelessness-is-a-housi...

> In light of Kraken’s decision and the social crises in San Francisco, the region’s hold on crypto and the future of finance may falter.

It is interesting that one of crypto's guiding principles is to decentralize finance, however venture capital-backed startups and technology companies are still subject to physical network effects.

An exchange's guiding principle is facilitating trades with a spread so they make money when it changes hands.

non sequitor?

Kraken is an exchange, that's what their business model is and how they make money. Talking about "crypto's guiding principles" is a non-sequitir because that has nothing to do with this.

Kraken is a corporation, did you not realize this?

I'm fully aware. I was just musing that it is interesting that the culture around the digital instruments of crypto is not always aligned with the corporate culture around companies making/trading/facilitating/mining the digital instruments of crypto.

I also find it interesting when I see companies making organic-this and organic-that, but their factories aren't particularly eco-friendly. There's no law saying that a company can'r greenwash its products, but it's interesting when you see it.

I don't even know what point you are trying to make. You think that because the money that an exchange uses is decentralized (in an automated way) that they wouldn't have an office or that they wouldn't care about crime around their office affecting their employees?

It wasn't a point to debate, it was an observation that I find it interesting that these two orthogonal issues:

1. whether an industry built on people doing business with each other has physical centralization effects, and; 2. whether that same industry is built on decentralizing the product/service/technology at the center of its business...

Should:

3. Be in opposition to each other.

There's nothing particularly important about that, it's just interesting to me that "decentralizing finance" may decentralize the instruments, but not the industry itself in a certain sense.

That's all, really.

Exchanges to fiat aren't built on decentralizing anything, they are explicitly about centralization. Why would it be interesting that a financial company would have an office?

SF has a crime problem and citizens recognize this in polling [1]. They are responding with a Recall of The District Attorney [2]

  1. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-residents-unhappy-poll-says-17045784.php
  2. https://www.safersfwithoutboudin.com/

We need a federal state of emergency and we need to do something about the unhoused crisis. I don't know the solution but we need to start experimenting.

Right now 0.2% of the US population is homeless. They are all over many cities on the west coast and each state and city has to deal with it themselves. I am not aware of any who have succeeded so far.

This issue is the only thing anyone can talk about. I get into Ubers and the driver starts talking about the camps. You see it on the Internet constantly.

I don't understand how everyone can be so laser focused on this but for nothing to ever happen.

This issue is dramatically real, but exactly how to solve it is not clear. Specifically targeting Chesa Boudin does not make much sense. A good illustration of how the problems go much deeper than the DA was when hooligans smashed up a high end shop in Union Square. Chesa swore to being them to justice and prosecute them with serious charges. That happened and then a short time later the perpetrators were released from incarceration. Pretending that Chesa is the problem may be fun and satisfying, but that approach cannot solve this problem.

How does targeting Chesa Boudin "not make much sense"? He has made things materially worse with policies of catch and release and mismanagement of the DA's Office. Bringing directly elected officials to account is a good first step.

Also if the suspects you talked about were prosecuted with "serious charges", why were they released? Surely there is a related policy which allowed this. Electing people to change those policies is the central method of effective change.

Is Chesa also responsible for the spikes in crime rates in Spokane, Phoenix, Laredo, and Nashville? There’s an asymmetry to this narrative where progressive DAs are responsible for all crime in their districts but conservative DAs are not. No matter what the facts are, the solution for some reason is always to swing in the tough-on-crime direction.

That's making an interesting comparison b/t the population density and economics of SF/NYC/etc and... Laredo?

Please, engage in the topic. Why do the crime rates of San Francisco disprove the theories of progressive policies, but the crime rates of Memphis, the nation’s most dangerous city by far, do not disprove the tough-on-crime theories of that jurisdiction’s district attorney?

Because Tennessee is not actually tough on crime. At least it isn't if the mayor of Memphis is to be believed.

https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/TNMEMPHIS/bulletins...

If it is true that there are people committing acts of gun violence and getting probation, you absolutely don't get to call it "tough-on-crime".

Great. In that case you agree with numerous academic studies: the progressive or conservative policies of district attorneys has no influence over local crime rates!

Now with that settled we can discuss the causes and solutions of crime in SF. Because we’ve ruled out Chesa Boudin as both cause and potential solution.

> Great. In that case you agree with numerous academic studies: the progressive or conservative policies of district attorneys has no influence over local crime rates!

Don't put words in my mouth. You probably think yourself clever, having trapped me with a "gotem". Actually, you kinda just made yourself look foolish. You have demonstrated a clear lack of understanding in how the justice system works.

I'll educate you.

Prosecutors have to bring charges to hold people accountable. If the prosecutor doesn't bring charges or does a poor job presenting their case, criminals aren't held accountable.

If a prosecutor brings charges and secure a conviction, the judge needs to provide an appropriate sentence. It used to be the case that judges had a lot of discretion as to how to sentence an offender. Now sentencing is tightly controlled by state law and sentencing guideline commissions, which are GENERALLY soft on crime (in the name of "equity").

State law and/or sentencing commissions ultimately decide what the maximum punishment for a crime can be.

So in short, you're wrong about Chesa Boudin. If ANY ONE of the above three entities fails to hold criminal accountable, the entire system fails to hold criminals accountable. In Chesa Boudin's case, he's failing at least as much as every other component.

You're asking people to engage on a comment/topic via an attempted apples:apples comparison that's actually apples:grapefruit.

The only info I can find on people who were charged for those retail thefts who have already been sentenced and released are these cases where the DA reduced the felony charges for a misdemeanor plea deal.

https://abc7news.com/connected-cannabis-burglary-bay-area-re...

These cases seem to support the idea that Boudin is part of the problem (going for misdemeanor charges after making a big deal about charging them with felonies - “this is not misdemeanor conduct, this is felony conduct”). Are there other cases you have in mind where the DA actually kept and prosecuted felony charges and the people were later released?

That tracks pretty closely with what I experienced when I last visited. I would call SF a failed city in that it cannot perform its basic functions to house or care for its people.

If it this is the situation I am somewhat surprised that real estate prices in the city are still through the roof. What am I missing?

It seems like many people walk away from this kind of article with the hypothesis “liberal cities are dangerous” when a more accurate hypothesis is “urban business districts attract crime”. The solution isn’t simple, but it’s not endemic to urban environments, and I’ve seen all types of city government manage the issue well and poorly.

Urban business districts generally don't attract crime, look at Midtown Manhattan, Chicago's loop are some of the safest parts of the city. SF is unique in that its CBD is the most dangerous.

> Midtown Manhattan Making midtown safe, especially at night, took a ton of effort.

Could these be targeted employee attacks?

Ie. some customers who aren't happy with the company are deliberately causing trouble for anyone going in or out of the company HQ?

Having seen behind the curtain of a crypto exchange, I can tell you there are massive numbers of really angry customers when, for example, their account gets hacked and then drained because they used SMS 2 factor and a weak password, or when they invest in some lolcoin that then goes to zero.

As somebody who despises SF and thinks crime is out of control in most US cities, this move by Kraken feels a bit absurd and over the top. Can it really be that bad?

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

No, it’s not that bad, this is a PR move to pander to a specific politically oriented audience.

Yep it has the feel of one of those items (ab)used by Rubin, Shapiro and friends as evidence that the dang leftist, communist Demoncrats in charge of California are turning it into a living hell for good god-fearing citizens. Culture war nonsense basically.

And who is that specific customer base Kraken is trying to attract by shutting down it's headquarters? The right-wing crypto investors that needed a reason to switch away from Coinbase?

As far st PR moves go, this one seems dubious.

Yes that makes sense. They are just doing it to own the libs? Sorry but that's ridiculous, it sounds like you need to tune off the culture war a bit.

What would crime "in control" look like?

Singapore.

In that case isn't crime 'out of control' in most places, everywhere, all the time?

I guess yes and no.

SF is certainly a city with its problems. I can't say that wasn't part of my decision to move away years ago.

However, the current right-wing meme of "new left-wing prosecutors instantly turned SF into an unliveable hellscape" is mostly just well-financed propaganda. The statistics don't support a huge surge in violent crime except in the sense that (like everywhere) it's rebounded from temporary lows during covid lockdowns: https://twitter.com/petercalloway/status/1510032517876764674

As a longtime San Francisco resident, I can confirm: yes, it's that bad. I posted another comment above with more details.

Good.

We don't need offices at all, with the exclusion of some hardware testing.

For iOS and Android testing I'd rather drop 2k of my own money on test devices than have to deal with living in California.

People are still catching COVID, I personally feel comfortable in my 3 vaccine shots, so I'm going to concerts. But we shouldn't force people back into the office.

“Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too full”

SF absolutely has crime issues that it’s not doing enough about, but based on this CEO’s history this feels like grandstanding. Here’s some past statements by the CEO:

> Powell gave an entire bitcoin to the protesters on February 6th out of a belief that the Canadian government went too far with its trucker vaccine mandates. “I'm personally against the mandates. I think they're just immoral. I also think there's, at this point, a lot of evidence to suggest that we've been lied to or information has been withheld. And I think its efficacy is dubious at best.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenehrlich/2022/02/23/kraken...

Sure kraken, Wallgreens, and Safeway are all using this “crime” as PR.

But San Franscisco changed and definitely feels unsafe now. Is it really more unsafe? I do not know - before I was not worrying about being attacked or harassed but I do all the time. Here are some examples…

Before, I was able to walk dog on the ocean beach in morning and everything was was fine. Yes there always homeless people. Now I’m getting harassed by scary looking 100% drugged out young homeless all the time. Or take example of sunset: in last 20 there were no home invasions in our block: last two years we had two. Or Walgreens in Richmond: we were always taking a walk thru the park and we would ended up in that Walgreens to pick up random things. But in last two years that Walgreens is like a war zone. I think the latest robbery was on the internet. So these are anecdotal evidence. And this is why I feel it is unsafe.

This seems like a PR move since skeptics, conspiracy theorists are the most likely people to get into crypto.

If this were true coinbase/cdc/ftx wouldnt be advertising in traditional media, esports; but would be plastered over infowars/qanon communities

the idea that conspiracy theorists would be using a public blockchain that tracks their every transaction doesn't sound too logical

the conspiracy theorists are mainly in one crypto community, but that demographic doesnt matter nearly enough

but believe what you want

Ah, yes. Conspiracy theorists, long known for logical consistency.

Are you talking about the first 2 comments? Because it seems like they believe this is just part of some sort of a right wing conspiracy to defame their side.

So yeah I guess you are right, not very logical to be honest.

Yes, this coupled with the dig at the lefty DA makes it clear that this move is mostly political posturing and virtue signaling for the alt-right crowd (which is also very pro-crypto)

"not safe"?

maybe because wealth isn't properly redistributed?

they are moving the problem to Texas and Miami, what a joke this country is

Every city has rough neighbourhoods. Is San Francisco relatively unique in that those rough neighbourhoods are the heart of downtown?

I think I've heard that downtown LA has had a pretty bad reputation in the past.

Hard to have sympathy for tech companies that push out working class people, raising rents, and generally making it impossible for anyone outside of tech to live there and having it come back to bite them.

Supply and demand. I think the problem is nimbyism and lack of building housing. Desirable places are in demand and cost $$ this isn’t some tech companies fault.

Should we be taking this story at face-value, or is this a post-COVID decision to avoid rent on a property (with blame-shifting to the government because the CEO doesn't want to alienate everyone else with property to rent by making it look like they're a client that will bail)?

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