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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

I remember being in SF in 2016 and there were whole city blocks that were barricaded and the gangs ran checkpoints. There were clearly stolen goods behind the checkpoint and drugs as well.

I recall me and a few co-workers going to eat right next to one of these checkpoints. Open needles, could buy drugs right there at the entrance. The restaurant was nice, a niche pizza place. You could order 20-30 kinds of different meats on a neapolitan style pizza. We walked out of the restaurant to a fully nude woman, giving head to a man. Another nude woman near by and a pimp looking at us. We just turned and walked around them.

This is San Francisco I remember.

Having wandered all over SF Oakland, and the Bay Area generally… It is the most dystopian place I can imagine. It’s a cultural rotten to its core in many ways. Yes, the art, the passion, it’s beautiful. But the people and city have lost the humanity, ironically enough.

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I'm not disputing your personal recollection, just adding another data point, but I have lived in SF since 2013 and have never experienced anything like that.

SF native, worked and socialized in the Tenderloin, live in East Oakland currently, and I agree. This sounds a lot like the guy who complained on r/oakland that government is a wild racket and that they're enforcing street sweeping restrictions without actually sweeping the streets. Lots of people pointed out their blocks are getting swept. Turns mechanized street sweepers aren't effective against the type of debris that the guy was complaining about.

People love to vent their hot air and thump their chest at their excited discovery that San Francisco is a grimy city. Guess what. Noted junkie and author Jack Kerouac was complaining about the winos on third street back in the 50s. Claims about the death of San Francisco are generally overrated.

Anecdotally I watched the street sweeper go by my kitchen this morning.

> SF native, worked and socialized in the Tenderloin, live in East Oakland currently, and I agree.

It could also be the case that your accustomed to it? Or perhaps it’s gotten worse?

This restaurant was in the Tenderloin in 2016. Can’t speak to your experiences, but this was a pretty near daily occurrence.

I have been renting a music rehearsal space at Hyde and Eddy since 2013, and lived in the city since 2010. I have never seen this as described. However, there’s a good chance what you have seen might be a few different things that appeared like that. For one, Larkin between Ellis and Eddy can look like this (also at there often at The Chairman when there was a brick and mortar there).

I think a lot of people are frogs in a pot with regards to their city deteriorating, while some definitely exaggerate because we also do just get cranky as we get old.

But the 1950s standard of dirty and the 2020s standard of dirty are very different. Disposable heroin needles and piles of plastic garbage simply weren’t a thing, although SF has always had a reputation as rife with opiate usage.

I lived in Portland. I loved the city, but over the span of a couple years, it was obvious seeing the progression of the grime. I lived a bit outside the city where it was nothing but green gardens and blackberry bushes free for the picking, and pockets of downtown had homeless camps. It quickly ramped up to the bushes being full of filthy plastic garbage, crusty addicts planting themselves outside stores all over downtown, lines of tents, and more.

Dirty cities 70 years ago smelled of piss and had smashed glass. Dirty cities today have all that and more. Our standards shifted.

> I think a lot of people are frogs in a pot with regards to their city deteriorating

Boiling the frog is more than a little ridiculous when you consider that I was replying to someone who'd claimed gangs have barricaded whole blocks of San Francisco and that this is why the city's lost its humanity.

As for Portland, it too has been dirty and grimy since forever. I think a lot of the Portlandia crowd forget how industrial and rough (and how tolerant of neo nazis) it used to be. To be fair that cult (and the perpetrator of the largest bioterror attack on US soil) wasn't in Multnomah County.

https://www.oregonlive.com/history/2017/06/portland_in_the_1...

I have so many stories like this. It was so pervasive.

I used to take the ferry from Alameda (great place to live btw) to SF every day. Every other day there was a (I presume homeless) woman who would stand at the entrance screaming at people getting off the ferry. On more than one occasion a person would run, and this screaming woman would chase them down the street.

Later I’d often see this homeless woman sleeping in yerba buena gardens. Once caught her doing yoga (I think).

Same ferry terminal, a homeless man was smearing his own poop all over the door to get in. Me and the other passengers just looked at him and then each other. A cop came up and we all looked at her, she said “not my job”. So we all waited watching this guy rolling in his own excrement. Eventually the ferry doors unlocked, but no one went to the ferry until some of the crew opened the door from the inside. We all them walked over / around this homeless man. His excrement on many of our shoes.

So many times…

I agree. I lived in SF in 2015 and I never, ever saw anything remotely like this.

It's sad that we've ceded the Tenderloin to being a known unsafe part of the city, but, well, it largely stays in there, for better or worse, and most everyone knows better than to be in that part of the city. (Seriously, gangs running checkpoints?)

Based on my ten years in the TL, and my roaming all over the district at all hours of the day and night, "checkpoints" is almost certainly the wrong word for what lettergram is describing.

Let me translate what lettergram mentions:

> ...whole city blocks that were barricaded...

The sidewalks on some blocks in the TL were occupied with tents, chairs containing people, people sitting on the sidewalks, the occasional cluster of "street markets" (aka: combination flea market and stolen-goods-market), and -sometimes- people grilling with charcoal grills.

> ...the gangs ran checkpoints.

This one requires a bit of explanation:

In the heart of the TL, some corners have drug and/or sex salesmen advertising their wares to passersby. Some streets will have clumps of salesmen, and some corners and section of sidewalk will be crowded, simply because a whole lot of folks in the neighborhood socialize outside... so they're hanging out on the sidewalks. (Why not hang out in parks? Because the cops will push them back into the TL so that they don't make tourists, techies, and other such milquetoast folks uncomfortable.)

Never, _ever_ have I run into anything remotely like a "checkpoint". Crowded sidewalks? Sure! Folks doing more than hawking wares at me as I pass by, unimpeded by anything other than folks that are on the sidewalk minding their own damn business? No way.

The crowds and dealers certainly can be intimidating (and were definitely so for me for my first few months in the neighborhood)... but once you figure out that they don't behave like they're portrayed in the movies... that they're disinterested in starting shit and are just out there hanging out and running a business, you treat them like any other salesman hawking his wares.

> we've ceded the Tenderloin to being a known unsafe part of the city

That's its reputation, sure. It is the site of the city's open-air drug and sex markets.

Based on my time in the neighborhood, I've come to the conclusion that the City acknowledges that these sorts of things _will_ be sold, and that it's better to have an arrangement with the sellers and other "market participants" that ensures that everyone works together to prevent the violence that can often happen when such markets are pushed deep underground.

Because these are open-air markets, if the City wished to, they could drive by every day, rolling up dealers, pimps, prostitutes, and customers. I see the patrol cars rolling by on a regular basis, and _everyone_ who has been in the area for more than a few weeks can spot the folks that would be rolled up. They don't... and -as far as I've seen- have no intention of doing so.

> that they're disinterested in starting shit and are just out there hanging out and running a business, you treat them like any other salesman hawking his wares.

I wish i could share this with more folks. The idea that these people are somehow hardened criminals that will knife anyone is such bullshit. They just want to be left alone for the most part.

The dealers may be more-or-less rational economic actors. Their customers are not. Yes, some will knife you.

https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/man-dead-after-tenderloi...

https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/4-stabbed-in-tenderloin-...

https://www.kron4.com/news/sf-man-stabbed-in-tenderloin-in-c...

Sometimes people will use a knife against other people, yes. Those articles you linked to provide no evidence to believe that the reported stabber is a customer of a Tenderloin dealer.

Agreed. The TL is mostly drug dealers and drug users and is for the most part not as unsafe as the pearl clutchers would have you believe. I've worked in neighborhoods where the indigent folks tend to be more outwardly mentally ill and that was far more hair raising on a day to day.

Man, the drive-by downvotes are weird. I can't remember if the site settled on (officially or otherwise) a "Downvotes indicate disagreement" or a "Downvotes indicate violation of site rules and regulations" policy, but if they settled on the former, that's quite a shame.

Some of the most interesting and informative conversations I've ever had have been with people who held opinions that were as opposed to mine as they could possibly get.

And -in truth- the core of your comment (Folks just want to get on with their lives.) is broadly applicable to _most_ big boogeymen... child snatchers, street thugs, terrorists (domestic or otherwise), etc, etc, etc. In the overwhelming majority of cases, folks simply don't want to start shit, and -when made by Officials- claims to the contrary are nearly always attempts to increase the power and/or wealth of that official and/or their cronies.

  The sidewalks on some blocks in the TL were occupied with
  tents, chairs containing people, people sitting on the
  sidewalks, the occasional cluster of "street markets" (aka: 
  combination flea market and stolen-goods-market), and -
  sometimes- people grilling with charcoal grills.

I think that's being far too generous. There are blocks that are literally barricaded, but it's the cops who've barricaded themselves into their station on Valencia.

https://sfist.com/2022/07/27/sfpd-mission-station-doubles-do...

I lived in SF from 2014 to 2020. Lived in Soma, the Mission, and the Haight. I saw a lot of really sad and disturbing things but I never saw or heard of a whole city block being barricaded by gangs of criminals. Where was that?

> there were whole city blocks that were barricaded and the gangs ran checkpoints.

lol, which favela and pizzeria? I can only think of Una Pizza Napoletana being in a slightly sketch spot. Montesacro's on 6th Street, but that's pinsa.

I don’t recall unfortunately, co-worker was the one who brought us there. Not sure if it was even know for pizza or not, tbh. Had pistachio prosciutto pizza though, which was pretty good.

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