Comment by ericbarrett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericbarrett | Hacker News Reader

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I guess I'll throw my anecdote in the pot. I used to live in SOMA Grand, the condo building sandwiched between the Federal Building and Trinity Towers, right around the corner from this Whole Foods. I left SF around 2015. I recently walked the neighborhood and holy shit it is much worse than I remembered. There is a methadone / treatment clinic on Minna, the alley between the Federal Building and the condo. So there's always been a few people coming or going from treatment, and a tent or two. But this time there had to be a hundred people or more crowded in the alley, hanging out on the steps of the Federal Building, and so on. I'm not sure if they were all there for the clinic but nobody seemed to be coming or going. People were openly burning trash on Market St. like some kind of dystopian 80s flick. I used to see active drug use maybe once a week; this time I saw it half a dozen times in two blocks. Maybe it has not changed in the last year or two, but as a former resident of the exact area under discussion, and one who's not unsympathetic to the plight of the homeless, the area has become unliveable.

I often miss the City and have found myself questioning the choices that led me away. After this last visit—no more!

To your point, I wonder if it is "boiling the frog." Maybe things didn't change that much in the last 2-3 years, but they sure have in the last 8.

Taqueria Cancun still slaps, though.

Yeah I moved to SF in 2009 and away in 2022. It got a LOT worse in the last few years, especially the area you talk about.

In the early to mid 2010s I used to spend quite a bit of time in the TL. There were restaurants and bars there you'd want to go to. Now, you don't even really want to drive through. It's so bad...

I think something important to note is that SF does not have jurisdiction over the Federal Building's plaza/steps.

I say that because it's a reminder of two things:

1) This isn't really a policing issue (if it were, wouldn't you expect the Feds to police their plaza better?)

2)This isn't really an SF-specific issue, since America has freedom of movement. People go to SF because they don't have better alternatives. I think everyone in this thread who lives in a jurisdiction that would either jail or forcibly remove these people should remember that as they discuss SF policies, since their government (The US Federal Government) is just as capable of solving these problems as SF's is, and can't actually do anything about it with the current toolkit (even in a 10,000 sqft area).

I also send this as a warning to those people, since SF is famous for experiencing social issues a decade or two before the rest of the country - Enjoy feeling like this is a foreign SF-specific thing while it lasts.

> since SF is famous for experiencing social issues a decade or two before the rest of the country

Interesting, what other social issues? Do you mean housing for example?

Plenty of things were major issues in SF well before they diffused to the rest of the country. It’s why the American right is so dead set on villainizing SF’s progressive government:

LGBT rights, recreational drug use, Nimby-ism (to your point), Internet socialization/commerce, rejecting elevated freeways, freely moving between jobs multiple times in a career (see: The treacherous 8), voting by mail, bicycle commuting, living alone/not having a traditional family structure.

SF is a place full of wealthy college educated people and as the saying goes “The future is here, it’s just for the rich.”

I’d argue that national trends around a drug use, housing policy, family structure, and Internet usage (phones make being homeless way better than before) are going to make homelessness much more common everywhere, SF is just at the frontier.

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