Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

motohagiography

I'd rather know how the Union Square Business Improvement District’s (USBID) camera network operates as a single service with people monitoring it, where they can just hand over access to police. These para-municipal agencies seem pretty dystopian.

The problem with this stuff is that it cuts both ways. You think you are protected by these surveillance schemes, but then your local government starts tolerating petty crimes like vandalism, auto theft, vagrancy, and shoplifting because it centralizes their role in "managing" (read: extracting value from) it, offering protection to favoured constituencies in exchange for support, and then when you want to shovel a tent off your property, paint over grafitti, or discourage a shoplifter, those cameras neutralize you because you can't take the risk of being charged because you actually have something to lose. Cameras don't stop criminals, they just neutralize law abiding residents from discouraging threats to themselves and their community.

I used to live on the border between USBID and Lower Nob Hill.

On the side of the alley within the USBID the streets would be cleaned of litter, poop would be washed, and private security (off duty SFPD hired by the USBID) would monitor the neighborhood.

On the side of the alley that wasn't within the USBID, trash would be dropped, you would see open PCP and Meth use, and poop on the street, and cops wouldn't respond unless a weapon was drawn.

The distance between the two was 5-7 feet. The area within the USBID didn't change drastically compared to pre-pandemic, but the area outside the USBID basically collapsed.

There are a lot of these invisible borders across San Francisco which townies and unhoused people can recognize.

So instead of solving problems, they move the problems somewhere else. That seems like not a good solution? You can't just make the whole world a business improvement district.

Agreed, but it shows where the issue lies - with the City and County of San Francisco.

And honestly, looking at how Rincon Hill and Mission Bay both privatized their operations and keep the neighborhoods extremely clean and safe, I am starting to feel privatization is the only short term solution that might help, no matter how unsavory it is.

Do you have more info on how Mission Bay privatized their services?

I live there and AFAIK I don’t pay anything extra for living in that neighborhood. Is it baked into my (high) rent and apartments pay out?

I live there as well now.

> Is it baked into my (high) rent and apartments pay out?

Yep! The parks, the library, the sprout social, and all the public areas are a mixed ownership between the City, the landlords (UDR, Avalon, etc), UCSF, the State of California, and Union Pacific. Also, because a decent portion of Mission Bay is owned by UCSF and Union Pacific, CHP and DoT can technically lay state and federal charges overriding local government - which is why the very few homeless you see in Mission Bay squat around the library and the community center (it's definitively City of SF land).

That’s really cool! Thanks for sharing. Living here definitely is a bubble, and in a good way. I feel 99% safe walking my dog late at night, and I’m generally not on edge here. And I’m still able to enjoy everything SF offers.

Agreed! I lived and help organize in Lower Nob Hill for several years, and it was a nice experience, but Mission Bay just has a better ambiance and quality of life (assuming you can afford it).

I know some people hate on it for being quiet, but it's only like 10-15 minutes away from other bustling parts of town like North Beach, Chinatown, Mission, etc via public transit or Uber - so honestly idk why people hate on it. I guess it's those 90s rage against the machine types.

> off duty SFPD hired by the USBID

Sounds like a perverse incentive to me

Might be, but Union Square, Lower Nob Hill, and Tenderloin all fall under the SFPD's Tenderloin Prescinct - which has seen recruiting and staffing collapse (doesn't help that Tenderloin PD needs officers fluent in Arabic, Vietnamese, Teochow, Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin, Pashto, Nepali, Spanish, Mayan, and Khmer due to the demographics of the neighborhood).

There's a very real issue of understaffing and underfunding which leads to the issues that exist with SFPD today. The exact same neglect and funding crisis is impacting SFUSD, SFMTA, and other public institutions in the city.

Normally, I'm not a fan of privatization, but Rincon Hill and Mission Bay have both proven that public services are better provided by the private management those neighborhoods have.

Those do sound like things we should discourage. We didn't protest and disrupt police "sweeps" to just let business owners go and do it. Capital always gets the benefit of the doubt from the law, if they're worried about being charged with something, they're doing something wrong.

There are many organizations like this sprouting up around the city. Businesses and neighbors attempting to collectively do the work that the city departments aren't doing.

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