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Comment by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | Hacker News Reader

The solution is pretty simple, don't go to downtown. Downtown, at least many parts of it, is a containment zone for the homeless and the addicted and their various services. It's not that different from Skid Row/Flower District in DTLA.

You can enjoy Pac Heights, Noe, the Dogpatch, the Sunset, the Richmond, North Beach etc. etc. just fine without ever making contact with downtown, the same way most people don't hang out on 5th and San Pedro in LA and can still enjoy Silver Lake. You can pretend it doesn't exist and never cross paths, unless you really insist on spending quality time on 6th and Mission and other fine intersections.

Would I like it better if the Tenderloin was more Fifth Avenue and less World War Z? Sure, but that's not happening with the way SF politics work, so I might as well live with the cards we were dealt.

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> The solution is pretty simple, don't go to downtown.

The city is what, 5 miles by 5 miles? This isn't LA where you just skip the bad parts your whole life.

It’s 7x7 and as it turns out, you can fit a lot of stuff if you don’t have highways and parking lots everywhere. A wild concept for Texans for whom the other opposite sidewalk may be a 6 minute drive away.

Or just no sidewalks. A company flew me to Dallas for a conference. Me and a colleague saw that the restaurant we wanted to go to was one block away, so no point in taking a taxi. Staff at the front desk looked at us like we were crazy. We found out why once we left the hotel: we had to walk on landscaping to get there, no pavement that wasn't road and absolutely nobody else out walking anywhere that could be seen.

Same happened to me when I interviewed in Austin. Had to walk through high grass on the median to get to a restaurant in the evening. Afterwards, someone told you that there occasionally were rattlesnakes living in the same grass…

The bad part of SF is about one square mile out of 49.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement lol. Where are the gay bars in SF?

In the Castro. Not downtown

A whole 1.5 miles away

A block is all you need.

I can tell you live in a land of sprawling strip malls if you think that's even remotely close in a city.

Interesting. So is there any reason tourists would check out downtown or is it a little like south Chicago?

What the media calls "Downtown" is really mostly offices. There also isn't really any district called "Downtown". There is FiDi (financial district), which is definitely all offices (dead on weekends), and SoMa (south of market), which is also mostly offices in the north-east part and ex-industrial/residential in the south-west part. Then there is the mid-Market area which has some newish residential development. Any remaining bars, restaurants etc are basically all just serving either the office crowd or the residents of SoMa (the former is getting smaller, so those businesses are unsurprisingly not doing so well). There is some stuff like a Target with an AMC and a convention center in SoMa too but that's basically it.

All the tourist attractions are in different, older parts of the city (Powell St, Embarcadero, etc). I don't see a reason a tourist would want to go to downtown (aka SoMa or FiDi).

Twin Peaks Tavern is located at 401 Castro St.

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