San Francisco Noir | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco Noir

nytimes.com

37 pointsdonmcc25 comments

>San Francisco is well known for its transformations, the most recent one fueled by tech money that has seemingly scrubbed much of the city clean.

Well if this is to be taken literally, it's laughable. San Francisco's thoroughfares are littered with garbage, the city smells like piss, and its public transportation is third world at best. I can't imagine what SF was like before the latest "transformation"!

I believe the author meant that a bit more metaphorically than you are taking it. Scrubbed clean in the sense of removing the hard edges and character.. whitewashing so to speak. That said, the tech industry has definitely cleaned up areas of the city. Compare the area around the Twitter office today to how it was even a few years ago.

Also this comment is pretty harsh, and you clearly are not spending time in the right parts of San Francisco if you think its all littered with garbage and smells like piss. I will grant you that muni isnt great compared to cities 10x the size like New York or London.

I think San Francisco's tolerance of diversity and oddity correlates to a greater tolerance of civic disorder than you see in other places. That said, it's often a much different city at the top of the hill than at the bottom.

It compared badly also to cities smaller than it: compare SF (metro population: 4.5m) to Vancouver (2.5m), Vienna (2.4m), Zurich (1.8m) or Prague (1.2m).

The population of San Francisco is 800k, so it is significantly smaller than any of those cities.

If you are talking about the entire Bay Area that is a different thing, but not really a valid comparison. The infrastructure problems in San Francisco tend to be due to it being a small city surrounded by lots of even smaller cities which dont want to play along for the greater good of the region (eg by expanding BART or shouldering the burden of homeless services). If the Bay Area as a whole was governed as a single unit a lot of these problems would be improved. But it's not.

It's a small city in an earthquake area with large hills, and uncooperative neighbors, all of which make it very difficult to build massive subway or streetcar systems.

The populations I mentioned for the other cities are also metropolitan (urban populations are smaller in all of them).

Zurich's city-proper population for example is just less than 400k: half of SF's.

Well that may be true. Of the cities you list I'm only familiar with the metros in vancouver and vienna, both of which are very nice. My point was not that muni doesn't have issues, but that they mostly stem from regional political problems which presumably those other regions dont have to the same extent. If the whole bay area would get on board with bart, things would be a lot better.

In any case comparing it to a third world country like the parent comment is a bit of a stretch.

It does not compare favorably to Washington, D. C. either.

>>Also this comment is pretty harsh, and you clearly are not spending time in the right parts of San Francisco if you think its all littered with garbage and smells like piss.

Last time I checked, homeless were pissing and defecating on sidewalks in the heart of SF's financial district, as well as many others.

http://www.thebolditalic.com/articles/3758-why-is-there-so-m...

(I don't say that to diss homeless people. Often times they have no choice because shops and businesses don't allow public usage of their restrooms.)

>> SF's financial district

See "not spending time in the right parts of San Francisco"

> its public transportation is third world at best

I come from a country which has a reputation for having top notch public transit, and I have lived in the south of the USA (which does feel like the third world in many ways). San Francisco's public transit could be better, but it's not that bad ;)

SF is still truly the "city that never sweeps".

I've got some street-sweeping parking tickets that beg to differ.

SF tickets for more times than it actually sweeps (i.e., they do not always have a street sweeper come at all the restricted street sweeping times). They will also ticket you even if the street sweeper has already passed. :/

No, they won't: http://sfmta.com/getting-around/parking/how-park-legally

Sure, that link says "Once the street sweeping truck has swept the curbside, you may park your vehicle there, even if the posted sweeping hours have not expired," but I've heard enough differing anecdotes from street parkers to consider that thoroughly debunked (the colloquial plural of 'anecdote' is 'data', after all)

The recourse is taking a picture, noting the time, going to court, and hoping you win. Most people don't even begin to try all that.

Trust me, from personal experience, they will and do.

>its public transportation is third world at best

There are muni stops within 1 block of 80% of all residences in SF. Having just moved back to SF from LA let me tell you there is no reason to bemoan public transportation here.

When I was in Budapest, I had a metro station, a bus stop, two tram stops and a public bike sharing station within a block from my apartment. The trams run every 4-5 minutes during off-peak, and if they ever stop during the night, we didn't notice, despite arriving at 5am and being awake until 3am.

That's a public transportation system!

To be fair, the Public Transport system in the Eastern European states is usually pretty dense. The downside is that most of the buses and trains seem to be from the soviet era

WTF is up with all the trash on the highway? I heard Brown cut funding to some stuff for budget, but seriously the roads are a horrible mess. It's just setting priorities, I guess. Aesthetics should be #1, because it transmits a message to everyone.

I highly recommend to anyone who lives in the bay area to check out some classic noir films and others at the Stanford Theatre in palo alto.

It's a real gem of a place.

Drifting even further afield than the above, but since it's the weekend on HN:

I remember watching a 50s era SF-based film during a Hitchcock festival (Vertigo? Read Window?)in the City, and the streets in the movie were torn up for repairs to the street car system just like outside. The place cracked up.

Everyone ooh-ed and aah-ed over the views with no hi-rises, though.

Even more unrelated to typical HN topics: How have those old tourist courts and motels on Lombard/101 on the way to the GG survived all these years? A serious question.

Vertigo (1958) SFAIK was the only Hitchcock film set in San Francisco. Rear Window was set in Greenwich Village, though it was reportedly inspired by a stay by Hitchcock in a Jackson Heights garden apartment.

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