Well said @sflawyermom, and great to hear this from another longtime resident with longtime firsthand experience. In all the years we have travelled out there and spent time there to be with our kids and their families, we haven’t come across rudeness.
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CNN story is on Sunday, 8pm eastern for those interested.
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Well, some places apparently do have solutions-for all the hand-wringing, the homeless issue in SF is a population of perhaps 7000? It is not Madras. New Orleans had tens, maybe hundreds of thousands homeless after Hurricane Katrina and managed to recover; they too had mentally ill and addicts. I don’t know what Houston did with its Housing First Plan, but it got national kudos so that might be worth trying.
You should love living there. But to tolerate the hughly increased property crime and decreased living conditions is not acceptable. Most see these as factors that are under government control–and your governing body doesn’t seem to care.
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And as someone who lives here (and whose husband actually works for the city), I can tell you that you are wrong on both counts. I care, and they do too.
If you’ve got solutions, by all means come offer to “fix” all of San Francisco’s ills. But don’t be surprised if people who are not you see complex issues through a lens that isn’t exactly your own political view. I’m sure you are certain you are “right” and I and anyone else who thinks differently is “wrong.”
Nothing is ever that black and white.
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SF needs a Snake Plissken.
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Due to the number of flags and people just talking over each other, I’m going to pause the thread to allow users to breathe.
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This topic was automatically opened after 36 hours.
We just spent a long weekend in SF visiting our son. We had multiple nice dinners out, walked a bunch, and cooked together on our final night. We took the train from Bayview into Chinatown, and walked quite a bit in the downtown area.
There was a significant police presence in Union Square, including a mobile command unit. There were no boarded buildings or an obvious feeling of unoccupied spaces.
We walked the Tenderloin to get a few Bahn Mi at LGs. We saw some rough folks, struggling at a much lower tier of Maslow’s Pyramid than those of us on the board, but I’ve never been in that neighborhood where it wasn’t that way.
The Presidio and Golden Gate Park were wonderful.
We saw very few tents on the streets.
All in all, it was probably the best visit to SF that we’ve had and we’ve been in town regularly since the early 90s.
Compare that to all the boarded up buildings and tents everywhere in downtown Portland, regularly coming across people having violent schizophrenic breaks, or Skid Row in LA and it really feels like all this SF hand wringing is just a tempest in a teapot.
Do they have problems? Sure. Is it an apocalyptic hell hole like it’s being portrayed in the media and by some here? Absolutely not!
San Francisco is still one of the coolest places on earth. I can’t wait to go back.
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Great to hear you had such a positive experience. In terms of actual occupancy of office space CBRE estimates vacancies to be 30%. This means that of all space available 30% isn’t leased. Of the remaining 70% that is leased estimates suggest 30% are occupied during “peak periods”. That means that during these peak periods approximately 20-25% of office workers who previously were in SF offices daily are physically in those office currently.
It is a beautiful city and this dynamic is not unique so I am not trying to be political or critical. It is just a practical reality that this migration of office workers has and will continue to have an adverse effect on city centers and their economic viability.
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I agree with all of that. That phenomenon is in no way though unique to SF. It’s happening everywhere.
The statistic gives the impression that 30% of the storefronts are unoccupied. That’s not the case. A lot of those offices are on upper floors. I saw very few street level spaces open.
The media and many on this thread are stoking the idea that a SF visit is like some sort of Mad Max experience. It just isn’t.
As we were walking around I told my wife and son about all the consternation in the media and on this thread. Both of them peered at me with a “what the heck are you talking about” look.
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I learned a lot in the CNN special. I had not realized that fentanyl prices are much lower in SF than elsewhere and thus draws drug addicts from the entire state and even country. Low prices and no enforcement are an attractive combination, per the addicts interviewed. I was heartened that the homeless they encountered had all been offered shelter which they refused. At least it was offered.
Kudos to former Mayor Brown for admitting that powerful interests do not want to solve the homeless problem. I did wonder which contractors are profiting from those $90k tents the city maintains. A whole industry of government employees, social workers, and contractors must share in the $ 1 billion SF has spent in the last 2 years on this issue.
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CNN unwisely aired that thing at the same time as American Idol. Much prefer the music!
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DC has the exact same problem. I think SF and DC DA’s must collaborate on prosecution (or shall-I-say, non-reporting) techniques.
Also, homeless are only at best tangentially involved. It’s organized crime, and those people all have homes and nice cars.
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Waiting patiently for CNN’s groundbreaking hour-long special revealing “What Happened to CNN?”
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My point completely! If SF citizens don’t care or even encourage the problem, why should the rest of us care?
It does serve as an interesting case study for local policies to avoid.
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Why are you tagging me ?? Don’t like American Idol??? 
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Admittedly, I haven’t watched it yet. I will. I am however grossly skeptical when someone claims that others simply don’t want to solve a problem that would benefit everyone if they did. Just because he said it doesn’t make it true. It doesn’t pass the sniff test.
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You probably have actual numbers, but Seattle seems to be in a similar situation. Like SF, we have a massive homeless problem, and while the vast majority of that pop. are given to no more than petty crime, within that group lurks more violent offenders who are hard to spot. My office is in the middle of it.
I think it’s hard to argue that SF is anything close to the city it once was. My D is in Boston and her consulting firm has offices in SF and LA. She is missing the west coast, and has her eye on transferring to SF. I’m hesitating and have advised staying put in Boston for the time being.
When you get your watch stolen in Pacific Heights, things have reached a tipping point:
I, too, want to keep this from becoming a political discussion. But there is a city management problem in SF just as there is in Seattle. Two of the country’s most beautifully situated cities seem to run in parallel in many respects, including this one. My oldest worked in SF for 5 years before moving home. Stepping over and around human waste, needles, cold bodies, being verbally assaulted and on a three occasions having literal poo slung in her direction, she did her best Roberto Duran and said “no mas” and left the city for good. That was in 2018. It’s become significantly worse since that time.
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