It's OOM worse in SF than any other city I've spent time in, including Zurich.
For comparison, I've spent maybe a month in SF put together over the last few years:
- In 30 days, I met more than 30 mentally ill people in SF. 40 Years everywhere else, I saw one old lady with dementia once in Copenhagen. And a few randoms few and far between in London. By mentally ill I mean the kind of ill where you're shouting nonsense in public.
- Then there's the guy who is aggressively threatening his imaginary friends. Seems to be a SF creature, doesn't seem drunk or stoned, just nuts. Even these guys outnumber the drunk/stoned nutters I've met in Europe in the last few years. I ran into them often, trying to stay away since you know...
- SF seemed like you were never more than 2 minutes away from someone with lower level mental health problems. I sat down in a Starbucks and realised I was hearing Cantonese from somewhere. Turned around it was some middle aged woman swearing while having a conversation with herself. But she wasn't in the category above.
- Never saw any crime but I've seen the shoplifting videos. That would not pass in Zurich. Probably not most places though I wonder if Metropolitan Police would get their act together.
- Extreme distress behavior like stealing food, never saw it anywhere else. In SF someone ran in to grab my leftovers when I was done eating. Not the same as a safety issue, but you can see how people might feel unsafe with that kind of thing happening.
- Generally an extreme level of inequality in living conditions might make people feel unsafe. I mean there were people on the street with no shoes, walking around Nordstrom department store in town centre.
Of course it's a long way between safety stats and feeling safe. I would guess if you're living in Sweden right now, you are safe despite the rocketing murder rate, providing you're not involved in organised crime. You might not feel that way and yes there's going to be innocents caught up with it. But safe means a lot of things.
I was recently in Copenhagen (one week, lived around King's New Square), and to be honest, I don't think I even saw any junkies there. Much less any obvious homeless people. Rode the subway every day, didn't see anyone there either.
It was pretty much the polar opposite experience of walking down any major street in LA or SF. Of all the metro areas I've visited in Europe, Copenhagen had the least visible amount of junkies and homeless people. I've been in Oslo tons of times, and there you see them quite frequently (but compared to California they're pretty much non-existent)
Try exploring less reputable parts of town, and not tourist trap areas. While SF has problems, others have some too. You probably just stuck in wealthy tourist areas, which they would probably police more to keep people coming and spending money.
I wonder if the mental health problems were mental hralth problems due to sickness, hpw many due to situation and how many due to drugs.
Drugs fry brains.
The existence of the problem and people denying it are intrinsically linked. You see similar developments in other big cites and it's not just limited to the US either but a phenomenon all over the Western world. Look at Britain and the cover up of those horrific gang rapes for many years.
Ideology is the problem. There are many who base their worldview not on reality but rather what they wish to be true.
This is precisely the problem. SF is the perfect example of a city where a singular political ideology has remained in control for decades, and what we’re witnessing now is the fallout to that. How can we ever change when it involves admitting that much of what people once championed about SF is exactly what’s killing it now?
It takes a lot to admit you were wrong, and it’s not the kind of thing I typically expect from the kind of folks well invested in ideologically driven politics.
What is the ideology? I’m asking honestly because from the perspective of an European, what the US calls “left” would usually be center or even center right here in my country.
You'll never get a straight answer because San Francisco represents nothing more to them than a symbolic confirmation of whatever bias they already had.
They'll ignore mitigating factors that might not fit their narrative - things like the Reagan repeal of MHSA, the bussing of 'problem' citizenry from other states to SF, police 'quiet quitting', among countless others.
Truth is, there's plenty of blame to go around, but one side deals in bad faith because they like it to be this way because it makes them feel right.
I gave a straight answer to the GP, it's too bad you felt the need to answer for me. It sounds like you've been in a lot of bad faith discussions around this topic, which is unfortunate and I'm sorry for. For the record, I'm a Canadian on visa, so if you were somehow reading my comment as some insidious GOP propaganda, you're sadly mistaken. In my limited opinion, both of your country's parties are broken in their own way, but in my experience living there, neither of them are as broken as the local politics in SF.
SJF is the political ideology which local governments like SF have embraced. It's one that I personally think is to blame for many of the city's problems, and I believe moderates like myself are ever so slowly being proven right on the topic.
The ideology is identity politics. Anti-equality, anti rule of law. There is overlap with traditional left wing ideology but I wouldn't generally classify it as such. Thinking in terms of "left" and "right" does not help to understand political developments.
Also much of it is not grassroots - that's the first mistake many make viewing it as. If you look at both the Democratic Party as well as Republicans there are wealthy elites behind both, funding the campaigns. But their policies and demands can be extremely radical and populist, much more so than in Europe.
Would you consider it far-left or far-right to demand payment of $5 million to every "Black adult" (they don't define what that means), as well as eliminating all their debt AND having them pay no tax AND guaranteed annual income of at least $97,000 for 250 years AND a home in San Francisco for just $1 per family? Might sound insane but that's an actual proposal from San Fransisco, it's not a made-up example.
The same party has been in power for over 20 years. This is actually not so different from some places in Europe. In Berlin for example you can see a similar development, although maybe not with the same level of crime. But the trend is comparable.
For Zurich this might be true, but there are definitely examples of European cities where the safety debate happens regularly (at least in my personal circles). Brussels and Paris come to mind with their explicit no-go zones and Naples and Rome are notorious for their pickpockets. Even Honest Guide[1], which is the main guide for my city, has half of its' videos dedicated to scams.
I've lived in Paris for over four years now, and I have no idea what these no-go zones people are talking about. I've never heard anyone in Paris talk about them. There is no neighborhood in Paris that I would flat out refuse to go to, even though there definitely a very small number of sketchy areas where I would be more on guard (the Barbès metro comes to mind). There is nothing here that is near as bad as the misery on display in the Tenderloin, or Skid Row.
I have also lived five years in San Francisco, and Paris overall feels much safer to me.
I also lived in Paris. What Americans get from their media as "no go zones" are areas with a large population of African immigrants or poor people. Yea, they are sketchy at night and I wouldn't go there alone if I was a woman, but it's nothing like sketchy areas I've seen or heard of in Chicago or SF.
> Yea, they are sketchy at night and I wouldn't go there alone if I was a woman,
So they are no-go zones. I'm glad you've cleared this up. I can now tell my liberal friends that a Parisian has confirmed the existence of such and it isn't just American conservatives telling lies.
As a Canadian, northern parts of Paris, (Seine-St.-Denis and some parts of the 18th) are really sketchy. Maybe not like some parts of American cities (fewer guns to start), but the 18th put me on guard in a way you'd never see in Canada.
No Go Zones are complete nonsense, but there's a gradient of safety.
One thing I’ve noticed is that cities in the USA seem to grow bad areas that are considered “don’t stop, don’t slow down, run a red light at night, the cops won’t care” - whereas the cities in Europe seem to have times when an area becomes an epicenter for something, but then everyone disperses.
The short video clips may seem similar, but the lived reality is vastly different.
Never thought about it like this. Yeah, nobody would question the safety of many European cities even if something like this were to happen. It would be considered a freak incident.
To be fair, most of the scams exposed by Honest Guide are targeted at tourists, not locals.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, as tourism is a big contributor to Prague's economy, and I don't like when people are getting scammed. But this doesn't affect much the average Tomáš' life.
It was just a few years ago that bien-pensants denounced Trump for repeating what others (including the authorities [1]) had said about no-go zones in Europe. I have since observed a slow but steady change in the European zeitgeist for what is happening, with a perceptible acceleration since Trump's departure from the White House; presumably, it is less embarrassing to acknowledge that he might have been right when he is no longer in office.
Nice! In Japan you can leave your laptop in the cafe while you go to the bathroom. This should NOT be amazing. Why do people find this amazing? This should be the norm. Sadly, SF people find it amazing.
Zürich certainly has dicey areas and such events happening. It is however, a much much smaller city. I don't know if it really makes a lot of sense to compare the two.
This also happened when Trump said there were no-go zones in some European cities. The MSM instantly "fact checked" his claims and said he was lying. Fast forward a couple of years and now even those countries' governments admit that those zones do in fact exist.
I live in (as I remember it) the prime example here. Birmingham UK. There were many articles about it some years ago. So, to fact check from the ground, there are no no-go areas. We're multi-cultural, and we do it well.
Considering the main hobby of Glaswegians is fighting each other over football games, does that mean it's possible to not be violent enough to belong there?
Not really. I think it boils down that most cities (and their areas) in the UK are mixed: so you have few streets of expensive houses, and next to it could be a council estate.. In Paris for example, it's not so mixed and you will get whole districts that are poor and deprived. These districts are usually inhabited by immigrants, and forgotten by local govs. Hence the so called "no-go" zones.
France literally has official names and policies for those areas, but all French politicians were like "what the hell is Trump talking about, is he crazy, ha ha funny Americans"
For those curious, SF has the 37th highest violent crime rate of anywhere in the country actually, far ahead of Seattle, St Paul, and Vegas. Number 2 for property theft though!
I'm pretty sure you would see these threads about Zürich if you were in a net community that has a substantial proportion of members living in or near Zürich.
I spend a lot of time in Zurich, and I’m in tech. Lotta googlers there. I haven’t seen any discussions like this about Zurich yet. When someone says Zurich is quite safe people nod and move on.
It’s not news and it’s not controversial.
Have you accounted for all confounding factors though? From my experiences of Germany, their news cycle isn't as hype-driven as the US's, I imagine Switzerland is even more restrained.
But the Swiss cities are so safe that people let 6yo kids go to school alone through the city center.
At night you can just go out and walk through the city with virtually no risk.
Accept that the two cities are not comparable in regard to crime, your reasoning above was flawed. Really, it's so safe that it feels weird, especially at night.
I didn't even bring up Zürich, the person I was replying to did.
And I'm not trying to claim that it's comparable. The only point I was trying to make is that this statement is reductio ad absurdum:
> Funny how people try so hard to show/prove/argue that SF is safe. If it was, these discussions wouldn’t exist.
Given the significant overlap between "people who live in or near SF because they work in tech, with a strong history of startups" and "people who discuss things on HN, a website about tech, with a strong history of startups", it's entirely unsurprising that people would discuss SF crime rates on HN, and the fact that they do so can't be construed as any form of evidence for any position.
I am pretty sure that when there is a stabbing in Zürich, locals will discuss it in their relevant online communities.
Sigh, I'm not even trying to affirm or deny anything about SF, I've only been there once, met some lovely homeless people, and some very unwell ones.
I tried looking up comparative crime rates; closest I could find was that for homicide, SF is 5 times worse per capita than Switzerland.
For a sense of scale for anyone who hasn't been, Switzerland has tax funded drinkable water fountains basically everywhere, and (if you will excuse the surprising conjunction) rolls of free bags for dog poo mounted on the dog poo bins which are also basically everywhere.
I'm not surprised, there's a lot more inequality in the US than in Switzerland.
Only point I was trying to make is that this statement is reductio ad absurdum:
> Funny how people try so hard to show/prove/argue that SF is safe.
If it was, these discussions wouldn’t exist.
Given the significant overlap between "people who live in or near SF because they work in tech, with a strong history of startups" and "people who discuss things on HN, a website about tech, with a strong history of startups", it's entirely unsurprising that people would discuss SF crime rates on HN, and the fact that they do so can't be construed as any form of evidence for any position.
Sigh, I'm not even trying to affirm or deny anything about SF, I've only been there once, met some lovely homeless people, and some very unwell ones.
My only time there, in town for some fancy proprietary DB training, the only accommodation I could get (due to a Salesforce conference) was right beside the Tenderloin. That was an experience.
If it was, these discussions wouldn’t exist.
You won’t see these threads about Zurich, just saying.