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El Monstro's avatar

San Francisco is still interesting especially if you are young and you don’t have to be rich to live here. You just have to do what we did when we were young and that is live in a big house with roommates.

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Bull Hubbard's avatar

Did you also need to avoid winos shitting in the streets and meth heads masturbating in public? Were stores closing because the cops wouldn't bust shoplifters? How often were your cars broken into?

The romance of partying and surviving in an urban hellhole usually fades by age 30.

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Koshmarov's avatar

"The romance of partying and surviving in an urban hellhole usually fades by age 30."

I did this in Detroit before I was 30 and it was fucking awesome. To your point,

...but I could not have afforded New York, San Francisco, or probably even LA at the time.

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El Monstro's avatar

My car has never been broken into. If you avoid the Tenderloin and nearby areas you won’t ever see people shooting up and shutting on the streets.

Both of my kids are in public schools which are very good. The oldest is in Lowell, which is one of the best public schools anywhere. The ride the excellent public transit everywhere which gives them a personal freedom most suburban kids don’t have.

It’s a beautiful and quirky city with many great cultural institutions. You should come visit and see for yourself. It is generally regarded as one of the most livable cities in America. It’s a lot like Amsterdam. If cities aren’t your thing, that’s fine. Good that we have choices!

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Bull Hubbard's avatar

I'm glad you find life in SF amenable.

I suppose the portrait painted by media of all persuasions and the testimony of people leaving should be taken with a grain of salt. Have you read "San Fransicko"? If so, do you dispute the author's conclusions?

Back in '95/'96 I would spend two to three days a month in SF, as a graduate student commuting from San Bernardino to San Jose nearly every weekend, and had a fine time. The drive was always entertaining, whether I took the I-5 or the 101. This was during two of the best years of my life. The salad days. There were no gigantic homeless encampments, no street ugliness beyond a few winos here and there. and I quite enjoyed spending many hours in North Beach. The Financial District Holiday Inn was an excellent hotel.

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El Monstro's avatar

By the way, I came to the Bay Area with nothing but the GI Bill in my pocket in the late 80s and am a millionaire now many times over, which no doubt colors my view of the place. It is one of the places in the world with the best opportunities for success. That's why the ambitious from all over the world streamed into the Bay Area since 2009. Some have left since Covid and we will see how it all shakes out, but cities remake themselves all the time and San Francisco is no different.

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TWC's avatar

How much was a modest place in the Sunset in the late 80s?

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El Monstro's avatar

I have lived here since 1993 and in the Bay Area since 1989. I worked in SOMA in 1995 and there were definitely homeless in SOMA at the time. I found an article in The Chronicle that says 142 homeless died in SF in 1995, mostly of drug overdoses and mostly in the Tenderloin (TL) and SOMA. Nothing much has changed except the number dying is about 6 times that now. Fentanyl is much more hazardous than meth or heroin.

Schellenberger is an interesting guy but makes the untenable claim that high rents have nothing to do with homelessness. He claims it is all due to drug use. West Virginia has the highest rate of opioid abuse in the nation but almost no homelessness. It is also one of the states with the cheapest housing. Liberal policies have indeed led to a surge in homelessness in California, but it is not the permissive attitude towards drug use, it the inability to build enough housing. NIMBYs block new construction at every turn.

Most people who are homeless in a given year are not drug addicts, they are people who are down in their luck for one reason or another, sleeping in their car or on a friends couch. Many of them have jobs but since it is hard to pull together a deposit end up struggling until they get back on their feet. At one point in my life I was one of those people. Another large percentage are mentally ill. Now there are more young healthy (and scary) drug addicted men on the streets that before and they are visible and often doing petty crime to support their habit. But Schellenberger's claim that this all the homeless are drug addicted is just false. People are homeless because they can't afford rent and San Francisco every year houses thousands of formerly homeless in supportive housing. Does this help them kick opioid abuse? Probably not, but it gets them off the streets and helps keep them alive until they can get treatment, which there isn't enough of.

There are indeed more visible homeless than there was 30 years ago, but it's been about the same for a long while, in spite of San Francisco building more affordable housing in this time. The homeless continue to be concentrated in the area around the Tenderloin, including SOMA and parts of The Mission. The Tenderloin is in the city center and so tourists are far more likely to see homeless here than in most cities. All the West Coast cities have a booming homeless population.

San Francisco has changed a lot since 1995 and mostly for the better. It has become a center for technology, creating dozens of technology companies and attracting bright and ambitious people from all over the world. Median household income has more than doubled and increased much more than the rest of the state or nation. But since we haven't built enough housing, many of the poor and working class have been pushed out. We have rent control, which slows the displacement but cannot stop the inevitable. A positive side of this is that our Asian population has rocketed upward and the public schools have improved and are mostly quite good. White people won't send their kids to them but never have, at least since the schools were desegregated. People forget that in the 60s, 70s and 80s the population declined as White Flight led to the abandonment of cities nationwide including here. The reason you had cheap rent in the 90s was because the population was still about the same as it was in 1970.

But when I lived in Noe Valley for 15 years I never saw homeless there. Almost all of the neighborhoods in San Francisco don't see homeless. I can name a list if you like but they include everything west of Twin Peaks, the wealthier areas in the center, and on the north side of the city. Wealthy people with resources wouldn't live here if it was as Schellenberger describes it. The cities libraries, parks and recreation are greatly expanded from the 90s. The city is wealthy and has a large and perhaps bloated budget to afford lots of nice things.

The biggest change since the 90s is public safety. The murder rate is 1/3 what it was in the early 90s. This mirrored trends nationwide but violent crime came down even more in SF than generally, probably due to the gentrification. Property crime however has remained high, especially auto break ins. People argue why but there are probably many reasons, number one being wealth disparity. The criminal gangs who steal catalytic converters and break into tourists cars aren't homeless. They are well organized and drive nice cars.

The quality of life is great for the vast majority of residents. Covid has hit San Francisco hard, but we are recovering well. I went out last night and the neighborhood restaurants and bars were packed as the usually are on a Friday night again. Don't believe me? Go look at the many publications who rate cities on their quality of life, San Francisco always comes up near the top. Come visit again and spend some time in the neighborhoods. Don't leave anything in your car though.

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Bull Hubbard's avatar

Well, that's a very good case for the reality of SF conditions, and I totally agree with you about the cost of housing contributing to the homeless population, especially in SF where rents are outrageously high because everyone still wants to live there despite its bad recent PR..

The fact is, the cost of living in SF and CA in general makes even those making, say, 40K a year live paycheck-to-paycheck as I did in my early days as a newly credentialed academic-at-large in southern CA.

Anyway, I'm glad to hear SF is still amenable to normal people with sufficient $. Maybe I'll visit again if I ever find myself on the left coast.

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El Monstro's avatar

Yes I have worked in tech for 30 years and now have a lot of money. Enough to easily afford it here now. I would have moved away a long time ago if that wasn't so.

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Koshmarov's avatar

"You just have to do what we did when we were young and that is live in a big house with roommates."

This is something like my particular idea of Hell, as according to Sartre and Charlie Brooker's DEAD SET, but I sincerely do thank you for the response. I have found that roommates are not too good about cleaning the bathroom and the refrigerator. As HST put it, "Nobody washes a rental car."

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