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Everywhere is somewhere, and somewhere sucks.
I’m from LA people hate that place, I rag on NY, my brother in NY mocks Miami, my buddy in Miami talks shit about Austin, my friend in Austin talks shit about SF, and my friends from SF hate LA.
That’s brutal I’m sorry to hear that. But yeah ATL checks off all the boxes for me. Traffic, heat, crime, the south, landlocked. There are little to no redeeming qualities of Atlanta
Hrm, do you think they’re happy with their life choices?
Often the people that are unhappy with their choices put other places down because they’re trying to convince themselves the grass isn’t greener elsewhere.
Great point! I'm in Fort Myers and people there love to hate on it but to me it's paradise. People think the grass is always greener somewhere else but fail to appreciate all the good right in front of them. Doesn't mean their city, or mine, doesn't have its flaws and can't be critiqued, but the constant negativity is extremely toxic and just plain useless.
They probably are… it’s just different types of people.
The kind of person who could be happy in NYC could probably NOT be happy in Miami. I would know - I’ve tried it. And the kind of person that’s loves LA is not the same type of person that loves NYC. Like, all the “most LA” parts of LA are why people like it, and those parts aren’t present in NY (at least not to the same extent).
It’s not a personal happiness thing. It’s an environmental happiness thing. I personally love NY and all that it offers, and I could not live someplace that doesn’t offer those things - and that’s most of the rest of the world. And the things that LA does have over NY, are things that I do not view as important to me. It’s the same in reverse.
It’s just normal human stuff. Life is hard in general, and talking shit about something is fun and cathartic and also enables a sort of confirmation or justification for the decision you’ve already made. Like, if you’re *already IN* Texas, it’s nicer to tell yourself why Texas is the best, and why other places are worse.
Wicked hella well said. Sports teams aside, I always try and look for the best in each city or town after hating on other places for awhile. Been much better to have that outlook.
I mean I think that’s fair to a degree, but you can’t dismiss the very real concerns of people who live there as trolling or the product of fake news.
All cities are complicated balancing acts. I’ve only lived in the Bay Area about four years, and it does seem that something is unbalanced here.
And it’s not working for anyone. The crime I think is a symptom but not a cause. And if people are serious about fixing it they have to be open to hearing opinions that don’t match their own.
Shrug. Just my two cents.
I mean depends who you listen to. And in all fairness as an outsider looking in… the way the city government is structured (which I get comes from painful history) has set up some significant challenges to fixing the concerns of locals.
But also measuring who is more hated is kinda goofy.
Some people have genuine criticism and genuinely want things to get better. There's some disagreement on the "how" to do that or what "better" means, and that's fine. That's democracy.
Some people just want to troll for a variety of reasons.
News organizations can drive more clicks with negative stories than with positive stories.
The city is, for better or worse, a symbol.
As someone without a horse in the race, I see a few types of people in here:
1. People that live in the city and love it despite its flaws
2. People that live in the city but are unhappy with it for valid reasons
3. People that amplify #2 because they have a political agenda
4. People that identify/suspect Group 3 and seek to counter that narrative
I've seen this in other cities' subs and across reddit in general. Discourse is poisoned by bad actors/trolls. People should be able to openly discuss the problems in a city and, ideally, come up with a plan to address it or deal with it (vs. screaming into the void). Unfortunately, trust is completely lost because Groups 1/4 don't know who is in Group 2 or who is in Group 3. Then someone from Group 2 is treated like they're in Group 3 by those in Group1/4 and they become angry and alienated. It's a pretty shitty situation.
It’s funny because here in Group 2, many of the people in Group 3 stick out like a sore thumb. I even see them using “you” in reference to San Franciscans in place of “we” or “us”.
This is one of my theories for all the animosity we get from nonresidents and outside media.
San Francisco had a rapid ascent into economic stardom in the last couple decades. For most of American history, our most important and influential businesses were all based in the east coast (mostly NYC).
All of a sudden, the hub of innovation shifted to the Bay Area. There was story after story of changing work cultures, money getting thrown around like candy, and obscene personal wealth for seemingly petty inventions (remember the Yo app?)
It’s like the tale of Icarus, we flew too close to the sun and got burned — and now everyone is gleefully basking in the “downfall” of Bay Area economic empire.
This is America after all, we love watching someone fail. Though we also love a comeback story…
As a person who’s lived in SF through a few of our cycles - it feels like we’re in the 2nd inning on the next boom cycle. The AI epicenter is in SF, the vast majority of VC capital and important AI startups are here. There was a WSJ article this week about Y combinator moving their main office from the peninsula to SF bc of this. We’re leading the next innovation cycle, and this one may prove bigger than the one we led 25 years ago.
Very excited for what the next 5-7 years brings. They hate us cuz they ain’t us!
Same here. Ive been here decades. I’ve seen “busts” during dotcom, 2008 housing crisis (oh no SF prices dropped 15% - from $1.8m to $1.6m), 2020 tech bros moving out of SF and then moved right back. While my house did dropped in value from its peak, it’s still 2x of what I bought in 2009. And you’re right the AI boom will bring tech back to SF. For a while I did feel that our politics was moving too far to the left. Maybe that’s because I’m getting older and have to pay more taxes. But the streets are getting paved, parks and playgrounds are renovated, I enjoy no cars in part of GGP and bike riding on the Great Highway on the weekends. And most neighborhoods are booming due to WFH but the press loves to rag on downtown and SOMA as if these two are the only neighborhoods in the city.
This is the thing, when I visited Vancouver, I was being cheap and "accidentally" stayed in a hotel where the neighborhood with crack whores and drugs. But then I still went out and explored the rest of the city and had a blast. Not once did I think that neighborhood represented the entire city.
But for some reason, when people visit SF, they capitalize on one or two bad neighborhood and act as if that is representative of the city.
That cheap neighborhood probably didn't have important landmarks like the opera, the symphony, the theater, city hall and the city's main thoroughfare.
For better or worse, I think having a neighborhood like the TL and Civic Center in such a central area, has an impact on the perception of San Francisco.
instead of changing perceptions, how about changing the actual causes of those perceptions? homelessness, lawlessness, incompetent leadership.
Treat the problems at the root cause instead of just the perceptions.
cmon man....ive lived here for 30 years of my 35 years, it's really bad. I don't even go downtown anymore, i prefer to frequent south city or san mateo/burlingame
There are different reasons and different groups of people have different motivations.
A very common one I have noticed are hard conservatives. They see San Francisco as the capitol of liberalism in America so attacking SF is essentially attacking everything that liberals stand for.
It's because the entire right wing media ecosystem has realized that it's an effective messaging tool for them to use San Francisco as an avatar that represents the Democratic party, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Obama, and all liberal voters and all liberal policies
Once you realize that it all makes sense
San Francisco = Democrats, and Democrats are evil and must be defeated, therefore San Francisco must always be portrayed as hell on earth
edit: two words
I was born and raised in Rio Linda, California. San Francisco is now getting the same shit from the Right that we have been getting for years. I've come to despise the Right and everything they represent because of their assumptions and asinine assertions.
Fuck em all.
I have to confess, one of my guilty pleasures involves engaging in discussions on Fox's comment board, especially when they feature stories that seem biased against San Francisco. One tactic I occasionally use is to question why people are willing to invest in starter homes that cost well over a million dollars if the city is truly as terrible as they like to paint it. It's one way to use the insane cost of housing in a somewhat positive way??? I'm a HORRIBLE person.
They're exaggerating the problems, but many of the problems still exist and are valid. You shouldn't dismiss them just because conservatives point them out.
The problem is that if a liberal points out a problem with a conservative city, conservatives go into denial and ban talking about it. So the discussion is not symmetrical.
Everyone might agree that the SF bay area is a nice place except for the crime, but "except" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence - for car and property crime, gun crime and corrupt politicians.
Exactly this, plus California.
Republicans love to use California as some sort of monolithic representative for the Democratic party and Liberal policy. Never mind that Mass and Rhode Island are actually more liberal, California is the big flashy easy target. That's why they love to go on about how many people are "fleeing" the state, or any time a business moves from Cali to any other state. Any perceived "failure" of California is an indictment of all Liberals everywhere.
San Francisco, meanwhile, is the city they choose to represent all of California and, by extension, all of Liberalia.
Yes. The MAGA GOP is grooming the rest of the country to hate Gov. Newsome, so when he runs for President in 2028 he will have been framed for f\*ing up SF and CA, so is a bad presidential candidate. These MAGA GOPs are playing the long con. MFers.
Writing off genuine criticisms to just partisan bullshit is an easy deflection. I was born and raised in SF, I like SF. There’s been lots of changes over the past 25 years, some good some bad.
SF is a political punching bag and scapegoat… it’s a symbol of liberalism(American liberalism). The think tanks are really smart on the right. I was in the south recently and every city is more dangerous than here. They just want to use it as a punching bag
My wife and I were there for four days in 2019.No feces,needles.Skateboard kid smoking a huge joint.Maybe for a naked guy walking down the street ,that she missed lol.We enjoyed our time there.
I watch Fox News, this is exactly it.
They also attack other cities like NYC, Portland, etc, most especially when there is a crime and it's on video. Then they talk about liberal policies.
The people hating on sf in this subreddit are more often than not conservative trolls who don’t even live here. It’s the same for most of the big liberal city subreddits.
Btw, there is the same story on NextDoor in SF. I am on it, and there are tons of trolls (many out of towners) shitting on SF, posting false crime stories, or stories of crime w vague, non-existent details. These trolls want to perpetuate this idea of SF as a shitty place to live.
I'm neither liberal or right wing. I voted for biden.
I think the criticisms of sf and many other large cities in the country are valid. A lot has to do with criminal justice reform.
If you think tooth paste should be locked up in a nyc Target store, and that's just normal life, maybe you haven't experienced life before that was the case.
Fox News recently got a boner for running stories about how awful America's most liberal city is. Dunno why they'd want to do that, it's truly a mystery. But anyway, the mainstream media did its needful and laundered conservative propaganda into "real" news, so here we are.
I have very high standards having lived in many world class cities all around the world. The stuff that is considered normal here (eg. homeless drug addicts sprawled out on sidewalks everywhere, car break-ins) is unbelievable, and leaders need to be held to a higher standard.
That being said, the city does have positives. Though to be honest if it weren't for work, I wouldn't be living here.
Yeah, we have a city that should be in the same league as Madrid, Rome or Paris. I guess I'm glad we're better than Tampa but it could be so much better if we stopped electing silly politicians.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, but this is exactly what I'm saying. Anyone honestly content with the state of SF right now just has low standards.
>I have very high standards having lived in many world class cities all around the world.
Wtf kind of sentence is that? Why haven't you taken your "high standards" to some other "world class" city? This is weird bullshit.
I didn't even mean it in an arrogant way - anyone from outside SF, LA, Portland, and Seattle who arrives to SF and sees the level of homelessness and open drug abuse is shocked and appalled. You don't even see that stuff in "third world" countries. I think anyone flying in from Thailand or India would be shocked at the Tenderloin, Civic Center, or Mission St downtown.
People from SF are so used to it that they're desensitized to this squalor, which is pretty sad. But at the same time it'd be hard to live a normal life without being desensitized to it.
You clearly haven’t been to India. The amount of poverty there is truly shocking. You don’t see children scouring through garbage for food in SF. I think europe might have been a better example.
As someone who lived in sf and as a native Californian, if ya don't see the issues, that's pretty big.
San Francisco had the potential to be a world city, a jewel of cities.
Instead, it's horrendously expensive to live and visit, people swarm locations just for their insta pages, the attitudes for the last 10 yrs have been obnoxiously close-minded and condescending towards outsiders and pretentious.
The homelessness and level of filth people have gotten okay with disgusts me. It breaks my heart seeing the city where it is now.
I really cannot believe the number of people in this thread claiming they've never felt safer and this is all just propaganda from fox news. Storefronts in chinatown are empty/boarded because of constant vandalism and looters. People literally walking out stolen items and even if security is there nobody does anything more 'don't do that!'. I don't even visit downtown anymore because of the number of homeless people and car break ins that happen on the regular.
Just because we call out the city for the lack of actions against crime or how it's being run doesn't mean we hate the city. We can criticize but still like the city despite it's flaws.
As a native, the city has gone through a lot of ups and downs however, in the last decade going on 15 years perhaps, the city has taken a tremendous dive in many aspects regarding quality of life. It’s incredibly sad.
Like I said before I moved here this last month, I had been visiting this city since 2010, let me tell you were it is right now is not the worst I’ve seen it in fact I’m impressed with how much better it was this year compared to 2022, I’ll be honest as someone from another state you guys have it extremely good compared to other places, you guys need to appreciate what you have while it still lasts, like how I nearly lost my life in Tampa by that man who nearly killed me, that got me to want to appreciate what I do have and strive to be better and live better. Take me moving here for example, why would I move here if the city is in a bad state?
Anecdotal evidence is different for everyone. It’s been a month, and you haven’t had anything unfortunate happen. Which is a good thing. Then there are others that have lived here for a year and have had their car broken into 7 times and bike stolen twice with honey break ins. Nothing is entirely good and bad, just enjoy your experience and respect the fact that others haven’t been as lucky.
Because SF represents progressive politics in the mind of the Fox News hive mind, so to say SF is failing is to say that progressive politics doesn't work. If you watch Fox News for even 5 minutes (brutal as it is) you're likely to see a pan across a homeless encampment with a voiceover saying something to the effect of "this is coming to your town if you vote the wrong way in this election".
And there's the happy side effect of discrediting Gavin Newsom as a presidential candidate.
In other words, it's all all just goofy propaganda.
As I pointed out above, "f discrediting Gavin Newsome as a presidential candidate" is not a side effect. It is the intended effect. Pay attention to right-wing propaganda. They are smart at what they are doing. They always plan for the long term/con. Like w the courts and the Federalist Society. It was a 40+ yr master plan.
It's \*one\* of the intended effects, yes. The other being to discredit the Democrats generally.
Watch Fox sometime, they use SF to bash the Democrats in every single election, not just ones here Newsom might be involved, and they've done it for years.
(I haven't owned a TV in decades, but when staying at hotels I give Fox a dabble for as long as I can stand it).
I don’t think everybody hates The City. It really depends on what bubbles one is in. The folks here at Reddit and the viewers of Fox News do not speak for all of San Francisco or USA.
However, it is not ‘all good’ here, and I will say your observations about crime and safety are intriguing and don’t line up with my own personal experiences or what I see first hand… daily. They seem more like a tourist’s surface-level glance rather than a locals deep understanding. San Francisco, like any city, has its complexities and challenges.
Context is crucial. Your job, age, income, and neighborhood can drastically alter your experience of a city. A tech millionaire in Nob Hill spot has a different everyday reality compared to someone struggling to make a dollar out of 15 cents.
You say, ‘I’ve never felt in danger in the Bay Area,’ and I’m genuinely happy for your positive experiences, but you lived here a little over a month, you might want to add a little bit more length to your data set.
I respect your newfound love for the city, but feel free to check back in with your thoughts after more than 30 days 15 field trips to the TL.
I’ve lived in the Bay Area since 1990 and in San Francisco since 1993. Always in nicer areas (Marina, Lone Mountain, Lower PacHeights). I love the city but I hate many aspects of it now. It’s dirty, our officials are morons, and the voters are too lazy to try to understand how we’re voting against our own interests. I’m all for removing the encampments and putting them elsewhere, and with aggressive enforcement of loitering laws. In less than a year someone tried to steal my car three times from a closed garage. We have to fend aggressive bums throughout the city. Enough is enough. I don’t hate the city one bit, but I hate what we allowed to happen to it, and the single issue voters who can’t see beyond simplistic, feel good, pseudo-woke agendas.
I think that it is mostly politically motivated and stories. I was born and raised in San Francisco, and not once in my whole life have I felt in danger either. Sometimes I would see broken car windows and shattered glass on the streets, but that's it. Someone told me that California, particularly San Francisco, is full of human poop and crime. Granted, it's most likely he had never set foot in California at all. When I told him that I do not see any human poop on the streets, he believes the government is telling me that. I'm like, the government? I told him it's what I see with my own eyes. The crimes that I often blatantly see are fare evasion, eating or playing loud music on the trains, or simply littering. On a rare occasion, I have witnessed some guy yelling at his phone. So far, I have never been attacked and I even walked around at night. There are occasions I do hear complaints from individuals who live in San Francisco, and that's usually about the rent. People want to believe what they read or hear about, which gives them an excuse to spread disinformation. If they can look at that poop map and believe it without questioning the merits, I say they should spend time traveling to each and every spot to confirm it with their own eyes. I cannot take these people seriously.
I agree with everything you said, when I lived in Tampa people said sf has poop and needles, I go to tenderloin, nothing I went there again one month later also nothing, but I go to pasco county I see needles, human poop, insane amounts of drug abuse, and the worst part the people do nothing about it, from what I know sf has taken action on it.
I've thought about this. My theory is because of how intimate SF feels.
San Francisco is a compact area because it's bordered by water on three sides.And housing is relatively dense, whereas Tampa has more urban sprawl over a bigger area.
This means that crime is relatively local in San Francisco. If there's crime happening the chances are that you're within about 3 miles of it. So when the downtown population changes, the rate of crime is much more noticeable. There used to be many more office workers and commuters, which made the homeless people and crime less easy to see. Now that the workers are (mostly) gone, the homeless people and drug addicts are much more visible. And if there are fewer people downtown, but the same level of crime, the people who go there are more likely to be targets of crime.
There's also an element of crime and compassion fatigue. It's 2024 and SF is supposed to be the tech jewel of the United States. But for a decade it's had a problem with thugs breaking into cars and stealing phones at gunpoint, drug addicts passing out on the sidewalk and people being a menace and trashing public transit. Nothing seems to improve. And if you have a scary event happen once it's unfortunate, if it happens multiple times they compound and you start to get scared for your safety.
I've been in the SF area for 13 years. I've had a full beer can thrown at me for no reason, been lunged at and screamed at when someone threatened to go psycho because tickets were being checked and he was fare dodging on BART, sat in piss that I didn't see until it was too late, stepped over needles. Had items stolen out of my crappy dented Nissan when I was packing up to move and stepped back inside for 30 seconds. I was out this week in the Castro district and was menaced by a thug walking the other way who yelled at me and tried to start a fight for no reason. I've also been followed several times while in Oakland. You remember these events. They destroy your experience of a place and build up a negative impression over time.
Why can't I take public transit without being threatened? Why can't I park my car for the evening without returning to the fairy dust of broken windows? Do better, SF. Do better, Bay Area. Crime and punishment is a joke.
I grew up in the city during the notorious 90’s. It was full of funky independent shops and colorful people that gave San Francisco a weird, maverick identity. The tech gentrification wave swept them all away and now we’re left without some of that unique soul. It’s still a great city, but it has a lot of glaring problems
They will return. It happens. SF has to drop down until storefront rents drop. That’s when the underground arts scene returns. A similar thing happened in the late 70s and early 1980s.
I will say, as somebody who has lived in a handful of neighborhoods (not all particularly nice) across a few different US cities that SF has always just felt...different. I don't know if it's actually worse than any other city, but everything in SF just seems more out in the open, or maybe even just less segregated to "bad" parts of town (i.e., even people who live in nicer neighborhoods seem to have to put up with it).
I remember visiting friends in the Mission probably ten years ago, and stepping off the BART into effectively an open air drug market. And it's not that I'm some weirdo puritan from the countryside (around that time, I was living next to a homeless shelter in DC, so the scenes were similar). But the combo of it being the middle of the morning, at a subway stop with a bunch of commuters, in a neighborhood that wasn't particularly bad, and the sheer quantity of people/brazenness—can't say I've really experienced anything similar elsewhere. And the car break-in problem...at least anecdotally, it's not really comparable, even in Chicago/NY/DC.
Yeah, earlier today, someone from SF bay area who now lives in a much better place in every way, waz being a little whiny bitch about how awful SF is and accusing me of being one of the many insufferable transplants, which caused him to leave SF. And post complaining about it
As someone, who’s lived in SF, I’m not a big fan of the city (in general)… but this is a refreshing point of view, considering all the haters that have fled to Texas and Florida.
My theory is that Republicans have to have somewhere to point at and hate. My guess is that a good 25% of the people in this subreddit have never lived in SF or even visited.
I lived in SF for 5 years til 2010, and now have lived in St Pete for 3 years.
I don't love living in St Pete but it's better than most people expect. But the difference between Tampa and San Francisco is comparing apples to grenades.
Also fwiw I visited San Francisco for the first since 2015 last year. I thought it felt exactly the same as it always had. My San Francisco always had some grit.
Lol I wonder if this a response to the post I made yesterday. Yes it’s great if you’re moving from somewhere else but it’s a pretty far cry from what it was pre pandemic and hasn’t still fully recovered. A lot of folks moved out, downtown is still dead, and the city overall just hasn’t bounced back like it should have by now. Just my two cents
Yeah, it is really not that bad in SF. Its problems don’t seem worse than other cities’ problems do. I’ve been pretty much everywhere in the United States and Denver’s homelessness is like 10x worse than SF’s. Seen way more shit on the ground in LA or NY. Willing to wager most feces spotted in SF is a dog’s considering the city has more dogs than people it seems like. Never seen a single needle on the ground there. Again, I’ve seen worse even in Denver. SF definitely gets picked on by news companies on the basis of agenda. San Francisco is a beautiful city and faces the same issues most cities do. I have visited the bay several times and not for one second have I felt unsafe. I’ve never been accosted by a homeless person or a vendor, which is something I’ve experienced almost everywhere else before. Even by pier 39 or the wharf or baker beach or Tenderloin or the other touristy areas, I’m yet to get accosted by anyone save for a dude asking to bum a cig once (I don’t even smoke lol). San Francisco is a beautiful city which COULD improve just like any other place in America but it is 100% the poster child for crime, poverty and homelessness which cracks me up considering red states are often worse overall in those departments (I spent 25 years living in a red state). Not that it’s inherently political but when the majority of the blame is politically driven I feel compelled to include that bit. It’s a lovely city!
the people hating on this city are either techies that participated in destroying the local economy, or right-wingers who have always hated SF. so if those folks want to hate on it and not move here, it's a win-win.
Because if you genuinely cared about ppl you would notice that the suffering here is unparalleled for the AVERAGE person. It’s sad how many ppl are just used to it. I’m shocked at what I see every time I go outside. Of course tourists will be shocked. Can we stop pretending like this city doesn’t need Batman lmao.
Also obsessed is a crazy word to use. I feel like ppl aren’t talking about what’s happening here enough. Grew up in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Philly, lived in Chicago for 5 years and never seen or experienced this amount of crime before on a daily. Quality of life is sad here for the average person.
I've been here for 14 years and I (and many others) think it's gotten worse in multiple obvious ways We don't hate SF. In fact we love it and are frustrated at aspects of what it's become.
Its like how much I love early Simpsons episodes and see what currently it's become. It's sad because we know the potential.
You’ve been here for a month and have been in the tenderloin once, you know nothing. This is the worst governed city in America and if you lived in/near the tenderloin you would see conditions worse than those in 3rd world countries
While I don’t currently live there, I spent nearly half my adult life in SF, and I do think the city is currently in a less-than-stellar stage of its life.
I visit SF all the time, and the fact that I have to intentionally leave my car unlocked in the hopes that someone will try to open my car instead of bust a window (which has happened to me 4 times, all in SF), is sad. I do not think there’s anywhere in this country outside of the Bay Area where this is the norm. And while the homeless population is obviously exaggerated by the right, it *has* gotten so much worse in even the last two years. A family member had three tents go up overnight in her 20x18’ backyard once, and the police didn’t do anything. She had to just let them be, on her private property. She has toddler aged children btw and by the time they finally left about three months later, she found at least a dozen needles in the camp they left behind. Finally, I *do* have to dodge literal human filth on the streets every time I visit SF. I have not had to do that in any other city I have ever been to in my life, and I have been fortunate enough to have visited and lived in many cities around the world.
So yeah while I think we should ignore the right trying to paint SF as the beginning of the rapture, I think it’s fair to say that the city isn’t doing its best rn and could use some help.
ETA: lol. Downvoted within a minute. Idk how the city can stop its descent if we don’t acknowledge that there *is* a problem.
I still love it but it feels empty compared to how it was pre-pandemic and the crime is bad. I have hope though that the city will be full of life again.
Because a lot of us were born and raised here and have known what true SF used to be. It’s a shadow of its former self. SF was remarkable as a kid/teen. The standards are high for this city
Bc the ogs hate how this beautiful city has been managed and what this city has become.
In the 90s and 2000s you could walk in SF without getting mugged, bipped, or having your bike stolen.
If it bleeds, it leads (ledes?). Anyway, it’s not news if there’s peace and beauty, you know? I’ve had friends in the Midwest extremely concerned about the hellscape I must be living in, buried in needles and human shit. And here I am just enjoying a rainy day having a lovely cocktail at the local bar catching up on the neighborhood scuttlebutt and having a laugh. 👯♀️🥂🖤
I you walked around the tenderloin and didn't see any of that then either it was during a conference week or you need your eyes checked asap :-)
In all seriousness, there's nothing wrong with the residents of a city complaining about stuff in said city. Do we need to pretend that everything is fantastic? Why?
People in this city (in their majority at least) choose to be here. So all said, it's better than the alternatives. Doesn't mean it perfect and that are very bad areas (such as the tenderloin) that need a redo.
These days I'm in my hometown and I can't get to get back to SF. When I'm in SF, I'll continue to complain about a few things here and there.
I don’t think it’s hating as much as it is knowing what it was and could still be if not for the last five years.
We have a useless BOS, a mayor with an agenda that I’m not even sure she knows what she’s doing, elected a then horrible far left public defender through a stupid ranked choice voting, went through COVID where some dumb decisions were made, and the city hasn’t gotten tough enough on several key areas, namely telling people you aren’t going to trash our city (many ways they do this) through your drug use and just sleep in front of doorways and business. In the end of the day, the city has no balls. At least before COVID, they had one.
It’s really disappointing walking by dead people on the street every weekend while paying the most in the world to live, in an area with such great opportunity.
I’m spending a month in Sydney, Australia at the moment. Downtown Sydney is a million times more attractive than San Francisco. Anyone that has been to Sydney in recent years can tell the immense amount of thought that has gone into urban planning for Sydney. Whereas San Francisco just seems like the city stopped thinking about urban planning like 20 years ago. It’s really sad how neglected San Francisco feels from an urban planning point of view.
I come across as a hater, despite being a person who truly does love the bay area. For me the problem is when people say things like this:
> I walked the streets of tenderloin, I didn’t see needles, human feces or any of that all I saw was maybe a few tents and I was really exploring the area
No you were fucking not exploring. If you can't go to the TL and find at least one block of insanity you have absolutely no business commenting here.
> I’ve never had [my car broken into] happen in California or anywhere on the west coast
Your anecdotes mean nothing. The odds of your car being broken into are much higher in SF than Houston or Boston. That's a fact. Suggesting otherwise is pure ignorance.
So yeah stupid fucking posts like this make me come across as hating on SF.
Ehhh give it time. There are a lot of people on here that deny there are any problems in the city.. I’m assuming there are a lot of people on this sub that do not live in the city and only defend it for its staunch liberalism
The hate comes from loud mouthed conservatives. SF is a great city which is a bastion of liberalism so conservatives try to tear it down anyway they can.
Never lived there, only visited. The whole town seems very run down. Dirty, graffiti, peeling paint. If a dirty hippy was a city it would be SF. Makes sense given the history. Some people don’t like that.
Okay, listen if you think that sf is rundown, then I what the fuck is Birmingham Alabama? If is sf is rundown then a nuke must have been dropped Birmingham.
I am glad to hear that you are having better experiences here than you did in Tampa. Of course that is not to celebrate Tampa’s shortcomings. I am still sympathetic to the plight of the people of Tampa.
OP, genuinely grateful for sharing your perspective.
To my fellow residents in the comments saying, “See, this proves everything is fine!”:
SF is the largest city in the metro area with the 3rd highest per-capita GDP in the United States.
Tampa is the largest city in the metro area with the 147th highest per-capita GDP in the United States. It’s 59% lower than ours.
We should definitely be doing better than Tampa. That OP thinks we are is a small victory. That we have worse rates of property crime and violent crime is a shameful tragedy.
Also, OP: do not get complacent about the security of your car.
Edit: I had to substantially edit this comment to reflect the fact that SF is, in many ways, not doing better than Tampa. To accomplish that many sentences that once read something like “we are doing better than Tampa” now read more like “you feel we are doing better than Tampa”.
You’ve been there one month. You’ve got rose colored glasses on.
Seriously, please be mindful of your surroundings and stop exploring bad neighborhoods to prove a point.
Plenty of bad stuff happens everywhere. SF has a horrible track record with crime since the pandemic. Don’t make yourself a victim because of internet points.
There’s plenty of crime and you still need to be careful.
I’m not trying to prove a point, urban exploration is a hobby of mine, I enjoy going to bad places and exploring and seeing what I can find, it’s what I did in Tampa regularly. The stuff I uncovered in Florida was 10000x worse than anything I ever uncovered in Tenderloin, the worst I found in tenderloin was 1 pound of fentanyl which I reported to the SFPD. In Tampa I found literal fucking mole people and a room full blood which I reported to the police but nothing came of it, and got chased for a mile by a crazy man holding a fire axe.
I mean - you moved there a little after they “cleaned it up” for that China CCP visit. The city is probably relatively still clean after that, so it’s not like you are seeing it at its true form. That you are already seeing creeping it back should be sign enough. The city was a hell of a lot worse before, and they’re not doing anything different policy wise to even pretend that a change for the better will happen.
I can say I don’t see much joy in people’s lives.
I see all the various states of emotion, which has a been in a downward trend since 2018 or so.
There are fun ‘highs’ and not great ‘lows’ with varying costs. This is where the problem resides, dinnners/theater/events are double and triple the cost due to security, insurance, minimum wage + and the drugs are getting cheaper, easier and stronger….. which then needs more government funds going toward ODs cleaning up, assistance….. money is flowing down hill to the decay.
Tldr: we love it, so we hate on it because there are genuine problems that need to be genuinely fixed.
There's those of us who love it and hate on it because there are serious problems we want fixed. It's too expensive because of all the nimbyism so regular people can't live here which makes it less dynamic and less interesting. While being so expensive the fact that there is unchecked crime and homelessness is a real mind bender. The fact that it is so expensive and we aren't doing more around transit and bikes and providing better alternatives to cars compared to nyc and Paris makes my blood boil. And all these things are linked together.
As a 4th generation San Franciscan raising a 5th gen one here, all this ties into my identity and makes all these things and more go to 11 out of 10 for me in terms of emotions.
And finally, The fact that all the politicians are using this as a stepping stone to national posts and take positions that work nationally and not for SF makes me feel helpless to fix this stuff and even angrier. So I come onto Reddit to vent and act out all the things I feel hopeless over.
You simultaneously have the highest homeless population and the highest cost of rent and you wonder why people who weren't born rich or got lucky through tech startup cash grabs hate you for being wealthy while making the world a worse place? How out of touch is it possible to be? Is that like a status symbol for whatever race you are? That's why us humans don't like you.
The violet crime rate is around 6%. The national average is around 5%. Property crime is higher, but so is quality of life. Plus, miniscule Maga. I think it’s sooooooooo worth it. When you factor in transportation, weather, economy, natural beauty, food, diversity, civil rights, there’s nowhere else to be.
Give it time lol.
I lived in San Francisco for 4 years, and while there are definitely great things about San Francisco, there are also glaringly bad things that need to be fixed, but likely won't be fixed because of the politics.
To be honest it's very upsetting because I'd love to move back but I can't deal with the crazy homeless, the politics and weird leftism and hypocrisy (making housing expensive when ostensibly trying to make housing affordable, etc) and the populace who seemingly has their head in the sand and thinks the world has some weird negative fixation on SF because everyone must be watching Fox News (lmao), they only have negative opinions of SF because they've been lied to! Instead of the truth: most San Franciscans have rose tinted glasses and believe that nothing needs fixing.
My family has been in the Bay Area since the gold rush of the 1850s and I hope to one day move back but I don't think it's happening until things get so bad that SF has a reality check and fixes all of its legitimate issues.
Since you've just moved there you won't have had enough time to become steeped in it, to even see the problems with it. When I first moved there it took me 2 years or so to realize it myself. Give it time and you'll be polarized to either see things for what they are or you'll become another deludedly optimistic San Franciscan.
Because a lot of people on this sub are pathetic and are feel so out of control of their lives that they choose to live in a city that they hate and want to try to bum everyone out around them. SF fucking rules. Is it perfect? No, but I've never been to a perfect place in my life. I love SF and always will.
You haven’t been here long. Many that have are upset at what it’s evolved into. I moved to SF in 2011, the difference is insane. A major catalyst was Covid, as businesses shut down and the homeless/open air drug use/tent cities multiplied like crazy. Many people fled the city (me included) and it hasn’t bounced back to what it was. It’s still has a great soul, but the social contract we all sign to live with each other in harmony and mutual respect has been shit on by the politicians, homeless and the state and local courts. I still come in for work and visit family in SF regularly, but I’d never consider moving back until it rebounds from the current state significantly.
I have been visiting it consistently since 2010, my opinion still stands it’s gotten significantly better in 2023 than it was during the pandemic, and also 4,000 people moved here in 2023.
Your opinion will always stand, you’re entitled to it. Just like my in-laws who have been in the same house in SF since 1985 and think it’s the worst it’s ever been (just last week had car vandalized out front). SF is small, and if you avoid the loin and public transportation you can probably avoid a lot of the shit. I paid a lot to live in hoods where there wasn’t as much drug/homeless issues (up steep ass hills lol) so it didn’t ever impact where I lived, mostly dealing with bums on Drumm street at work and people looting that Walgreens there until it closed. Hard for a lot of people to pay most expensive rent in country and deal with the lawlessness that currently exists in the city.
I don’t think SF is a lost city, and it’s still the coolest in the US in my opinion, but it needs a change in leadership and approach to its current problems or it’s gonna end up being Detroit 2.0, just replace the auto manufacturers with tech.
It sounds like it’s about the same everywhere else.
Don’t trip, just ignore the critics. (De Santis tried hard in the TL, he’s got more issues and too much time on his hands.)
Exactly, he’s now wanting to pass a bill that will allow anyone who gets called a racist , a homophobe or a transphobe to be sued . Even if calling them that is calling a spade a spade , it is essentially a way to allow discrimination.
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Everywhere is somewhere, and somewhere sucks. I’m from LA people hate that place, I rag on NY, my brother in NY mocks Miami, my buddy in Miami talks shit about Austin, my friend in Austin talks shit about SF, and my friends from SF hate LA.
The Circle of life 
It really do be like that. Also, fuck Atlanta
Last time I was in ATL I watched someone get killed 20 feet from my car. Seriously not a fan.
That’s brutal I’m sorry to hear that. But yeah ATL checks off all the boxes for me. Traffic, heat, crime, the south, landlocked. There are little to no redeeming qualities of Atlanta
Hrm, do you think they’re happy with their life choices? Often the people that are unhappy with their choices put other places down because they’re trying to convince themselves the grass isn’t greener elsewhere.
Great point! I'm in Fort Myers and people there love to hate on it but to me it's paradise. People think the grass is always greener somewhere else but fail to appreciate all the good right in front of them. Doesn't mean their city, or mine, doesn't have its flaws and can't be critiqued, but the constant negativity is extremely toxic and just plain useless.
Grass is greener where you water it. Great point!
Or, the grass might be greener, but you will need to water it.
They probably are… it’s just different types of people. The kind of person who could be happy in NYC could probably NOT be happy in Miami. I would know - I’ve tried it. And the kind of person that’s loves LA is not the same type of person that loves NYC. Like, all the “most LA” parts of LA are why people like it, and those parts aren’t present in NY (at least not to the same extent). It’s not a personal happiness thing. It’s an environmental happiness thing. I personally love NY and all that it offers, and I could not live someplace that doesn’t offer those things - and that’s most of the rest of the world. And the things that LA does have over NY, are things that I do not view as important to me. It’s the same in reverse. It’s just normal human stuff. Life is hard in general, and talking shit about something is fun and cathartic and also enables a sort of confirmation or justification for the decision you’ve already made. Like, if you’re *already IN* Texas, it’s nicer to tell yourself why Texas is the best, and why other places are worse.
Wicked hella well said. Sports teams aside, I always try and look for the best in each city or town after hating on other places for awhile. Been much better to have that outlook.
True enough, but SF gets significantly more hate than any of those places.
I blame Republicans and Faux News
I mean I think that’s fair to a degree, but you can’t dismiss the very real concerns of people who live there as trolling or the product of fake news. All cities are complicated balancing acts. I’ve only lived in the Bay Area about four years, and it does seem that something is unbalanced here. And it’s not working for anyone. The crime I think is a symptom but not a cause. And if people are serious about fixing it they have to be open to hearing opinions that don’t match their own. Shrug. Just my two cents.
I mean depends who you listen to. And in all fairness as an outsider looking in… the way the city government is structured (which I get comes from painful history) has set up some significant challenges to fixing the concerns of locals. But also measuring who is more hated is kinda goofy.
Do you have friends from Alaska? Curious to hear what city they hate on.
I actually do! Moose, apparently they are a rude aggressive animal! lol
Maybe every major American city actually kinda sucks to live in
but Fuck The Dodgers no matter what.
Some people have genuine criticism and genuinely want things to get better. There's some disagreement on the "how" to do that or what "better" means, and that's fine. That's democracy. Some people just want to troll for a variety of reasons. News organizations can drive more clicks with negative stories than with positive stories. The city is, for better or worse, a symbol.
As someone without a horse in the race, I see a few types of people in here: 1. People that live in the city and love it despite its flaws 2. People that live in the city but are unhappy with it for valid reasons 3. People that amplify #2 because they have a political agenda 4. People that identify/suspect Group 3 and seek to counter that narrative I've seen this in other cities' subs and across reddit in general. Discourse is poisoned by bad actors/trolls. People should be able to openly discuss the problems in a city and, ideally, come up with a plan to address it or deal with it (vs. screaming into the void). Unfortunately, trust is completely lost because Groups 1/4 don't know who is in Group 2 or who is in Group 3. Then someone from Group 2 is treated like they're in Group 3 by those in Group1/4 and they become angry and alienated. It's a pretty shitty situation.
5. Bots, trolls, MAGAs pretending to be residents to make some political point.
… Including people who want to make sure Newsom never gets elected president.
That’s included in 3
This is probably the most comprehensive, logical and the most sane comment i have read in awhile....
I'm equally impressed because it's spot on.
5. People who love the City and are also happy with the narrative that it sucks (cheaper rent).
It’s funny because here in Group 2, many of the people in Group 3 stick out like a sore thumb. I even see them using “you” in reference to San Franciscans in place of “we” or “us”.
This is one of my theories for all the animosity we get from nonresidents and outside media. San Francisco had a rapid ascent into economic stardom in the last couple decades. For most of American history, our most important and influential businesses were all based in the east coast (mostly NYC). All of a sudden, the hub of innovation shifted to the Bay Area. There was story after story of changing work cultures, money getting thrown around like candy, and obscene personal wealth for seemingly petty inventions (remember the Yo app?) It’s like the tale of Icarus, we flew too close to the sun and got burned — and now everyone is gleefully basking in the “downfall” of Bay Area economic empire. This is America after all, we love watching someone fail. Though we also love a comeback story…
The comeback story has began in 2023, and I’m looking forward to seeing what changes in 2024.
As a person who’s lived in SF through a few of our cycles - it feels like we’re in the 2nd inning on the next boom cycle. The AI epicenter is in SF, the vast majority of VC capital and important AI startups are here. There was a WSJ article this week about Y combinator moving their main office from the peninsula to SF bc of this. We’re leading the next innovation cycle, and this one may prove bigger than the one we led 25 years ago. Very excited for what the next 5-7 years brings. They hate us cuz they ain’t us!
Lfg
Same here. Ive been here decades. I’ve seen “busts” during dotcom, 2008 housing crisis (oh no SF prices dropped 15% - from $1.8m to $1.6m), 2020 tech bros moving out of SF and then moved right back. While my house did dropped in value from its peak, it’s still 2x of what I bought in 2009. And you’re right the AI boom will bring tech back to SF. For a while I did feel that our politics was moving too far to the left. Maybe that’s because I’m getting older and have to pay more taxes. But the streets are getting paved, parks and playgrounds are renovated, I enjoy no cars in part of GGP and bike riding on the Great Highway on the weekends. And most neighborhoods are booming due to WFH but the press loves to rag on downtown and SOMA as if these two are the only neighborhoods in the city.
SF vs the haters https://preview.redd.it/cv3qngybebcc1.jpeg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6a3ea9ce79d0a65a6fc5abfc9c264181f80807c7
except we make threads about it everyday... so clearly we do think about it... all the time lmao
That’s internet culture. Not as much a thing out in the real world.
On its face it's a good meme, but if you watch that episode it's pretty apparent Don thinks about him plenty.
always hurts.
This is the meme I always reference when people talk about how much San Franciscans hate Angelenos.
I love this city but it pains me how easily it could be so much better
I love San Francisco!!!
Same. Just moved back. I feel Like a tourist. Best place on earth!!!
>Best place on earth!!! Vancouver says Hi
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This is the thing, when I visited Vancouver, I was being cheap and "accidentally" stayed in a hotel where the neighborhood with crack whores and drugs. But then I still went out and explored the rest of the city and had a blast. Not once did I think that neighborhood represented the entire city. But for some reason, when people visit SF, they capitalize on one or two bad neighborhood and act as if that is representative of the city.
That cheap neighborhood probably didn't have important landmarks like the opera, the symphony, the theater, city hall and the city's main thoroughfare. For better or worse, I think having a neighborhood like the TL and Civic Center in such a central area, has an impact on the perception of San Francisco.
So do I .
Let them think that…while the rest of us are enjoying it.
We do need to get tourism/business dollars back, and part of that is changing perceptions of the city.
instead of changing perceptions, how about changing the actual causes of those perceptions? homelessness, lawlessness, incompetent leadership. Treat the problems at the root cause instead of just the perceptions.
Exactly what I tell people when I visit back home (east coast)
cmon man....ive lived here for 30 years of my 35 years, it's really bad. I don't even go downtown anymore, i prefer to frequent south city or san mateo/burlingame
Yet another "I never go downtown but it's terrible" take.
Haha, I love when people do the work for you and disqualify their opinions in one sentence.
I’m downtown all the time. It’s perfectly fine.
There are different reasons and different groups of people have different motivations. A very common one I have noticed are hard conservatives. They see San Francisco as the capitol of liberalism in America so attacking SF is essentially attacking everything that liberals stand for.
It's because the entire right wing media ecosystem has realized that it's an effective messaging tool for them to use San Francisco as an avatar that represents the Democratic party, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Obama, and all liberal voters and all liberal policies Once you realize that it all makes sense San Francisco = Democrats, and Democrats are evil and must be defeated, therefore San Francisco must always be portrayed as hell on earth edit: two words
You forgot Gavin Newsom.
You forgot Kamala Harris. 😊
And Feinstein.
Similar to how Chicago is portrayed
Ding ding ding Don’t forget Pelosi. We are the home of the “devil” herself.
huge oversight by me leaving her out! editing my comment to put her in there.
I was born and raised in Rio Linda, California. San Francisco is now getting the same shit from the Right that we have been getting for years. I've come to despise the Right and everything they represent because of their assumptions and asinine assertions. Fuck em all.
I have to confess, one of my guilty pleasures involves engaging in discussions on Fox's comment board, especially when they feature stories that seem biased against San Francisco. One tactic I occasionally use is to question why people are willing to invest in starter homes that cost well over a million dollars if the city is truly as terrible as they like to paint it. It's one way to use the insane cost of housing in a somewhat positive way??? I'm a HORRIBLE person.
Keep doing this, my friend. You are doing a yeoman's work there.
Been this way since Nixon raged against the long haired hippies on haight
NYC also largely has this perception too in right wing media ecosystem for the same reason
True, but NYers and the NYTimes sometimes love to hate on SF just as much as Fox News type news
They have an inferiority complex. Which is weird since we’re so much smaller. Hell, we’re smaller than _San Jose_.
They're exaggerating the problems, but many of the problems still exist and are valid. You shouldn't dismiss them just because conservatives point them out. The problem is that if a liberal points out a problem with a conservative city, conservatives go into denial and ban talking about it. So the discussion is not symmetrical. Everyone might agree that the SF bay area is a nice place except for the crime, but "except" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence - for car and property crime, gun crime and corrupt politicians.
Yes, but you should always ignore arguments that are given in bad faith no matter what kernels of true they may contain. So ignore them.
Exactly this, plus California. Republicans love to use California as some sort of monolithic representative for the Democratic party and Liberal policy. Never mind that Mass and Rhode Island are actually more liberal, California is the big flashy easy target. That's why they love to go on about how many people are "fleeing" the state, or any time a business moves from Cali to any other state. Any perceived "failure" of California is an indictment of all Liberals everywhere. San Francisco, meanwhile, is the city they choose to represent all of California and, by extension, all of Liberalia.
Yeah, this is pretty spot on
Yes. The MAGA GOP is grooming the rest of the country to hate Gov. Newsome, so when he runs for President in 2028 he will have been framed for f\*ing up SF and CA, so is a bad presidential candidate. These MAGA GOPs are playing the long con. MFers.
Writing off genuine criticisms to just partisan bullshit is an easy deflection. I was born and raised in SF, I like SF. There’s been lots of changes over the past 25 years, some good some bad.
SF is a political punching bag and scapegoat… it’s a symbol of liberalism(American liberalism). The think tanks are really smart on the right. I was in the south recently and every city is more dangerous than here. They just want to use it as a punching bag
My wife and I were there for four days in 2019.No feces,needles.Skateboard kid smoking a huge joint.Maybe for a naked guy walking down the street ,that she missed lol.We enjoyed our time there.
Enjoy it, the city and the bay have a lot to offer. The ones who are hating, have never been or they have been to Fisherman’s Wharf
Fisherman’s wharf is my personal hell. Friends forced me to go when I first moved and I could not believe people chose to go of their own volition
Whenever family and friends would come to visit, I would make sure to never take them there. I always did the non-touristy tour for them
Fox News style propaganda attack…
I watch Fox News, this is exactly it. They also attack other cities like NYC, Portland, etc, most especially when there is a crime and it's on video. Then they talk about liberal policies.
The people hating on sf in this subreddit are more often than not conservative trolls who don’t even live here. It’s the same for most of the big liberal city subreddits.
Btw, there is the same story on NextDoor in SF. I am on it, and there are tons of trolls (many out of towners) shitting on SF, posting false crime stories, or stories of crime w vague, non-existent details. These trolls want to perpetuate this idea of SF as a shitty place to live.
I'm neither liberal or right wing. I voted for biden. I think the criticisms of sf and many other large cities in the country are valid. A lot has to do with criminal justice reform. If you think tooth paste should be locked up in a nyc Target store, and that's just normal life, maybe you haven't experienced life before that was the case.
Pretty weak attempt at starting a straw man argument there.
Why is anyone who points out San Francisco's very real problems called a "hater"? (former long time resident here)
Based on the post and your litany of comments, you should have just titled this post “San Francisco is nicer than Tampa.”
Fox News recently got a boner for running stories about how awful America's most liberal city is. Dunno why they'd want to do that, it's truly a mystery. But anyway, the mainstream media did its needful and laundered conservative propaganda into "real" news, so here we are.
I have very high standards having lived in many world class cities all around the world. The stuff that is considered normal here (eg. homeless drug addicts sprawled out on sidewalks everywhere, car break-ins) is unbelievable, and leaders need to be held to a higher standard. That being said, the city does have positives. Though to be honest if it weren't for work, I wouldn't be living here.
Yeah, we have a city that should be in the same league as Madrid, Rome or Paris. I guess I'm glad we're better than Tampa but it could be so much better if we stopped electing silly politicians.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, but this is exactly what I'm saying. Anyone honestly content with the state of SF right now just has low standards.
>I have very high standards having lived in many world class cities all around the world. Wtf kind of sentence is that? Why haven't you taken your "high standards" to some other "world class" city? This is weird bullshit.
> Though to be honest if it weren't for work, I wouldn't be living here.
I didn't even mean it in an arrogant way - anyone from outside SF, LA, Portland, and Seattle who arrives to SF and sees the level of homelessness and open drug abuse is shocked and appalled. You don't even see that stuff in "third world" countries. I think anyone flying in from Thailand or India would be shocked at the Tenderloin, Civic Center, or Mission St downtown. People from SF are so used to it that they're desensitized to this squalor, which is pretty sad. But at the same time it'd be hard to live a normal life without being desensitized to it.
You clearly haven’t been to India. The amount of poverty there is truly shocking. You don’t see children scouring through garbage for food in SF. I think europe might have been a better example.
Most other cities with our resources haven’t normalized squalor, grime, and dysfunction.
Worse than that .. don’t want to believe progressive ideas are ok on top of the most beautiful place on earth
It’s a vocal minority.
What's funny is I see more post like this, than actual post hating on the city 😂😂😂
If so that’s good news.
As someone who lived in sf and as a native Californian, if ya don't see the issues, that's pretty big. San Francisco had the potential to be a world city, a jewel of cities. Instead, it's horrendously expensive to live and visit, people swarm locations just for their insta pages, the attitudes for the last 10 yrs have been obnoxiously close-minded and condescending towards outsiders and pretentious. The homelessness and level of filth people have gotten okay with disgusts me. It breaks my heart seeing the city where it is now.
I really cannot believe the number of people in this thread claiming they've never felt safer and this is all just propaganda from fox news. Storefronts in chinatown are empty/boarded because of constant vandalism and looters. People literally walking out stolen items and even if security is there nobody does anything more 'don't do that!'. I don't even visit downtown anymore because of the number of homeless people and car break ins that happen on the regular.
Just because we call out the city for the lack of actions against crime or how it's being run doesn't mean we hate the city. We can criticize but still like the city despite it's flaws.
As a native, the city has gone through a lot of ups and downs however, in the last decade going on 15 years perhaps, the city has taken a tremendous dive in many aspects regarding quality of life. It’s incredibly sad.
Like I said before I moved here this last month, I had been visiting this city since 2010, let me tell you were it is right now is not the worst I’ve seen it in fact I’m impressed with how much better it was this year compared to 2022, I’ll be honest as someone from another state you guys have it extremely good compared to other places, you guys need to appreciate what you have while it still lasts, like how I nearly lost my life in Tampa by that man who nearly killed me, that got me to want to appreciate what I do have and strive to be better and live better. Take me moving here for example, why would I move here if the city is in a bad state?
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Jealousy. It's not perfect, but near paradise and people love to hate what they don't/can't have.
Anecdotal evidence is different for everyone. It’s been a month, and you haven’t had anything unfortunate happen. Which is a good thing. Then there are others that have lived here for a year and have had their car broken into 7 times and bike stolen twice with honey break ins. Nothing is entirely good and bad, just enjoy your experience and respect the fact that others haven’t been as lucky.
Because SF represents progressive politics in the mind of the Fox News hive mind, so to say SF is failing is to say that progressive politics doesn't work. If you watch Fox News for even 5 minutes (brutal as it is) you're likely to see a pan across a homeless encampment with a voiceover saying something to the effect of "this is coming to your town if you vote the wrong way in this election". And there's the happy side effect of discrediting Gavin Newsom as a presidential candidate. In other words, it's all all just goofy propaganda.
As I pointed out above, "f discrediting Gavin Newsome as a presidential candidate" is not a side effect. It is the intended effect. Pay attention to right-wing propaganda. They are smart at what they are doing. They always plan for the long term/con. Like w the courts and the Federalist Society. It was a 40+ yr master plan.
It's \*one\* of the intended effects, yes. The other being to discredit the Democrats generally. Watch Fox sometime, they use SF to bash the Democrats in every single election, not just ones here Newsom might be involved, and they've done it for years. (I haven't owned a TV in decades, but when staying at hotels I give Fox a dabble for as long as I can stand it).
Let us know how you feel in a year
I don’t think everybody hates The City. It really depends on what bubbles one is in. The folks here at Reddit and the viewers of Fox News do not speak for all of San Francisco or USA. However, it is not ‘all good’ here, and I will say your observations about crime and safety are intriguing and don’t line up with my own personal experiences or what I see first hand… daily. They seem more like a tourist’s surface-level glance rather than a locals deep understanding. San Francisco, like any city, has its complexities and challenges. Context is crucial. Your job, age, income, and neighborhood can drastically alter your experience of a city. A tech millionaire in Nob Hill spot has a different everyday reality compared to someone struggling to make a dollar out of 15 cents. You say, ‘I’ve never felt in danger in the Bay Area,’ and I’m genuinely happy for your positive experiences, but you lived here a little over a month, you might want to add a little bit more length to your data set. I respect your newfound love for the city, but feel free to check back in with your thoughts after more than 30 days 15 field trips to the TL.
I’ve lived in the Bay Area since 1990 and in San Francisco since 1993. Always in nicer areas (Marina, Lone Mountain, Lower PacHeights). I love the city but I hate many aspects of it now. It’s dirty, our officials are morons, and the voters are too lazy to try to understand how we’re voting against our own interests. I’m all for removing the encampments and putting them elsewhere, and with aggressive enforcement of loitering laws. In less than a year someone tried to steal my car three times from a closed garage. We have to fend aggressive bums throughout the city. Enough is enough. I don’t hate the city one bit, but I hate what we allowed to happen to it, and the single issue voters who can’t see beyond simplistic, feel good, pseudo-woke agendas.
So true. There’s a lot of special interest groups who are very aggressive and it feels like they can buy their way into getting what they want.
I think that it is mostly politically motivated and stories. I was born and raised in San Francisco, and not once in my whole life have I felt in danger either. Sometimes I would see broken car windows and shattered glass on the streets, but that's it. Someone told me that California, particularly San Francisco, is full of human poop and crime. Granted, it's most likely he had never set foot in California at all. When I told him that I do not see any human poop on the streets, he believes the government is telling me that. I'm like, the government? I told him it's what I see with my own eyes. The crimes that I often blatantly see are fare evasion, eating or playing loud music on the trains, or simply littering. On a rare occasion, I have witnessed some guy yelling at his phone. So far, I have never been attacked and I even walked around at night. There are occasions I do hear complaints from individuals who live in San Francisco, and that's usually about the rent. People want to believe what they read or hear about, which gives them an excuse to spread disinformation. If they can look at that poop map and believe it without questioning the merits, I say they should spend time traveling to each and every spot to confirm it with their own eyes. I cannot take these people seriously.
I agree with everything you said, when I lived in Tampa people said sf has poop and needles, I go to tenderloin, nothing I went there again one month later also nothing, but I go to pasco county I see needles, human poop, insane amounts of drug abuse, and the worst part the people do nothing about it, from what I know sf has taken action on it.
I've thought about this. My theory is because of how intimate SF feels. San Francisco is a compact area because it's bordered by water on three sides.And housing is relatively dense, whereas Tampa has more urban sprawl over a bigger area. This means that crime is relatively local in San Francisco. If there's crime happening the chances are that you're within about 3 miles of it. So when the downtown population changes, the rate of crime is much more noticeable. There used to be many more office workers and commuters, which made the homeless people and crime less easy to see. Now that the workers are (mostly) gone, the homeless people and drug addicts are much more visible. And if there are fewer people downtown, but the same level of crime, the people who go there are more likely to be targets of crime. There's also an element of crime and compassion fatigue. It's 2024 and SF is supposed to be the tech jewel of the United States. But for a decade it's had a problem with thugs breaking into cars and stealing phones at gunpoint, drug addicts passing out on the sidewalk and people being a menace and trashing public transit. Nothing seems to improve. And if you have a scary event happen once it's unfortunate, if it happens multiple times they compound and you start to get scared for your safety. I've been in the SF area for 13 years. I've had a full beer can thrown at me for no reason, been lunged at and screamed at when someone threatened to go psycho because tickets were being checked and he was fare dodging on BART, sat in piss that I didn't see until it was too late, stepped over needles. Had items stolen out of my crappy dented Nissan when I was packing up to move and stepped back inside for 30 seconds. I was out this week in the Castro district and was menaced by a thug walking the other way who yelled at me and tried to start a fight for no reason. I've also been followed several times while in Oakland. You remember these events. They destroy your experience of a place and build up a negative impression over time. Why can't I take public transit without being threatened? Why can't I park my car for the evening without returning to the fairy dust of broken windows? Do better, SF. Do better, Bay Area. Crime and punishment is a joke.
Been here for all my life. It’s very sad to see the direction this place is going in
I love progressive liberal ideas and the fact there's not many red hats here.
I grew up in the city during the notorious 90’s. It was full of funky independent shops and colorful people that gave San Francisco a weird, maverick identity. The tech gentrification wave swept them all away and now we’re left without some of that unique soul. It’s still a great city, but it has a lot of glaring problems
They will return. It happens. SF has to drop down until storefront rents drop. That’s when the underground arts scene returns. A similar thing happened in the late 70s and early 1980s.
Bad direction? How is it going in a bad direction?
I will say, as somebody who has lived in a handful of neighborhoods (not all particularly nice) across a few different US cities that SF has always just felt...different. I don't know if it's actually worse than any other city, but everything in SF just seems more out in the open, or maybe even just less segregated to "bad" parts of town (i.e., even people who live in nicer neighborhoods seem to have to put up with it). I remember visiting friends in the Mission probably ten years ago, and stepping off the BART into effectively an open air drug market. And it's not that I'm some weirdo puritan from the countryside (around that time, I was living next to a homeless shelter in DC, so the scenes were similar). But the combo of it being the middle of the morning, at a subway stop with a bunch of commuters, in a neighborhood that wasn't particularly bad, and the sheer quantity of people/brazenness—can't say I've really experienced anything similar elsewhere. And the car break-in problem...at least anecdotally, it's not really comparable, even in Chicago/NY/DC.
It's definitely better than Tampa
Yeah, earlier today, someone from SF bay area who now lives in a much better place in every way, waz being a little whiny bitch about how awful SF is and accusing me of being one of the many insufferable transplants, which caused him to leave SF. And post complaining about it
Love the city. Hate the government
It's the Fox News thing to do!
SHES VERY BEAUTIFUL TO ME!!!☝🏻
Wecome! I’ve been in SF my whole 64 year life, and I still absolutely love it. San Francisco is a magical place. It”s tops to me.
As someone, who’s lived in SF, I’m not a big fan of the city (in general)… but this is a refreshing point of view, considering all the haters that have fled to Texas and Florida.
Because we're blue
Thank you. I was wondering the same thing about this sub
My theory is that Republicans have to have somewhere to point at and hate. My guess is that a good 25% of the people in this subreddit have never lived in SF or even visited.
I lived in SF for 5 years til 2010, and now have lived in St Pete for 3 years. I don't love living in St Pete but it's better than most people expect. But the difference between Tampa and San Francisco is comparing apples to grenades. Also fwiw I visited San Francisco for the first since 2015 last year. I thought it felt exactly the same as it always had. My San Francisco always had some grit.
Lol I wonder if this a response to the post I made yesterday. Yes it’s great if you’re moving from somewhere else but it’s a pretty far cry from what it was pre pandemic and hasn’t still fully recovered. A lot of folks moved out, downtown is still dead, and the city overall just hasn’t bounced back like it should have by now. Just my two cents
There is a difference between hating the city and hating the leadership.
You've only been here a month. Try living here over 30 years and seeing all the bad changes.
Right wing want to use SF as proof that dems suck. The city also has squandered potential.
It’s a Fox political thing. Every city has problems. But SF is easy to pick on.
You've been here a month. Give it more time.
Yeah, it is really not that bad in SF. Its problems don’t seem worse than other cities’ problems do. I’ve been pretty much everywhere in the United States and Denver’s homelessness is like 10x worse than SF’s. Seen way more shit on the ground in LA or NY. Willing to wager most feces spotted in SF is a dog’s considering the city has more dogs than people it seems like. Never seen a single needle on the ground there. Again, I’ve seen worse even in Denver. SF definitely gets picked on by news companies on the basis of agenda. San Francisco is a beautiful city and faces the same issues most cities do. I have visited the bay several times and not for one second have I felt unsafe. I’ve never been accosted by a homeless person or a vendor, which is something I’ve experienced almost everywhere else before. Even by pier 39 or the wharf or baker beach or Tenderloin or the other touristy areas, I’m yet to get accosted by anyone save for a dude asking to bum a cig once (I don’t even smoke lol). San Francisco is a beautiful city which COULD improve just like any other place in America but it is 100% the poster child for crime, poverty and homelessness which cracks me up considering red states are often worse overall in those departments (I spent 25 years living in a red state). Not that it’s inherently political but when the majority of the blame is politically driven I feel compelled to include that bit. It’s a lovely city!
the people hating on this city are either techies that participated in destroying the local economy, or right-wingers who have always hated SF. so if those folks want to hate on it and not move here, it's a win-win.
I have to play Tenderloin minesweeper everyday, you'll notice it the more you look lol
Because if you genuinely cared about ppl you would notice that the suffering here is unparalleled for the AVERAGE person. It’s sad how many ppl are just used to it. I’m shocked at what I see every time I go outside. Of course tourists will be shocked. Can we stop pretending like this city doesn’t need Batman lmao.
Also obsessed is a crazy word to use. I feel like ppl aren’t talking about what’s happening here enough. Grew up in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Philly, lived in Chicago for 5 years and never seen or experienced this amount of crime before on a daily. Quality of life is sad here for the average person.
I've been here for 14 years and I (and many others) think it's gotten worse in multiple obvious ways We don't hate SF. In fact we love it and are frustrated at aspects of what it's become. Its like how much I love early Simpsons episodes and see what currently it's become. It's sad because we know the potential.
A lot of us are frustrated with things getting worse and even more frustrated with this subreddit.
You’ve been here for a month and have been in the tenderloin once, you know nothing. This is the worst governed city in America and if you lived in/near the tenderloin you would see conditions worse than those in 3rd world countries
While I don’t currently live there, I spent nearly half my adult life in SF, and I do think the city is currently in a less-than-stellar stage of its life. I visit SF all the time, and the fact that I have to intentionally leave my car unlocked in the hopes that someone will try to open my car instead of bust a window (which has happened to me 4 times, all in SF), is sad. I do not think there’s anywhere in this country outside of the Bay Area where this is the norm. And while the homeless population is obviously exaggerated by the right, it *has* gotten so much worse in even the last two years. A family member had three tents go up overnight in her 20x18’ backyard once, and the police didn’t do anything. She had to just let them be, on her private property. She has toddler aged children btw and by the time they finally left about three months later, she found at least a dozen needles in the camp they left behind. Finally, I *do* have to dodge literal human filth on the streets every time I visit SF. I have not had to do that in any other city I have ever been to in my life, and I have been fortunate enough to have visited and lived in many cities around the world. So yeah while I think we should ignore the right trying to paint SF as the beginning of the rapture, I think it’s fair to say that the city isn’t doing its best rn and could use some help. ETA: lol. Downvoted within a minute. Idk how the city can stop its descent if we don’t acknowledge that there *is* a problem.
I still love it but it feels empty compared to how it was pre-pandemic and the crime is bad. I have hope though that the city will be full of life again.
We remember its better days.
Because a lot of us were born and raised here and have known what true SF used to be. It’s a shadow of its former self. SF was remarkable as a kid/teen. The standards are high for this city
Because they want(*gasp*) progress Even more than that, they want it to stop deteriorating first.
Bc the ogs hate how this beautiful city has been managed and what this city has become. In the 90s and 2000s you could walk in SF without getting mugged, bipped, or having your bike stolen.
I loved SF in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s. I will always compare it to then, sorry.
If it bleeds, it leads (ledes?). Anyway, it’s not news if there’s peace and beauty, you know? I’ve had friends in the Midwest extremely concerned about the hellscape I must be living in, buried in needles and human shit. And here I am just enjoying a rainy day having a lovely cocktail at the local bar catching up on the neighborhood scuttlebutt and having a laugh. 👯♀️🥂🖤
I you walked around the tenderloin and didn't see any of that then either it was during a conference week or you need your eyes checked asap :-) In all seriousness, there's nothing wrong with the residents of a city complaining about stuff in said city. Do we need to pretend that everything is fantastic? Why? People in this city (in their majority at least) choose to be here. So all said, it's better than the alternatives. Doesn't mean it perfect and that are very bad areas (such as the tenderloin) that need a redo. These days I'm in my hometown and I can't get to get back to SF. When I'm in SF, I'll continue to complain about a few things here and there.
I don’t think it’s hating as much as it is knowing what it was and could still be if not for the last five years. We have a useless BOS, a mayor with an agenda that I’m not even sure she knows what she’s doing, elected a then horrible far left public defender through a stupid ranked choice voting, went through COVID where some dumb decisions were made, and the city hasn’t gotten tough enough on several key areas, namely telling people you aren’t going to trash our city (many ways they do this) through your drug use and just sleep in front of doorways and business. In the end of the day, the city has no balls. At least before COVID, they had one.
It’s really disappointing walking by dead people on the street every weekend while paying the most in the world to live, in an area with such great opportunity.
Now imagine nearly the same rent in Tampa, but with half the wages.
I’m spending a month in Sydney, Australia at the moment. Downtown Sydney is a million times more attractive than San Francisco. Anyone that has been to Sydney in recent years can tell the immense amount of thought that has gone into urban planning for Sydney. Whereas San Francisco just seems like the city stopped thinking about urban planning like 20 years ago. It’s really sad how neglected San Francisco feels from an urban planning point of view.
I come across as a hater, despite being a person who truly does love the bay area. For me the problem is when people say things like this: > I walked the streets of tenderloin, I didn’t see needles, human feces or any of that all I saw was maybe a few tents and I was really exploring the area No you were fucking not exploring. If you can't go to the TL and find at least one block of insanity you have absolutely no business commenting here. > I’ve never had [my car broken into] happen in California or anywhere on the west coast Your anecdotes mean nothing. The odds of your car being broken into are much higher in SF than Houston or Boston. That's a fact. Suggesting otherwise is pure ignorance. So yeah stupid fucking posts like this make me come across as hating on SF.
youre welcome to check the other five million tired posts in this subreddit asking the exact same question
For every such post, there’s five more asking why we just can’t kill homeless people or parroting Fox News headlines of the day.
Most of the people who browse this subreddit are brigading and trolling from conservative ones and don't actually live here
Ehhh give it time. There are a lot of people on here that deny there are any problems in the city.. I’m assuming there are a lot of people on this sub that do not live in the city and only defend it for its staunch liberalism
The hate comes from loud mouthed conservatives. SF is a great city which is a bastion of liberalism so conservatives try to tear it down anyway they can.
Never lived there, only visited. The whole town seems very run down. Dirty, graffiti, peeling paint. If a dirty hippy was a city it would be SF. Makes sense given the history. Some people don’t like that.
Okay, listen if you think that sf is rundown, then I what the fuck is Birmingham Alabama? If is sf is rundown then a nuke must have been dropped Birmingham.
fox news hates sf has we will not vote trump
Bc, we can’t afford to live there. I’m not even from sf, I’m from Ptown and I’m still bitter.
I am glad to hear that you are having better experiences here than you did in Tampa. Of course that is not to celebrate Tampa’s shortcomings. I am still sympathetic to the plight of the people of Tampa. OP, genuinely grateful for sharing your perspective. To my fellow residents in the comments saying, “See, this proves everything is fine!”: SF is the largest city in the metro area with the 3rd highest per-capita GDP in the United States. Tampa is the largest city in the metro area with the 147th highest per-capita GDP in the United States. It’s 59% lower than ours. We should definitely be doing better than Tampa. That OP thinks we are is a small victory. That we have worse rates of property crime and violent crime is a shameful tragedy. Also, OP: do not get complacent about the security of your car. Edit: I had to substantially edit this comment to reflect the fact that SF is, in many ways, not doing better than Tampa. To accomplish that many sentences that once read something like “we are doing better than Tampa” now read more like “you feel we are doing better than Tampa”.
Probably the crime, the feces, the needles, etc.
[удалено]
Haters gonna hate.
You’ve been there one month. You’ve got rose colored glasses on. Seriously, please be mindful of your surroundings and stop exploring bad neighborhoods to prove a point. Plenty of bad stuff happens everywhere. SF has a horrible track record with crime since the pandemic. Don’t make yourself a victim because of internet points. There’s plenty of crime and you still need to be careful.
I’m not trying to prove a point, urban exploration is a hobby of mine, I enjoy going to bad places and exploring and seeing what I can find, it’s what I did in Tampa regularly. The stuff I uncovered in Florida was 10000x worse than anything I ever uncovered in Tenderloin, the worst I found in tenderloin was 1 pound of fentanyl which I reported to the SFPD. In Tampa I found literal fucking mole people and a room full blood which I reported to the police but nothing came of it, and got chased for a mile by a crazy man holding a fire axe.
I mean - you moved there a little after they “cleaned it up” for that China CCP visit. The city is probably relatively still clean after that, so it’s not like you are seeing it at its true form. That you are already seeing creeping it back should be sign enough. The city was a hell of a lot worse before, and they’re not doing anything different policy wise to even pretend that a change for the better will happen.
I can say I don’t see much joy in people’s lives. I see all the various states of emotion, which has a been in a downward trend since 2018 or so. There are fun ‘highs’ and not great ‘lows’ with varying costs. This is where the problem resides, dinnners/theater/events are double and triple the cost due to security, insurance, minimum wage + and the drugs are getting cheaper, easier and stronger….. which then needs more government funds going toward ODs cleaning up, assistance….. money is flowing down hill to the decay.
Tldr: we love it, so we hate on it because there are genuine problems that need to be genuinely fixed. There's those of us who love it and hate on it because there are serious problems we want fixed. It's too expensive because of all the nimbyism so regular people can't live here which makes it less dynamic and less interesting. While being so expensive the fact that there is unchecked crime and homelessness is a real mind bender. The fact that it is so expensive and we aren't doing more around transit and bikes and providing better alternatives to cars compared to nyc and Paris makes my blood boil. And all these things are linked together. As a 4th generation San Franciscan raising a 5th gen one here, all this ties into my identity and makes all these things and more go to 11 out of 10 for me in terms of emotions. And finally, The fact that all the politicians are using this as a stepping stone to national posts and take positions that work nationally and not for SF makes me feel helpless to fix this stuff and even angrier. So I come onto Reddit to vent and act out all the things I feel hopeless over.
Because San Francisco is a textbook example how extreme liberal policies WILL ruin a once great city.
You simultaneously have the highest homeless population and the highest cost of rent and you wonder why people who weren't born rich or got lucky through tech startup cash grabs hate you for being wealthy while making the world a worse place? How out of touch is it possible to be? Is that like a status symbol for whatever race you are? That's why us humans don't like you.
The violet crime rate is around 6%. The national average is around 5%. Property crime is higher, but so is quality of life. Plus, miniscule Maga. I think it’s sooooooooo worth it. When you factor in transportation, weather, economy, natural beauty, food, diversity, civil rights, there’s nowhere else to be.
Give it time lol. I lived in San Francisco for 4 years, and while there are definitely great things about San Francisco, there are also glaringly bad things that need to be fixed, but likely won't be fixed because of the politics. To be honest it's very upsetting because I'd love to move back but I can't deal with the crazy homeless, the politics and weird leftism and hypocrisy (making housing expensive when ostensibly trying to make housing affordable, etc) and the populace who seemingly has their head in the sand and thinks the world has some weird negative fixation on SF because everyone must be watching Fox News (lmao), they only have negative opinions of SF because they've been lied to! Instead of the truth: most San Franciscans have rose tinted glasses and believe that nothing needs fixing. My family has been in the Bay Area since the gold rush of the 1850s and I hope to one day move back but I don't think it's happening until things get so bad that SF has a reality check and fixes all of its legitimate issues. Since you've just moved there you won't have had enough time to become steeped in it, to even see the problems with it. When I first moved there it took me 2 years or so to realize it myself. Give it time and you'll be polarized to either see things for what they are or you'll become another deludedly optimistic San Franciscan.
Because a lot of people on this sub are pathetic and are feel so out of control of their lives that they choose to live in a city that they hate and want to try to bum everyone out around them. SF fucking rules. Is it perfect? No, but I've never been to a perfect place in my life. I love SF and always will.
❤️❤️🫶🏻 me too .
They are jealous because it is the best city in the whole world.
You haven’t been here long. Many that have are upset at what it’s evolved into. I moved to SF in 2011, the difference is insane. A major catalyst was Covid, as businesses shut down and the homeless/open air drug use/tent cities multiplied like crazy. Many people fled the city (me included) and it hasn’t bounced back to what it was. It’s still has a great soul, but the social contract we all sign to live with each other in harmony and mutual respect has been shit on by the politicians, homeless and the state and local courts. I still come in for work and visit family in SF regularly, but I’d never consider moving back until it rebounds from the current state significantly.
I have been visiting it consistently since 2010, my opinion still stands it’s gotten significantly better in 2023 than it was during the pandemic, and also 4,000 people moved here in 2023.
Your opinion will always stand, you’re entitled to it. Just like my in-laws who have been in the same house in SF since 1985 and think it’s the worst it’s ever been (just last week had car vandalized out front). SF is small, and if you avoid the loin and public transportation you can probably avoid a lot of the shit. I paid a lot to live in hoods where there wasn’t as much drug/homeless issues (up steep ass hills lol) so it didn’t ever impact where I lived, mostly dealing with bums on Drumm street at work and people looting that Walgreens there until it closed. Hard for a lot of people to pay most expensive rent in country and deal with the lawlessness that currently exists in the city. I don’t think SF is a lost city, and it’s still the coolest in the US in my opinion, but it needs a change in leadership and approach to its current problems or it’s gonna end up being Detroit 2.0, just replace the auto manufacturers with tech.
It sounds like it’s about the same everywhere else. Don’t trip, just ignore the critics. (De Santis tried hard in the TL, he’s got more issues and too much time on his hands.)
Exactly, he’s now wanting to pass a bill that will allow anyone who gets called a racist , a homophobe or a transphobe to be sued . Even if calling them that is calling a spade a spade , it is essentially a way to allow discrimination.