I lived there 2015-2019. A year less, but in my experience

5 car break-ins 2 bottles thrown to me 1 mugged, wallet gone Chased with an axe

These things happened at SoMa, which is objectively known to be a "nicer" neighborhood. The Tenderloin area definitely experiences worse. Surely everyone that has walked Market St or taken the train has seen things uncommon in most other urban American cities.

I struggle to understand how in SF we've gotten accustomed to downplaying these experiences.

I suspect these people have never actually lived somewhere nice and think junkies threatening you on the street is just normal background noise you have everywhere.

Genuinely curious where you experienced this on a regular basis in sf? Do you also live in a business district?

this kind of shit happens everywhere along geary and market stretching all the way past divisadero and to castro. there's a reason the tenderloin is right where geary and market come together. i lived in SF for 2 years around 2008 and it wasn't safe then either.

and more recently i've seen crazy shit go down (or the aftermath, like broken glass everywhere) every time i visit friends. the western more suburban parts of the city are much better.

sf has basically been broken since the gold rush. seems to me the primary goal these days is to make enough money to insulate yourself from this stuff as much as possible, or just leave.

> These things happened at SoMa, which is objectively known to be a "nicer" neighborhood.

i'm having a really hard time reconciling 4 years in sf with thinking soma is one of the nicer parts of the city.

SoMa actually was nice! But that was long ago, before you-know-what happened, but let’s not get into politics.

SoMa was a crime-ridden area nearly as bad as the tenderloin and has slowly gotten better, but pretty large parts of it never did. It's really hard to believe you lived in SF and thought SoMa was nice. Inner/Outer Sunset/Richmond are nice. Potrero Hill went from being kind of rough to being nice.

Lots of other areas are nice, but it's honestly very difficult to say SoMa, as a whole, was ever nice.

SoMa was shit in the mid-late 2000s when I lived there. My wife grew up in SF and maintains SoMa was also shit before that.

And to be clear, I usually find the "these cities are shitholes" rhetoric overblown. But SoMa has been, and will likely continue to be, shit.

> These things happened at SoMa, which is objectively known to be a "nicer" neighborhood.

What? After the Tenderloin, SoMA is absolutely the worst neighborhood for interactions with crazy people. What on Earth gave you the impression that it's "objectively known to be nice"? IMO it's the single worst neighborhood in the city; at least the Tenderloin has history and some great commerce.

You're right, I've lived and worked in both areas (several times during 2000-2016).

SoMA varies a LOT by exact location (at a per-block level) and changes with time of day, time of year, and has changed in cycles over the years. The area where this incident happened was historically one of the safer parts of SoMA, but not the safest, pre-Covid; I don't know how much worse it's gotten but directionally worse.

When I lived in TL (136 Taylor) I had someone brandish a firearm at me, witnessed two murders (in one incident), a bunch of people fighting other people, public drug use, etc., but SoMA is where more people I know personally were assaulted (partially because they're more likely to be walking around there...). I had a few non-consensual interactions which luckily stopped short of escalating too far, and a few times had to abort trips to an office, store, etc. to avoid stuff.

TL at least had better food.

I didn't enjoy stepping over human feces when walking down the street every day, carefully dodging used needles on the sidewalks or watching homeless people piss or shit in front of Starbucks at ~11AM but to each their own.

You've lived there a long time. Are there places where you know you would probably see feces? If so, how do you manage to avoid them?

I don’t go to SoMA, mission, tenderloin, or civic center often.

I avoid them because there’s much elsewhere. It’s not that I’m explicitly avoiding, but my interests are often in other parts of the city.

You must carry around your own alternate reality bubble. I was in SF for 6 months in 2015, by all reports a much safer time than now. I lived adjacent to the Berkeley campus and took the Bart to market street.

Got chased into the street twice, and had someone smear their blood on my jacket another time. I watched people eat morsels out of the gutter, defecate in public, scurried away from cars getting broken into and my Bart station was an open air drug market at 8am. I watched drugged out people wander into traffic, just to see other passersbys scream at the police for interfering. I’ve been to the poorest countries in the world and have never seen anything like the Tenderloin.

Ya’ll can keep SF.