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.