I didn't feel safe in SF until maybe the mid-late 90s. SF was seriously a violent place until the tech boom. China Basin, where the ballpark is now, was one of the worst parts of the city.
A "safe" SF only existed for about 20 years total.
San Francisco is safer (in terms of violent crime rate) today than it was at any time in the 1990s. (It also went up from the late 1990s to the mid-00s, so if you only started feeling safe in the late 1990s, that was probably your personal circumstances, not the actual safety of the city.)
Fair enough. I don't think it's that unsafe now either. It just felt like it had a lot more rough edges when I was younger, but that could've been due to differences in experiences as I got older.
That was also the last great opportunity to buy a home there too.