Agreed, at least here in Los Angeles. Leaving anything in sight in your car is very tempting to thieves. Don’t do it. It’s better to leave your car unlocked than anything in sight.
I think this is a common overstatement. There are many white-collar professions that require a degree of hands-on. Mine, pharmaceuticals, requires R&D, manufacturing, QA/QC, and other roles to be on-site. One thing we see is a resentment when (say) Supply Chain managers can all work from home, but the QC techs and the R&D scientists have to come in every day.
Most of the pharmaceutical companies around here seem to be allowing 1-2 WFH days but expecting people to be on site the majority of the week. Morale is everyone’s problem.
And yet rush hour traffic into and out of San Francisco, Monday through Thursday, seems just about as horrible as it was pre-Covid. I say “seems” because I don’t have to be in it, but if I have to travel anywhere in the city, I plan around it. If all those people aren’t going to their places of work, i.e. offices, I wonder where they’re going?
I don’t live in SF, but I live a couple house away and visit fairly regularly (last time was April of this year), and I have never encountered human waste. IMO those reports are greatly exaggerated.
Addressing the “no decent parking” complaint, I would most definitely not recommend driving in San Francisco. It’s a dense city not unlike New York, where having a car is more hassle than it’s worth. I always park out in the suburbs and take BART into the city and get around on public transit when I go.
That said, I like Fisherman’s Wharf well enough. It is most definitely touristy, but there are some fun things to do there.
Chicago has a clearly bad side of town and a clearly good side of town. Not so with SF - the touristy areas are right next to the shitty ones for the most part. You’d think that city hall would be a nice place, and no, it is not. It’s always been rough around the edges, and the question is whether it’s gotten worse? I’m not sure, but it seems like the homeless problem has indeed gotten worse in certain places (Emeryville seemed to have passed the zenith and is on a decline). And there has been quite a bit of local contention over law enforcement, perceived lack of enforcement of crime, etc. and the local politics hardly have a real conservative wing.
FWIW I haven’t seen much of the celebrated human excrement, but I have seen urine on Muni seats - and smelling pee or seeing weird stains is common on the street.
I used to live and work in San Francisco. I moved out about 20 years ago, and stopped working there before that, and over the years have gone up there less and less. I now live about a 45 minute drive south of it. I kind of recently went downtown and to SOMA near downtown and was appalled at how dirty and grimy the city has gotten. Walking on Market Street between 4th and 5th on a weekday afternoon there was a guy openly defecting on the sidewalk up against the building.
My heart sank. That city used to be a jewel but it has really gotten run down over the last 20 years. It’s sad.
He was leaving Russia? I would think that is a good thing. 
JK. I know what you meant.
My dad worked as a letter carrier in San Francisco before retiring in 2019, did routes all over the city including downtown.
Lots of open drug use in the streets as he worked, he never felt unsafe but yeah it wasn’t the best city he worked in. Said you could tell it was a city in decline before he left. Said he saw a lot of stuff in the streets he REALLY doesn’t want to talk about, which judging from him is probably sex or masturbation. When they had some big mail carrier related party at a local hotel by the airport the parking lot was packed and a few of the cars in the outer edges of the parking lot got broken into.
On the plus side nobody ever messed with him and we’re always glad to see him. People tipped their mailman very well over there.
Not sure if this thread was inspired by this article (below), which discusses drug overdoses, high crime, homelessness, office vacancy rates of 30% with loss of tax revenue, during a city deficit and such.
Some of this is because SF had a lot of consecutive boom years. Some of it is it probably because of local industries that attract outsized attention. Obviously there is a lot of local wealth and creativity so probably to soon to be abandoning ship.
But the guy who left his heart there might also have left some syringes and foul smelling puddles. It’s still hardly the only metropolis with a struggling downtown.
I’ve only been once. It was just okay. Some overpriced restaurants, a lot of rough people, some beautiful views and hills and houses, good weather. Parts of it were quite charming. The clubs and concerts I went to were just okay. I can see better streetcars and Chinatowns in Toronto. Not in a hurry to return.
When I did my Flash Card walks in the city, pre-Covid (2018, I think) places like Land’s End had big signs by parking warning people not to leave stuff in their cars. And the same thing happened to my daughter in Italy 20 years ago.
The whole Bay Area shut down early, and we had a pretty low death rate thanks to it. But even before Covid a lot of people with bad commutes would spend the morning working from home and coming to work when it was slightly better.
Christ, in the 1980’s we knew better than to leave any valuables in sight in the City. And since we were punk rocks and went to see shows in really dodgy parts of town (the Mission, near J town, clubfoot down town, etc), I was the designated driver with a 10 year old beat up Pinto wagon. None of my friends would drive their nicer cars and dare to park where I didn’t give a whit.
And Fisherman’s Wharf has been a tourist trap for decades. And I haven’t been there for at least 30 years now, and don’t plan on it.
I haven’t been back for ages, so can’t compare, but SF always had a soft gritty underbelly.
Research, manufacturing, etc roles don’t typically take place in downtown office high-rises though. I’m sure there are exceptions but that’s not normally the case in my experience.
This is not true, not by a long shot. There were some highly publicized closings of some of their stores, but Walgreens still has 45 locations within the city limits of San Francisco.
I am wrong on that, thank you for the correction. I guess I fell victim to the misinformation.
I spent a week in San Francisco about a year ago. I loved it.
CNN / Anderson Cooper just did a show on the decline of the city, citing drug use, homelessness, and mental health issues as ongoing and significant problems. They showed one woman who, each morning before opening her shop, has to hunt for used syringes and hose down the human waste before opening. They showed a section where kids had to walk through homeless folks and open drug abuse on their daily trek to school. They showed parked cars with rolled-down windows and signs saying “nothing to steal here”.
I saw homeless people, some of which needed acute mental health intervention. As we were parked at a red light one guy screamed at us and repeatedly punched our vehicle. Another painted a passed-out man’s face with lipstick, dancing and laughing and talking to himself while doing so (the police arrived). Another fellow showed us - and everyone else - his bare ass for some reason.
But, as I said, I loved the trip. So much to see and do. I would return.
mmm
There’s a lot more of that than you think. Modern pharma/biotech often does not need a huge footprint. The big manufacturing centers are located outside the cities (generally), but I can do a lot with 10,000 square feet when the actual product is just a few milligrams.
(I’ve had many roles in pharma and biotech over the past 30 years, including running a 10,000 square foot cGMP manufacturing facility; our largest batch size was 10,000 vials and we could put that out about once a week)
No. It’s not nearly that simple.
Note I am comparing it to San Francisco, not as a stereotypical “other side of the tracks” situation. SF has some “bad” neighborhoods like Bayview/Hunters Point which you can avoid easily as do many cities - most people wouldn’t have cause to wander into them unless they’re making a specific visit. But in SF many bad neighborhoods are literally right next to places that tourists go, and unless they’re paying attention to surroundings they may very easily not notice.
… until it’s too late and they find themselves smack in the middle of unfriendly territory. You have to keep your eyes peeled.
I guess that can be true just about in any large city. Washington DC comes immediately to mind.
you didn’t read where escalators at Muni stopped working due to feces