Quote:
Originally Posted by Doady
I found very annoying recently seeing American retirees on another forum singling out San Francisco for very high crime, even claiming that crime has skyrocketed there in the recent decade, disorder and decay has become rampant, and warning other users to stay out of the city. Even as a Canadian, I found it infuriating to read and I was forced to take time to refute them and defend the city. SF may not doing so great by Western standards, but by US standards it is amazing. I don't think we can ignore the context when we talk about city murder rates. Country murder rates, that's a whole other matter.
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Those people are wrong, but so are you if you think SF has an amazingly low crime rate by US standards.
In 2019, it had the 32nd highest violent crime rate of the 100 largest US cities, and the 4th highest property crime rate. It ranked 66th for the murder rate, but it's still higher than quite a few other large cities.
Is SF as bad as the media narrative currently says? No, obviously not. Is it amazingly safe by US standards? No, not at all lol
Quote:
Originally Posted by moorhosj1
You are correct, that perception seems completely detached from reality. I will add that SF does benefit from essentially “outsourcing” a lot of these problems to Oakland.
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I guess you could say SF "outsources" some problems, but then so does Oakland, and any other combo of cities/suburbs. SF's recorded crime and poverty rates do "benefit" a little bit, while Oakland's suffer (the rates would be somewhere in the middle if the cities combined, of course), but it's all the same metro anyways.
But at the same time SF and Oakland don't outsource problems. While they're interdependent (with SF having a larger proportion of wealthy areas, and Oakland more working class areas, as we all know), they're also more or less "full-service" cities all on their own, with each containing large upper class, middle class, and lower class residential areas, a downtown area, sizable industrial areas, ports, etc, all within their respective city limits (with each containing areas about as rough and fancy as each other). The cities are also right next to each other, and its common for residents of both cities to be victims or perpetrators of crime in the other. They both have multiple poor and high crime neighborhoods (Oakland has more), lots of homeless people (Oakland has more), and the Bay Area's main open air drug market is in SF, in the Tenderloin, while SF also has far more tourists to rob. They're both simultaneously dealing with their own problems and "outsourcing" them to each other, along with anything else you can imagine.
And it's not exactly surprising lol. They're within the same urban/metro area, share a border, and you can travel between downtown Oakland and downtown SF in about 15 minutes.
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