Queue the anecdotes of people feeling unsafe, and others who feel completely safe. Queue the speculation about whether this had underlying reasons, other than what is claimed. Queue statements of crime stats being down, and counter claims of people not reporting anything because nothing is ever done.
As an outsider, it's really interesting how varied everyone's perceptions on this is. How everyone has a different truth. It makes you wonder how accurate history books are, if people cannot agree what is happening right in front of them.
I guess I'll throw my anecdote in the pot. I used to live in SOMA Grand, the condo building sandwiched between the Federal Building and Trinity Towers, right around the corner from this Whole Foods. I left SF around 2015. I recently walked the neighborhood and holy shit it is much worse than I remembered. There is a methadone / treatment clinic on Minna, the alley between the Federal Building and the condo. So there's always been a few people coming or going from treatment, and a tent or two. But this time there had to be a hundred people or more crowded in the alley, hanging out on the steps of the Federal Building, and so on. I'm not sure if they were all there for the clinic but nobody seemed to be coming or going. People were openly burning trash on Market St. like some kind of dystopian 80s flick. I used to see active drug use maybe once a week; this time I saw it half a dozen times in two blocks. Maybe it has not changed in the last year or two, but as a former resident of the exact area under discussion, and one who's not unsympathetic to the plight of the homeless, the area has become unliveable.
I often miss the City and have found myself questioning the choices that led me away. After this last visit—no more!
To your point, I wonder if it is "boiling the frog." Maybe things didn't change that much in the last 2-3 years, but they sure have in the last 8.
Yeah I moved to SF in 2009 and away in 2022. It got a LOT worse in the last few years, especially the area you talk about.
In the early to mid 2010s I used to spend quite a bit of time in the TL. There were restaurants and bars there you'd want to go to. Now, you don't even really want to drive through. It's so bad...
I think something important to note is that SF does not have jurisdiction over the Federal Building's plaza/steps.
I say that because it's a reminder of two things:
1) This isn't really a policing issue (if it were, wouldn't you expect the Feds to police their plaza better?)
2)This isn't really an SF-specific issue, since America has freedom of movement. People go to SF because they don't have better alternatives. I think everyone in this thread who lives in a jurisdiction that would either jail or forcibly remove these people should remember that as they discuss SF policies, since their government (The US Federal Government) is just as capable of solving these problems as SF's is, and can't actually do anything about it with the current toolkit (even in a 10,000 sqft area).
I also send this as a warning to those people, since SF is famous for experiencing social issues a decade or two before the rest of the country - Enjoy feeling like this is a foreign SF-specific thing while it lasts.
I lived on that block for close to 10 years and can confirm that the safety situation around there significantly degraded over the last 1-2 years. Gangs of drug dealers moved in and took over key sidewalk areas (particularly 7th and 8th streets between Market and Mission), and violent crime and property destruction increased significantly. In my last year, there were two murders nearby (including one that I heard the gunshots for), and I witnessed a bunch of things I had never seen in the neighborhood before including trash fires, people screaming at all hours of the night, and overdose victims being revived on the sidewalk.
Although nothing bad happened to me personally, it just got really depressing and emotionally draining to live in a place where you're surrounded by so much suffering and destruction, and where you have to be hyper-vigilant every time you step outside. I packed up my things and left in December. My mental health and happiness have improved since then.
I don't blame Whole Foods and other businesses in the neighborhood for shutting down. The city leadership, including the mayor and a majority of the Board of Supervisors (SF's legislative body) really didn't seem to care one bit about the problems in that area of the city. Maybe if enough people and businesses vote with their feet, they'll be motivated to actually fix things.
I was around the touristy parts 2 days ago. No more visible homeless than the previous time I visited in 2019. Some of their tents were more developed, pallet floors and stuff. I wasn't curious enough to try my luck going too deep into the city. Downtown was eerie empty though, just a small handful of people walking on sidewalks. Not as alive as it used to be. I kept handbag under my feet in the car, I saw somebodies link here about a car being broken into at a stoplight to take a handbag by the back window.
I did however see a very large amount of Giants fans going to the stadium.
I lived on Nob Hill for 7 years, it was fairly quiet, always felt safe. We had one unhoused guy who was harmless, you'd see him around.
Go down the hill, and cross Geary and you're in the Tenderloin. Violent crime on that map goes from 64 to 361. People are passed out on the sidewalk with needles hanging out of their arms. There are tents, trash, squalor everywhere.
Go over the Pacific Heights and it's $10-20M houses everywhere.
The Richmond and the Sunset are like any suburbs, just a tiny bit more dense (houses are touching but they often have back yards). Low crime. Sleepy.
After Nob Hill I lived in SOMA for 5 years, just half a block from 6th street. I once counted 12 tents on my block. A guy was tapping the street light for electricity. Needles in arms, people screaming, the sidewalk is a bathroom. Go east of 5th street (or maybe east of 4th) and it's all modern buildings. In the time since SalesForce tower went up, that area completely transformed. It's hyper modern full of high end office and residential buildings.
(This is the area where Bob Lee was killed
When I lived in Nob Hill, I felt like I was in this great dense walkable urban neighborhood. Then I made the mistake of moving to SOMA, it was nice that I was close to so many tech jobs, but being exposed to what went on there made me grow to hate San Francisco.
A lot of people just actively avoid those really bad areas. So they never see it. Unfortunately I either lived in the middle of it, or regularly walked through it.
People need to vote on the ballot and with their feet. Don’t be a hero and make a statement by renting on lower Larkin or on 5th and Mission. Do what the city administration does and avoid living in any of those areas.
If they want to turn those areas into a Mad Max hell scape, let them, and don’t work anywhere that requires you to risk it out there either. Why be a martyr?
In the end people still actively rent in the luxury apartments in the worst parts of SoMa, so the markets are clearing. Why they do it is beyond me, but to each their own. My guess is that it's the usual new batch of tech space cadets in their 20s who do their time and bail as soon as they need more space, safety and they can afford it.
Reading the comments that I think you're referencing, it sounds more like most people are talking about different facets of broadly-the-same facts.
I don't think it's fair to go from "people have different perspectives" to "people have different truths" in this context, at least not so easily. If I discard the handful of patently unreasonable takes, I just see people sharing different information that isn't necessarily mutually exclusive.
How safe you _feel_ often has little correlation to how much danger you are actually in. A lot of people are oblivious to their impending assault or murder until just before it happens to them.
I lived in SOMA until a year ago. We had a dog and I'd need to walk her in the evening, and before bed. I usually felt fine.
My wife on the other hand did not like walking the dog in the evening. More often than not she'd have some random creepy person follow her around and say weird shit to her. Nothing worse ever happened thankfully, but it was regular low key harassment for her.
We sold the place, to a single guy. We had a few couples interested, but in each case, the woman was worried about what it would be like after dark. Rightfully so based on my wife's experiences.
There is one solution that bypasses politics, bureaucracy, or having to assign people to protect things: let people have reasonable access to firearms and legal recourse in their use to defend themselves and property.
The vast majority of people are normal, decent human beings that won't resort to shooting each other at every argument. The rest would probably pursue deadly force even if they didn't have access to firearms. Yes, US has a disproportionally a larger number of those due to our culture, but the way to fix that is to let former people arm themselves and the problem will be minimized.
Cue also the people who are shocked at how terrible it has gotten, and how that means it can be blamed on the people they were already very inclined to blame!
I've lived in San Francisco more than 20 years at this point. Some things get better, some things get worse, but overall I'd say it's about the same. I used to work a couple blocks from there, and I just ran past it on Sunday, and the neighborhood was always kinda sketchy. And just a couple of blocks away is a pleasant, upscale grocery store, Harvest Urban Market, that has done just fine.
So I suspect this is something more about Whole Foods than any surprising change. E.g., did the pandemic and the resulting drop in the downtown population in the area put a whole in the store's profitability?
Head meets sand. I’ve worked right across the street from that WF (orpheum building), saw it went up. Since covid that whole area turned in a little snippet of war-torn country. There’s just no way anyone sane would live or even go near that without a pressing need and i guess $13 eggs are just not that alluring
While I've no reason to doubt that safety concerns were the primary driver of this move, I wonder if economic concerns weren't also a big factor.
This store was opened in 2022 and presumably the decision to open it was made in 2021, back when people were anticipating a big return to offices and downtown SF in general.
That certainly didn't wind up happening, and SF's downtown hasn't recovered nearly as much as other major metros. A big expensive store at 8th and Market probably saw far fewer customers than they'd planned for. Low revenue could have been a driving factor in the decision to close, alongside safety.
Anecdotal, of course, but this was my Whole Foods and just about every time I went in it was pretty well trafficked. In addition to the apartment complex right above the store, there are several high density complexes within a couple blocks of that store. I really doubt it was for economic reasons.
But it was fairly common to see someone riding the long escalator up to the exit (the store is below ground) while yelling profanities at the security below watching them leave. When the store opened it used to have a nice selection of hard liquor, but they stopped selling that due to theft. And there are always several people so high they're barely able to stand, pretending to shop.
I don't understand why that population is something they did not plan for. The neighborhood has been sketchy for 25 years at least. I get that the Whole Foods vibe is deeply suburban, but surely this all crossed their minds?
Flagship stores (which TFA describes this store as) often run at a loss, because the visibility in a highly-trafficked, prestigious area is worth it. That math changes drastically if you have to account for the potential PR headache that this particular location brings.
Highly trafficked? Yes. Prestigious? Not once in my lifetime has that part of Market Street been prestigious. I know there was some lingering optimism going back through the previous decade that things might be looking up, but since then the crime and grime has only expanded further up Market Street.
There’s another Whole Foods on Market, which for now is open and seems to be doing everything right across the street from a Safeway that’s been doing everything wrong—more so since the Albertsons acquisition—but to be fair my perspective is limited only to their evening hours when things seem fine. Some of the restaurants that opened up between the two areas are also already gone, either shut down or moved locations. They took their temporal location-based tax benefits to the end of their life and moved on.
Pre-pandemic, one of several possible narratives about that area was that Twitter had moved in successfully and trends were looking up. That was the sort of optimism that brought Whole Foods. I remember that there were some local reactions that they could be getting ahead of themselves.
> A Walgreens executive said this week that the company, which cited “organized” shoplifting as a reason to close five stores in San Francisco in October 2021, might have overstated the effect of theft on its business.
> Mr. Kehoe also said that the company had “probably” spent too much on security measures and that it might have mischaracterized how much theft took place in its stores.
I don't know the truth of it, but it could also be crime reasons, with no economic reasons to justify putting up with it. Corporations aren't that worried about employee safety if there's a lot of money being made.
Saying "due to safety concerns" makes it sound less of a failure on the parts of the business decision and more along the lines of "things out of their control". move the goalposts and look like a win.
Walmart also announced they are closing 4 locations in downtown Chicago due to profitability issues related to crime. Choosing not to prosecute criminals and releasing those that are caught immediately only emboldens and worsens crime. This country needs to crack down on crime swiftly and harshly until order returns.
Nothing released by Walmart mentions crime or safety - only profitability, while the news about this whole foods does.
Chicago is a large city and none of these are really downtown. There used to be a small walmart that was actually downtown, but that closed a number of years ago - I do not recall why. There aren't really a lot of Walmart stores in Chicago - there was some kind of fight between the city and company around needing to pay living wages to get the approvals.
Of the closing ones I know the Lakeview store, it is a small/neighborhood store and in a fairly wealthy/pricey location. IMO it was never a great fit for the area's typical resident - there are many other higher end options within walking distance or with parking (which this walmart did not have) - several grocery stores, trader joe's, walgreens, target, whole foods, etc. Without parking or being that close to the subway, it was never the the kind of store that would serve a large area. I'm not at all surprised this one is unprofitable and closing.
Yeah! Why figure out why crime happens in the first place (it cannot be poverty and unavailability of safety nets for people, impossible!) when you can just put all those p̶e̶a̶s̶a̶n̶t̶s criminals in prison instead, so we don't have to deal with it.
I am pretty damn poor but don't commit crimes. Crime happens when people decide that's the route they want to take over other routes. It's as much a cultural thing as it is an economic thing. There are wide swaths of the public now in the US making excuses why crime is the best option for many.
Discussion of why crime happens is multifaceted of course, but there is a significant part of it that is essentially forbidden to address in circles where the discussion matters. You end up with wishy-washy "dogwhistles" that get shouted down as x-ist, or at best, shrugged off and blamed on generational poverty/oppression/trauma. All of which can be true, but that doesn't help solve anything.
There is no solution, other than a vast cultural shift towards a refusal to stop glorifying cultures that glorify criminal behavior. This includes the suicidal grimy juggalos and trailer park meth cowboys, the brand- and status-obsessed inner city wannabe crip, and the fuck you I got mine and the fuck you I want yours mentality prevalent across the country (world?) equally.
I repeat: there is no solution to crime. There is only mitigation and reaction.
> This country needs to crack down on crime swiftly and harshly until order returns
Please provide the data that shows this approach will work.
This has been tried for decades in every city across the world and it has been shown over and over again that simply being "tougher on crime" does not work.
What seems to work is a multi-faceted approach targeting root causes like inequality, drug use, homelessness as well as better policing.
Only a small group of people are responsible for the majority of crimes. The same people keep committing armed robbery, shootings, carjacking, etc. until they are physically stopped from doing so.
Keeping criminals in jail so that they cannot commit more crime will absolutely reduce crime. The elimination of cash bail and downgrading of felonies is a joke.
You are ascribing zero agency to multibillion dollar corporations. They are deliberately closing stores in vulnerable neighborhoods to maximize the political blowback against labor gains. Chicago just elected a union leader mayor, who committed to a program to address crime's root causes. He dared to mention poverty and inequality in his campaign.
Walmart doesn't want this. Walmart thrives on the price-sensitivity of the impoverished and deliberately undercuts local businesses to funnel every cent of profit to the Walton family. They are playing the long-game here: demolish Brandon Johnson's appeal by depriving the neighborhoods that voted for him access to groceries, and keep their chokehold on their non-union workforce in an era of rising living costs.
With this and what happened with Bob Lee, what is going on with San Francisco? Cops not doing their jobs? DA's not prosecuting criminals? Couldn't Whole Foods hire armed security to dissuade theft?
This is going to elude a quick explanation.
The problems are very specific to San Francisco, so trying to fit this into a national narrative or attribute it to a single factor is not going to work.
* The voters sacked the old DA. He wasn't doing a great job but more importantly he had picked a fight with the police chief.
The police have a tough job in the city and also they have been slacking off for the past 50 years.
A security guard can't really intervene in a fight without 1.) risking their physical safety for $18 an hour, and 2.) risking a lawsuit since they don't really have any legal grounds to detain someone.
The store was on 8th and Market. I generally try to avoid that part of town for physical safety reasons based on a number of personal incidents involving some of the the more unpredictable characters in that part of town. I'm not sure what Whole Foods corporate HQ was thinking on that one. The location is just not a good place for a high end grocery store. HQ messed up.
I would also point out that Rainbow foods is maybe 0.5 miles over on Folsom and Division. While Rainbow is near a lot of homeless encampments (maybe more than 8th and Market) the people are more steady and I never get the unsafe vibes in that part of town.
The location, in my mind, makes sense. It is near upcoming new-housing, and also notorious 6th, so it's likely to be cheap and popular.
And it's more central than their South-of-Market store on ... 4th & Harrison.
The Twitter building's nearby "The Market" grocery might benefit from this closure - it's suffered greatly from the Pandemic, Twitter itself shrinking, and the great Fentanyl-flooding.
The previous DA was doing a fantastic job, he had finally started focusing on violent crime instead of, “quality of life” crime like shoplifting and vandalism. Doing this is difficult because people will (as they did!) post videos online of petty theft or “unruly” people in the streets and people who do not understand how safety is actually created are never going to listen to people who are actually informed.
> he had picked a fight with the police chief.
This is not true. He prosecuted a police officer for murder and put pressure on the police, which have a long history of corruption and rampant racism, human trafficking, etc.. But police unions have a lot of power and influence, the average person thinks that police create safety (they do not! if they respond at all to anything, they respond after the fact with a pencil and paper, and their behavior is often very dangerous - e.g. speeding around the city running red lights when they clearly are not headed anywhere).
The police in SF do not have a tough job, and police everywhere, always slack off. The SFPD famously went on strike some decades ago and were basically shooting out streetlights and holding the entire city hostage, eventually culminating in a bombing on the mayor’s front lawn.
SFPD do not live in SF, almost any of them, they aren’t members of the community, they do not have the community’s best interest at heart. They are bullies who come from the suburbs and basically view all residents of SF as dirty miscreants. If you ask them for help in a violent situation, they will likely threaten you with violence or arrest yourself.
> security guard... risking their physical safety for $18 an hour
I never understood what's the point of hiring security at a miniscule wage. Noone sane will risk any physical confrontation for that money.
If they get stabbed, need 6 months to recover and get a $100K surgery, is employer paying all the bills?
I see this in many places - like a few badly behaved teenagers will jump over the barriers at the tube and the employees are not willing to challange them.
> risking a lawsuit since they don't really have any legal grounds to detain someone.
No. Shopkeeper’s privilege allows detention for a reasonable time solely for the purpose of investigation of 490.5 shoplifting in the presence of probable cause.
The Bob Lee thing was incredibly unfortunate (I used to work with Bob) but violent crime is actually fairly low in SF compared to similar sized cities in the US.
However property crime is not low. And downtown, TL, SOMA etc are full of tents and open air drug use.
Shoplifting has been bad in SF since I first moved there in 2009 from Seattle. I was surprised to see Walgreens had nearly everything locked up, and you had to get staff to unlock it to buy just about anything.
But it feels like it's gotten worse. And while I believe the violent crime statistics are likely correct. I suspect property crime goes hugely underreported because people don't think it's worth reporting to a police department that won't do anything.
SF police are severely under-staffed, down about 500 officers since their peak several years ago.
The previous DA wasn't prosecuting a lot of these kinds of crimes. The police might have been on a quiet strike, not really doing their jobs because of understaffing and defund the police politics. This last point is mostly speculation and anecdote. But lots of stories of the police seeing a robbery go down, doing nothing.
And then the rampant poverty you see all over downtown has just gotten worse.
If I were a cop I wouldn’t expend any effort to chase down a criminal if I know the DA is gonna shirk their responsibility. What’s the point? Law enforcement doesn’t work if the law isn’t enforced.
Same way I’m not gonna do any extra work in the office if I know my manager doesn’t care.
Property crime should be considered violent crime. Nothing in this world is free, someone had to spend hours of their life to be able to buy said property, and taking that is essentially stealing those hours of their life away.
> Couldn't Whole Foods hire armed security to dissuade theft?
This would likely result in a social media fallout that they don't want to deal with, considering that the core customer base of Whole Foods overlaps largely with those that at least publicly claim that law enforcement over private property rights is tantamount to oppression.
I suspect a more important issue is that attending an "upscale" store is at least partly an aesthetic experience. A heavy security presence spoils that aesthetic. If you want to shop under a 10 x 10 foot grid of security cameras, there's always Wal-Mart.
To be fair, the security presence in Wal-Mart, or in a bank, may also be an aesthetic.
Other whole foods in SF have a guard at the door. Are they armed? I don't know but they have a guard. No one is bothered. Most big stores in SF seem to have security. Target has multiple that stand by the doors.
What happened to Bob Lee is tragic and unacceptable.
But violent crime is not unique to San Francisco and if you look at the data the city is far safer than many others.
When it comes to issues like this you really need to look at the data as it is too easy to let passions and bias drive decision making. If you could solve crime by hiring more police and locking more people up every city would do that. But the data shows that it doesn't work like that.
Per sq ft, per capita, per any stat you care to look at this isn’t really true if you use the actual numbers and not whatever doctored nonsense people are blowing around to pretend their form of politics/propaganda is better.
> Couldn't Whole Foods hire armed security to dissuade theft?
That seems rather “off brand”, and in any event while we could begin outsourcing public safety to corporations, and we probably will, I don’t think that story ends well for anyone.
> Couldn't Whole Foods hire armed security to dissuade theft?
I don't know.
But I have directly seen security from the Target on 4th tackle someone in the middle of the crosswalk, and hit them repeatedly as they took back whatever that person had stolen.
Random people on the street then started yelling at security to stop hitting the person who was caught shoplifting.
I know you're kind of joking. But ever been to Rio de Janeiro? Every restaurant and store in the nice neighborhoods, like Ipanema and Leblon has a least one guard.
Sit down at outdoor seating at any restaurant in those areas and there is a guard standing there right by the tables while you eat.
San Francisco is about at that point. Years ago I was sitting at some outdoor seating on a first date and a guy walked up, grabbed my dates glass of wine, pounded it, and said "I'm an alcoholic" making eye contact with both of us, as he set my dates glass back down on the table.
People don’t need security all the time. What we need is like an Uber for armed security.
Although to generally protect the community, maybe there’s a way we could do like an Uberpool for the whole town? If only there were a way to get everyone to chip in.
According to [1] San Francisco has the most police per 100,000 residents in California amongst cities with populations 100,000 or more. According to [2] this is still less than the number of police per 100,000 people in London. Given the prevalence of guns, lack of social safety net in the U.S., and overall higher rate of murders I would have thought American cities had more police than British cities. Note that police forces have gotten smaller in the UK over the last several years and they consider themselves under staffed.
Will passing a bill requiring SF to have a certain number of police officers actually cause SF to have that number of police officers? If nobody wants the job, then they can't exactly press-gang people into being cops.
in that case, the bar to qualify as a cop gets lowered like the TSA. you can always hit your metrics if you try hard enough. the ol' saying "lower your standards, raise your average" can apply here.
Garry Tan was behind the big push to recall the old DA. Wait 6 months and, homicides went up 20% YoY (measured over the same quarter). If we're to judge by performance - I think we'd have to give him an F.
The theorycrafting was fine, and the old DA was soft, but I prefer to judge on outcomes.
I'm not in SF, but the police in my city are openly quite quitting because they know the staffing issues mean they're completely unaccountable. They legitimately do nothing except sit in their cars and respond to shootings sometimes. About as helpful as a rock when it comes to property crime. I would not be surprised if police in SF are similarly unhelpful.
I think the last thing anyone needs is more people like Garry Tan weighing in.
As the article mentions SF does not have a high crime rate compared to other cities. What it does have that is more unique are issues around homelessness, inequality, drug use etc.
Those need to be solved by real experts who can look into social and inequality programs that can target the root cause in a measured, data-driven and impassioned way. Not hyperbolic, tech-bro VCs.
I think the solutions are quite clear to anyone that lives in the area (i.e. arrest drug dealers and shoplifters). As an SF resident, it is frustrating to see incredible sums of money thrown at the problem citing abstract solutions while things continue to deteriorate.
> San Francisco has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes - from the smallest towns to the very largest cities. One's chance of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime here is one in 18. Within California, more than 98% of the communities have a lower crime rate than San Francisco.
Silicon Valley is a very big area - and yes San Francisco has problems and needs to make changes - but there is a wide swath of cities and places to live that are almost without peer in terms of being great places to live with unparalleled career opportunities.
Edit: Nor are a lot of these issues limited to SF. We had a large encampment set up shop right outside our property line, right next to downtown Milpitas a few years back. It grew and grew for over a year, and nothing was done about it until they decided to dig down and cut into a water main that was connected to our warehouse for their own personal use.
I'm hesitant to post this because its tabloidy ("Seattle is Dying"), but came across this regarding Seattle's problems with crime and homelessness. It's done by their local news channel as a sort of mini-documentary.
Towards the end they also give an example of a city that is managing to turn this around with some good programs...
So, while this is a hot-button issue, I would be curious to hear from any HN readers who live in SF, and go shopping in grocery stores there, as to whether they were surprised by this? I hear such contradictory reports that I would be curious to hear from people with "boots on the ground".
Readit News
As an outsider, it's really interesting how varied everyone's perceptions on this is. How everyone has a different truth. It makes you wonder how accurate history books are, if people cannot agree what is happening right in front of them.
I often miss the City and have found myself questioning the choices that led me away. After this last visit—no more!
To your point, I wonder if it is "boiling the frog." Maybe things didn't change that much in the last 2-3 years, but they sure have in the last 8.
Taqueria Cancun still slaps, though.
In the early to mid 2010s I used to spend quite a bit of time in the TL. There were restaurants and bars there you'd want to go to. Now, you don't even really want to drive through. It's so bad...
I say that because it's a reminder of two things:
1) This isn't really a policing issue (if it were, wouldn't you expect the Feds to police their plaza better?)
2)This isn't really an SF-specific issue, since America has freedom of movement. People go to SF because they don't have better alternatives. I think everyone in this thread who lives in a jurisdiction that would either jail or forcibly remove these people should remember that as they discuss SF policies, since their government (The US Federal Government) is just as capable of solving these problems as SF's is, and can't actually do anything about it with the current toolkit (even in a 10,000 sqft area).
I also send this as a warning to those people, since SF is famous for experiencing social issues a decade or two before the rest of the country - Enjoy feeling like this is a foreign SF-specific thing while it lasts.
Although nothing bad happened to me personally, it just got really depressing and emotionally draining to live in a place where you're surrounded by so much suffering and destruction, and where you have to be hyper-vigilant every time you step outside. I packed up my things and left in December. My mental health and happiness have improved since then.
I don't blame Whole Foods and other businesses in the neighborhood for shutting down. The city leadership, including the mayor and a majority of the Board of Supervisors (SF's legislative body) really didn't seem to care one bit about the problems in that area of the city. Maybe if enough people and businesses vote with their feet, they'll be motivated to actually fix things.
I did however see a very large amount of Giants fans going to the stadium.
Yeah the city is only a 7x7 mile square. But block by block it can be dramatically different.
Check out the map of violent crime halfway down this article: https://sfstandard.com/criminal-justice/bob-lee-killing-viol...
I lived on Nob Hill for 7 years, it was fairly quiet, always felt safe. We had one unhoused guy who was harmless, you'd see him around.
Go down the hill, and cross Geary and you're in the Tenderloin. Violent crime on that map goes from 64 to 361. People are passed out on the sidewalk with needles hanging out of their arms. There are tents, trash, squalor everywhere.
Go over the Pacific Heights and it's $10-20M houses everywhere.
The Richmond and the Sunset are like any suburbs, just a tiny bit more dense (houses are touching but they often have back yards). Low crime. Sleepy.
After Nob Hill I lived in SOMA for 5 years, just half a block from 6th street. I once counted 12 tents on my block. A guy was tapping the street light for electricity. Needles in arms, people screaming, the sidewalk is a bathroom. Go east of 5th street (or maybe east of 4th) and it's all modern buildings. In the time since SalesForce tower went up, that area completely transformed. It's hyper modern full of high end office and residential buildings. (This is the area where Bob Lee was killed
When I lived in Nob Hill, I felt like I was in this great dense walkable urban neighborhood. Then I made the mistake of moving to SOMA, it was nice that I was close to so many tech jobs, but being exposed to what went on there made me grow to hate San Francisco.
A lot of people just actively avoid those really bad areas. So they never see it. Unfortunately I either lived in the middle of it, or regularly walked through it.
If they want to turn those areas into a Mad Max hell scape, let them, and don’t work anywhere that requires you to risk it out there either. Why be a martyr?
In the end people still actively rent in the luxury apartments in the worst parts of SoMa, so the markets are clearing. Why they do it is beyond me, but to each their own. My guess is that it's the usual new batch of tech space cadets in their 20s who do their time and bail as soon as they need more space, safety and they can afford it.
Source: currently reading a book about the American Revolution from the opposition’s perspective.
I don't think it's fair to go from "people have different perspectives" to "people have different truths" in this context, at least not so easily. If I discard the handful of patently unreasonable takes, I just see people sharing different information that isn't necessarily mutually exclusive.
Did I ever feel unsafe? No.
Was it sad seeing a lot of, very obviously mentally ill, homeless people? Yes.
How to solve this? Hard to say.
How safe you _feel_ often has little correlation to how much danger you are actually in. A lot of people are oblivious to their impending assault or murder until just before it happens to them.
My wife on the other hand did not like walking the dog in the evening. More often than not she'd have some random creepy person follow her around and say weird shit to her. Nothing worse ever happened thankfully, but it was regular low key harassment for her.
We sold the place, to a single guy. We had a few couples interested, but in each case, the woman was worried about what it would be like after dark. Rightfully so based on my wife's experiences.
There is one solution that bypasses politics, bureaucracy, or having to assign people to protect things: let people have reasonable access to firearms and legal recourse in their use to defend themselves and property.
The vast majority of people are normal, decent human beings that won't resort to shooting each other at every argument. The rest would probably pursue deadly force even if they didn't have access to firearms. Yes, US has a disproportionally a larger number of those due to our culture, but the way to fix that is to let former people arm themselves and the problem will be minimized.
I've lived in San Francisco more than 20 years at this point. Some things get better, some things get worse, but overall I'd say it's about the same. I used to work a couple blocks from there, and I just ran past it on Sunday, and the neighborhood was always kinda sketchy. And just a couple of blocks away is a pleasant, upscale grocery store, Harvest Urban Market, that has done just fine.
So I suspect this is something more about Whole Foods than any surprising change. E.g., did the pandemic and the resulting drop in the downtown population in the area put a whole in the store's profitability?
Also it seems like they were threatening to close in 2019 due to exactly the kinds of issues that Whole Foods says is causing their closure: https://abc7news.com/south-of-market-sf-san-francisco-soma/5...
This store was opened in 2022 and presumably the decision to open it was made in 2021, back when people were anticipating a big return to offices and downtown SF in general.
That certainly didn't wind up happening, and SF's downtown hasn't recovered nearly as much as other major metros. A big expensive store at 8th and Market probably saw far fewer customers than they'd planned for. Low revenue could have been a driving factor in the decision to close, alongside safety.
But it was fairly common to see someone riding the long escalator up to the exit (the store is below ground) while yelling profanities at the security below watching them leave. When the store opened it used to have a nice selection of hard liquor, but they stopped selling that due to theft. And there are always several people so high they're barely able to stand, pretending to shop.
There’s another Whole Foods on Market, which for now is open and seems to be doing everything right across the street from a Safeway that’s been doing everything wrong—more so since the Albertsons acquisition—but to be fair my perspective is limited only to their evening hours when things seem fine. Some of the restaurants that opened up between the two areas are also already gone, either shut down or moved locations. They took their temporal location-based tax benefits to the end of their life and moved on.
I think it was earlier than that. Pre-pandemic. Here's an article talking about it in early 2018. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-s-massi...
Pre-pandemic, one of several possible narratives about that area was that Twitter had moved in successfully and trends were looking up. That was the sort of optimism that brought Whole Foods. I remember that there were some local reactions that they could be getting ahead of themselves.
Businesses were moving in, buildings were getting renovated.
Then it turned the wrong direction again, and now we have what we have.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shopli...
> A Walgreens executive said this week that the company, which cited “organized” shoplifting as a reason to close five stores in San Francisco in October 2021, might have overstated the effect of theft on its business.
> Mr. Kehoe also said that the company had “probably” spent too much on security measures and that it might have mischaracterized how much theft took place in its stores.
Dead Comment
Chicago is a large city and none of these are really downtown. There used to be a small walmart that was actually downtown, but that closed a number of years ago - I do not recall why. There aren't really a lot of Walmart stores in Chicago - there was some kind of fight between the city and company around needing to pay living wages to get the approvals.
Of the closing ones I know the Lakeview store, it is a small/neighborhood store and in a fairly wealthy/pricey location. IMO it was never a great fit for the area's typical resident - there are many other higher end options within walking distance or with parking (which this walmart did not have) - several grocery stores, trader joe's, walgreens, target, whole foods, etc. Without parking or being that close to the subway, it was never the the kind of store that would serve a large area. I'm not at all surprised this one is unprofitable and closing.
They even mentioned that in their press release today regarding these closures.
https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2023/04/11/walmart-an...
There is no solution, other than a vast cultural shift towards a refusal to stop glorifying cultures that glorify criminal behavior. This includes the suicidal grimy juggalos and trailer park meth cowboys, the brand- and status-obsessed inner city wannabe crip, and the fuck you I got mine and the fuck you I want yours mentality prevalent across the country (world?) equally.
I repeat: there is no solution to crime. There is only mitigation and reaction.
Please provide the data that shows this approach will work.
This has been tried for decades in every city across the world and it has been shown over and over again that simply being "tougher on crime" does not work.
What seems to work is a multi-faceted approach targeting root causes like inequality, drug use, homelessness as well as better policing.
Keeping criminals in jail so that they cannot commit more crime will absolutely reduce crime. The elimination of cash bail and downgrading of felonies is a joke.
Dead Comment
Walmart doesn't want this. Walmart thrives on the price-sensitivity of the impoverished and deliberately undercuts local businesses to funnel every cent of profit to the Walton family. They are playing the long-game here: demolish Brandon Johnson's appeal by depriving the neighborhoods that voted for him access to groceries, and keep their chokehold on their non-union workforce in an era of rising living costs.
* The voters sacked the old DA. He wasn't doing a great job but more importantly he had picked a fight with the police chief. The police have a tough job in the city and also they have been slacking off for the past 50 years. A security guard can't really intervene in a fight without 1.) risking their physical safety for $18 an hour, and 2.) risking a lawsuit since they don't really have any legal grounds to detain someone.
The store was on 8th and Market. I generally try to avoid that part of town for physical safety reasons based on a number of personal incidents involving some of the the more unpredictable characters in that part of town. I'm not sure what Whole Foods corporate HQ was thinking on that one. The location is just not a good place for a high end grocery store. HQ messed up. I would also point out that Rainbow foods is maybe 0.5 miles over on Folsom and Division. While Rainbow is near a lot of homeless encampments (maybe more than 8th and Market) the people are more steady and I never get the unsafe vibes in that part of town.
And it's more central than their South-of-Market store on ... 4th & Harrison.
The Twitter building's nearby "The Market" grocery might benefit from this closure - it's suffered greatly from the Pandemic, Twitter itself shrinking, and the great Fentanyl-flooding.
The previous DA was doing a fantastic job, he had finally started focusing on violent crime instead of, “quality of life” crime like shoplifting and vandalism. Doing this is difficult because people will (as they did!) post videos online of petty theft or “unruly” people in the streets and people who do not understand how safety is actually created are never going to listen to people who are actually informed.
> he had picked a fight with the police chief.
This is not true. He prosecuted a police officer for murder and put pressure on the police, which have a long history of corruption and rampant racism, human trafficking, etc.. But police unions have a lot of power and influence, the average person thinks that police create safety (they do not! if they respond at all to anything, they respond after the fact with a pencil and paper, and their behavior is often very dangerous - e.g. speeding around the city running red lights when they clearly are not headed anywhere).
The police in SF do not have a tough job, and police everywhere, always slack off. The SFPD famously went on strike some decades ago and were basically shooting out streetlights and holding the entire city hostage, eventually culminating in a bombing on the mayor’s front lawn.
SFPD do not live in SF, almost any of them, they aren’t members of the community, they do not have the community’s best interest at heart. They are bullies who come from the suburbs and basically view all residents of SF as dirty miscreants. If you ask them for help in a violent situation, they will likely threaten you with violence or arrest yourself.
I never understood what's the point of hiring security at a miniscule wage. Noone sane will risk any physical confrontation for that money.
If they get stabbed, need 6 months to recover and get a $100K surgery, is employer paying all the bills?
I see this in many places - like a few badly behaved teenagers will jump over the barriers at the tube and the employees are not willing to challange them.
Like do I only pay because I am well-mannered?
No. Shopkeeper’s privilege allows detention for a reasonable time solely for the purpose of investigation of 490.5 shoplifting in the presence of probable cause.
(Dead right on the eighteen dollar bit, though).
However property crime is not low. And downtown, TL, SOMA etc are full of tents and open air drug use.
Shoplifting has been bad in SF since I first moved there in 2009 from Seattle. I was surprised to see Walgreens had nearly everything locked up, and you had to get staff to unlock it to buy just about anything.
But it feels like it's gotten worse. And while I believe the violent crime statistics are likely correct. I suspect property crime goes hugely underreported because people don't think it's worth reporting to a police department that won't do anything.
SF police are severely under-staffed, down about 500 officers since their peak several years ago.
The previous DA wasn't prosecuting a lot of these kinds of crimes. The police might have been on a quiet strike, not really doing their jobs because of understaffing and defund the police politics. This last point is mostly speculation and anecdote. But lots of stories of the police seeing a robbery go down, doing nothing.
And then the rampant poverty you see all over downtown has just gotten worse.
Same way I’m not gonna do any extra work in the office if I know my manager doesn’t care.
Deleted Comment
This would likely result in a social media fallout that they don't want to deal with, considering that the core customer base of Whole Foods overlaps largely with those that at least publicly claim that law enforcement over private property rights is tantamount to oppression.
To be fair, the security presence in Wal-Mart, or in a bank, may also be an aesthetic.
Other whole foods in SF have a guard at the door. Are they armed? I don't know but they have a guard. No one is bothered. Most big stores in SF seem to have security. Target has multiple that stand by the doors.
But violent crime is not unique to San Francisco and if you look at the data the city is far safer than many others.
When it comes to issues like this you really need to look at the data as it is too easy to let passions and bias drive decision making. If you could solve crime by hiring more police and locking more people up every city would do that. But the data shows that it doesn't work like that.
"Safer than 2% of U.S. Cities..."
That seems rather “off brand”, and in any event while we could begin outsourcing public safety to corporations, and we probably will, I don’t think that story ends well for anyone.
I don't know.
But I have directly seen security from the Target on 4th tackle someone in the middle of the crosswalk, and hit them repeatedly as they took back whatever that person had stolen.
Random people on the street then started yelling at security to stop hitting the person who was caught shoplifting.
Sit down at outdoor seating at any restaurant in those areas and there is a guard standing there right by the tables while you eat.
San Francisco is about at that point. Years ago I was sitting at some outdoor seating on a first date and a guy walked up, grabbed my dates glass of wine, pounded it, and said "I'm an alcoholic" making eye contact with both of us, as he set my dates glass back down on the table.
Although to generally protect the community, maybe there’s a way we could do like an Uberpool for the whole town? If only there were a way to get everyone to chip in.
Dead Comment
He retweeted this on the matter of Whole Foods ->
https://twitter.com/mattdorsey/status/1645547717714915328
(1) https://twitter.com/garrytan
(2) https://twitter.com/paulg
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Is-the-San-Francis...
[2] https://www.finder.com/uk/police-statistics
The theorycrafting was fine, and the old DA was soft, but I prefer to judge on outcomes.
Dead Comment
As the article mentions SF does not have a high crime rate compared to other cities. What it does have that is more unique are issues around homelessness, inequality, drug use etc.
Those need to be solved by real experts who can look into social and inequality programs that can target the root cause in a measured, data-driven and impassioned way. Not hyperbolic, tech-bro VCs.
https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime#des...
Edit: Nor are a lot of these issues limited to SF. We had a large encampment set up shop right outside our property line, right next to downtown Milpitas a few years back. It grew and grew for over a year, and nothing was done about it until they decided to dig down and cut into a water main that was connected to our warehouse for their own personal use.
Towards the end they also give an example of a city that is managing to turn this around with some good programs...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw