San Francisco's tourist areas is almost like a completely separate universe than San Francisco's residential areas.
On one side you have old streetcars, cable cars, cute restaurants, tourist traps, and wide sidewalks.
On the other side you have extreme poverty, homelessness, gang wars, a huge violent crime problem, literal shit and piss in the streets, and enough race and class tension to cut with a knife.
The two seldom cross, but they do sometimes. The southern end of the Powell cable car stop is one such place. Walk just a teensy bit further west along Market and you will notice a complete collapse of the city. In the Union Square area head just a few blocks west and you will be in the middle of the Tenderloin, which is the infamous heart of unsavory and disgusting things that happen in the city.
More adventurous tourists that don't rely strictly on the most standard guides will also get to see the other side of the city. Find your way down to El Farolito in the Mission for their famous tacos and burritos? Welcome, you're now in contested gang territory where randoms get shot as part of gang initiations.
It's a puzzling city. I lived there for a year, and while I enjoyed a lot of it, my overall impression was deeply negative.
I used to love to go to the Roxie Theater in the Mission, where they showed movies you might never encounter otherwise. During a retrospective for some anniversary of a Friedkin film, the great director himself just came walking up the sidewalk right through his speechless fans.
On the other hand, I have been stuck in traffic on Mission near 17th while the SFPD put down rows of little yellow numbered plastic cones across three lanes of traffic -- one for each shell casing.
Is there any public transit facility less welcoming than the urine-drenched BART station slash homeless zoo at 16th? Yes, actually. Just pop down to 24th, if you dare.
Heroin dealers used to turn little alleys off of 26th into open-air markets in the wee hours. Maybe they still do.
I just can't bring myself to visit the Mission anymore.
Well, it depends. If you only ever hang out on Valencia (or west thereof), the Mission is vibrant, active, and more or less safe. Just grungy enough to be interesting, and the worst you can expect is a bar fight.
The Mission is very different to visit vs. to live in. It reminds me slightly of Belltown in Seattle - nice to visit, kind of shitty to live in. If you're just there on Thursday nights a lot of the awfulness of the neighborhood fails to bother you.
Catching a giant whiff of shit and piss coming out of the BART station you can shrug off when it's once in a while, especially when you're on the way to a good night out. When it's every single day, to and from work, all hours of the day, it becomes tiresome. When you pass by a homeless dude passed out (maybe dead? who knows) on the sidewalk you can shrug it off, but when you see him slumped over every day on your way to work it starts digging at you. When you hear about some poor Mexican kid who got shot as part of a gang initiation, you can think "how terrible" and get on with your day... when you see the street-side memorials, and then you see another a week later, and then another, it becomes different.
The Mission is a different beast when you live there vs. just visit. If you decide to cocoon yourself strictly in the heavily gentrified western border of the Mission (because let's be honest, the Valencia corridor is a tiny sliver of the Mission), you will never have to deal with any of it. For many people though, the Mission includes everything east of Mission St also ;)
Not to mention, once you leave the bar and restaurant stretch along Valencia/Guerrero the whole thing becomes really shitty, really fast. Have you ever walked down Capp St at night? It's two blocks away from party central at 16th and Valencia. You really, really don't want to.
The Mission isn't Afghanistan, but it's objectively a troubled neighborhood that is among San Francisco's most violent (which is a small feat in itself, considering that SF as a whole has elevated violent crime rates compared to other major American cities). The Tenderloin tends to get a bad rap as SF's "worst" neighborhood - but its violence rate is actually not the highest in the city. Even more concerning is that the Mission's violent crime rate is largely driven by gang activity, which sets it apart from other neighborhoods of the city also.
Yeah dude, I live there, the southeastern sketchy part, and I've been jumped off of my bike by random people for no other reason than they wanted to kick my ass. And I don't hang out on Valencia street at all. So thanks for being presumptuous, but you missed that one by a longshot.
You're still overstating the case. Yes, gang violence is prevalent, but its not like in Oakland where bystanders get shot for shit they had nothing to do with.
And I should add, I live about a block from where that 19 year old football player got shot a few weeks ago. I saw the memorial, the posters up all around the block, the whole thing.
I think you should ask yourself what made you automatically assume I was the kind of person you're describing in your response to my original comment. Because this whole debate is constantly poisoned by idiotic assumptions on both sides.
On one side you have old streetcars, cable cars, cute restaurants, tourist traps, and wide sidewalks.
On the other side you have extreme poverty, homelessness, gang wars, a huge violent crime problem, literal shit and piss in the streets, and enough race and class tension to cut with a knife.
The two seldom cross, but they do sometimes. The southern end of the Powell cable car stop is one such place. Walk just a teensy bit further west along Market and you will notice a complete collapse of the city. In the Union Square area head just a few blocks west and you will be in the middle of the Tenderloin, which is the infamous heart of unsavory and disgusting things that happen in the city.
More adventurous tourists that don't rely strictly on the most standard guides will also get to see the other side of the city. Find your way down to El Farolito in the Mission for their famous tacos and burritos? Welcome, you're now in contested gang territory where randoms get shot as part of gang initiations.
It's a puzzling city. I lived there for a year, and while I enjoyed a lot of it, my overall impression was deeply negative.