thoughts on safety in sf

the first time i lived in sf, i didn’t know much about it other than that people kept telling me it was unsafe, so i read a bunch of quora answers on which parts of the city were the most dangerous. most responses mentioned the usual suspects (hunters point, tenderloin, etc), but there was one comment that’s stuck with me for the last few years - it went along the lines of “by far the most dangerous people in sf are certain tech leaders who are willing to unleash massive changes on the world in pursuit of personal profit”

back then i thought very cool, congrats on writing a contrarian quora answer. it’s taken me almost three years to come around. in many ways it reminds me of those childrens’ science museums that ask what’s the most dangerous species on earth and the answer turns out to be humans - not the answer you wanted, but eventually you grow up and understand the truth behind it

anyway, the point of this post isn’t to discuss the dangers of capitalism or man-made ecological collapse, so let me get back to sf…

i lived here in the spring of 2021 and visited almost every weekend in the summer of 2022 without any issues, but i was still terrified of moving here after college. yes, i’d seen a good chunk of the city, but i hadn’t really been a long-term resident or witnessed all four seasons or gone around much at night, and in the meantime i kept hearing horror stories from friends and media - surely these people knew better than me and had good reasons for saying the things they were saying, right?

there were many little things i became deeply worried about as a result of believing what i’d been told: riding certain buses with horrendous reviews on yelp and reddit (lines 14 and 19, among others). the end of daylight savings time, and getting home from work in the dark. i walked the streets like a madman, making sudden turns at random intervals to look behind me, tensing up and gluing my eyes to everyone i passed. maybe this all sounds a bit ridiculous, but what else are you supposed to do when you’ve just moved to a new city, one you’ve spent years hearing a single narrative about?

existing in this state of nonstop paranoia feels really awful, and i realized pretty quickly that it isn't how i want to live my life. i don’t want to be the kind of person who is deeply suspicious of everyone they encounter, and i wonder if viewing all strangers as threats affects your psyche in ways more subtle and sinister than you can be conscious of. some people consider this idea of worst-case preparedness to be a kind of strength (constant vigilance, as alastor moody would say), to which i would respond - maybe some kinds of strength aren’t worth maintaining?

i’m reminded of a blog post by my friend audrey:
“They say that pressure makes diamonds…
but I don't want to emerge [from pressure] so hardened that I cut everything I touch…
Instead, I want to be sea glass.
I want to emerge from these waves not shattered,
but smoothed into a soft caress.
I'll learn that I don't have to be constantly pushing against the currents,
so sometimes I'll just let them wash over me.”

it’s true that we live in a world filled with risk. but maybe instead of becoming hard and tense and constantly bracing for impact, we can respond to that risk by trusting other people more and learning to relax in the face of uncertainty and improving ourselves so that we have less to fear? that’s what i’ve been trying to do, at least: trust, relax, and get in better shape

by now i’ve lived in four or five different parts of sf, depending on how you count. a couple of those locations are places that friends warned me to avoid at all costs because they would be unlivable. they’ve all been fine. yes, it’s sometimes messy outside and i often see people on the street in awful living conditions, but i’m clearly not the victim here, and people on the streets aren’t the main perpetrators of violent crime anyway

this isn’t to say that sf is doing a good job. fentanyl, shoplifting, and the housing crisis are massive problems. there are entire other categories of problems (most obviously sexual harassment/assault) which affect specific subsets of the population and which i’m fortunate to be able to avoid. and there are still plenty of things i refuse to do out of caution, like going on my phone while walking outside or visiting blocks with a history of shootings

but here is another set of truths about my experience here: the biggest source of day-to-day danger in sf (by far) has been bike riders and car drivers not stopping properly. the most dangerous places in sf have been steep inclines and cliffs where you can fall and severely injure yourself. the worst part of moving to sf has been the stress and anxiety and the subsequent toll on my mental health, not caused by any corporeal feature of the city, but caused by this narrative that we for whatever reason have collectively decided to manufacture and blow out of proportion. and yes, in expectation, the people in sf with the largest negative impact on my life will probably be random tech leaders

to be honest i’m deeply disappointed by how we managed to end up in this situation in the first place. how many of my acquaintances in tech - mostly young, educated, male, and reasonably wealthy, the exact demographics that should be least affected by safety concerns - decided to amplify a narrative that was based on truth but misleading at best. how, when i asked them why reality wasn’t lining up with the stories i’d heard, many of them admitted that they were just passing on stories they’d heard from someone else but hadn’t experienced, or that they’d exaggerated things because they were bored or dissatisfied with their lives and wanted to vent somehow

i think the danger in spreading these kinds of hyperbolic narratives is that we ourselves may understand which parts are fact and which parts are fiction, but stories spread and eventually end up in the ears of someone who doesn’t understand and then takes those narratives far more literally than intended