I told people I was going to Chicago, they acted like I was going to Gaza. It’s a fucking city, stop pretending Fox “news” speaks any kind of truth
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When do you realize you’ve been systematically lied to?
Two of us did a 25-mile bike ride along San Francisco shoreline a couple weeks ago.
Was fully expecting to ride over homeless people, drug addicts, and raging anarchists. All we saw was pleasant weather, a beautiful coast line, and people just doing their thing. Horrified at how damn sedate Sunset Dunes and Golden Gate Park were.
The most annoying thing was out-of-service BART escalators. Expected having to dodge gang-wars and knife attacks while going up and down the stairs.
Got home with zero scars. Would not recommend.
Every time I spend a nice weekend in Seattle or Portland, I get home and see people on Facebook acting like it's Escape From LA and you gotta be Snake Plissken to survive.
The stadium is nowhere near San Francisco. It’s 45 minutes away in Santa Clara
I see a lotta people mention humam shit on the sidewalk in SF because an app that let you report such things got flooded by trolls once and some funny meme images csme from it.
I'm there fairly regularly and have never seen shit on the sidewalk outside of the occasional dog turd some asshole owner didn't pick up; which I see almost everywhere I've been in the world, too.
The worst thing I can say about SF is the traffic is terrible despite having pretty decent public transportation. I never drive there. I drive to Livermore and take BART into and around the city and walk everywhere else. And if not for Musk's dumbass I might have been able to not even have to drive to Livermore; they were planning on extending BART where I live and I'd have been able to never need a car to get to the Bay Area at all until that dipshit lobbied against it.
I've lived here for almost 15 years, I love it, especially my neighborhood North Beach. And, you're right, the poop map app was blown out of proportion and used by trolls and other bad faith actors to make things sound much worse than they were/are.
But
Poop on the sidewalk is a common enough occurrence that you'll never catch me slipping up watching where I am stepping to avoid those land mines.
I've sent in reports to 311 (the source for the poop map data) quite a few times, as well. It'd probably be worse if business owners didn't often take it upon themselves to keep the area by their storefronts/parklets clean for customers and passersby
And north beach is one of the nicer neighborhoods, with lots of tourists.
Does it ruin my life or perception of the city? No way. I do wish we'd invest in more public toilets, or businesses would offer restrooms to non-customers though.
Also, poop is not the only thing to avoid stepping on even though it's the only thing that gets repeated by the trolls. There's occasionally food littered about, vomit (especially on saturday/Sunday mornings or after "party holidays"), the rare flattened pigeon. Probably other notable stuff I've dodged over the years but have forgotten about.
Come visit, but stay vigilant, pedestrians!
I’ve stepped in human shit on multiple occasions. I don’t even like going into the city because it’s so hard to find a bathroom
My out of state family always looks at me like I'm an alien when I mention I'm spending a weekend in San Francisco.
The modern media ecosystem really is a bizarre thing. Amazing that liars have learned to be so effective that people trust them over their friends and family and often their own eyes.
When I travel, and tell people I'm from SF, I've gotten the questions "Isn't it dangerous?" "Isn't it dirty?" "Is it as bad as I see on TV?" and no it's not particularly dangerous or dirty, and when Fox News shows "San Francisco" It's always the worst street in the Tenderloin, and characterizing it as the entire city.
I've been to Republican leaning suburbs with equally as many homeless people, even though they are much less dense and less populated than SF.
There are people that live in Oregon that think Portland burned down in 2020.
Not to mention that the same people who express shock and horror at the poverty on those streets are often the same ones whose actions and politics created that situation.
We were in SF a few months ago, and wandered around the Union Square area. I snapped pictures around the city because I actually adored it and sent them to my MAGA parents, telling them they promised me human shit on the sidewalks and hoardes of homeless people harrassing me, so I wanted my money back. I told them I was also promised looters and cars being smashed into right in front of my face.
They were not amused and said something along the lines of: "Yes well Trump has been president so cities are cleaning up their acts!"
They both live on the fucking east coast and have never even set foot in CA for a second.
They think Portland was burnt to the ground, they think Chicago, New York, LA, San Francisco, are war zones where everyone is shooting each other and gangs of black youths are patrolling the streets murdering and raping white women.
They think all of this unironically
Recently, a photographer posted his lasted Portland photo, a beautiful night shot of the harbor with lots of lights.
I told him the photo was gorgeous, you could hardly tell Portland was burning to the ground.
noem said minneapolis burned to the ground which isnt true lol. nothing happened there. she had to reiterated that on FACEthenrightwingnation news segment
Levi’s Stadium is in Santa Clara, not San Francisco. So weird, because it’s a good 45 minute drive from SF.
Also, SFO is rather far south of SF proper, and going between there and Santa Clara doesn’t take you through the city.
they are confusing it being in SF, because the moscone center has a SUPERBOWL event/thing going on there.
Of course, but the Superbowl media circus does go to the city, and it's pretty obvious from the article that's where they were talking about.
The image the right wing nut jobs and oligarchy machine constantly propagandize for the last several decades for their drones
I didn't realize right wingers actively thought of San Francisco as a hellhole. I've heard it of Portland and Los Angeles, but never of the Bay area. I thought people imagined that all the coastal elites were from there.
I was in SF last year for a 9ers game (stayed in San Mateo, did a bunch of touristy stuff in SF and of course the actual game was in Santa Clara). Some homeless people digging through the trash in Portsmouth Square Park. I think someone tried to break into our Airbnb, too. But, I never really felt unsafe. It's not really any worse than most any other big city in the US. Kinda run down, seems like it could use some TLC, but that's true of most American cities. And of course everything is stupid expensive.
The worst part was the traffic, imo. We used Caltrain and I think Bart? Idk, it was confusing. And expensive. And slow. But we also did a fair amount of driving, and driving around SF is like my own personal hell. To be fair, though, I generally hate driving in any major US city. But I think SF is worse than most.
SF isn't terrible, but it ain't great, either.
caltrain is more expensive than bart i think, if you planning to go way out the bay area.
lol... that's a perfect, concise description of transit in the bay area. Slow, expensive, and still requires a lot of driving to get where you want to go.
They clearly haven't walked around Castro street after dark
What do you mean?
Used to live in SF. Love walking in cities. Didn't love the urine & feces & junkies of the Tenderloin
Castro Street doesn't cut into the TL. And the Castro is nice.
You’re so full of shit
They're not. Even though I really enjoyed living in the Bay Area, I'm not blind to how dystopian it can feel. Just hang in the Tenderloin. Or if you really want something eye-opening, shoot on over to Oakland. The area is still great, but it's a poor value when you consider it has the mkst expensive CoL in the country. I'd love to see the area get itself a little more together.
Edit: though the other commenter is right. Castro street has nothing to do with the TL
castro isnt the tenderloin. its often more upper middle class lgbtq+ people. TL is still pretty trashy though, especially right after lifting pandemic restriction a WF(now defunct) was there.
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