r/sanfrancisco

I voted for Lurie and have been happy with his performance because it FELT like things were getting better. But increasingly, I’m not so sure… are things actually getting better? I’d love to hear what Reddit has to say about this…

• Homelessness: In the Mission, the homeless situation is worse than ever. The BART plazas are an unmitigated mess. Market Street still looks like zombie land from Van Ness to Powell. As usual, it seems that the problem is being pushed around, not actually addressed.
• Traffic violence: Not getting any better. Drivers are still out of control and have already killed 12 pedestrians this year. Bicycles ignore all rules. There seems to be no traffic enforcement and I don’t see any meaningful investments in people-centric infrastructure.
• Housing affordability: Yeah…
• Economic recovery: Seems to largely hinge on a few AI companies with questionable business and ethical models. 
• Car break-ins: Have gone done by a lot. But not clear how much of this was Lurie’s doing. 
• He did mostly keep ICE out of SF by calling up Marc and Jensen

Am I missing something? 

And just to be clear... I love living SF and we are raising out family here. I'm just not so sure I'm drinking the Lurie Kool-aide anymore.

last week, my father-in-law received a $191 ticket for not stopping at a stop sign on Lake Street while on his bike. He asked the police officer why he wasn't ticketing all the cars that drive down that street at 25 or 30 mph despite it being a slow street and the cop said that a slow street is not legally- enforceable. And he said people have been complaining about bikes blowing stops signs.

It's unreal how you can get away with speeding in a car down a residential street designated for non-motorized recreation, but penalized for not stopping at a stop sign on your bike.

With how high demand is in recent times to watch blockbuster hits in premium format. There shall be no reason for the largest theater chain to resist expansion for what is arguably the best variety of option to watch a movie on a projector during the time of its showing.

Thinking this morning about some favorite restaurants that are no longer around. A favorite of mine was “J’s Pots of Soul”, a soul food place in Hayes Valley that shut down around 2010. The food was heavy and so, so good.

What were some of your favorite closed places?

[supprimé]

The Giants are having a Pokemon Drone Show, I imagine they'll face inside the stadium but anybody else got any good viewing points for the show? The tickets are already sold out for the show (only tickets for the game are available).

Curious if anybody remembers the last time they did it if they had a good viewing point to hang out at.

A great op-ed in the SF Chronicle by a doctor at a Tenderloin clinic:

There is another John Doe in the intensive care unit. 

“He is critically ill, hoping someone might know this person. Found down with overdose at 1180 Howard Street around 5am.”

This email, and too many others like it, arrive in the all-staff listserv at the San Francisco homeless clinic where I work as a physician. Leftover pizza reminders and meeting agendas routinely roll into frightening, blandly described near-death experiences.

“John Doe arrived to SFGH on 1/22  found down near MISSION ST / 6 TH ST, possible overdose ( + fent & cocaine ), active seizing on route to SFGH. See photo attached.”

Usually, the messages are sent by hospital social workers asking our team to help identify their client. 

“He tested positive for amphetamines. He currently is more awake, but cannot speak at all. He suffered a stroke. Oh, and in addition to the tattoos seen in the photos he has a very distinctive scar over his LEFT leg.”

The photographs are garish. The men, always men, look close to death. Limp faces with ointment smeared across half-closed eyes. Mouths hang agape. Floppy necks cannot support heavy heads that loll to one side. Oily, long hair lies limply across white, rough pillowcases. Breathing tubes are taped to lips, fastened across cheeks, wrapped behind occiputs. Tubes and lines everywhere. Sometimes, there is a neck brace. A laceration on a cheekbone. A black eye. Stiff, blue and white hospital gowns are draped over them like a funerary shroud. 

They are discovered lying on the sidewalk, folded in a tent, face down in a recreational vehicle. With lights and sirens, they are shuttled to hospitals, where their cold bodies are warmed, lacerations sutured, infections treated with antibiotics, broken bones set — they are resuscitated, revitalized, reanimated. But the hypoxia, the brain bleed and the acute kidney injury are serious, and they have not regained consciousness. Often, they are of uncertain neurological recovery. 

These men have no wallet, phone, driver’s license or registration. No electronic items to unlock, no numbers to call. In the middle of a city that lives and breathes technology, there are no digital footprints here. 

Usually the problem is the opposite — with personal data ubiquitous online, credit card hacks and security breaches seem pro forma. But when you have few possessions and live in a tent on the sidewalk, no one is stealing your identity. In fact, that is exactly the problem: No one can figure out what that identity even is. 

It is a luxury, it turns out, to be someone with an identity to steal. Living outside all the normal regulatory, governmental tracking systems of modern life, these men are unbanked. Off-grid. Anonymous.

Living an anonymous life, paradoxically, in the heart of a city, on a sidewalk, in public view. An acutely conspicuous form of anonymity.  

“They are currently in the ICU at St. Francis under John Doe. They were brought in this morning via Ambulance, found unresponsive with 2 others on Larkin St, OD.” 

A pile of unconscious people, with too few respirations among the three of them. Fentanyl, or the rat-poison-and-adjacent-horrors it could have been cut with, is, my god, taking out groups, blocks. Maybe the fact they were all together means they were friends, I tell myself. Or maybe they just all had the same dealer. 

When one, singular patient languishes in a hospital bed, it is easier to persuade yourself it is an unfortunate, personal event. But when groups of unconscious people arrive at a hospital, it feels cataclysmic, apocalyptic, b iblical. Instead of locusts, our pestilence is high-potency synthetic opioids — it makes bugs feel provincial.

During my residency on an inpatient rotation at the San Francisco General Hospital, I watched a homeless man die alone. He had drunk himself into liver failure, and there was nothing left to do except watch his cirrhosis cause a cascade of other organs to fail. His labs became more and more abnormal. We had offered to reach out to his family or friends, but he said there was no one to call. He became increasingly confused and fatigued until, one night, he died. 

Afterward, our attending physician asked how everyone was doing, and I said it felt like a sad way to go, with no friends or family by his side, knowing, as he had, that his actions had caused a premature and completely avoidable death. I could not imagine a more sorrowful way to end a life full of sorrow. 

The attending told me she didn’t view it that way. She had seen a lot of people die and said he died with people taking care of him, with me, his worried, harried resident, checking in on him two times a day. He had meds to make him comfortable, a soft bed, three warm meals. This could have been the most communal, the most social, the most comfortable he had been for some time. 

I was trying to tell her, This is sad. I would never want this for myself, for anyone.

She was trying to tell me, It could be much, much sadder...

I was curious to see how much my last apt was going for and could not believe my eyes that the tin can of an apartment that I was renting from 2021-2022 for $1695 is now going for $5300!!! This is insaneeee and I’m truly sorry for everyone looking for an apartment right now. It’s straight up robbery.