I was struck by the comments on yesterday’s posts about the T-Third line, about fearing the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood (BVHP). I may have actually started it all in my own post on Friday when I referred to “the shudders of pedestrians walking up the deserted industrial block that is the butt-end of Sunnydale Ave” and on Saturday about a distance of “1000 frightening feet” between the end of the T-Third line and the Bayshore Caltrain station — which Muni’s own map shows as falsely connected.
 

My intention was to tell people headed to CalTrain that there’s a better way to get there from the T-Third than walking down Sunnydale and through a deserted industrial wasteland. This has nothing to do with whether or not I appreciate the BVHP neighborhood or its residents, to whom I intended no offense. But if people were talking in general about the notion of being afraid of going into other neighborhoods, I offer this quote from today’s SF Chronicle story about the T-line. Speaking of the light rail line, district Supervisor Sophie Maxwell said:

Being connected to the city is so very, very important. I can get on a streetcar and go to work for the first time. Not two or three buses, having to risk my life in some strange place to get home.

So if it’s possible for people from elsewhere in the city to feel uneasy in Bayview, perhaps it’s just as possible for Bayview residents to feel like they’re “risking their lives” in other neighborhoods.

Also in today’s paper was a story about two men gunned down in the 400 block of Haight St.:

The shooting occurred beneath a small, three-story apartment building and across the street from a popular night club. The block has restaurants, two medical marijuana clubs and stores that sell furniture, bicycles and candles.

A reporter who pulled up to the block at 10 a.m. this morning was immediately asked if he wanted to buy drugs as a teenage boy rolled a joint in plain sight on the hood of a car.

Two men in their 30s, who arrived this morning to retrieve their car, a Toyota Matrix spattered with blood from the shooting, said they had been partying at the night club, Underground SF, and had been forced to leave their car due to police blockades. “Usually (killings) are confined to certain areas of the city. I think it’s spreading out a little more,” said one of the men, who declined to give their names.

Many people about to visit San Francisco ask how safe it is to walk around. I came here almost 30 years ago, and during that time, while parts of the city have gotten dirtier and there are more homeless people, most of the city has also gotten safer. There are very few parts I would actually be afraid to walk through — but there are parts I wouldn’t walk through with a $500 camera around my neck, either. But as for that deserted stretch between the Sunnydale Ave. Muni stop and the Bayshore CalTrain station — my advice is, get off at Arleta, one stop north, and walk down Tunnel Ave.

It’s a city. There are some bad-asses. No neighborhood has a monopoly on them.