San Francisco, CA
Now nowhere in San Francisco is safe from crime — we’re the proof say shop owners in ‘quiet’ areas
San Francisco’s crime spree has taken a new twist: it has exploded out of its shattered downtown into areas residents thought were still safe — despite its mayor claiming the city is beating the criminals.
Mayor Landon Breed touted declining crime numbers in January, saying in a statement that “our work around public safety is making a difference.”
But police statistics analyzed by The Post show that the city’s previously quieter residential areas are instead being hit hard with burglary — and shopkeepers in those areas told The Post they’re living on edge.
While crime in the notorious Tenderloin district and the surrounding downtown area is down compared with this time last year, burglary is up by 44% in 2024 in San Francisco’s more residential Taraval police district. Burglaries are also up by 19% in Ingleside and 6.2% in the Richmond neighborhood.
“It never occurred to me that crime would be a problem. It’s a nice, safe area on the edge of the city,” Taraval-area candy shop owner Diane Zogaric told The Post. “But that doesn’t seem to matter anymore.”
The city’s “doom loop” downtown has caused half of retailers to flee the area, citing crime and safety concerns, with progressive policies on criminal justice widely blamed for the exodus.
This week Macy’s became the latest retailer to call it quits, saying it will close its giant Union Square department store.
But in residential areas, shop owners told The Post they fear for their future.
Chinese restaurant owner Andy Yang said: “We can’t just pack up and leave. We spent decades of our youth building and cultivating our businesses. We have families here. We have properties here.”
‘It shouldn’t be dangerous to work in a candy store.’
Diana Zogaric never imagined that she was making herself a target of crime when she bought the candy store her children had loved when they were young in 2020. But she’s since been robbed and violently assaulted.
Zogaric, 53, took over Shaw’s Candy, a local favorite in the West Portal, when it came up for sale in August of 2020.
The first major crime was in March 2023, when her front door was smashed at 5 a.m. and a robber strolled in to grab her cash box containing $600, costing $1,500 in repairs. It was a forewarning of the sharp crime rise in the police district of Taraval, of which West Port is a par.
“The police who responded were great, but I don’t think that they prioritize crimes of that nature,” Zogaric said.
Then in September of 2023, when Zogaric asked a homeless man bothering customers outside her store to leave, he shoved her in the chest, causing her to stumble backwards. “He proceeded to punch me numerous times in the head, and all the while I was backing away, he kept punching me,” she said.
He forced his way into the store, punched the manager in the face, and pushed an elderly woman customer. Four male bystanders managed to restrain him until the cops came.
The man is now being detained in a mental facility for two years after getting a schizophrenia diagnosis, and a restraining order will prevent him coming into the store when he is released, but she remains shaken.
“I find myself recoiling on the streets,” she said. “I kind of just wanna leave San Francisco.”
“The biggest fear for me now is for my employees. As awful as what happened to me was, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if that happened to a teenager,” she said.
Zogaric cannot let employees work alone for fear of their safety, and the city’s $18.07 minimum wage means her margins are stretched thin.
“It should not be dangerous to work in a candy store. But, here, it is.”
“I’m pretty left wing,” Zogaric said. “But I still think criminals need to be prosecuted. There’s no fear because crimes aren’t being taken seriously in San Francisco.”
‘The stress gave me a heart attack’
Andy Yang’s Chinese joint Kung Food in the Park police district has been battered by vandals and burglars seven times since the pandemic.
The 35-year-old says the stress was so bad that he had an unexpected heart attack in December at the gym and is now recovering from bypass surgery.
“I’m just trying to keep my head out of the water,” the father of two, aged 4 and 18 months, told The Post. “I’m living in constant fear as a small business owner in San Francisco.”
“All the money that I’ve lost has just taken a toll on my life and my health,” he said.
“It’s the crime, it’s the vandalism, it’s the theft, it’s the beggars harassing customers. You can’t run a business like that, and I think I just collapsed under the stress of it all.”
Yang’s restaurant, in the North of the Panhandle neighborhood, has been broken into once every six months since 2020, costing him $15,000 in repairs, $3,000 in looted cash, and untold amounts in stolen food.
He used to leave takeout orders on his front table, but thieves snatched hundreds of dollars worth of food at a time. Once a waitress chased someone who stole takeout and got punched in the face.
“The restaurant business itself is a very thin margin business — especially with inflation — so all of this affects us tremendously,” he said.
Even though he pays $10,000 a year for insurance, his claims have never reached his deductible, leaving him to pay out of pocket and to stop filing entirely.
Throughout his string of burglaries, Yang contacted local city officials for support but says all he got in return was “some patronizing BS from like an intern.”
“I don’t blame the police for not doing their jobs. Their hands are tied,” he said.
Out of five burglaries, two perpetrators were caught by police, but, when he showed up to court, he learned that the district attorney had dropped the case.
Although crime is down this year in the Park district, he says, “If the rates are down here, I don’t feel any less miserable.”
Yang has posted about crime on social media and been sent nasty messages telling him to just leave San Francisco.
As crime continues to rage on, Yang says it’s important for the Chinese American community in San Francisco to speak up for themselves.
“Every small business owner I know is frustrated,” he said. “Everyone has an exit plan. Everyone is praying for Jesus to come to save us because clearly the elected officials aren’t going to.”
‘This is not the city I grew up in’
Michael Hsu, a 35-year-old San Francisco native, was thrilled when he bought his shoe store, Footprint, from his retiring boss in early 2020. But, when he took over the shop in the Sunset neighborhood, part of the Traval police district, things instantly fell apart.
“Two weeks later, we had to close because of Covid-19,” he said.
When Louis Vuitton was looted in San Francisco’s Union Square that June, Hsu knew he had to board up his business to protect his merchandise, so he shelled out $2,500 for in-demand plywood and depended on online business for more than seven months.
But, when he finally re-opened in 2021, he was barraged by crime like he’d never seen before: three major break-ins and repeated shoplifting which cost him around $50,000 in losses but resulted in zero arrests.
In 2021, burglars used a blowtorch to bypass the sensor which would alert him to broken glass and got away with over $25,000 in merchandise — a brutal toll considering his average sale is $100.
“It’s a lot of shoes we have to sell to make that up,” he said. “This isn’t Target or Nordstrom. This is a family business they’re stealing from.”
Later that year a thief, dubbed the Butt Crack Bandit, scaled scaffolding to get into his shop and got away with around $10,000 in shoes.
“It’s hard to sleep peacefully at night because you’re always wondering when the next call from the alarm company or the police is going to come,” Hsu, who relies on Footprint to support his 3-year-old daughter, told The Post. “The bottom line is we’re in San Francisco, so you have to be ready for anything.”
Even though he’s had to pay $1,500 each time his glass door was broken, it was below his insurance’s $2,000 deductible.
Then his insurers dropped him this month for filing too many claims — forcing him to pay 40% more to another insurer.
It can take a few weeks to get the glass he needs to repair his storefront, so now he orders two at a time, preparing for the next break-in.
“You can walk into a store and just walk out with anything, and there’s little that’s going to happen to you,” he said.
On New Year’s Eve thieves bashed in his windows and caused $20,000 in losses and repairs.
Even though the police arrived in under five minutes, the perpetrators got away — because, thanks to a local rule, the police aren’t able to pursue perpetrators of property crime if nobody is in harm’s way.
“That’s when I called the mayor’s office and said, ‘You gotta be kidding me. Watch this video. It doesn’t look good on you. It doesn’t look good on San Francisco. Let’s change this.”
Mayor Breed is now backing Proposition E, a ballot initiative that would allow police to pursue perps of property crime, like those who robbed Hsu.
“I don’t like to talk s–t about my city,” he said. “I love San Francisco. That’s why I want to work with policymakers — because we can do better, we’re better than this. We have to take back our city.”
In the North Bay, the SMART commuter rail line will begin work next week to extend service to the city of Healdsburg, with plenty of challenges, both in construction and in finding long-term funding.
As the largest city north of Santa Rosa, Healdsburg is generating considerable excitement among those who await SMART’s arrival. But first there’s a lot of work to do, starting next week.
“It starts with a topographical survey,” said SMART Chief Engineer Bill Gamlen. “Monday, we’ll be moving into geotechnical boring, where we’ll have a drill rig out on the site, and we are taking cores of soil samples. There’ll be a lot of things going in parallel. We’re going to be taking things apart, tearing out old track, taking out old bridges, tearing up grade crossings. The bridge across the Russian River will be one of the first activities there.”
That bridge was built in the 1870s and will need a complete replacement to carry the weight of the modern SMART trains. The prep work will take about a year, with actual construction beginning next spring. The $270 million in funding for the extension is already in place and SMART expects to be pulling into the old Healdsburg station sometime in late 2028.
“We think it’s a big milestone,” said Gamlen. “You know, Healdsburg is a delightful place to go visit on the weekends, and even vacation there. So, we see a lot of ridership heading up to Healdsburg, a destination, probably, more than an origination point.”
But that’s a problem, according to Mike Arnold, an economist and outspoken critic of SMART, living in Novato. Arnold said he thinks SMART will never be financially feasible because it doesn’t take people to any large urban job centers.
“The primary problem is the economics,” he said. “Passenger rail in suburbia just doesn’t get the ridership. And the reason is because there just isn’t a place for people to get to easily. There is no major employment center in either Marin or Sonoma Counties. And so, therefore, when you take people to stations, how are they going to get where they want to go? The answer is, very few of them do, and that’s why they get very few riders.”
Currently, kids and seniors pay no fare, and Arnold said that means more than 40 percent of riders are riding for free. And he points to Hwy 101, where SMART was supposed to relieve traffic during morning commute times.
Changes in work habits, brought on by the pandemic, have decreased the number of commuters, but Arnold said it has simply compressed the traffic jams into a smaller time period, with little impact from SMART.
“You’ve narrowed the peak,” he said. “But when you talk about peak-hour congestion at 7:30 in the morning, it looks like it hasn’t changed at all. And the answer is, based on the count on the cars, it really hasn’t changed at all.”
The debate matters because in June voters will be asked to decide whether or not to extend, for another 30 years, the quarter-cent sales tax to continue funding SMART. The current tax will sunset in 2029, shortly after the Healdsburg extension is scheduled to be finished.
Joby Aviation has kick-started a nationwide tour of its flying taxi. The first flight saw its aircraft fly over the San Francisco Bay Area and around the Golden Gate Bridge.
The flight took place around the same time the FAA announced a nationwide pilot program aimed at finally making commercial air taxi services a reality.
Joby Aviation kickstarts nationwide eVTOL tour
The Joby air taxi is piloted, though the company eventually aims to automate its flight services. It will be capable of flying as many as four passengers on short, urban trips, reaching cruise speeds of roughly 200 mph. Its fixed wings feature six propellers and are capable of swiveling forward after takeoff for increased speed.
Joby Aviation’s nationwide tour, dubbed the “Electric Skies Tour”, will include demonstrations in several cities throughout the US.
In a press statement, the company stated: “With one of the world’s most recognizable skylines as a backdrop, the company showcased its operational readiness in a region defined by traffic congestion, demonstrating that the future of quiet, emissions-free flight, is not just a concept, but nearing commercial readiness.”
The San Francisco flight was conducted using a pre-production prototype, designated N545JX. According to a report by the San Francisco Chronicle, the N545JX aircraft “cruised along in virtual silence” as it flew across the bay. Separately, Joby revealed earlier this month that it had flown its first “FAA-conforming” air taxi.
“With an operational foundation built on thousands of test flights and more than 50,000 miles logged across its fleet, the company is now ready to scale its presence across the US,” the company said in its statement.
The Trump administration’s air taxi push
Joby Aviation also noted that it is among a handful of firms selected as partners in the White House’s recently announced eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP). The other companies selected are Archer Aviation, BETA Technologies, Electra, Wisk, Ampaire, Elroy Air, and Reliable Robotics.
“Here’s an opportunity for the industry to roll out in a similar way to how Waymo rolled out,” Archer Aviation CEO Adam Archer explained in a video on X after the eIPP announcement. “Rather than an all-or-nothing type certificate where you can go anywhere, or no type certificate where you can’t go anywhere… You can think about it as a few concentrated areas with very, very high margins of safety, allowing us to start very low-level operations, and then expand from there.”
According to Joby, eIPP gives it the opportunity to “begin early operations across 10 states: Arizona, Florida, Idaho, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, and Utah.” The company added that the program also has the “potential to meaningfully accelerate the path to commercial service.”
If all goes to plan, Joby Aviation claims it will help realize a society where a daily commute can “take minutes, not hours.”
“Our technology provides an opportunity to build on the immense potential of this region while protecting it for the next generation,” said JoeBen Bevirt, founder and CEO of Joby. “By providing clean, quiet service with minimal infrastructure investment, we are making flight an everyday reality for the community.”
The San Francisco Giants didn’t make that “major” move in the offseason. They saved those for last offseason and last year’s trade deadline.
Still, San Francisco did plenty to position itself as a team that could be better than 81-81 last season. Not all moves are created equal. Not all moves work out the way the franchise hoped. The value of some of those moves have yet to be determined.
But, on their face, here are the moves that already look smart and already look, eh, dumb, going into opening day.
Smart
Signing Luis Arráez
The Venezuela native had a huge World Baseball Classic as his home country won the title for the first time. He had his second career multi-home run game in his WBC career. He returned to spring training and the bat kept cooking. He slashed .353/.389/.412.
While many envisioned him as a leadoff hitter due to his impressive ability to get contact and his three batting titles, San Francisco is toying with batting him later in the order. He’s one of the few contact hitters that could excel in that role, and he gives the lineup flexibility.
Signing Tyler Mahle and Adrian Houser
The Giants may get the best version of both pitchers. Before Sunday’s exhibition game in Sacramento, Mahle had thrown 10 scoreless innings in spring and showed no signs of the shoulder fatigue that limited him last season. Houser has thrown 11 innings and while he hasn’t been as effective, he looks like the innings-eater the Giants hoped they signed.
With the season-ending injury to Hayden Birdsong and the underperformance of the Carsons — Seymour and Whisenhunt — signing the two veterans to inexpensive deals looks smarter by the day.
Signing Harrison Bader
He’s day-to-day with a tight hamstring, but it’s a minor inconvenience this early in the campaign. San Francisco knew what they were getting when they signed him — a Gold Glove level center fielder with a resurgent bat who can make their entire outfield better. It allowed San Francisco to move Jung Hoo Lee to right field, which should improve his defensive numbers. San Francisco locked him into a cheap two-year deal. It should pay off handsomely.
Dumb
Not Signing Left-Handed Relief Help Sooner
San Francisco knew it was going to have some issues at left-handed relief. Erik Miller was going to need time to recover from a back issue. Sam Hentges won’t be ready after arthroscopic knee surgery. Then the Giants lost Reiver Sanmartin for three months to hip surgery. At one point the only healthy left-handed reliever in camp was Matt Gage.
San Francisco tried addressing it by signing Joey Lucchesi. But the Giants released him on Sunday after signing Ryan Borucki. But a bit more careful planning might have lessened San Francisco’s need to scramble this late in camp.
Not Adding Healthy Closing Experience
The Giants signed left-hander Jason Foley to bolster the bullpen. He had 28 saves for the Detroit Tigers in 2024. There was one problem. His recovery from shoulder surgery will keep him out of the lineup until the second half of the season.
That puts the pressure on Ryan Walker to not only be the closer but keep the job. He wants the pressure, he has said repeatedly in camp. He’s held the job before but not consistently. If he meets the moment, the Giants look smart for trusting him. If he can’t, San Francisco doesn’t have a healthy back-up plan until the All-Star break.
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