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Aditya just wrote something that struck me on his blog post about Rent.

"The trailer for Rent (via Trina) is online. Segements [sic] of Rent were shot on 6th Street, between Mission and Market, which is exactly where I live. For a week or two, movie busses, lights, and extras flooded the streets every night to shoot a couple of scenes. It you look in the trailer, all the New Year's celebration scenes are from my neighbourhood. It's pretty nutty. Club 6 became the Cat Scratch Club (?), 7th Street Haircutters became a mid 80s haircut place, some pawn shop becaome [sic] Crazy Eddie's. It's funny to think that to find grimy mid-80s NYC, the best location they found was the 6th area."

Actually, it's not very funny that they found San Francisco to be a perfect city to represent the grimy mid-80s NYC. The area of the shot, is actually grimy and much like many parts of NYC in the 80s. San Francisco is a great city, and I love it to death, but I grew up in NYC in the 80s, and saw an INCREDIBLE transformation of that city in the 90s. Most of this transformation can be attributed to the Broken Windows theory outlined by sociologists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling.

"Their approach worked in New York City’s subways, where felonies have fallen by 75% in the 1990s, and all across New York City as former Police Chief William Bratton implemented many of Kelling’s and Coles’ policy recommendations."

The premise of the theory is that if some one breaks a window, and no one bothers to clean up the glass or prevent the crime from occuring in the first place, criminals, or those that may be inclided to commit crime will be more willing to do so since they think no one cares. This results in a problem that is often hard to fix with a band-aid. A good example of this is my street in SF where once a week at least one car is broken into. There is broken glass all over the place, and it remains that way till the owner shows up. Next week another car is victimized. In NYC in the 80s, my father's car was broken into the only 3 times he ever parked it on the street at night. And mind you, this is on the Upper East Side, one of the nicer parts of the city. When I was a boy walking home from school one day, two guys stole a car radio in broad daylight on 73rd and 5 avenue, and 10 feet in front of me as I walked by. Since the mid 90s I haven't heard of a en a single car broken into on my family's block. As a kid I was mugged twice in NYC. Once in Central Park and once 3 blocks from our apartment. This was the reality of NYC in the 80s.

Some other people think that the same approach that worked for NYC would not work for San Francisco. I have four things for you. 1) 6th street, 2) tenderloin, 3) the mission (mostly mission between 16th and 21st), 4) market street between the Castro and 6th street.

As a child of the 80s and 90s, and seeing how far NYC is come in terms of being a tourist friendly and generally clean city, I am often shocked when going around San Francisco by foot or by car. There are many times I've felt ashamed or embarrassed by the condition of the street, or the people in the street.

This is one of the areas that SF really falls short of NYC. There is just too much graffiti on buildings, broken car glass, trash, and displaced folks roaming around.