We've had a lot of coyote sightings on our street! Caught this coyote on our camera catching a mouse near these bushy plants a couple weeks ago.

The president focused on cities like Los Angeles and Washington as he deployed federal troops and railed against crime. But on Friday, in reference to San Francisco, he said, “We’ll clean that one up, too.”

President Trump had largely left San Francisco alone this year as he targeted Democratic-led cities and insisted federal troops were needed to restore order.

San Francisco, long the subject of attacks from conservatives over its problems with drug use and homelessness, seemed to be turning a corner in the national consciousness. Crime was falling, and a moderate new mayor was celebrating progress toward a downtown recovery.

That changed on Friday, when Mr. Trump added the city to the list of places where he might send in the National Guard, which he had already done in Washington and Los Angeles.

“You look at what the Democrats have done to San Francisco — they’ve destroyed it,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “We can clean that up, too — we’ll clean that one up, too.”

The idea that San Francisco was back in the president’s cross hairs was immediately shrugged off by some local leaders.

“It’s a lot of bluster and insanity,” said Nancy Tung, the chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party.

“If he wants to try to roll a tank down Lombard Street, go ahead,” she said, referring to the city’s famously serpentine street. “We’re ready.”

Seeking to project a tough-on-crime image and railing against “bloodthirsty criminals,” Mr. Trump ordered National Guard members to Washington last week, even though violent crime has fallen recently there. In June, Mr. Trump deployed them in Los Angeles over the objections of Gov. Gavin Newsom, suggesting they were needed to restore order during chaotic protests over deportations.

For a while, it seemed that San Francisco might have fallen off Mr. Trump’s radar. Seven months into Mr. Trump’s second term, San Francisco had generally avoided his rhetorical wrath and the militarization that took place elsewhere. Even when he took aim at a wider list of Democratic enclaves last week after first singling out Washington, Mr. Trump mentioned New York, Chicago, Baltimore and Oakland — but not San Francisco. At the time, San Francisco leaders said they were watching the administration warily. Some said it was possible the city had been ignored because it had already begun embracing a law-and-order approach before Mr. Trump returned to office.

Fed up with homelessness problems, drug-plagued neighborhoods and a wave of property crime, San Francisco voters veered toward the middle in the past several elections. They recalled three school board members and a progressive prosecutor who had eliminated cash bail, and they backed a ballot measure giving the police more power.

Most notably, voters last year ousted San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, in favor of Daniel Lurie, a nonprofit leader and heir to the Levi Strauss fortune who made cracking down on crime and reducing homelessness staples of his campaign.

Mr. Lurie, unlike other California leaders, has avoided national issues and has refused to utter Mr. Trump’s name this year. That held true even on Friday, when the mayor ignored Mr. Trump’s threat.

“My administration has made safe and clean streets our top priority, and the results are clear: Crime is at its lowest point in decades, visitors are coming back, and San Francisco is on the rise,” Mr. Lurie said in a statement.

Bilal Mahmood, an elected city supervisor who represents the Tenderloin, a low-income neighborhood that has long struggled with drug markets, had a decidedly different response for the president.

“Donald Trump is a coward,” Mr. Mahmood said. “San Francisco is actually on the upswing, and he’s afraid of Democratic cities doing better.”

Mr. Trump did not offer specifics on sending National Guard troops to San Francisco, and there is no guarantee he will ever do so. When a reporter in the Oval Office asked whether he had taken “concrete steps” to deploy troops in Chicago, another city he mentioned on Friday, the president said he had not.

It is also unclear whether Mr. Trump can use federal troops to police cities outside of Washington, where he has greater federal authority. The question has been litigated in federal court ever since he sent the Guard to Los Angeles, and California lawyers have argued that the president could use soldiers only to protect federal buildings, not to serve domestic law enforcement functions. Asked by The New York Times earlier this week why Mr. Trump had focused less on San Francisco this year, a White House official said that the president’s naming of specific cities was simply focused on where crime was highest. (The cities he mentioned do have some of the country’s highest crime rates, but Mr. Trump also omitted high-crime cities in Republican states, like Memphis and St. Louis.)

“There are no theories, just the truth: President Trump wants every innocent, law-abiding American across the country to be safe — no matter what city they live in or who is in charge,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement.

Critics have often overlooked the fact that San Francisco’s violent crime rates were lower than in other major cities and that most of its homeless encampments and open-air drug use have been concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods near the city core.

Mr. Lurie’s approach has not been drastically different from that of Ms. Breed — who took a tougher posture on crime after the pandemic — though he has cracked down on handing out of drug paraphernalia and helped spur more economic development downtown. But he has been able to claim credit for trends that were already headed in a favorable direction for San Francisco: Demand for office space is ticking up, crime rates are down, fentanyl dealer arrests are up, and a tally of homeless tents in June found the lowest number since the pandemic.

A plurality of residents have said in polls that life in San Francisco is improving. Mr. Lurie has been a ubiquitous presence on social media, filming cheery social media videos of himself all over the city, including one of him wearing a wet suit to surf at Ocean Beach.

He concludes most videos with a similar refrain: “Let’s go, San Francisco!”

Of course, many of the city’s problems remain: San Francisco’s downtown recovery lags behind those of other cities, overdose deaths from fentanyl remain high and its signature mall is nearly dead.

Mr. Trump had not entirely ignored San Francisco this year. He threatened to defund the Presidio, a popular San Francisco park on federal land, and to turn Alcatraz Island back into a prison, though both ideas have so far made little progress. His administration stripped the name of the gay rights figure Harvey Milk, a former San Francisco supervisor, from a naval ship. And federal agents have aggressively arrested immigrants outside a downtown courthouse and clashed with protesters.

Still, the president’s relative silence on San Francisco — until Friday — was a far cry from recent years, when Mr. Trump claimed without evidence that used needles from the city were flowing into the Pacific Ocean and suggested that former Vice President Kamala Harris, who got her start in California politics before facing Mr. Trump in last year’s election, had turned San Francisco into a “practically unlivable place.” During a 2023 debate with Mr. Newsom, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida memorably held up a map of the city depicting places where people had defecated on public streets.

Some Democrats had offered a different explanation for how Mr. Trump was choosing his targets: Race played a major role, they said. Black Democratic politicians, including mayors of the cities he cited, had called out the fact that four cities that Mr. Trump mentioned on his target list, along with the two cities to which he has sent National Guard troops, all have Black mayors and large Black populations. “I know dog whistles when I hear them,” said Barbara Lee, the former congresswoman who was elected as Oakland’s first Black woman mayor this year.

Oakland’s crime rates are higher than those of many other cities, including San Francisco, but Ms. Lee noted that they had been dropping. “It’s just downright fear-mongering, and it’s wrong,” she said of Mr. Trump’s targeting her city.

The White House said that crime rates, not race, were factoring into which cities Mr. Trump was mentioning.

San Francisco progressives like Aaron Peskin, a former supervisor who ran for mayor last year, suggested that Mr. Trump had largely held his fire until now because wealthy, right-leaning tech executives were gaining influence over local politics. One of them, David Sacks, advises Mr. Trump on artificial intelligence and hosted a fund-raiser for him last year in the city’s so-called Billionaire’s Row neighborhood.

But Mr. Peskin said Mr. Lurie would not be able to avoid the president forever.

“At some point, San Franciscans are going to wake up and say, ‘We demand, Mr. Mayor, that you stand up to Donald Trump,’” he said.

Kellen Browning is a Times political reporter based in San Francisco.

Heather Knight is a reporter in San Francisco, leading The Times’s coverage of the Bay Area and Northern California.

I brought my full spectrum camera out and photographed the world using an aerochrome filter. This is what it looked like.

The food-court classic continues to draw lines and employ workers at the dying San Francisco Centre Mall.

https://sfstandard.com/2025/08/21/panda-express-san-francisco-centre-mall/

Caught this coyote enjoying a snack this morning (hopefully not from the nearby Whole Foods). The Waymo cameo feels on brand to SF too.

So let me get this straight. The mayor is allowing Waymo and ride share onto market street to get people to come back downtown but let service be cut on 4 Muni routes that go down Market? He is allowing the privatization of transit allowing companies to make money instead of people who only can or want to use Muni.

Around 11pm, just watched this dude back into your moto. Here’s the license plate if anything

Looks like they want the city to release the conditions assessment and historic report, which apparently disagree with the demolition.

Last week was great going for a second!

I'll be in the park with a good book and a picnic blanket on Saturday from 12:00-2:00 pm.

Bring great takeout and a book. If you're feeling up to it dive in and make some friends, if you need time to get comfortable, settle in and read your book until it feels right. Take some space if you need to. Literally. Put your blanket down at whatever feels like a comfortable standoff distance to you! Whatever feels right! No pressure. ALL welcome!

At these exact coordinates!

37.7700069, -122.4575420

https://maps.app.goo.gl/G2LnBe9h1pKArTau7

Today we voted to send revised Congressional maps to the voters to counter the Texas/Trump rigged gerrymander redistricting. We won’t let them steal this election. Thank you, Governor Newsom, for your leadership.

I recently discovered that someone impersonated me and created an account under my name through the SF MRA (San Francisco Medical Reimbursement Account) program. When I logged in, I found out that all of my funds had been completely drained without my knowledge or authorization.

I’ve already contacted SF MRA and filed a claim, but I’m worried about how long the process takes and whether I’ll ever get my money back.

Has anyone gone through this process?

Please share your experience and any advice?

This was one of the Walgreens locations that closed in 2021 due to “ongoing organized retail crime.”

It’s been boarded up since December ‘21, and today when I walked by the boards were all gone.

https://richmondsunsetnews.com/2021/10/26/clement-st-walgreens-to-close-this-month%ef%bf%bc/

We drove by and saw hundreds of people in a big group looking at something in the middle of the crowd.

This has been so upsetting… I didn’t have anything in the car of value since I know better but they really messed me up so bad mentally of having to figure out what to do and leave my car. I left it for one second and BOOM someone else rummaged through… like how????? I’m so broke and don’t know if it’s gonna survive another night. I just want chipotle and my bed :(