There is always an Enderman

2026-10-30

In Minecraft there is always something that wants to wreck your stuff. The first one I think of is the Enderman, a tall black mob that leaves you alone until you look it in the eyes, then comes for you. It also literally steals your blocks and ruins your base.

I think every shared space in real life has something that wears it down. You won't get rid of it. The question is how you design around it.

Light, not eye contact

The Enderman's rule is the wrong lesson, though: "don't look at it" is just ignoring the problem. The better lesson is about the dark. Monsters, Endermen included, only spawn where the light level is zero. Every player ends up with torches everywhere, a fence around the base, and trips back for the dark corners. Stop lighting and things spawn again.

In real life the Enderman is the damage: open drug dealing, needles on the sidewalk, a block nobody looks after. The light is maintenance and enforcement, every day, mostly boring.

Down by Market Street

This is what I notice on my walks. In San Francisco the worst of it is in the low central streets around Market Street and the Tenderloin. Walk uphill and the city gets nicer block by block. For a while my theory was altitude.

Then I looked at a map. The Tenderloin sits in the flatlands at the foot of Nob Hill, one of the city's richest neighborhoods, a short walk away. So height alone explains nothing.

I think the more practical explanation is cheap rooms and easy access. The Tenderloin has a lot of cheap places to stay, services close by and a big BART station on its edge. Disorder gathers where it's cheap to stay and easy to arrive, and in San Francisco that happens to be low ground. Whether the services or the problem came first, I can't tell from a park bench.

Why put up with it

What bothers me more is why people tolerate it. I think many residents see someone using on the sidewalk as a victim who can't help it, someone to protect, almost like a child. Pushing back then feels cruel.

I see it differently. Using drugs is a choice, at least at the start. Hopelessness explains a lot, but it doesn't excuse it, and I believe there is always a way out. Compassion that only makes it easier to stay on the sidewalk is not compassion to me. A city that stops enforcing is a base with no torches.

I also think the city's politics are part of it. San Francisco is a very progressive place, and tolerance is close to a core value here, so saying no to something can feel like going against the current here, and that makes some people uncomfortable.

Who owns the light

I think about this like an engineer. When something breaks in production, somebody owns it, and there is a loop: it gets noticed, fixed and checked. On the street I can't see who owns anything. The sidewalk belongs to the city, the services to a dozen programs and the courts to someone else, and nobody gets paged when a block goes dark. I'd rather see someone whose whole job is that block, judged by how it looks next month.

Close to paradise

One vaguer thought. A rich, comfortable place can afford to put up with things that cost everyone a little, and forget that its goodwill came from people who build slowly. It's a feeling more than an argument.

Without this one problem, San Francisco would be close to paradise. Great weather, the ocean and hills right there, optimistic people and opportunity everywhere. If I were a builder looking for somewhere better, I honestly don't know where I'd go. Probably still here.

What would have to change

Here is what I keep coming back to. A society thrives when most of its energy goes into building. Here a lot of it goes into managing behavior nobody wants on their street, and into arguing about whether managing it is even allowed.

How does a place thrive like that? And what would have to change in how we think, so that this behavior is simply not accepted, instead of waiting for the next law?

- SF street walk mind dump