I lived on Beulah, one of the flat streets between Cole and Haight. There were countless bums from GGP & haight street milling about my block, which was considered "Cole Valley", a relatively yuppie neighborhood. My apartment was burglarized and my TV was stolen. I moved up to Stanyan and Rivoli, considered to be the same neighborhood, but straight up a very steep hill, and never saw another human soul again.
My parents have lived in the same apartment, above the UCSF Parnassus campus near the end of 5th Ave, for decades. It requires climbing multiple steep hills and/or stairs, it ends in a cul-de-sac, and like many buildings in the city, you have to climb stairs yet again to reach the door - the first floor is ground level in the back, but above the carport in the front.
Since the hillside is forested, we get plenty of traffic from wildlife, but I can only think of maybe once or twice that any homeless person has dared ventured through to collect cans. Despite this I'm told that there WAS a burglary, but it must have been in the 70s, because following that the management put bars over the first floor windows, which have existed for my entire lifetime.
I lived near there - at Clayton and Ashbury - for a year. Not once did I see any homeless people. There is no way of getting up to that location without hitting at least a block of 15% grade. But the hill did not demarcate the homeless population - it appeared to be Frederick, which is a block further south than Beulah away from Haight.
I had two theories: leaving Golden Gate Park, you end up on Frederick street; going north gets you to Haight St which is a wonderful place to panhandle, going south gets you nowhere. The other theory is that it would have gone further south (maybe a few more blocks to Parnassus), but the Cole/Carl intersection was nice enough, and full of enough families, to push people south the second they get off of the N-Judah.
Interesting. Maybe crime actually does flow downhill to some extent? It would be interesting to see if there's a correlation between crime rate and relative elevation.
Completely different city but with lots of hills (seven to be precise): Lisbon. The most dangerous areas are near the top of the hills in places like Bairro Alto, Sé, Alfama, while the main bottom of the hill, Baixa, is much better.
I believe Lisbon has a very low crime rate (for european standards) and my theory for more crime happening on the higher streets is pretty simple: on the bottom the streets are really big and there's lot of space while the streets on the top of the hills are really small so easier to be seen by the police when you're doing something evil.
I like thinking about these kind of relations though!
In Brazil (and probably elsewhere in South America), real estate values go down (and thus crime goes up) the higher you go on the hills. Basically, this is because walking up and down the hills is arduous and sucks, and thus people try to avoid living on the hills if they possibly can. Thus you end up with favelas.
If everyone had cars, or public transit, you would probably see better property values on hills, like you do in SF.
