6PM
In the tourist guides to San Francisco , they manage to photograph it so that it looks like Epcot Center , futuristic and austere . But on the ground , it 's grimy and gross . Homeless people sleep on all the benches . The district is empty by 6PM except for drunks and druggies , because with only one kind of building there , there 's no legit reason for people to hang around after the sun goes down . It 's more like a mall than a neighborhood , and the only businesses there are bail-bondsmen and liquor stores , places that cater to the families of crooks on trial and the bums who make it their nighttime home . I really came to understand all of this when I read an interview with an amazing old urban planner , a woman called Jane Jacobs who was the first person to really nail why it was wrong to slice cities up with freeways , stick all the poor people in housing projects , and use zoning laws to tightly control who got to do what where . Jacobs explained that real cities are organic and they have a lot of variety -- rich and poor , white and brown , Anglo and Mex , retail and residential and even industrial .