>We generally take excellent care of public places. This is a combo of culture and government services actually cleaning stuff up every once in a while.

Ok, I've gotta take issue with this.

Dutch people litter. All the time. People rarely seem to clean up after their dogs. People place their trash bags out on the curb (where there aren't underground bins) far earlier than they should, resulting in trash-strewn streets and fat, obnoxious seagulls. It's a mess. Beer cans left on bridges and park benches. Energy drink cans tossed to the side. Cigarette butts strewn carelessly. Firework refuse absolutely fucking everywhere a few weeks either side of New Years. Bikes left as litter.

There's always someone who comes along with a street vacuum, or a team of people going along with bags and pickers. It seems to me that people have little respect for not littering because it's always someone else's problem, and there's always going to be someone cleaning up after you.

So if by "we" take care of public spaces you mean "lots of people get paid to clean up others' carelessness," sure, but in six years I've seen little to suggest that not leaving trash just anywhere is strong tenent of Dutch culture.

My hunch is that urban areas of the NL are essentially all developed and man-made, in that every street, sidewalk, tree, bush, patch of grass is planned and raw, untouched nature is relatively less accessible and visible. Therefore people perceive this urban "fabrication" with its attendant cleaning staff as less precious, less worth keeping clean than some primeval forest or national park.

I could be wrong, of course, and this is all just my own perception. But I really fail to recognize the cultural cleanliness that you say embodies the Dutch.

Last time I was in Amsterdam the people who clean up the metro stations were on strike. I didn't know this and I was thinking, "Wow! I really expected things to be cleaner than this." It was quite a mess the whole week I was there. That said, away from the stations things seemed very well kept.

  SF is a pile of poo compared to an average Dutch city.

SF is a pile of poo compared to an average American city, too.

Ah right, thanks. I didn't know that :)

It's not true, though. SF is pretty much average in this regard.

Americans in general just don't seem to care about public spaces, pretty much anywhere in the country. I've travelled to many US cities and the only reason other cities some how feel "cleaner" is because there's literally nobody walking in them.

The cities made for walking (like NYC and maybe Boston) are on par with SF. Maybe less dog poo everywhere though.

This reminds me of my earlier experiences walking around LA. My natural instinct looking at the state of disarray in some of the streets was that I was on the wrong side of town, because where I come from (Granada, Spain) that's what you notice when you venture into the slummy areas. In LA, however, you need to readjust your gauge, as this was a fairly safe area, just not well taken care of.

SF has an extreme homelessness problem, smells like urine in upscale pedestrian magnet areas (not just back-alleys) and the residential buildings are poorly maintained to the point it being visually distracting because the land underneath them is so much more valuable than the edifices themselves.

NYC is better, but still fairly grungy. Boston is substantially better along these metrics. Montreal and Quebec city, two of the oldest and, by dint of age, pedestrian-friendly cities on the continent, are leagues ahead of SF as well in this respect.

SF is great. Love the vibe. But lets not kid ourselves into thinking it is clean.

To be fair, none of those other cities is a year-round magnet for homeless to move to from other areas.

Or all of Switzerland. In Germany, it depends - Berlin is, well, Berlin. But Munich is immaculate.

In my experience SF is the worst smelling city in the U.S. Compare it to Europe's worst smelling places, not the best ones.