Go a block or so inland and it gets starkly worse, especially as you get closer to Market. You ain't having fun in San Francisco until you make eye contact with a guy "dropping a bomb" in broad daylight at Sue Bierman Park, or have your car broken into near Levi Plaza because someone wants to try to steal your jumper cables (and fail, in my case, as evidenced by them hanging out of my now-significantly-more-aerodynamic quarterpanel window).

And the stench. Nothing like the glorious smell of ocean breezes and human excrement in the morning!

And to think the Embarcadero is relatively clean by SF standards. The Tenderloin is where it gets real fun.

I've had this thing happen twice now while visiting SF, where I'm following google maps, end up walking through the Tenderloin, and have a bunch of people try to sell me drugs.

The second time I asked one of the guys trying to sell me coke why that was happening, he said it was really the only reason white people walk there.

The whole thing was very different from the super-liberal picture of SF I had in my head.

San Francisco’s homelessness is highly concentrated. You happened to be in areas that are relatively clean.

Where is it largely concentrated? That sort of sounds like Vancouver as well. Toronto has its spots as well.

I just find much of the rhetoric makes it sound like the city is overrun and in shambles and that wasn't my experience. Of course, if I lived in those concentrated locales I might feel that way.

- The whole Tenderloin district (and quite a bit of the surrounding areas, e.g. Polk Gulch)

- Market St.

- Embarcadero & Washington St. intersection

- King St. (esp. around the CalTrain station)

- Pretty much all the BART stations within SF city limits

Those are the areas I'm in pretty frequently, at least.

Take a walk down market street.. by city hall. Disgusting and yet why is it so bad and in your face and not like that in say new york city? Doesn't NYC put the homeless up in hotels.. have a voucher program or something?

San Fran doesn't care how terrible their city looks to tourists nor care for its people like NYC does? I don't get it ... uber super tech rich living in the most expensive houses in the US with human feces outside on their pavements or around the corner.

Whatever San Fran is doing and methodology it's following it doesnt seem to be working out for itself!

It's interesting watching movies from the 70s and 80s depicting New York. It looks like present day San Francisco or Baltimore, and not at all like modern New York.

Yup, gives me hope that one day SF can improve.

>San Fran doesn't care how terrible their city looks to tourists nor care for its people like NYC does?

The way I see it, fundamentally, San Francisco views the homeless as part of it's people, many other places do not.

Their feces that line the street, violent outbreaks, shooting up, the human destitution, shouting crazy one even with a megaphone on my 2013 visit.

I guess that's now considered the charm of San Francisco. Disgusting!

Sorry but I don’t think visiting for a week once is a large enough set of data

I didn’t claim it was anything of the sort. Just adding a singular data point.

People often say the same kinds of things about Toronto but the place is hardly overrun.

I just thought it would be a valuable single data point from a visitor’s perspective. No assumptions, just an experience.

he didn't visit even for a week; it was just a layover.