Come on dude. People aren't talking about the "weird" or quirky aspects of SF. We're talking about fucking needles, and human feces in the street. Stop protecting this shit by labeling it as something other than human suffering and a public health disaster.

My friend lived in SF for 3 years, then left for a year. He called me to say, “dude what happened to SF? Apparently it’s all shit and needles now.” I had to explain to him that nothing has changed. He was just reading sensationalized media.

I live in SF, I would like the city cleaned up, more accountability for taxes, more focus on tax payers over homeless. But at the same time, SF represents liberalism in the US so is a target for conservative media and the problems are massively overblown. People act like the Tenderloin is the whole city, or tech people who never left soma. The city is incredibly beautiful overall.

The top comment at time of writing is complaining about taxes AND how terrible it is to see homeless and we are evil. It’s a hot take totally free of substance, short of kicking people out of the city there are no easy solutions that involve lower taxes and helping all the homeless. These people want to sound compassionate but mostly sound like they want suffering out of their eyesight.

Downtown SF has emptied out because we’re still in the middle of a pandemic. I don’t know if it will last but it’s so dumb to act like people left for any other reason than a pandemic making city living awful. There’s a good chance it will bounce back.

Most of SFs biggest problems like affordability are caused by too many people wanting to live there. These are problems other cities are jealous of. The mayor of Miami literally bought a billboard right now begging people to go to his city. And that jealousy combined with hatred of democrats means people will massively exaggerate problems.

Again, I highly recommend visiting any other neighborhood besides soma or the tenderloin.

> and the problems are massively overblown

For all the places I have worked in and visited through my life, including poor countries in Africa, Europe, Russia, and places as extreme as Afghanistan, the only place I have ever seen someone openly defecate in the street is San Francisco. And I've seen it many times in San Francisco.

It's not overblown. Your reference points have been distorted. It's not normal. People don't do that in other cities.

...This actually happens in the downtown of literally every major metro in the US because the US is terrible at dealing with the underlying issues that lead to this sort of thing as a whole.

Just because you haven't exposed yourself to it nor seen about it in disgusting sensationalist shitshow that is media in the US doesn't mean it isn't happening.

Is there some CDC or HHS data on public defecation?

e: remove false info

The incident in your link occurred in Canada, not San Francisco.

I could have sworn when I first heard about it, it was a SF thing. My bad.

I’ve seen it in Vietnam, India, and heard about seeing it in Brazil from friends. I’m sure it’s more common than you think, we just have a very embolden and large homeless population with not enough public toilets and way too many substance abuse / mental health issues.

I was born and raised in Brazil where I lived until 25 in a major city with no shortage of poverty and inequality. I have never seen or heard reports of people defecating on the street. Though at least in the northeast it’s common for men to urinate.

I had a friend living in Rio, who told me of a woman who did this before getting into her car. Now I’m not saying it’s common, but it isn’t like SF is the only place in the world where it’s happening.

For whatever it’s worth, I’m from San Francisco and I’ve never seen anyone do this either. But clearly it happens.

I was born in and grew up in SF. I still go once in awhile. SF got a lot worse.

I didn’t grow up with tents surrounding City Hall nor tents lining the sidewalk in the Tenderloin.

Go look at Polk Street in Nob Hill. Go look at Van Ness. Go look at the Castro. Those aren’t SOMA or the Tenderloin. I saw a smashed bus shelter right off Van Ness. I saw graffiti and garbage on the sidewalk in Nob Hill. There are multiple tents pitched right off the freeway off ramp in the Castro.

The problem of SF is not affordability. It is that its policies make it a honeypot for homeless. These people are in no shape at all to work. Think mental issues, drug abuse, etc...

These issues are societal and not limited to SF. Furthermore, SF’s policies don’t seem to be helping at all.

If you want to contain it, turn Salesforce tower into a homeless shelter and ban tents on sidewalks. Establish work programs to clean up street. Perhaps some of the people will turn around their lives.

The towns and cities on the Peninsula are probably laughing at SF. All the homeless are drawn to SF and have disappeared from their sidewalks.

Many towns on the Peninsula are not cool with homeless pitching tents on sidewalks. They get their tents taken down and are directed to homeless shelters.

SF seems ok with it, so all the homeless go there and pitch tents. Homeless elsewhere hear about this and head off to SF. SF politicians run on leftist agendas and then pour money into this endless pit.

> The towns and cities on the Peninsula are probably laughing at SF. All the homeless are drawn to SF and have disappeared from their sidewalks.

Haha absolutely wrong. While not as bad as SF, homeless issues everywhere else in the Bay have also gotten much worse. Mountain View, San Jose, Fremont, Oakland, everywhere.

Nope. It seems better in Belmont, San Carlos, Burlingame, San Mateo, and Millbrae. Don’t notice the homeless hanging around CalTrain stops anymore. There used to be a few tents pitched along the tracks upper Peninsula. I don’t see those anymore. There is zero discussion of tents in social media mid Peninsula. Discussion is only focused on providing food and isolated cases of people losing jobs.

It may be worse in Mountain View or San Jose, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem worse in Fremont, at least the parts that I go to. Also, my relatives and friends who live there aren’t complaining. My friends who lived in SF were complaining loudly before they moved out.

Think homeless encampment in an empty lot right next door (not the Tenderloin nor SOMA).

You don’t have to believe me. Go check out videos on YouTube. Use your own eyes.

https://youtu.be/1tv0FjfGbUs https://youtu.be/HmOIQv0yu-U

Now search for other cities in the Bay. Go see what you find.

I quoted a specific line of yours that purported the rest of the Bay's homeless situation was improving, to the detriment of SF. Linking videos of increasing homeless in SF tells us nothing about the rest of the Bay's situation.

I don't need to "search" youtube videos of the rest of the Bay to get a more accurate picture. I guess I can't speak for that tiny population-slice of the peninsula you did mention, but for the rest I'm all over the rest of the Bay's towns constantly and saying homeless populations "have disappeared from their sidewalks" is quite the overstatement.

You also probably shouldn't scatter your replies across many different nested comments elsewhere?

The paragraph specified the Peninsula. None of the cities you mentioned are even on the Peninsula. San Jose, Fremont, Mountain View, Oakland. None of them are in the Peninsula.

You may be right about those cities that you mentioned but my statement did not apply to them. I don’t know enough about them. I have been to Oakland recently. It’s bad. I have also been to Fremont and Milpitas. The parts I have been to don’t look worse. But who knows.

I don’t know how to gauge the Bay as a whole. That encompasses a very large region that I don’t think many have a good grasp of. The areas you mention don’t even make up half the Bay Area in area yet you are so willing to denigrate what I saw.

You are right, I should have linked to videos of the other cities. I can’t find any for several of the cities on the Peninsula. I did find two on San Jose. One says that it is bad in a specific area and the other is a protest against sweeps of that area by the police.

https://youtu.be/HXq7cXR4r2U https://youtu.be/PGLCHhH5vxY

Sure I could've focused on explicitly the Peninsula like you originally mentioned, but 75% of the Peninsula is living in Redwood City, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, not the 4 adjacent tiny towns you mentioned + San Mateo.

So go add focus on those towns as well or go limit it to mid Peninsula.

I also consider Mountain View on south to be part of the South Bay but Wikipedia doesn’t. Most SF Bay natives also draw the line the way I draw it but it doesn’t matter much.

The distinction people I know made is how far south or north people were willing to commute. So commuting from Palo Alto or Mountain View to SF was considered a really long commute. Commuting from Sunnyvale was considered untenable long term.

Most recent SF residents seem to have an additional line around SF and consider anything outside SF far. Oh well.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/30qv6d/help_is_mou...

Oakland doesn’t count. It has the same policies as SF and has gotten worse.

Check out the tents off I-880.

> The mayor of Miami literally bought a billboard right now begging people to go to his city.

Going on a bit of a tangent here, but I moved to central FL a couple years ago and I tend to browse jobs from time to time just to see whats around me, so while I don't live in Miami, specifically, I have looked around. Looking at Florida is weird, compared to some other places I've been, the market in FL seems rather disappointing, in both the quality and variety of tech jobs in the state. I feel like career wise, it'd be better off to go back to GA or NC. Culturally Miami seems past it's prime as well. You never really here much about or here about people talking wanting to move there like you do most of the other cosmopolitan US cities or even cities in the Midwest and South. I'll give south FL one thing though, the area sparked a great underground rap scene in the 2010s.

Yeah I don't really get what's happening with Florida either. The state has more population than New York yet is beaten out in the tech sector by what would normally be seen as hill-billy fly-over states. Not even the space coast has a lot going on, though I guess the market for space-stable software is kinda limited.

At least housing is cheap enough you can stumble into a 3b2b with a pool and a 20 minute commute to the city on a 80k salary

Seems like there's a lot going on in Miami: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_qRK9VplNY

Miami has had a nice cultural revolution in the last 10 years or so. A lot more art and culture than before and tons of things to do besides partying on South Beach. Many areas of Miami feel more like SF in LA than Trump country.

> Most of SFs biggest problems like affordability are caused by too many people wanting to live there

It's caused by not building places for people to live.

>Most of SFs biggest problems like affordability are caused by too many people wanting to live there. These are problems other cities are jealous of.

Is this supposed to be some kind of joke? How the fuck can you brag about incompetence? Seriously. This isn't magic. All you have to do is absolutely nothing to achieve this outcome. It's basically the opposite of prosperity. Vancouver is also suffering from this "success". Berlin too. Are they examples of cities to look up to? Hell no.

People are not jealous of your city taking jobs hostage and extorting people who want to live there. After all, the pandemic ruined your cities' ability to take jobs hostage. That's why people are leaving.

When I think of SF I think of hundreds of thousands of people who failed to make it because of gate keeping.

Given that they're spending 60k/yr per tent and 100k/yr per hotel room to kick the homeless can down the road, which is about 5 and 8 times what I spend on my own housing per year, it does seem like there are easy, better, cheaper solutions, actually --- give them apartments. That might require building some. I hear SF residents are against that idea though.

> People aren't talking about the "weird" or quirky aspects of SF

Someone has to stand up for these aspects of the city, and I guess today it's my turn.

> I'm excited to see it get weirder ... personally, I like [it]

I think the problem is that the 'weirdness' is more like 'human suffering'. People treat it like a charming part of the experience for their benefit... but like it's real people suffering.

If you’re imagining crime and homelessness, that’s not exactly what I mean by “weirdness” – those are problems that San Francisco needs to fix... and will probably always need to fix.

I mean Noone here is complaining about about having too many quirky stores. They are complaining about crime and homelessness. I don't think you're perspective is that different from them on what makes the city good,you just don't care as much about the bad.

SF’s homeless problem is out of control in a way that it isn’t in most large cities. You can’t say “that’s just life”.

SF's homeless problem is the US's homeless problem. Talk to people camping on the sidewalk and each one will tell you a different story, but with common themes: horrible home situation in a different state, crime -> prison -> loss of work opportunity, depression & drug abuse. These are suffering people that the American People have decided to let suffer. Yes, SF has enough money to get them all off the streets and into housing and only does that for half of them. But SF doesn't deserve all the blame.

I certainly never said that homelessness is “just life.” I’m just realistic. San Francisco will probably always have this problem to some extent, and it’s our responsibility as San Franciscans to help alleviate it as much as possible.

None of this has to do with my original point about San Francisco’s recent changes, which I have personally experienced as having a much higher density of artists.

> San Francisco will probably always have this problem to some extent

But why?

Other cities don't. For example Liechtenstein has literally no homeless people in the entire country. They had to close their last homeless shelter... because it was empty.

Many other global cities have single-digit homeless per 100k population. Why does San Francisco have literally ten thousand homeless people and why are the numbers still growing?

"will probably always have this problem" is bat-shit insane.

As a country we've decided that the suitable response to children regularly being mass murdered in schools is to train children to expect being mass murdered in school. A similar abandonment on the subject of homeless is hardly surprising.

To a certain extent, housing is a statewide problem (prop 13) which the city has limited power to address. To another extent, the lack of a National affordable healthcare program and support for people in duress amplifies the problem even further.

The city has also taken a more humane approach to dealing with the homeless rather than incarcerating or throwing them elsewhere. Most of the homeless suffer from drug/alcohol related issues and the city has tried different approaches to solving this problem.

Overall, it’s a confluence of many problems that makes it very difficult to “solve” the homelessness problem. Comparing to another city with different circumstances isn’t really helpful; they’re not facing the same situation.

Liechtenstein has a population of 38,000. The median income is about $60,000. GDP per capita is $165,028.

In their entire country of 38k people, which has the second highest GDP per capita in the world. There are a lot of comparisons one could make here, but this is not the strongest one.

> will probably always need to fix.

Quitter.

If I spent 40 hours a week fixing the same bug I'd be fired from my job.

One of the most strangely written cope pieces I've seen pro-SF so far. San Francisco has never been less exciting.

Sure, it'll remain the Enterprise SaaS capital of the world for a while, but all the most exciting and interesting people have higher expectations than never-ending battles with NIMBYs and deranged city councils.

It's been feeling like time for a change for years now. I'm glad to see it happening.

All I can say is that my experience is much different than yours.

SF’s bust now is $1m+ condos in Western Edition, not really a bust.

SF was built on gold mining and capitalism. There was a counter culture period but it’s a money making town.

I’ve not lived here for too long but I agree with your sentiment. It’s a wonderful city and I’ve met wonderful people and have had great experiences so far. No city is perfect and to the contrary of what most people complain about, I am happy that this city has a big homeless budget and that my tax dollars are being used to provide them some kind of relief, that the city Government is not prosecuting an already unfortunate class of people for doing exactly what any one of us put in such terrible circumstances would be coerced into doing.

If you really want weird you should try some favelas outside of Rio. You'd love it there if you're looking for weird like they have in SF!

>I will always choose to live somewhere that is exciting over somewhere that will be the same forever.

If you were to ask the local home owners they want it to stay the same forever. In fact, the city isn't changing at all, it's the people that are changing.