Love Warsaw but suspect your in $1000/mo+ Airbnb, alcohol abuse amongst the homeless in Warsaw is massive, and thus aggressive begging, everything else you say is correct, but your in a 2km bubble and Warsaw is a big city, even a walk to googles free coworking space will be enlightening for you (it will put you marginally outside the comfort zone briefly if you walk the quickest path over the bridge, then loop back in to an arty farty outlet shopping complex zone), even in your comfort zone I've seen some pretty horrific situations with people collapsed outside with head split open (self inflicted alcohol abuse, but I guess less scary than stringes everywhere)

I am a block away from it in Praga. There are a handful of drunks, but I understand this is the worst area of the city, but I was interested in getting to know the other side of the Vistula. I haven't seen any rough sleeping or open air drug use near me. Very little public drinking over here (unlike all the students on the other side of the river). Praga has nothing on the Tenderloin.

Elsewhere in the city, I saw pushy begging exactly once when entering the Old Town. There were about 6 rough sleepers under one of the Vistula bridges with neatly folded sleeping bags and they are being guarded by a police van.

If there's a homeless tent city of heroin addicts around here, do tell.

For the most part the homeless live inside abandoned buildings or under the bridges since the weather in Warsaw is drastically different than in the SF. If you are a drunkard, you are very likely to die in the winter due to exposure.

Example 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1TyHe7b0SY

Example 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWUmdTvtSJo

An example of people living under the bridges:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Homx6vJ3R0

Some charities distribute sleeping bags and mattresses at the end of the summer so that people don't freeze - no shelters allow drunk people.

If you sleep in parks or elsewhere, the police are going to remove you from there to a drunk tank.

Fair play, might of changed with covid, the many times I went I always thought they should do more for them, same in Katowice, Lodz, etc.. perhaps care has stepped up a bit, always felt safe but that's probably due to male and size. You couldn't move for pushy beggars in 2019

I really think there must have been a recent push to clean things up then based on what you and some friends here have said. I think the Mayor wants to run for President again and one of the richest persons in Poland is making a huge investment in Port Praski a few blocks from here, so they might want a guaranteed ROI, drunks be damned.

Damn it, my message went missing, glad as long as they get real help and isn't just a push them out city center deal

I'm really confused as to what point you're trying to make with this comment.

In order to secure religious freedoms, religious rights, and LGBTQ inclusion, we need to have a filthy city, filled with homelessness, drug addiction, and absurd policies?

His/her comment was clearly in regards to Poland taking a pretty stark curve to the right. Which also has absolutely nothing to do with the benefits the person above mentioned, just as it isn't a "distraction" in San Francisco (what a ridiculous canard that should be pounded down into transparency).

Loads of places have all of those freedoms and inclusions, but also have little to no homelessness, crime, or police brutality. It is a complete non-sequitur.

San Francisco has loads of problems. A serious housing problem. A wealth disparity problem. An "activist" police force that is basically fundamentally incompetent and incapable of doing even a modicum of their job, intentionally trying to burn the city to the ground to make some right wing point. Mental health issues.

It isn't because they are inclusive or considerate.

> It is a complete non-sequitur.

I disagree because of the hierarchy of needs. Having LGBTQ rights is great, but safety and security comes before that.

Not at all, merely that every locale has its skeletons.

All are achievable with out caving to the lowest common denominator of tweakers and those that refuse to help themselves take precedence over everything else.

That is the west coast of the US. Regardless of crime, mental situation, etc, every major city is catering to patch work policies instead of addressing crime and mental / drug related illnesses.

Commit a crime with a drug addiction, there should be camps with rehab options where you serve your time on the books or engage with rehab options.

Most every sheriffs office in coastal CA instead does not incarcerate drug/mental health related issues and instead just releases them again.

Those are no doubt important, but isn’t that potentially the issue? Have those concerns distracted from basic livability efforts?

It's not an issue in Warsaw and most other major cities.

Hmm. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-22/polish-to...

You don't need that stuff if it requires that you have to experience proximity to poverty

Isn’t this changing the subject? Or are you implying a connection? There are many major cities in the US that are socially fairly liberal and nowhere near as dysfunctional as SF.

Actually most urban areas in the US are pretty accepting even in areas like the Midwest and the South. If you are in a city you are generally fine.

Poland could become much more tolerant and accepting of differences without becoming an open air psychiatric ward with absurdly unaffordable housing and feces on the steeet.

Maybe not as dysfunctional as SF, but clearly there is severe social dysfunction in a lot of the cities run by liberals: Oakland, Seattle, Portland, NYC, Detroit, DC, Minneapolis.

Allowing for some variation, at what point does one begin to blame the policies and ideologies behind those policies, that are substantially similar across the board?

What "severe social dysfunction" are you referring to in, say, NYC or DC?

Among the 10 most populous US cities, not a single one currently has a Republican mayor. Among the top 25, there are only 2 with Republican mayors: Jacksonville, FL and Fort Worth, TX.

Do you honestly believe that most of the other 23 largest cities in the country have severe social dysfunction? Do you honestly believe that Jacksonville and Fort Worth are substantially more functional urban societies?

In NYC, for years, Jews have repeatedly gotten attacked in the streets. Last year, the city had major riots and looting. D.C. had the same.

Here in San Diego we had a Republican mayor, Republican county board of supervisors, and Republican county DA last year, and there was only minimal social dysfunction, while rioters and looters ransacked many parts of LA County.

I've lived in or near NYC for 14 years now. There were no "major riots" last year, full stop. There was some looting, yes. Not "major riots". Crown Heights in 1991 was a "major riot", this was nothing of the sort.

As for violence against Hasidim (not "Jews" in general), there have been occasional acts of violence between the Hasidic community and other residents of the same neighborhoods -- in both directions, notably -- for several decades. Including times when the mayor was a Republican.

I'm Jewish and have never felt unsafe in NYC. The NYC metro area literally has the highest percentage of Jewish population in the entire US.

"Some" looting. We have the videos of rampant looting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/nyregion/hasidic-jewish-a...

"More than half of the hate crimes in New York City last year were attacks on Jewish people. Orthodox Jews are particularly at risk."

No, it's not "in both directions," or would you care to put a number on the ratio there?

So you've reviewed all these looting videos and think that somehow gives you a better perspective on its extensiveness than someone who actually lives in this city? If this is seriously your perspective then there's no point discussing anything further with you.

As for "both directions", YES, it is. Educate yourself by reading about the Shomrim and their history of assaulting random people of color.

You're also examining a statistic that is effectively ethnic proportion of hate crime convictions, which is orthogonal to per capita violence or "severe social dysfunction".

My point in this subthread is that people complaining about "severe social dysfunction in liberal-run cities" are actually just complaining about large US cities in general, because literally every large city in this country leans left.

You didn’t put a number on that ratio, did you. Are you saying it’s 100:1, instead of 100:0? Why isn’t there a volunteer patrol protecting people from rampaging Hasids?

A more reliable source of information than you is the data, the videos, and the voters who somehow, despite your explanations that things are just fine, picked Eric Adams for mayor.

You seem to lack all historical context on the social dynamic in Crown Heights and South Williamsburg, the disproportionately massive political power of the Hasidim voting block, and how this leads to disproportionately one-sided arrest and conviction rates whenever ethnic violence occurs in these neighborhoods.

The severe 1991 Crown Heights riots occurred directly as a result of a Hasidic rabbi's motorcade running a red light and striking two black children, one fatally. Ethnic tensions in this area had already been simmering for a long time, and while they've improved since 1991, there are still lots of problems. But this is just two Brooklyn neighborhoods, and has absolutely nothing to do with liberal-run cities or widespread "severe social dysfunction" in NYC, a city of over 8 million people and a combined metro area of 20 million people.

So, no, I'm absolutely not going to waste my time researching some arbitrary ratio that is completely orthogonal to the topic at hand, just because some random person on the internet is trying to gaslight me from 2500 miles away.

As for looting and "the data" and "the videos": two NewsCorp-owned publications put the estimated number of looted businesses at 450. As NewsCorp skews far-right we can assume that's the worst-case (highest possible) number. Among the approx 220,000 businesses in NYC, an estimated 32,000 are retail businesses, but this number does not account for how many of these are businesses with multiple storefronts.

From this, as well as daily personal observation in various parts of the NYC metro area, I would conclude far less than 1% of storefronts in NYC were looted. While this was a significant event, it's FAR from a "major riot". It's also not an ongoing problem.

In all the videos I saw, the perpetrators were large groups of teens on bicycles. Meanwhile NYPD has 36,000 officers and a nontrivial amount of military-grade equipment. One can either conclude that somehow they were incapable of stopping groups of teenagers on bicycles, or one can more logically conclude that they chose not to.

> and how this leads to disproportionately one-sided arrest and conviction rates whenever ethnic violence occurs in these neighborhoods.

Nope, we have surveillance cameras everywhere now, and thus we know the one-sided arrest and conviction rates are driven by the one-sided crime rates.

> put the estimated number of looted businesses at

But you deserve to live in a city where people don't riot when kid gets hit by a car, and you deserve to live in a city where 0% of storefronts are looted, and where the looters would actually get prosecuted and serve time.

> we have surveillance cameras everywhere now

LOL, you've clearly never been to Crown Heights. Think airplane security theater, not London-level omnipresent cameras.

Last year de Blasio made a big stink about installing a whooping 100 cameras between Crown Heights, Williamsburg, and Borough Park. In combination, the population of these neighborhoods is over 400,000 people.

> But you deserve to live in a city where people don't riot when kid gets hit by a car, and you deserve to live in a city where 0% of storefronts are looted, and where the looters would actually get prosecuted and serve time.

I'd settle for a country where people don't riot when they lose a free and fair election. In the most severe US riot in 2021, the perpetrators were Republicans who violently assaulted law enforcement officers and ransacked the seat of our democracy. Many of them traveled from red states; I suppose these states must have severe social dysfunction?

It should be mentioned that Warsaw is not at all representative for the country or even the local region. It's a status which the city had for many decades.

Then again, neither is SF for California or the USA.

In the same way, it should be mentioned that SF is not at all representative for the country or even the local region. I have never been in another city anywhere that has the problems which people relate about SF.