Similarly, I've lived in and around Boston my entire adult life (I'm 34) and I don't think I've ever seen needles on the street. I've seen what was probably human waste two or three times. It seems like San Francisco and Portland in particular are pretty bad, from talking to folks who live there and from visiting both. But most urban areas I've been to in the United States are fine.

(Now, are American cities kind of dirty? Yeah. There's a ton of people who travel through every day. But Americans, as a rule, seem to not like paying that much for other folks. Certainly not enough to pay for the kind of urban cleaning that'd be necessary.)

As a Bostonian myself, I'm getting used to the idea that we're the exception, rather than the rule. I typically _do_ see these things when I travel within the country. But I'm increasingly seeing it as a "Boston success" rather than a "San Francisco problem" or "Austin problem" or "Seattle problem", because it seems more like a default state, given the current way of things.

That said, I'm not sure what to attribute that to. It could be the broad availability of drug rehab and housing services. It could be that the climate is inhospitable to living on the street for the majority of the year. For all I know, it could be an aftershock of the city's love affair with redlining, effectively putting me away from where I would see it.

It's just a mix of climate and policy. In Milwaukee you can see some serious blight but they don't even allow overnight parking on the streets without a permit, let alone overnight pooping.

Personally can't recall ever seeing needles or human feces in or around Austin. Some areas/alleyways around 4th-7th can get pretty urine-y on the weekends.

Generally speaking, one is more likely to run into horse manure around Austin.

Was this down voted because the horse manure comment?

To clarify, I meant that quite literally. Horses are considered a legal vehicle. It is not uncommon to see people riding horses (small groups, solo, & APD mounted patrol) along the shoulder of a road or along the creek and river trails in central/south/southeast/east Austin, especially on the weekends. Probably other places too, but those are the areas I am familiar with.

It is certainly more common to see horse manure in the city than it is to see the human feces or needles that was alluded to in the comment I replied too. At least, in my personal experience spanning decades.

It's more a US culture thing IMO. Go travel to other cities in other developed nations and you see this kind of crap SIGNIFICANTLY LESS, if at all.

It is sort of shocking that an objectively rich city like San Francisco has considerably worse homelessness problem than, say, Uzhhorod in Ukraine. (With average income perhaps 10 per cent of SF one, if not less.)

Just guessing, but could it be because the homeless in Uzhhorod starve to death or freeze in winter, while the homeless in San Francisco survive?

It's mostly because the political culture of SF is trying to solve a mental health issue in compromising way, because the real solution set is not a local level thing, but a state and federal level thing. It's same with the current DA, trying to activist create an alternative to arrest vs. using social workers, while such a solution needs more than the power of the DA's office to properly implement. So you get half-assed solutions that don't actually solve anything much.

Also pure corruption. You'll notice there are a bunch of regions where the homeless roam, and bunch where they do not, and there are very good reasons as to why that is the case.

> the homeless in Uzhhorod starve to death or freeze in winter

I doubt it. Housing is one of those problems that is quite easy to solve and the fact that poorer countries can do it while the US can't must be because of nefarious. The same shit is said about developing countries having a lower COVID death rate than the US, "they must be hiding a lot of bodies." In fact, it is quite hard to hide a lot of bodies.

The fact is the US does poorly on a lot of metrics and we have the capability not to.

Most of Europe has homeless shelters, including the poorer countries, it is not as if modern countries just let them drop dead like bugs.

Also a Bostonian, but have been in NYC metro for 10 years. I'm back in Boston enough to say this with clarity: Boston is very clean.

DTX is regressing in the last 5-10 years. Not to combat zone levels, but certainly not the calmer place it was becoming

even the wealthier areas? southlake, prosper, parks, celina?

Sorry, by DTX I meant Downtown Crossing in Boston :)

You can’t easily survive the winter out east on the street, you sure can in the west, so the west gets all the permanent homeless.

You can also fairly easily survive winter in the street in Málaga or Madrid, but those cities haven't turned to an Europe-wide haven of homeless people.

Europe has a strong social safety net?

It’s good to be you.

https://pavementpieces.com/on-the-front-line-of-the-heroin-e...

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/rockaway-beach-needles...

https://nypost.com/2021/09/25/nyc-drug-users-shoot-up-in-bro...

https://nypost.com/2021/08/07/new-records-reveal-rampant-dru...

http://bronxink.org/2019/09/19/28351-a-zone-of-neglect/

https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-city/these-are-nycs-poop...

If you're trying to call me a liar, it's better to not be oblique.

I've lived in three neighborhoods for my entire life: Bloomingdale (now called "Manhattan Valley"), South Harlem, and Bedford-Stuyvesant. The only one that I regularly saw needles in was South Harlem, and that was only by one apartment where we had a guy dealing on the corner. That was a pretty unpleasant situation. I only saw needles once or twice in Bloomingdale, and I've yet to see them anywhere in my current parts of Brooklyn.

As for the poop: NYC has a big dog poop problem, which is what that article is about. I don't think anybody has ever contested that.

Where on earth did you get liar? You just have a very different context from many of us. I worked three jobs for 30 years so my kids could live a sheltered life.

Here’s an example of me not being oblique. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31363040

That was how I read "it's good to be you." I apologize for the misinterpretation.

I've said this in other threads: there is crime in NYC. It's a big city with a lot of people in it, and I am not pretending that it is a utopia. But it just isn't an overriding (or even pressing) feature of life here.

It is if you’re paying rent for a storefront and junkies are blocking the door so customers can’t get in, the cops won’t do anything, and “nonviolent misdemeanors” aren’t prosecuted.

Then it’s an overriding and pressing feature of your life.

Yes: if you're actually victimized, then it becomes an overriding and pressing feature of your life. But you're sidestepping the claim: it's just not that common here.

I've never seen drug addicts block a storefront here. The closest thing I've seen to that is someone (and I really do mean one individual) try to panhandle in a restaurant. They were kicked out.

Murder and rape are down a few percent each. Almost everything else is skyrocketing. Robbery is up 15.8%. Felonious assault is up 13.8%. Grand larceny is up 18.6%. Grand larceny auto at 14.2%.

Crime overall is up 11.2% in one year. That’s affecting a lot of people other than you. I find your dismissal of so many people’s misery to be callous at best.

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/pr1103/nypd-citywide-cri...

Of course, it's useful to keep in mind here that overall crime rates are still around only half what they were in the 70s-90s. Combine that with the obvious aftereffects of a lasting pandemic and lockdown (and pandemic-related stimulus evaporating while outbreaks continue) and it doesn't seem very prudent to adopt a sky-is-falling attitude.

Who adopted a sky-is-falling attitude?

I think you misread your own link. Crime in October 2021 was 11.2% higher than October 2020, but YTD crime (the thing people usually call "crime overall") is only up 1.3%. It's the next sentence in the same graf.

I have not been callous, in any ordinary sense of the word. When people are affected by crime (and indeed, they are in this city), I feel bad for them. What I have no space for is breathless accusations that my city is an unlivable hellhole, when I've seen with my own two eyes how much it's improved over the last two decades.

(If you want real callousness, read about the people who died in last year's flooding[1]. NYC has a flood control system that should have lessened the damage, but it didn't function because the city hasn't done regular street cleanings for the past two years. Why haven't they done street cleanings? Because car owners complained about having to move their cars during the pandemic.)

[1]: https://abc7ny.com/nyc-flooding-deadly-13-killed-basement-ap...

> What I have no space for is breathless accusations that my city is an unlivable hellhole, when I've seen with my own two eyes how much it's improved over the last two decades.

I assume that is a general statement and not based on something I said, because of course I made no such accusations.

I am however glad that you give your own two eyes credibility for reporting. Each of the articles I posted was a product of someone else’s two eyes and included pictures of what would be considered an alarming situation if one lived in those neighborhoods. Many of them are from a borough called “The Bronx”, which is north of you. It’s a big place with lots of problems, tons of amazing people, and a rich multicultural environment. You might be intrigued to visit it some time.

As far as the statistics I gave you, year over a year is obviously a much better sample then part of the year. It’s smooths out the curves. I could easily have chosen some statistics from the summer of 2020 that would make it look much worse. I did not.

Not sure why you threw in the drainage situation but I like that you did. Offhand the only city I know of that plans properly for this is Phoenix, Arizona. From what I can tell no other major city in the country comes even close to that kind of preparation.

> It’s a big place with lots of problems, tons of amazing people, and a rich multicultural environment. You might be intrigued to visit it some time.

I went to high school in the Bronx, and spent most of my adolescence walking around it (including the "scary" part, which is the South Bronx). It's not a hellhole either, "rich multicultural" dogwhistling aside.

Edit: This is going to be my last comment. I don't think you live here, which makes me think that the back-and-forth of "here's what it's like" versus "here's an eye-popping news story about a crime" isn't accomplishing much.

Duly upvoted because I love a good debate. Thanks for engaging!

Where I live is a little hard to pin down because I own residences on multiple continents. I say Seattle because that’s where my farm is and I spend most of my time there.

New York City was the greatest city in the world until recently, but I’m equally interested in what’s going on in Shanghai, Beijing, and other places. But in my view it’s perfectly acceptable to talk about a place even if you haven’t lived there for a while. Or ever. I listen to lots of wonderful commentary about the USA from people in the United Kingdom, for example.

He's telling his story, and you're telling him he's wrong for having it.

Then by your logic you are doing the same to me. Quoting easily verifiable crime statistics (along with a link to said statistics) and photographic evidence of obvious degradation was simply an alternate viewpoint from my perspective.

Both “stories”, as you put it, are true. In fact, I congratulated the person for building a sheltered world. I did the same for my wife and children. Nothing wrong with keeping your family out of the muck.

Could you pay for some "security staff" to "clean up" the area around your storefront? As long as the clean up process doesn't involve anything more than misdemeanors it sounds like nobody will be prosecuted.

Here’s a crazy thought. Have your police, who are already paid for by usurious New York City taxes, be allowed to enforce the law.

In theory police enforce the law. In practice, police do what democratically elected officials tell them to do, and there will always be more shoplifters and homeless people than business owners. So buy private security and know that they work for your interests specifically. The cleaned up street will attract more customers and the added security will pay for itself.

> So buy private security and know that they work for your interests specifically. The cleaned up street will attract more customers and the added security will pay for itself.

“Will” pay for itself? Spoken like someone who has never had to pay the bills to run a retail establishment.

I'll call you a liar. Or at best, someone who could be more observant.

Of all of the positive and negative things I've been called in my life, "not observant" has never been one of them!

We have crime here. But this isn't a superhero comic; it's just not an overriding feature of life. I'm sorry if that's difficult for you to believe.

If it's noteworthy enough to be in a news article when it happens, that sort of feeds into OP's point imo.

Depends on where you are. San Francisco absolutely has a real, extremely-visible problem in a number of places. In a "walk from transit to work, you'll see it quite literally every day for years on end" kind of way.

When it rains, a significant amount of the Market Street area (and surrounding blocks) smells like pee for a day.

---

Part of the issue with the "perception vs reality" claim in big cities is that people who live near-ish to places with issues like this avoid those places, either consciously (x area is dangerous so don't park there) or subconsciously (none of your friends go there, so you don't know anything there, and have no reason to go randomly). Visitors and new arrivals are pretty often more likely to encounter it at a more accurate rate.

LA /Minneapolis citizen here.

Urban blight is so real it's a tautology to use two words.

The lack of enforcement and the actual protests against enforcement of the most basic laws borders on satire.

No. That's the point. The cops take all the money and don't fix the actual problems we have.

Do you think cops should be responsible for finding homeless people homes? You can't just throw them all in jail. Being poor isn't illegal yet.

Perhaps greed is a factor in non-enforcement, but I suspect in LA it's more of a "overly humanitarian" subculture. See Echo Park protests. bodies were turning up in that park, and it was unusable for local residents due to a massive encampment and rampant drug use. When the police showed up to clear it, they met actual protestors from outside the neighborhood who thought it was inhumane to force the campers to move on.

I lived in Studio City for a bit. We had a well-known vagrant who lived under a local bridge who regularly accosted women, including assault, groping, etc. The nice walking paths along the LA river, and the immediate neighborhood around them were completely unsafe even during daylight hours for my wife and daughters to walk along. What could be done?

I lived in mount washington for a bit. There, the citizens would quietly organize, bring lots of shovels, and go "clean up" even the smallest encampments. I suspect if that word got out, they'd meet protestors, or even police.

I'm all for helping those who need and want it.

The trouble is, there's a significant enough population that doesn't want help, and wants to camp and live among drug use wherever they choose. This is the only case where "Not in my backyard" makes absolute sense. Police can and should protect the safety of neighborhoods and parks which are funded and occupied by tax payers.

Go to venice. It looks like a third world country. Last time I went to the beach, none of the shops were open and obviously-mentally-ill people were sitting in their own filth on residential and commercial doorsteps. One obviously intoxicated person was holding a can of gasoline on the sidewalk, and swaying between cars he didn't own. What good can come of this? The rights of the people in that area need to be balanced against each other through the use of local laws and law enforcement. We've gone way too far past "balanced" towards an ideologically-forced tolerance of vagrancy.

It is not the job of the average citizen to come up with solutions, it is normal and fine for citizens to collectively demand change from their government and to weigh the outcomes during the next election cycle. My own lack of ingenious ideas for it does not mean I need to be silent and tolerate the solution.

> Do you think cops should be responsible for finding homeless people homes? You can't just throw them all in jail.

We used to do just that, and it worked just fine.

We have never done that.

It is also extraordinarily expensive to do that.

Yes, we had and enforced vagrancy laws. It didn’t use to be expensive.

Vagrancy laws were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court almost 40 years ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1983/05/03/s.... A bit of reflection will suggest the possibilities of abuse under them.

Indeed, but a bit of observation shows me the abuse that happens without them.

Perhaps if you were poorer or of a disfavored ethnic group, observation would show you the abuse that happens with them.

Find them homes or throw em all in the clink?

After regularly getting catcalled directly outside my door and being followed at night, I said “fuck this” and moved to a small walkable town not far outside the city. It’s much easier to not treat strangers as predators here, because they generally don’t act like predators. I still enjoy a day in the city, but at home I can take nighttime walks with no worries. I do feel a little bad that I couldn’t stick it out like other people can.

Today, I walked a couple blocks west of where I work to grab a slice of pizza and while I ate, a dude just hauled forth his member and urinated in the gutter, not 15 feet away from me. I felt bad for the tourists and their kids, but only because the pizza was overpriced and tasted like Digiorno.

Usually I find defecation is easiest - not for me, but for the unfortunate souls without access to privacy - at the far end of a subway platform, away from the glare of publicity.

I don’t feel it’s fair to criticize someone explaining why they live the way they do when you where the first to criticize said group:

>>The communities that hand-wring the most about predators and risks to children tend to be middle class, suburban, and white.

The presence of this comment purposely invites controversy.

If these people are supposed to behave differently (from a cultural standpoint), there are issues that need to be resolved first. These “two different topics” are heavily intertwined.

Also, presumably the issue of needles and human waste can be resolved with further prosocial investments in harm reduction facilities for drug users and housing for the homeless. These problems aren't intractable.

The UK's hardly a haven of social democracy, but I've never seen human excrement on the street and only seen needles off the beaten path. We don't do a very good job helping our homeless population though.

In terms of urban detritus, some of the colder US cities might have comparable counterparts in the UK, just with shotspotter and much larger jails.

Glasgow is the single exception to that rule in my decade living in the UK and Isle of Man.

>harm reduction facilities

To those unsympathetic to addiction being a medical condition, these facilities are just seen as legalization which goes against everything they've been fed. This isn't even a NIMBY thing as they don't just not want it in their area, they don't want them to exist at all.

Showing how they have worked in Europe, then they will just write it off as socialist policies run amok.

In Europe do they give the users needles and drugs or do they actually fix the problem?

giving people needles and drugs is called harm reduction for a reason - it's to reduce the risk of dirty needles and street drugs, these policies don't solve drug addiction, they just keep drug addicts safe(r). Solving drug addiction is actually a tremendously hard problem but it starts with helping rather than punishing addicts. Portugal is a good example of doing this right: drugs are broadly decriminalised and the government provides help to addicts. Here's an article on drug policies across Europe (and some other countries): https://www.foundationswellness.net/drug-abuse/do-other-coun...

Portugal: https://deserthopetreatment.com/addiction-guide/drug-industr...

I’m all for providing help to addicts, but giving them the drugs doesn’t seem to help. While I offer no solutions, I don’t think this is working and believe there is a better way. Perhaps rehab centers or synthesized equivalents that decrease potency over time.

therein lies the rub.