Utopia? More like a Cyberpunk Dystopia...
> Look at the actual numbers though and, at least officially, it’s not that bad. A city of ~800,000 residents has ~8,000 people living on the streets[1]. Around 1%, same as the ratio for USA as a whole with 580,000 homeless people[2].
1% of the US would be around 3 Million people...
I think that depends where you land. San Francisco is in the top 10 cities in the world for “billionaires per capita”. SFBA as a whole takes the cake if I remember correctly.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2022/04/05/where-t...
> 1% of the US would be around 3 Million people...
You are right, I decimal’d wrong. USA as a whole is 0.2% homeless
"dystopia: an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice"
That doesn't preclude rich people. In fact having rich people help with the contrast, like in the article where a human beings body rotted on the sidewalk for a day outside a 5 million dollar home.
I think your comment can teach an important lesson in statistics. Without proper segmentation, totals and averages and medians can obscure real and important results. (This is only one part of the general "garbage in garbage out" data-quality problem BTW.) If the arbitrary political boundary that defines "San Francisco" were changed so that it actually became two cities, it would be abundantly clear that one of them has severe problems and it would probably qualify for all sorts of state/federal assistance that the current aggregate does not.
Alita Battle Angel, the movie, is almost exactly how San Francisco feels.
There are actually 2 cities. San Francisco, the tech town, is booming like crazy. New highrises and shiny skyscrapers are coming online almost every month. Areas that were barren wastelands when I moved here in 2015 are now bustling with new construction, street level businesses, full of upper middle class rich people running to and fro enjoying their lives.
The skyscrapers are fast encroaching on the other San Francisco, the poor and troubled city. They’re squeezing homeless people, drug addicts, etc into a smaller and smaller area. In some neighborhoods the concentration of shanty towns and “bad elements” is so high it looks and feels like a slum. Because that’s what it is.
Look at the actual numbers though and, at least officially, it’s not that bad. A city of ~800,000 residents has ~8,000 people living on the streets[1]. Around 1%, same as the ratio for USA as a whole with 580,000 homeless people[2].
What has changed during the pandemic is that these homeless people became more visible because while the upper middle class retreated into working from home. Now that people are coming back to the office, the city is again filling with commuters and the “undesirables” are slowly retreating back to wherever they were hiding before.
As others have said, lots of downtown businesses shut down due to lack of foot traffic. Because few people actually live downtown. Hopefully that gets restored as commuters come back.
Another way to sum up San Francisco is that seeing a person shooting up on the street is normal and seeing a Tesla is about as remarkable as a Toyota Corolla.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/New-data-shows-fewer-...
[2] https://theweek.com/briefing/1013082/living-on-the-streets