My point is that isn't the reality I see living in the city. It was closer to the reality I saw when I lived on the outskirts of the Mission and commuted downtown every day, but even then not as bad.

Here's some random photos I took in the past year https://imgur.com/a/Q0ZF1nH. Yes SF has some terrible bits, but just like the US I don't actually have to visit them all the time.

This was my experience too. People just love to hate sf ime. If it wasn't so cold, foggy and expensive I would have stayed. Lifestyle is nice. Easy enough to stay out of the tl

> I think the truth is SF is undesirable for maybe these reasons: [...]

> * SF doesn't do as much pushing of the homeless out of the dense parts of town as other big cities (which to be clear I think is probably morally the right choice)

I mean isn't that kind of underselling the problem? It's unlivable if you don't want to surround yourself with that kind of problem.

Why pay to be near something unpleasant?...

> The United States of America is a country between the Atlantic and the Pacific. The land has a total area of 9,831,510 km² (four million mi²) and a total coastline of 19,924 km (12,380.2 mi). This land area is about 1.3 times the size of Australia or 2.3 times the size of the European Union.

Plenty of other places to live in America.

Well, there are plenty of parts of SF with a low homeless population, for example where I live. Even some of the high density bits are quite nice. It's really unfortunate that the union square/powell street area can feel sketchy, though even there it isn't much worse than say NYC which is currently seeing surging demand

Because some people don’t make their life choices by “out of sight out of mind”.

People on this site always neglect the positives of having a large homeless population in SF. The homeless keep a lot of boring tech people away from the fun bars and clubs around tenderloin, mission, and soma. The boring people all move to the outskirts and stay there because they can’t deal with the chaos.

I think a lot of people who live in SF realize the solution isn’t hiding/shunning homeless people, so seeing it affects them less than people who live places where they think hiding/shunning homelessness is a solution.

Just because something isn’t happening near you doesn’t mean you’re not part of it’s cause.