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Comment by token_throwaway | Hacker News Reader

I lived in SF for many years and fully absorbed the culture, and wow, getting out was a huge wake-up call. The bubble is extreme. Outside, streets colored by actual human shit, people living in extreme poverty, other people walking over sleeping bags to get to work. Inside, someone tweet-storming about how the guy on BART was manspreading and how this is a direct threat to our wellness as a society. Rough

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I visited SF for the first time for a conference last year. Damn, what a shithole (good seafood, though - had some awesome halibut at Scoma's down by the wharf).

While you could pay me enough to live there, I assure you my price would be quite unreasonable :)

I hear you can get a deal on a condo in the Millennium Tower.

Where $1.5M for a 1BR apartment (albeit 1600 sq feet) is a deal. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/301-Mission-St-APT-906-Sa...

For us non SV types, it's crazy.

Just a joke.. the tower is sinking and leaning to one side.

Sure. It's just nuts that a sinking building has $1M+ 1br apartments for me. You can get a decent 2br condo here for < $100k.

Imagine if a sizable earthquake struck. Actually, let's not imagine it.

That's pretty much my reaction the first time I went to SF. My first BART experience was 16th and Mission and that left... quite an impression. It's surprising how people get used to it.

Mental illness is a huge issue. Previously, many homeless lived in mental hospitals but such institutions have been universally abandoned.

While only tangentially related to rising cost of living, it deserves as much merit as a solution as low-income housing, steeper property taxes, and steeper progressive taxation.

Thanks for this...it's so underreported. People imagine that there's some support system for mental illness. There just isn't, at all.

There are 37,679 state run psychiatric beds in the US now. There were 560,000 in 1955. http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stat...

I had a personal experience with someone that made a serious attempt at suicide. Checked into the ER, released to the street 24 hours later with no options offered at all.

One reason for the decrease in state-run psychiatric beds was the rampant abuse most facilities hosted. As this was addressed, a replacement was not introduced.

I have my doubts as to whether that was the real driver or just the scapegoat. The real driver was probably the direct costs. Abuse existed, but the alternative is all of these people living on the street.

There's a pretty good timeline here: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/timeline-mental-...

Isn't a better alternative to give people free access to early intervention (especially early intervention in psychosis services) and free access to treatment in the home?

I don't know the larger picture, but from my personal experience that would mean lots of adult schizophrenics (or similar) living with their parents. The sad fact is that there are just a lot of people that can't manage on their own. In today's system they are all homeless or in jail.

The replacement was the Mental Health Services Act, which gives more resources to local governments. Mental Health Boards play a part in figuring out what to do, even if it's only an advisory board.

If you want to see mental illness improve in San Francisco, attend the San Francisco Mental Health Board meetings. If you can't be physically present, you can also call in. The website is: http://www.mhbsf.org/

You can call 415-255-3474 on Wednesday, November 15, 2017 before 6:30PM (and every month afterwards) and ask to be put on the conference call. Put it on your calendar. You can start by just listening in and hearing what people say. Everyone who calls in has a legal ability to comment on what's been said, after the board has spoken. You might have an idea no one else has heard.

I serve on a different mental health board. I can answer some questions if you have them.

Thank you for posting a way for members of HN to actually contribute to their community. It’s better to have an actionable item then to have opinions float about.

Don't just thank me, engage with your local mental health board. Also, thank you for reading my post.

Grew up in Berkeley and Oakland, lived in SF for years.. It has always been like that.. Thats where the crazies congregate. You get used to it. Im 32 and I have no other memory of SF being all that different from what it is now.. Homeless camps, crack zombies, poo streets..

The first time I saw human feces on the sidewalk surprised me. It's like the city is turning into Manhattan, but with a crazy mental illness problem on the streets.

Manhattan isn't what it was 40 years ago. It's a lot cleaner now.

Yes. Perhaps this is what SF has to go through? I'm generally not a fan of trickle-down economics, but does the city have to go through such a long stretch of prosperity for there to be enough wealth to pay for everyone? If so, advocates for UBI may need to wait a while.

Is SF unique in such a large % of the population being mentally ill or addicts?

Well the weather is absolutely phenomenal, so it definitely has a leg up on NYC there.

It's just spit-balling, but there's also a thriving drug culture and ideologically-driven tolerance for all manner of person.

The city already spends a ton of money on the issue - clearly the government just isn't great at putting that cash to use. So I don't think throwing more money at the problem will help. Truthfully the answers to the problem may make the situation worse before it gets better. You should look up an article by Nick Buckley, who runs an outreach service for homeless people in Manchester UK. It's obviously a different situation than SF but it piqued my interest because it's an angle you really never hear.

"There being enough wealth to pay everyone" is not really what happened in New York, I don't think.

The difference in NYC (really, mostly Manhattan) wasn't really spending although the city had financial issues as well in the 80s. It was mostly a change in attitude. What some people now decry as "Disneyfication" for example was the political will to clean up areas like 42nd Street. Rudy Giuliani was nicknamed the proctor of New York for a reason.

>> Yes. Perhaps this is what SF has to go through?

What - getting a Guiliani to fix it?

but does the city have to go through such a long stretch of prosperity for there to be enough wealth to pay for everyone?

Does SF get prosperous? Serious question; I don't know how SF's taxes work. Does SF get a piece of everyone's income, such that as the people make more money the city gets more money? What actually puts more money into SF's pocket when people in SF get richer?

Last time I was in Manhattan there were literally mountains of trash on the sidewalk and the entire city smelled like it.

Probably a trash collection day. Those days during the summer are gonna stink, no real way around it.

The city is remarkably clean and safe for what it is.

NYC of the 70s-90s was considerably different from today: much less safe, bankrupt, gritty, dirty...while you might have seen and smelled some trash, it's not at all like it used to be.

http://all-that-is-interesting.com/1980s-new-york

That's just garbage day though.

The areas of Manhattan you'd be likely to visit are very dense and there are generally no back alleys so, even with the system working as intended, there can be a lot of trash that ends up on the sidewalk waiting to be collected. Yes, in the summer especially, Manhattan gets hot and smelly. There's a reason that a "house in the Hamptons" is something of a meme for wealthy New Yorkers.

When I lived in Manhattan one summer, during a time when the city was "rougher around the edges" than today, I was definitely ready to get out of town on a number of weekends.

> there can be a lot of trash that ends up on the sidewalk waiting to be collected.

Correct my if I'm wrong, but they still put bags of trash out don't they? Those things also attract rats who can easily chew through the bags or they can not be tied up properly in the first place, allowing he smell to escape. Why don't they use tidier, less smelly wheelie bins: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=chakra&q=wheelie+bins&iax=images&i...

Yeah Manhattan is nothing like that for at least 25 years. SF is like what NYC was in like 1975 only worse. I have no idea how the whole tech industry wants to be out there.

That was also my thought, people didn't really want to believe it though when I said "the shit on the street is quite likely not from an animal...".

After a walk around SoMa, I lost what the appeal of working there was to be honest. The touristy parts of the city are great, but you hear all this talk about the offices and startup culture around that area, but one block over from Twitter HQ and there's a rampant homeless issue with people doing all kinds of stuff in full daylight.

I used to love SF. Now I'm not sure how much of it is the city is going downhill, versus being older and bothered by different things. Then again, in the 90s people said the new crowd in the Marina were taking things downhill.

I live in Brooklyn and a homeless person keeps pooping on the steps at my subway stop, but compared to what I saw in SF a month ago, it's not the worst that can happen

> It's like the city is turning into Manhattan

Manhattan hasn't had widespread problems on this level for decades. SF, on the other hand, has had feces on the sidewalk level problems for decades.

Someone made a map: http://mochimachine.org/wasteland/

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