Our most central and highly-trafficked sidewalks and public transit stations are de facto public restrooms and homeless shelters. The plaza around our government and cultural center is densely populated with open drug use and varying degrees of mental health crisis. Begging and tent encampments abound. The cyclist-advocacy and homeless-advocacy groups are at each other's throats over whether the takeover of bike lanes by encampments should be permanent. Violent mental health breakdowns on the sidewalk are not considered worthy of the attention of any government service, least of all the police.

You can learn to tune these things out and live with them, but it is absolutely 100% backwards for place so rich and so ostensibly progressive and compassionate to blithely incubate such shocking and pervasive displays of desperation and public neglect in its own backyard. Property values are in a sustained, meteoric rise and we choose not to tap them to address these issues in any meaningful way, not from a compassionate perspective, and not from an enforcement perspective either.

EDIT: more detail.