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Comment by uhtred | Hacker News Reader

San Fransisco is the most shocking city I've visited, in the world, in terms of wealth inequality. It felt a few small steps from being a distopia. Homeless people and drug addicts staggering around and shitting in the street a few hundred meters from high end boutiques with armed guards that 99% of the population could never afford to buy anything from.

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And yet many from this area are the first to criticize others for inequality and a lack of empathy.

You could say this about literally any city/area.

Yes, but some cities are worse, much worse, than others. It's like saying nobody is perfect so it's okay to hurt others.

That's fair. The Bay is terrible, I've experienced it firsthand for four years. My point, however, is that high costs of living and poor wages exist regardless of people's "empathy" and awareness of "wealth inequality".

I've lived in Cincinnati and Atlanta. It's nowhere near as bad as what seems to be coming out of the Bay Area.

I live in a suburban oasis in North Orange County, with plenty of "empathy" and awareness for wealth "inequality".

Yet, at the most recent city council meeting, there were a large number of residents complaining about the personal cost of opening up supportive housing for homeless people. Not a financial cost, but a personally subjective "cost" of sharing their city with transients. This housing complex includes mental health services and employment services on-site and has support from the local city government. Instead of compromising and considering alternatives, these people advocated for removing the program entirely and passing the buck to the next city.

High costs of living exist regardless of "empathy" or awareness of "inequality". The problem is policy, not personality.

There are vast differences between rich and poor areas in most US metros. Usually they are separated by some freeway driving. San Francisco is rare in that the middle class and higher spend enough time in/near the center to notice its conditions.

Yep. Your comment reminds me of this picture:

https://goo.gl/images/21xra9

Imagine a dark twist, where the people who are walking by the tents in that picture, actually live in those tents! The smiling guy with the phone just got out of his tent and is heading to his workplace at a tech startup.

Just a bit more public gadget tech and pollution and it's a Gibson still frame.

Reminds me of here in Bristol. The amount of people I know in caravans and tents in cities here in the UK is fucking depressing. Nearly all of them have jobs.

Really? I've never seen a person living in a tent or caravan in a UK city. Travellers living in caravans out in a field, sure, but that's different.

I cycle past a large and growing encampent of shanty buildings, tent and caravans out the back of Bristol Temple Meads train station every day. Is right on the canal, across the water from a large nightclub and next to a yacht.

That's not really "shocking wealth inequality", but more like a shocking display of wealth inequality.

Most cities around the developed world will spend more effort to herd the "undesirables" into some corners far away from fancy shopping districts. We can debate the pros and cons (after all, nobody benefits from having to avoid human feces on sidewalk), but I don't think SF has much more actual inequality than most other cities.

I never saw anything even close in European cities I've lived in and visited. There's definitely more homeless in American cities, but the West coast is by far the worst I've seen and San Fran was considerably worse than other places.

Paris subway comes to mind...

I took a friend straight from the airport to Hayes Valley, Russian Hill and the Marina

She thinks its the cutest city ever

I told her we avoided the other parts but we dont need to go there

SF is unique in that the tourist and commerce center attracts and tolerates the open air drug bazaar and the poor sanitary conditions of its patrons.

I don’t know, some Asian cities (e.g. Jakarta) seem worse. At least in SF middle class people walk on the streets and don’t live behind electric fences either.

I travelled around south East Asia, and in Cambodia for example, it was more that most people seemed poor but were scraping by with some kind of job. And not surrounded by extravagant high end shops, or rich people with everything. People lived on the street sometimes, but they had a little makeshift shelter with amenities, beds etc, and turned the shelter into a market stall in the daytime. So even they had something, even if very little.

That's not a comparable city. Try Singapore, Shanghai and Tokyo instead.

Most cities have these extremes. What's unique about SF is their geographic proximity. One could debate whether it's better to keep the inequalities out-of-sight and out-of-mind or not.

Yes -- while lauding itself as being very Progressive.

> It felt a few small steps from being a dystopia.

Is it really? The only difference between San Francisco of today and SF a la "Bridge Trilogy" (William Gibson) is that the have-nots haven't completely taken over the bridge yet.

progressives would have an easier time convincing conservatives to support their policies if the most liberal places in the country weren't complete hell holes with the worst income inequality

be the change you wish to see in the world and all that

California, New Jersey, and Illinois all in bottom 5 for quality of life, New York at 37.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/quality-of-...

These rankings are suspect. Mississippi is #6 in quality of life, yet they are near dead last in almost everything else (health care #50, education #46, economy #48, opportunity #49, infrastructure #49). How can someone have a high quality of life if they are poor, uneducated, and unhealthy?

The answer seems to be that US News defines quality of life in an extremely narrow manner. The measurement seems to place a high emphasis on community engagement (likely tied to religiosity) and natural environment (which seems to favor areas without large cities).

The reasons for this are because they are the only places offering adequate services for low income families so people migrate to these areas. They become overburdened because most cities are not pulling their own weight. It sucks but it's better than being elsewhere for them. This only works with a collaborative effort from all over the US, not just a handful of progressive cities doing all the work while people stand in the sidelines criticizing it for not working.

Most liberal places are hell holes ? I mean Marin County is 80% Democrats is one of the best places to live in the world. In fact the entire coast of US from San Diego all the way to Washington is all blue. What about huge cities like LA and NYC ? Are they hell holes too ? I don't really need to point out what areas of the US are true dystopian, with no jobs, declining life spans, opiod epidemics, and so forth.

Also, urban areas will have blight. That is true for any country in the world. But what makes the US unique is the historical context of slavery, reconstruction, segregation, white flight, incarceration etc. It's like 400 years of history and baggage.

>I mean Marin County is 80% Democrats is one of the best places to live in the world

sure, if you're white and well educated. The brown serf laborers have all been nicely segregated away so you don't have to see the misery

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/03/17/marin-county-ra...

You can also easily go to a very brown area and see the same thing. I mean Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Fremont, Dublin, San Ramon are heavily Indian cities, if not outright majority, and heavily blue. They are also awesome places to live.

This seems to be very dependent on which factors one values; that ranking only has three non-nature related factors, which seems frankly insufficient.

One could similarly point to the suicide rate and write the same sentence with liberal/conservative switched (California, New York, etc are all at the bottom of the age-adjusted suicide rates in US states).

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