I live in SF, I would like the city cleaned up, more accountability for taxes, more focus on tax payers over homeless. But at the same time, SF represents liberalism in the US so is a target for conservative media and the problems are massively overblown. People act like the Tenderloin is the whole city, or tech people who never left soma. The city is incredibly beautiful overall.
The top comment at time of writing is complaining about taxes AND how terrible it is to see homeless and we are evil. It’s a hot take totally free of substance, short of kicking people out of the city there are no easy solutions that involve lower taxes and helping all the homeless. These people want to sound compassionate but mostly sound like they want suffering out of their eyesight.
Downtown SF has emptied out because we’re still in the middle of a pandemic. I don’t know if it will last but it’s so dumb to act like people left for any other reason than a pandemic making city living awful. There’s a good chance it will bounce back.
Most of SFs biggest problems like affordability are caused by too many people wanting to live there. These are problems other cities are jealous of. The mayor of Miami literally bought a billboard right now begging people to go to his city. And that jealousy combined with hatred of democrats means people will massively exaggerate problems.
Again, I highly recommend visiting any other neighborhood besides soma or the tenderloin.
For all the places I have worked in and visited through my life, including poor countries in Africa, Europe, Russia, and places as extreme as Afghanistan, the only place I have ever seen someone openly defecate in the street is San Francisco. And I've seen it many times in San Francisco.
It's not overblown. Your reference points have been distorted. It's not normal. People don't do that in other cities.
Just because you haven't exposed yourself to it nor seen about it in disgusting sensationalist shitshow that is media in the US doesn't mean it isn't happening.
e: remove false info
For whatever it’s worth, I’m from San Francisco and I’ve never seen anyone do this either. But clearly it happens.
Going on a bit of a tangent here, but I moved to central FL a couple years ago and I tend to browse jobs from time to time just to see whats around me, so while I don't live in Miami, specifically, I have looked around. Looking at Florida is weird, compared to some other places I've been, the market in FL seems rather disappointing, in both the quality and variety of tech jobs in the state. I feel like career wise, it'd be better off to go back to GA or NC. Culturally Miami seems past it's prime as well. You never really here much about or here about people talking wanting to move there like you do most of the other cosmopolitan US cities or even cities in the Midwest and South. I'll give south FL one thing though, the area sparked a great underground rap scene in the 2010s.
At least housing is cheap enough you can stumble into a 3b2b with a pool and a 20 minute commute to the city on a 80k salary
It's caused by not building places for people to live.
I didn’t grow up with tents surrounding City Hall nor tents lining the sidewalk in the Tenderloin.
Go look at Polk Street in Nob Hill. Go look at Van Ness. Go look at the Castro. Those aren’t SOMA or the Tenderloin. I saw a smashed bus shelter right off Van Ness. I saw graffiti and garbage on the sidewalk in Nob Hill. There are multiple tents pitched right off the freeway off ramp in the Castro.
The problem of SF is not affordability. It is that its policies make it a honeypot for homeless. These people are in no shape at all to work. Think mental issues, drug abuse, etc...
These issues are societal and not limited to SF. Furthermore, SF’s policies don’t seem to be helping at all.
If you want to contain it, turn Salesforce tower into a homeless shelter and ban tents on sidewalks. Establish work programs to clean up street. Perhaps some of the people will turn around their lives.
The towns and cities on the Peninsula are probably laughing at SF. All the homeless are drawn to SF and have disappeared from their sidewalks.
Many towns on the Peninsula are not cool with homeless pitching tents on sidewalks. They get their tents taken down and are directed to homeless shelters.
SF seems ok with it, so all the homeless go there and pitch tents. Homeless elsewhere hear about this and head off to SF. SF politicians run on leftist agendas and then pour money into this endless pit.
Haha absolutely wrong. While not as bad as SF, homeless issues everywhere else in the Bay have also gotten much worse. Mountain View, San Jose, Fremont, Oakland, everywhere.
https://youtu.be/1tv0FjfGbUs https://youtu.be/HmOIQv0yu-U
Now search for other cities in the Bay. Go see what you find.
I don't need to "search" youtube videos of the rest of the Bay to get a more accurate picture. I guess I can't speak for that tiny population-slice of the peninsula you did mention, but for the rest I'm all over the rest of the Bay's towns constantly and saying homeless populations "have disappeared from their sidewalks" is quite the overstatement.
You also probably shouldn't scatter your replies across many different nested comments elsewhere?
You may be right about those cities that you mentioned but my statement did not apply to them. I don’t know enough about them. I have been to Oakland recently. It’s bad. I have also been to Fremont and Milpitas. The parts I have been to don’t look worse. But who knows.
I don’t know how to gauge the Bay as a whole. That encompasses a very large region that I don’t think many have a good grasp of. The areas you mention don’t even make up half the Bay Area in area yet you are so willing to denigrate what I saw.
You are right, I should have linked to videos of the other cities. I can’t find any for several of the cities on the Peninsula. I did find two on San Jose. One says that it is bad in a specific area and the other is a protest against sweeps of that area by the police.
The distinction people I know made is how far south or north people were willing to commute. So commuting from Palo Alto or Mountain View to SF was considered a really long commute. Commuting from Sunnyvale was considered untenable long term.
Most recent SF residents seem to have an additional line around SF and consider anything outside SF far. Oh well.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/30qv6d/help_is_mou...
Is this supposed to be some kind of joke? How the fuck can you brag about incompetence? Seriously. This isn't magic. All you have to do is absolutely nothing to achieve this outcome. It's basically the opposite of prosperity. Vancouver is also suffering from this "success". Berlin too. Are they examples of cities to look up to? Hell no.
People are not jealous of your city taking jobs hostage and extorting people who want to live there. After all, the pandemic ruined your cities' ability to take jobs hostage. That's why people are leaving.
When I think of SF I think of hundreds of thousands of people who failed to make it because of gate keeping.
Someone has to stand up for these aspects of the city, and I guess today it's my turn.