sounds like Mumbai or Karachi or any other large city in a developing nation. sheesh.
I moved to the SF Bay area from NYC 4 years ago and I routinely tell my friends that you need to watch out for human, not animal, feces on the street.
It's really sad to see people who are employed that are still homeless and have to deal with mental issues :(
The Federal Government estimates that about 0.4% of Californians were homeless in 2020. From what I've seen on the streets the numbers are probably a little worse now.
[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2020/11/15/la-fondati...
--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
The list of countries by incarceration rate is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera....
About 5% of people in the US go to prison at some point, 9% for males, 16% for Hispanic males, and 29% for black males. https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/Llgsfp.pdf
"About one-quarter of U.S. adults report having a mental health diagnosis such as anxiety or depression or experiencing emotional distress. This is one of the highest rates among 11 high-income countries. ... The United States has some of the worst mental health–related outcomes, including the highest suicide rate and second-highest drug-related death rate."
--https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...
And of course, "Approximately 80 percent of the global opioid supply is consumed in the United States".
-- https://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/27/americans-consume-almost-all...
The article touches on why that won’t happen though. Voter demographics won’t allow that. It’s either radical and young liberals which would go for every insane policy or the old and entrenched.
San Francisco was this way since forever. The poor have been systematically corralled into the Tenderloin for over 100 years. The divisions between neighborhoods elsewhere were why San Francisco was always considered so "charming"--you could cross the street and enter an entirely different world.
Setting aside the tremendous increase in drug abuse and homelessness, it's the tearing down of those virtual fences, especially around the Tenderloin, that is really causing people to freak out. It's just that their freak outs are coded in the language of social activism. Excepting the Tenderloin, every other part of San Francisco has become systematically homogenized, not to mention seen increased wealth.