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Comment by treeman79 | Hacker News Reader

Doesn’t San Fransisco do all of those? They spend a huge amount on it anyway. And being one the dirtiest cities possible.

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I'm really tired of this "SF is the dirties city" trope. Yes, there are areas that are incredibly dirty, but those areas are something like 5% of the city, and most of those areas are concentrated in a few specific neighborhoods. Most of the city is fairly clean (but to be sure, it's no Singapore) and reasonably well-maintained.

I've been in areas of Manhattan that would rival SF's dirtiest areas, but I wouldn't claim that NYC is a "dirty city".

I'm more worried about the threat of violence from mentally-unstable people on SF's streets, though that's something that's also concentrated in a relatively small number of places (unsurprisingly often coinciding with the dirtiness).

I saw about 5 between the bart station and Berkeley campus on my way to get a curry, and I wouldn't even consider that dirty relative to driving a few blocks down towards the freeway...(I know it might not technically be "SF" but you know what I mean)

> I've been in areas of Manhattan that would rival SF's dirtiest areas, but I wouldn't claim that NYC is a "dirty city".

I've lived here my entire life, and I would :-)

As much as I'm a booster for NYC (and immensely proud of our public transit), we're also a very dirty city (partially for historical planning reasons, resulting in no alleyways or trash disposal consideration).

It's also gotten worse during the pandemic, in no small part thanks to drivers: people have stopped moving their cars for street cleaning, resulting in accumulations of trash and dirt that then clog the drains, worsening our floods (and damaging the subways further).

> I wouldn't claim that NYC is a "dirty city".

NYC is a filthy city. I think most people that live here and love it would agree.

No city can adequately fund these programs, and San Francisco certainly doesn't build housing for the homeless, have an enlightened drugs policy or have adequate mental health care. San Francisco and other coastal cities mainly differentiate their policies by treating the homeless populations there with malignant neglect instead of outright hostility, which leads to the phenomenon you see where 10-12 cities bear the brunt of a national homelessness crisis. Because San Francisco is one of them, you also see a bunch of entitled tech bros whining about how they have to see a homeless person sometimes on HN.

I will admit that, by American standards, SF has pretty good public transit though.

I feel like SF is one of the most permissive places to do drugs in perhaps the entire world. Even if there are laws on the books, they are not really enforced.

I am not coming from a perspective of pro-law & order, just a commentary on drug law & enforcement here.

https://www.hoover.org/research/only-san-francisco-61000-ten...

Spending for homeless is 61,000 per person

It's misallocated through an enormous network of private contractors, ineffectual nonprofits and government bureaucracies. The unaffordable expenditure (public housing or at least publicly funded housing) is completely out of that budget, while the rest of the programs are so watered down and so much have been leeched out of them that they're completely ineffectual. Rebuilding capacity for direct state action, without farming out to all of these parasitic middlemen is a key component, as is reducing or eliminating wasteful and top-heavy bureaucracies.

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