Nearly every night, mentally ill homeless people were screaming at the top of their lungs, making it extremely hard to get to sleep. This lasted until 3 and 4 AM.
On the few nights I ventured out after dark, there were people sprawled out all over the sidewalk, and you had to jump around or walk into the street to avoid them. There were lit fires on the bare sidewalk under the Westfield entrance.
It's surreal.
From a May 2023 article on the decline of the city <http://web.archive.org/web/20230510153958/https://www.curbed...>:
>A note to my fellow San Franciscians: I’m sorry. I know. There’s always some story in the East Coast press about how our city is dying. San Franciscians hate—HATE—these pieces. You’re a stooge and a traitor for writing one. When I set out reporting, I wanted to write a debunking-the-doom piece myself. Yet to live in San Francisco right now, to watch its streets, is to realize that no one will catch you if you fall. In the first three months of 2023, 200 San Franciscans OD’d, up 41 percent from last year.“It’s like a wasteland,” the guard said when I asked how San Francisco looked to him. “It’s like the only way to describe it. It’s like a video game — like made-up shit. Have you ever played Fallout?”
>I shook my head.
>“There’s this thing in the game called feral ghouls, and they’re like rotted. They’re like zombies.” There’s only so much pain a person can take before you disintegrate, grow paranoid, or turn numb. “I go home and play with my wife, and we’re like, ‘Ah, hahahaha, this is SF.’”
All that to say, this problem has existed for decades. It doesn't explain the recent drop in foot traffic which is largely caused by people no longer going to the office. Getting around in SF isn't the easiest thing to do and if you don't have to go downtown then you're probably not going to. This scenario is playing out in downtowns all across America.
How long are we going to blame Reagan? Democrats have supermajority in California since 2011-12 ballot reforms, and hypermajority in SF. It's not for a lack of funding neither as SF has spent billions[1] so far.
So blaming it on Reagan and funding is just lazy and dishonest.
[1] 1.45B per https://abc7news.com/sf-homeless-plan-housing-all-san-franci...
The first was in the 60's when JFK (whose sister had been savaged by the mental health institutions) signed legislation changing the requirements for commitment to be "posing a danger to oneself or others." This was a change from the metric of "mentally unfit to live independently in society."
The second was in the 80's when Reagan and the Democratic-majority congress defunded and shuttered many of the state-owned mental health facilities. This was a bi-partisan effort by the Republicans, who hated spending money, and the Democrats, who hated how poorly run the facilities were. Nobody has had a really good solution for mental health care in the US since those happened and, as the parent post points out, it is unfair to paint this as "Reagan defunded mental health care."