It likely felt safer than walking but there is a 0% chance that a 1.5 block walk through San Francisco was truly more dangerous than a 1.5 block car ride. It’s much more likely that neither was dangerous at all.
I stayed in SF for a few nights, it was pretty shocking to me the amount of homeless people (euphemism creep: temporarily unhoused) and the various tactics they employed to try and get money. One lady was just screaming at people in a fast food restaurant, I guess she was hoping to get paid in order to go away. This was 20 years ago and I hear the situation has only gotten worse since.
California treating homeless people like sacred cows is eventually going to wreck their inner cities for everyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Russia
SF attracts homeless from all over the US, given its mild weather (great for living outside) and generous social services. It has been like that forever also, you can watch old movies from the 1920s about hobos jumping trains to get to SF (or LA, or Seattle, or Portland, or even Vancouver BC, choose any of the west coast cities, all for similar reasons).
People have freedom of movement in the USA, and they mostly take advantage of it.
> Maybe it’s not capitalism at fault here but a government that is unwilling or unable to supply standard social safety nets like homeless shelters and addiction therapy.
The issue is then how do you prevent one locality from having their resources swamped fixing what is really a national problem. SF can't fix the nations problems, so its voters/tax payers get jaded really quickly.
Mentally ill people are a massive part of the homeless population and we basically just yeet them out on to the street.
Having said that, a lot has changed since 2009