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Comment by redeeman | Hacker News Reader

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all things covered in the article w direct quotes from Lurie re: homelessness, drugs, building permits. he missed the feces part though, but assume he's working on that too

I don’t have an opinion on the current situation there[0], but in TFA, the mayor seems to understand that improving that stuff is part of the equation:

> The first step to winning these folks back, he said, is addressing a rampant drug and homelessness crisis that’s pushed many business leaders out of the city.

0 - I haven’t visited SF since early 2020. On that trip, my hotel was near the Tenderloin and things were pretty rough vis-a-vis public intoxication, indecent exposure, homelessness, etc.

Every city has an area you don't go to. Sfs just happens to be right in the middle and next to the major tourist areas and down town. The rest of city is nothing like the tenderloin.

I've lived in a bunch of different cities in a bunch of different countries, and none of them have area(s) you "don't go to". There are some rougher areas, sure, but it's generally fine (I've lived in some of these "rough areas").

I think this says more about the general state of cities in the US than cities in general.

This is absolutely true. It also doesn't mean we don't care, don't work on it, or don't want it to change. People are told to hate sf more often than most other US cities plus it's very geographically small plus everything you said makes it easy to paint a nasty picture.

Yeah I get for visitors it looks bad but I think everyone needs to be realistic about how much can change. The tenderloin is the way it is becasue of the services it provides to homeless and drug users. If you got rid of the services the people dissappear. But I think that would be a pretty bad thing to do. And you can't move the other districts really either.

There is not any part of the city where I live where you can readily observe people injecting IV drugs in broad daylight in full view of the police, or who are so high they don’t notice, or don’t care, they are exposing themselves near a daycare[0]. Those things are not normal and are not widely occurring features of most American cities, even the “areas you don’t go to.” In fact, in all my travels, I’ve seen those things in one American city: San Francisco.

0 - to head off the inevitable gaslighting that always comes up when discussing this, these are things I saw live, in person, with my own eyes.

I haven't been to either place in quite a while, but--by my recollection--if you want to give SF a run for its money you should go cruise around Baltimore for a minute.

Completely false statement, unless you are only taking about american cities.

Maybe, in countries with social services.overall I think it's a mistake to think of handling the homeless, mental illness, and lack of opportunities like this on a city by city basis. It's more a reflection of America, the federal government needs to step in an help these people. Like why should each individual city help homeless veterans and not the government of the entire country that they served in.

Completely agree. I live in Europe and my City is safe enough to sleep overnight in a park on a bench without being touched.

In fact, last night I accidentally left my car keys in the ignition and my car was still there in the morning. Lol.

So yeah, the idea that every city has bad parts is a pretty American notion. In fact, that's one of the commonly asked questions about people visiting my city as in where should they avoid and they have a hard time believing that there's not actually any area to avoid.

> 0 - I haven’t visited SF since early 2020. On that trip, my hotel was near the Tenderloin and things were pretty rough vis-a-vis public intoxication, indecent exposure, homelessness, etc.

That was my same opinion of SF when I lived in the bay area for 2 years in '99. Moving there, I first went into SF as tourists mostly do, and it was a filthy, nasty place then coming from Phoenix Arizona, after avoiding going anywhere close to downtown SF again, and moving back to Phoenix 2 years later.

I can only imagine (or read, daily) how much worse it is now. Why anyone stays is beyond me.

So, ban cities east of the coast from shipping their homeless people to liberal cities?

I don’t know how much you have traveled up and down the western states, but I have driven from Seattle to LA a few times in the past few years and SF does not have a monopoly on poverty and tent cities. It’s bad everywhere.

Love to hear your thoughts on how the city of SF is supposed to stop this.

Massively increase housing availability, remove the ability of nimbys to kneecap social projects, enforce existing laws. Something can definitely be done.

NYC and Boston don’t have this problem

Are Boston and NYC harder to be homeless in simply because winter is harder?

Migrating someplace warm would be my first idea if I found myself living in a car (or less).

It's because NYC had a right to shelter whereas CA doesn't. It means that CA has very visible homelessness.

Hawaii has better weather than even San Francisco, so maybe eventually they’ll all end up there.

FTA: “ The first step to winning these folks back, he said, is addressing a rampant drug and homelessness crisis that’s pushed many business leaders out of the city”

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