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Comment by nahname | Hacker News Reader

Westwood in LA was pretty similar. I would guess the climate and the excess change is the primary draw.

As a visitor to the US, I find the homeless there very emotionally saddening.

I had a morning routine in LA where the same guy would greet me and everyone around. I just started buying him breakfast each day and he was always very appreciative. Saw a lot of people grabbing food out of garbage cans. Another guy with no legs crossing 10 lanes of traffic. Just a painful reminder of how much harder life could be.

I wasn't as regular with my routine in SFO and admittedly moved apartments further from the tenderloin. I ended up scaring more homeless whenever I walked through the tenderloin than scared me. But I still found it depressing to have to face that each day when I knew I could make a meaningful difference to many of the people I saw.

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Has Westwood gotten worse since I graduated UCLA in 2010? By my memory, there were only several decipherably-homeless individuals wandering about. In most cases, they would talk at me, mumbling, and didn't actually talk TO me in a real attempt to get anything. I would even say downtown Palo Alto is worse than Westwood. The rest of LA is pretty bad, but Westwood was a far cry away from any of it.

Didn't spend much time in the rest of LA, but I was in westwood for 8 months in 2011. There was less than the tenderloin, but most of the streets with shops had a homeless on every corner. I would walk by 5-10 on my way to grab lunch or dinner.

But did they harass you at all? Downtown Palo Alto has one on every street corner too, and they don't bother anyone. But Tenderloin... after walking through Westwood and PA for several years now, I still just plain don't feel safe in the Tenderloin at all.

Tenderloin at market street or inside the tenderloin? Market street attracts the most people.

You are exaggerating. I live in Westwood, have lived in the area for 15 years. Also spent quite a bit of time in SF.

There is absolutely no comparison between the two places. Even in Westwood Village you could go months without being hit up by a homeless person for change. Now, maybe you were in a hot spot where a few hang out regularly, but they are not everywhere by any stretch of the imagination. They're also nothing like the aggressive homeless population in SF. The police here are very quick to crackdown on any kind of aggressiveness.

If you lived in rural Idaho I could see how you might think Westwood had a lot of homeless people -- anyone from SF would think there were none.

yeah. i live in santa monica but have lived in SF, and these people complaining about west LA's "homeless problem" are out of their minds.

I agree about West LA completely, but I feel people are missing the bigger story about LA's homeless problems: skid row. I volunteered at a soup kitchen there for a few months several years ago, and it was as bad as the worst I've seen in SF, except more concentrated, with less normality in the immediate vicinity. This means there's less harassment, but perhaps even more complete, down and out, blatant drug use and prostitution.

I said that there were less and I would agree the ones in SF are more aggressive. I fail to see why there needs to be a distinction between 20 homeless on a block and 10. If you have 10 homeless living in your block, you have a problem.

Westwood is absolutely nothing like downtown SF in this regard - its homeless population consists of about a half dozen friendly transients and a bird lady. I have no idea where this poster lived in SFO but he clearly has never been to the Tenderloin.

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