Hacker News Reader

Comment by uuilly | Hacker News Reader

The other day I saw two SF cruisers pulled over busting a guy selling strawberries on the corner. I constantly walk past human shit, used needles and the broken glass of car windows and they're arresting a guy who's doing something useful?

View on HN

Where in SF was this (feces, needles, etc)? SF is the cleanest city I've spent time in.

You're kidding right? I guess you haven't been to the Tenderloin, Western Addition, Mission, 6th & Market, Upper Haight, Chinatown, etc...?

I apologize... Spent most of my time just east of Golden Gate Park

So what you're saying is you're too high to notice.

I live in SF and constantly joke about how gross and dirty it is. However, I recently went to NYC and I'll have to say that relatively, SF actually is much cleaner than I gave it credit for. It's just that the gross areas in SF are REALLY gross. The trash and poo in SF are largely concentrated in the areas you mention. As an example, even in the Upper Haight, it's only bad on Haight street itself. The streets just parallel, Page and Waller, are quite clean. In Manhattan, there's a thin layer of grime and garbage spread out everywhere. I will have to say that I didn't see any human poo in NYC. That seems to be a unique feature of San Francisco.

Same thing with Boston. The Cambridge side of town is nicer, but generally dirty all around.

Come visit New Orleans.

I was there recently actually - problem is it doesn't fall under the rubric of "city" as described in the GP...more of a war zone :-)

It looks good on their annual performance evaluation.

Get organized, make a difference.

I don't know why you were down voted. I fully agree, get angry, get organized, participate in local politics.

Local politics is not as hopeless as national/federal. You do have a realistic chance of making a difference there.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/05/...

By the sound of it, they already have...

Or, at least the people have begun voting with their feet (no pun intended).

A comment I noticed from the follow-up article:

Nice story Chron. Do a story like this every day and you'll have peple [sic] lining up to buy your newspaper too.

Newspapers have the power to serve the local interest, if they would just accept the responsibility and effort necessary to do so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com