In Oakland: there's a bunch of parks, a hacker space called the sudo room, a bunch of JS related companies included npm Inc are headquartered there and the last JSFest was there.
The good news, it appears most of the human filth concentrates into a relatively isolated part of the city.
The bad news, this appears to actually be something you have to care about.
(I would never call any of the big East Coast cities "nice and clean", but at least worrying about wading through human feces is not something anywhere near the top of my list)
(also for the record, I found L.A. far more filthy on average than SF, just less poop everywhere)
SF refers to a ~50 square mile area. LA refers to a nearly 5,000 square mile area. Most of LA is far cleaner than SF in every way. There are only a few areas that are comparable.
San Francisco has human feces because it is one of the only cities in the USA which has not completely criminalized homelesness, because there are a lot of services there, and because once people decide that San Francisco is home, they really, really, really do not want to leave.
First of all, there are plenty of human feces in Oakland, but again, let's try and crawl away from that lens. If you become homeless in Oakland, the best advice I can give you is to spend your last $5 on a BART ticket to San Francisco. Oakland and a lot of Alameda County's solution to these sort of problems are a humongous jail called Santa Rita which is comparable to the size of the nearby San Quentin prison. Most of the people in there are there for minor crimes related to homelessness or poverty, and their situations escalate once they enter what is a major portal to our for-profit prison system, which per-capita is the most heavily populated in the world.
Your claims about for profit prisons may be true, but they don't change the fact that San Francisco is uniquely filthy.
Literally.
How many of you reading this are in San Francisco and live in an apartment building? Go and check the trash room.
You'll probably find that Recology emptied out the bins today but left garbage, even if tied up neatly in trash bags, piled up against the wall or door.
Disgusting and unsanitary. What happened to common sense? What happened to people doing their job? Seriously, is there some law which says that trashmen are not allowed to place trash bags into a wheelie bin for expensive compacting trucks to get to work?
San Francisco is one of the worst run cities I have ever seen.
[That's what happens when a private company is granted a monopoly to perform a necessary public service.](http://www.trashrecology.com/stop-the-sf-monopoly.html)
SF: 7,000 / 840,000 = 0.8% NY: 64,000 / 8,400,000 = 0.8%
To me this is the soft version of the broken window theory. If your city can't care enough to clean up its messes, yes people will treat the whole thing like a trash heap.
Contrast.
In Shibuya every single night, 365 days a year, drunk people puke and toss waste all over an area about 4 SF city blocks. Every single morning a team of govt workers clean it to fairly acceptable levels. The homeless also congregate under the nearby train tracks, but there are so many public FREE toilets that no, I have never seen shit on the street.
SF is dirty because the people prefer low taxes to real government services. Shibuya CITY tax is hefty and rises considerably if your income is above a certain level, maybe 100k, I forget the exact numbers.
No. Coastal California is populated by Democratic voters, people who generally prefer high taxes and more (albeit of questionable quality) government services. SF is dirty because it has never had a Rudy Giuliani to clean it up — and the aforementioned residents would never vote someone like that into office.
(I grew up in NYC, and have been living in both SF and Oakland for the last four years.)
It's a bit unfortunate, but getting a substantially cleaner, safer SF would require a cultural shift away from egalitarian principles that are deeply ingrained in the city's DNA.
Note that while downtown Manhattan is approaching a dystopian Disneyland of tourist-friendly homogeneity, there are still parts of the city that are scary no-man's-land, you just don't see them if you visit or live & work in gentrified neighborhoods.
Back in the day, NYC was nice or nasty block by block, just like SF is today.
No it wouldn't. It would just require spending more money on public sanitation.
Of course if you let homeless congregate and don't provide the services to clean up after them the place is going to get filthy. But there are more solutions than getting rid of the homeless.
New Yorkers pay similar taxes as San Franciscans. Yet our service level is substantially better. I think it comes down to city governments that are willing to make trade-offs (versus those that tend to get locked down by incumbent interests and populist temptations).
It has one major thing over SF that makes it work: It gains much more tax revenue per square mile than SF due to its superior density, which is derived from history and its superior zoning rules.
Getting offtopic but: Holy crap. Talk about cultural differences. The system in my nordic wellfare state makes sure people capable of renting a house and going to the wellfare office will have at least minimum accommodation (without criminalization).