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.