Syringes were visible, people were staggering, others had wide aggressive eyes.
San Francisco – a Democratic stronghold known for cable cars, quaint architecture and its diverse culture, has become a bastion of squalor and crime as city dwellers and visitors alike dodge aggressive, drug-addled vagrants. And it’s beginning to scare the tourists…
An Australian couple visiting the city were shocked by what they saw after deciding to walk back to their hotel:
“Is this normal or am I in a ‘bad part of town?’ Just walked past numerous homeless off their faces, screaming and running all over the sidewalk near Twitter HQ and then a murder scene. Wife is scared to leave hotel now,” reads a Wednesday posting by Reddit user /u/nashtendo.
When another Redditor said “put on your big boy pants… scared to leave the hotel?”…
The Aussie replied:
It was my wife that was scared and it was partly the mass of concentrated, drug affected homeless mixed with a guy being rolled into an ambulance dead. –/u/nashtendo
“We did La and Nyc on this trip too. Both felt safer,” he said later in the thread, adding “Syringes were visible, people were staggering, others had wide aggressive eyes. ‘Off their faces’ might be an Australian thing (sorry) but I meant just visibly drug affected.”
Another Reddit user replied:
It’s pretty normal. I’m honestly hoping tourists will realize how shitty this city has become and stop coming. Maybe the loss of income will finally push the city to stop allowing the rampant drug dealing and homeless people treating the entire city like their toilet. You would think a city that deoends so heavily on tourism and conventions for the bulk of their income would put more effort into maintaining a certain standard, but there is rampant drug dealing out in the open in some of the most heavily tourist areas. The city know about it, they just don’t care. –/u/SgtPeanutbutter
“You see things on the streets that are just not humane,” Kevin Carroll, executive director of the Hotel Council of San Francisco told The Chronicle‘s Heather Knight in April. “People come into hotels saying, ‘What is going on out there?’ They’re just shocked. … People say, ‘I love your city, I love your restaurants, but I’ll never come back.'”
In a completely seperate thread, another Reddit user posted in the San Francisco subreddit “Why is this city so terrifying?”
I’ve wanted to visit SF my entire life and I finally make it here and my goddddd it’s terrifying. Anyone have any advice for a tourist aside from “don’t be such a pussy.” –u/xnmb1
“The streets are filthy. There’s trash everywhere. It’s disgusting,” Joe D’Alessandro, president of S.F. Travel told the Chronicle’s Heather Knight in April. “I’ve never seen any other city like this — the homelessness, dirty streets, drug use on the streets, smash-and-grabs.”
The city, which hands out up to 4.8 million syringes each year, has struggled to figure out how to keep streets clean and safe for residents, while accommodating a growing homeless population and longstanding HIV and Hepatitis C epidemics. There are roughly 16,000 residents in San Francisco with HIV, and 13,000 with Hep C.
City Health Director Barbara Garcia estimated in 2016 that there were 22,000 intravenous drug users in San Francisco – around one for every 38.9 residents, while the city hands out roughly 400,000 needles per month.
Of the 400,000 needles distributed monthly, San Francisco receives around 246,000 back – meaning that there are roughly 150,000 discarded needles floating around each month – or nearly 2 million per year, according to Curbed.
Mayor Mark Farrell has said, repeatedly, in recent weeks that the problem of discarded syringes on city streets has become a sticking point for him, and the city promised millions of dollars to curb the problem of hazardous waste on sidewalks and streets.
Meanwhile, San Francisco Chronicle’s Matier and Ross chimed in Wednesday with an uncomfortable observation: Most of the needles littering streets in downtown neighborhoods came by way of the city itself, as part of the Department of Public Health’s 25-year-old needle exchange program. –Curbed
While certainly nowhere near the top of the list, crime is also a problem in San Francisco – which is higher than 92.7% of the United States according to city-data.com.
Meh.
These tourists saved money by staying at hotels in the Tenderloin – one of the largest centers of ugliness in SF.
It isn’t physically dangerous but definitely very uncomfortable. There are also parts which are physically dangerous, fortunately those are so far away that it is unlikely tourists would wind up there.
You get what you pay for.
Wow, are you an idiot. Exactly what is the right price to pay for raging addicts and murder victims in the streets?
San Fran is the perfect example of the disgusting nature of progressives. Take over something of value. Turn it to shit. Then blame everyone else for why it happened. Leave and repeat.
Obviously, according to your comment, for this part of town, you’ve reached the “leave and repeat” stage.
Don’t bother moving near me when you do.
Back then my sister lived about a block away from the Castro and all you saw there were hairy nasty looking gay men who like to wear leather. They never wore shirts under their leather jackets.
I remember that they had just discovered how AIDS spread and all the gays were fighting among themselves- half wanted the bath houses shut down and the other half were pissed off because they did.
Another democrap shithole. Since it is Nancy Pelousy’s home town, that should tell you all you need to know.
Piglosi is an east coast tramsplant from Bodymorgue.
A decaying city. What makes people want to live and work there? I would think that sane people would want to clean it up.
The people running the city most likely don’t live there, but in gated communities outside the city borders.
Now there’s the problem. Sanity and even basic intelligence have eroded into hatred of common sense and morality.
It’s obviously Trump’s fault.
Times have changed.
It has been a shithole city since the late 60s. It sure was whenever I drove in there in 1982 from another town in the east Bay area. $$$ talks, when tourism declines enough there will be street cleaning. Perhaps a biomass unit can be built.
Part of the problem is the more you give and do for these shitbags the more will come. At this point maybe it’s best for every city to send a monthly stipend to SanFran, along with their chronic homeless/druggies/mentally ill, and just write the city off. At least when it falls into the ocean it will improve America.
What kind of idiot would live their? And a special fool to visit their?
I was from Or. and thats way too close to Ca.
I am Jack Lovett
My sister has lived in San Francisco since 1980. Back in June of 1982 I went out there to see her for the whole month. I was 18 years old and man I had never seen shit like they had out there. I was about scared to death because I got looked at a whole lot and sure as hell wasn’t going to talk to anyone especially the men dressed in leather.
Anyhow, Sis lived in this old apartment that was very spacious and had high ceilings, but quite a bit run down. She picked me up at the airport and when we got there it was at night. I went to the kitchen to get a drink of water and when I turned on the lights- oh my God, I had never seen so many damned cock roaches in one place in my life. I pitched a bitch fit and the next day she gave me the money to buy the spray and bombs to kill them. The cans said, “Specially formulated for Bay Area Roaches”. I sprayed that place and the next morning I had to use a dust pan and broom to sweep them up multiple times. I could have used snow shovels!
The town was run down then and had some nasty squirrelly looking characters and could have been called an early stage Democrat Shithole.
Welcome to the “global village”. Give them the dregs, the trash, the sewage and freaks. That’s the garbage that these globull swine are making. Its not a happy high tech Star Trek place at all. Its the ghetto, the favela, and the drug dealing gangbangers.
Diverse-shitty. All the garbage at the BOTTOM OF THE GENE POOL. It may be easy to manipulate, but never under CONTROL.
POWER is CONTROL. The enemy can cause Disorder, they just cannot bring ORDER.
The problem with SF is that you DON’T get what you pay for. Everything is a battle. The public transportation is awful, full of thieves and junkies, yet there’s little parking anywhere. None of this affects Diane Feinstein, who gets to sit in a bubble bath in her Pacific Heights mansion, far removed from it. Like a Soviet premier.
The homeless need to be kicked in the face when they’re sleeping, we need a thousand more of this guy:
http://www.ktvu.com/news/san-francisco-police-search-for-man-who-kicked-homeless-person
Perhaps a solution to this invasion, as with the Aztlan and Eurabia invasions, is to learn to use social media (?) or something to invite all those invaders to join the elite at their Pacific Heights etc, enclaves? Camp at the gates and climb the walls! If that’s “the in place” for the homeless and addicts, the optics of compassion fails pretty quick.
San Francisco just elected its first black woman mayor. They’re so progressive that Minneapolis only had them beat by 25 years. I’m sure this new mayor will enact some common sense law and order policies. /sarc
Humans wee never intended to live in close proximity in such numbers. Overpopulation will have serious repercussions wherever and whenever it happens. It is unnatural and destructive.
I intend to stay as far away from big shitholes as I can.
Thing to know about this piece is it originated on sfgate.com the local rag. If you really want to see how bad it is, go there and look at the comments on this story. Normal people are totally fed up, and they’re starting to realize Newsom won’t offer any solutions, so maybe Cox has a chance. I hope so because I like to visit SF; the wife grew up on “the Haight” and visited the Grateful Dead’s house and interviewed The Byrds for her HS newspaper. She’s in mourning for her lost gem of a city. Not so much today.
Here is Socal we have bums in almost every parking lot or sidewalk. Most are non-threatening, but my situational awareness meter is always up & running ’cause it only takes one.
Why is this news now ? San Francisco has always been like this. Lived there in the early 90s when young and oh so liberal , after a year my political views totally changed . I could see then how political correctness would destroy a city , state , country if allowed free rein.
When One of the ladies in the rotary club dropped a sewing needle at the community center on quilting night. Thats the extent of the needle problem here.
Never been there. Never going. To many cocksuckers.
Lips are lips, my guess is that your cock won’t even be able to tell the difference.
For my husband and I, the silver lining is that our newly married 32YO son and his wife were between jobs in January when the northeast was suffering from an extreme cold spell. Being newly married, without children and newly unemployed, they suddenly had some freedom and a desire to move to a place with a warmer year round climate. Yes, California. They decided to take a 3-week vacation to tour the state with that in mind. Thankfully, that tour changed their mind. They said SF especially was disgusting with homeless tent areas, the odor of urine and excrement even in tourist areas, drugged-out, aggressive beggars, and discarded needles. They said LA and San Diego areas were not much better. To be fair, they thought Northern Napa Valley was nice. But then also their realization of the cost of living and the high taxes. Anyway, like I said, silver lining for us that it changed their mind and for the moment, they are very well employed again and settled closer to home.
Back in the day SF was a beautiful, vibrant city, just like Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore and others which have fallen to rampant social pathology enabled by liberal social policies. I refuse to go there anymore because of the changes I observed on my last visit about 10 years ago, when things were not nearly as bad as now.
I was just thinking early this morning that probably the most powerful truth on this planet involves sowing and reaping.