Walking down the street in SF near the Caltrain station, right on the street in a parking space I saw a huge pile of discarded construction of waste wood, with exposed nails and sharp edges. In any city with functioning cleaning services, this would trigger a cleanup response, since it is unsafe and a nuisance. Yet this pile of crap appeared to have been there for quite some time.
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.
> SF is dirty because the people prefer low taxes to real government services.
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.)
Hear here. ex-NYC too -- SF is a lot like the New York of around 25+ years ago.
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.
> 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.
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.
Walk down the tourist area of Haight Street towards the park and you'll see pieces of cardboard and what looks like dog poop or human faeces smeared all over the sidewalk. Outside every store is someone smoking marijuana. It's a terrible place to go for a walk with a baby or kids.
>SF is dirty because the people prefer low taxes to real government services
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).
NYC has plenty of 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.
Houston has far lower taxes than both SF and NYC and I have never seen human poop on the sidewalks. My point is that the tax rate has little to do with it; it's a question of priorities.
