It’s not extreme when you compare it to most other Western cities. If you want to get into undeveloped nations and dilapidated ghost cities, you’re just entering a different arena.
The endless tent encampments, open drug use, human feces on the street, glass/needles/trash everywhere, and rampant vehicle theft make the place unbearable. It is a shithole.
Western cities like Portland, LA, Eugene, or Seattle? Or is that just west coast and you also mean to include Baltimore, Detroit or St Louis? Many of those are worst. Or I could go to Miami or Austin where their states are trying to legislate me out of existence.
I don’t disagree things have gotten worse, but a wide variety of factors are contributing to this beyond politics. They’re also mainly occur in certain areas - I don’t come across all the things very often living in SF because I’m not in SoMA/civic center/mission where it’s all the most acute.
Not really, SF is a shithole for a wealthy North American city. And I say that as someone who grew up here and still loves this place.
Story time. We literally had squatters break into and occupy a house two doors down from us, on Sunday (Easter). I was gardening in the front yard and seven people came and went over the course of the day. The police came in the afternoon but missed them, and they came back that night. It took until Tuesday to get them out and lock down the building so they couldn't get back in. A similar incident happened across the street a few months ago, the squatters even changed the lock on the front door.
I've lived here nearly half a century and I've never seen anything like this. Oh, also, last month, a guy came through and busted into several cars one morning. He got five or six of us.
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The thing is, SF has always been a crazy shitty town. It's also beautiful and fun, but this is the town that grew from the Gold Rush. It was built by 49ers and the folks who sold them shovels and booze and women. It's always been crazy here.
So when people point to SF as the paragon of Left-wing politics, they are ignoring that it's not really a functional city and never has been. The port is in the East Bay where the train tracks run, eh? No trains on the Golden Gate Bridge, eh? There's no economic center here (except the artifical banking nexus, but that doesn't need to stay here, SV bank was in SV.) And the weather never gets better. The entire rest of the state has better weather. The people who think SF has nice weather typically stay in one of the tiny microclimates that avoid the worst of the wind and fog.
Seriously, go look at the trees in Mission Rock. They are all at 45 degree angles because the damn wind never stops. They should have put wind turbines on the roofs of those nifty new condos (the ones with the sidewalks breaking away from the buildings.)
Oh man, I could go on and on about this town.
All I'm really getting at is that, if you know the history of San Francisco, you know that it's not really a left-wing exemplar, it's just a nuthouse, and always has been since the USA kicked out the Spanish. (What the Spanish did is the stuff of nightmares. Before that it was the Ohlone people here, and I don't know what they were like. There are still a few Ohlone people around but everybody is real careful not to mention them except in the past tense because it breaks the illusion of inclusive progressive politics. We still want to e.g. build apartment buildings on their old cemeteries and such.)
I’d reserve that for very, very different places in the world.