[ido]

I live in a very suburban part of Tempelhof (on the border to Mariendorf, near the Teltow canal & the U6 line) & even here you occasionally find spent needles along the riverside.

    Coming from Boston or Copenhagen, SF feels like 
    an extremely dirty and grimy city. So does Berlin.

I can see that...But man - visit New Delhi, Cairo, or hell even Tel Aviv or LA. Berlin is not that dirty - a relative judgment, sure - but I find comparing to Copenhagen (I haven't been to Boston since I was 14 so I don't really remember much) ingenuine.

It reminds of when I lived in Vienna & had a Swiss coworker telling me how bad the transit is in Austria (if you're unfamiliar - transit is amazing in Austria, to the point where you can live in a small alpine village and not need a car. Switzerland just happens to be one of the handful of countries with even better transit).

[johnomarkid]

That's my point. It's a matter of perspective whether or not you find SF dirty. If you come from a cleaner place, you're going to feel like it's dirty. Berlin isn't much cleaner, and there is a homeless problem too (though likely different in cause), so you're not likely to go to SF and feel like the criticism others are passing is as bad as it sounds.

[ido]

Yeah but how many people are coming from Copenhagen vs e.g. LA or Miami[1]? Let alone any large Latin American or Asian city. But maybe that's just the HN demographics.

[1] I haven't visited Miami in a long time but last I went it was far seedier and grimier than SF, despite lots of rain.

[johnomarkid]

A lot of people are coming from cleaner places, and those places aren't necessarily big cities. Rather, suburbs and rural areas.