[deminature]

Market St in SF is what most Australians see when attending conferences. The homelessness, human waste, open drug use, and visibly serious mental illness is pretty confronting for anyone not used to it, and that's at daytime - it gets significantly scarier at night if you make the mistake of walking back to your hotel. I've never understood why all the hotels international guests stay in are in by far the worst neighborhood.

[DubiousPusher]

It's grodey and depressing but hardly a "war zone".

[deminature]

Last time I was there, someone was openly defecating in front of city hall, next to multiple people shooting heroin. I had to step over someone who had collapsed apparently from drug use, in front of a restaurant entrance, and nobody seemed to care. It's about as close to the third world as exists in the west. I recognize there's extremely nice parts of SF, but most out of state/international guests stay around Tenderloin/SOMA and would never know that.

[alfiedotwtf]

I stayed in Tenderloin and was shocked when walking back to hotel people having sex on the footpath in front of their tent, while a few tents down someone shooting up. Then what looked like a 14 year old (at most) prostitute soliciting at the corner.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the depths of the Philippines, and never saw anything that bad... and that was during a single stroll to the hotel!

[InvertedRhodium]

I'm not sure if you appreciate how utterly surreal that visage is to someone who is 3 hours off a flight from Sydney.

It honestly feels like a scaled down version of the slums you see in South Africa butting right up against typical suburban homes.

[DubiousPusher]

Sure I do. I'm from picturesque, rural Montana. My first visit to LA in the 90s was quite shocking. But a war zone implies a level of lawlessness that doesn't apply. Most of what is going on, people using drugs, using the bathroom on the street, etc, it isn't good but it doesn't really affect you. In a war zone, you have high odds of being maimed or killed any second for no good reason. It's a poor analogy. I think the homelessness is a problem we need to desperately to address but this kind of militant rhetoric doesn't help at all. In fact for several decades here it has made things worse.