8 ms·
San Fransisco is the most shocking city I've visited, in the world, in terms of wealth inequality. It felt a few small steps from being a distopia. Homeless peo
by uhtred 8y ago
San Fransisco is the most shocking city I've visited, in the world, in terms of wealth inequality. It felt a few small steps from being a distopia. Homeless people and drug addicts staggering around and shitting in the street a few hundred meters from high end boutiques with armed guards that 99% of the population could never afford to buy anything from.
- atom-morgan 8y agoAnd yet many from this area are the first to criticize others for inequality and a lack of empathy.
- afjl 8y agoYou could say this about literally any city/area.
- jostmey 8y agoYes, but some cities are worse, much worse, than others. It's like saying nobody is perfect so it's okay to hurt others.
- afjl 8y agoThat's fair. The Bay is terrible, I've experienced it firsthand for four years. My point, however, is that high costs of living and poor wages exist regardless of people's "empathy" and awareness of "wealth inequality".
- atom-morgan 8y agoI've lived in Cincinnati and Atlanta. It's nowhere near as bad as what seems to be coming out of the Bay Area.
- afjl 8y agoI live in a suburban oasis in North Orange County, with plenty of "empathy" and awareness for wealth "inequality". Yet, at the most recent city council meeting, there were a large number of residents complaining about the personal cost of opening up supportive housing for homeless people. Not a financial cost, but a personally subjective "cost" of sharing their city with transients. This housing complex includes mental health services and employment services on-site and has support from the local city government. Instead of compromising and considering alternatives, these people advocated for removing the program entirely and passing the buck to the next city. High costs of living exist regardless of "empathy" or awareness of "inequality". The problem is policy, not personality.
- TaylorAlexander 8y agoYep. Your comment reminds me of this picture: https://goo.gl/images/21xra9 https://goo.gl/images/21xra9
- starbeast 8y agoReminds me of here in Bristol. The amount of people I know in caravans and tents in cities here in the UK is fucking depressing. Nearly all of them have jobs.
- uhtred 8y agoReally? I've never seen a person living in a tent or caravan in a UK city. Travellers living in caravans out in a field, sure, but that's different.
- starbeast 8y agoI cycle past a large and growing encampent of shanty buildings, tent and caravans out the back of Bristol Temple Meads train station every day. Is right on the canal, across the water from a large nightclub and next to a yacht.
- johnchristopher 8y agoJust a bit more public gadget tech and pollution and it's a Gibson still frame.
- aznumeric 8y agoImagine a dark twist, where the people who are walking by the tents in that picture, actually live in those tents! The smiling guy with the phone just got out of his tent and is heading to his workplace at a tech startup.
- closeparen 8y agoThere are vast differences between rich and poor areas in most US metros. Usually they are separated by some freeway driving. San Francisco is rare in that the middle class and higher spend enough time in/near the center to notice its conditions.
- stuxnet79 8y ago> It felt a few small steps from being a dystopia. Is it really? The only difference between San Francisco of today and SF a la "Bridge Trilogy" (William Gibson) is that the have-nots haven't completely taken over the bridge yet.
- xvedejas 8y agoMost cities have these extremes. What's unique about SF is their geographic proximity. One could debate whether it's better to keep the inequalities out-of-sight and out-of-mind or not.
- hopefulengineer 8y agoprogressives would have an easier time convincing conservatives to support their policies if the most liberal places in the country weren't complete hell holes with the worst income inequality be the change you wish to see in the world and all that California, New Jersey, and Illinois all in bottom 5 for quality of life, New York at 37. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/quality-of-life https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/quality-of-...
- dmode 8y agoMost liberal places are hell holes ? I mean Marin County is 80% Democrats is one of the best places to live in the world. In fact the entire coast of US from San Diego all the way to Washington is all blue. What about huge cities like LA and NYC ? Are they hell holes too ? I don't really need to point out what areas of the US are true dystopian, with no jobs, declining life spans, opiod epidemics, and so forth. Also, urban areas will have blight. That is true for any country in the world. But what makes the US unique is the historical context of slavery, reconstruction, segregation, white flight, incarceration etc. It's like 400 years of history and baggage.
- hopefulengineer 8y ago>I mean Marin County is 80% Democrats is one of the best places to live in the world sure, if you're white and well educated. The brown serf laborers have all been nicely segregated away so you don't have to see the misery https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/03/17/marin-county-ranked-health-income-inequality-segregation/ https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/03/17/marin-county-ra...
- dmode 8y agoYou can also easily go to a very brown area and see the same thing. I mean Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Fremont, Dublin, San Ramon are heavily Indian cities, if not outright majority, and heavily blue. They are also awesome places to live.
- notus 8y ago
- gammateam 8y agoI took a friend straight from the airport to Hayes Valley, Russian Hill and the Marina She thinks its the cutest city ever I told her we avoided the other parts but we dont need to go there SF is unique in that the tourist and commerce center attracts and tolerates the open air drug bazaar and the poor sanitary conditions of its patrons.
- yks 8y agoI don’t know, some Asian cities (e.g. Jakarta) seem worse. At least in SF middle class people walk on the streets and don’t live behind electric fences either.
- zachguo 8y agoThat's not a comparable city. Try Singapore, Shanghai and Tokyo instead.
- uhtred 8y agoI travelled around south East Asia, and in Cambodia for example, it was more that most people seemed poor but were scraping by with some kind of job. And not surrounded by extravagant high end shops, or rich people with everything. People lived on the street sometimes, but they had a little makeshift shelter with amenities, beds etc, and turned the shelter into a market stall in the daytime. So even they had something, even if very little.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- eplanit 8y agoYes -- while lauding itself as being very Progressive.
- yongjik 8y agoThat's not really "shocking wealth inequality", but more like a shocking display of wealth inequality. Most cities around the developed world will spend more effort to herd the "undesirables" into some corners far away from fancy shopping districts. We can debate the pros and cons (after all, nobody benefits from having to avoid human feces on sidewalk), but I don't think SF has much more actual inequality than most other cities.
- uhtred 8y agoI never saw anything even close in European cities I've lived in and visited. There's definitely more homeless in American cities, but the West coast is by far the worst I've seen and San Fran was considerably worse than other places.
- thomasjoulin 8y agoParis subway comes to mind...