I’ve been here for 7 years now. The best way to describe San Francisco is that it feels like living in a cyberpunk utopia. Alita Battle Angel, the movie, is al

I’ve been here for 7 years now. The best way to describe San Francisco is that it feels like living in a cyberpunk utopia. Alita Battle Angel, the movie, is almost exactly how San Francisco feels. There are actually 2 cities. San Francisco, the tech town, is booming like crazy. New highrises and shiny skyscrapers are coming online almost every month. Areas that were barren wastelands when I moved here in 2015 are now bustling with new construction, street level businesses, full of upper middle class rich people running to and fro enjoying their lives. The skyscrapers are fast encroaching on the other San Francisco, the poor and troubled city. They’re squeezing homeless people, drug addicts, etc into a smaller and smaller area. In some neighborhoods the concentration of shanty towns and “bad elements” is so high it looks and feels like a slum. Because that’s what it is. Look at the actual numbers though and, at least officially, it’s not that bad. A city of ~800,000 residents has ~8,000 people living on the streets[1]. Around 1%, same as the ratio for USA as a whole with 580,000 homeless people[2]. What has changed during the pandemic is that these homeless people became more visible because while the upper middle class retreated into working from home. Now that people are coming back to the office, the city is again filling with commuters and the “undesirables” are slowly retreating back to wherever they were hiding before. As others have said, lots of downtown businesses shut down due to lack of foot traffic. Because few people actually live downtown. Hopefully that gets restored as commuters come back. Another way to sum up San Francisco is that seeing a person shooting up on the street is normal and seeing a Tesla is about as remarkable as a Toyota Corolla. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/New-data-shows-fewer-people-are-homeless-in-San-17176319.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/New-data-shows-fewer-... [2] https://theweek.com/briefing/1013082/living-on-the-streets https://theweek.com/briefing/1013082/living-on-the-streets