It comes down to the part of the city you visit. LA, Sac, Sf all have similar areas to what you saw in SF. They have other nice areas too, where the residents

It comes down to the part of the city you visit. LA, Sac, Sf all have similar areas to what you saw in SF. They have other nice areas too, where the residents can ignore the problems that concentrated in certain neighborhoods. And they continue opposing building up single family home areas. All major west coast cities have massive disparities and homeless problems. And even other cities like Phoenix have big homeless problems. But building cities super spread out does serve to make the homeless problem go elsewhere, I.e a downtownish area.