Heather Knight, San Francisco Chronicle:
It can be refreshing to leave San Francisco’s misery behind and see cities that take care of people better than we do. I saw about a dozen homeless people in a week in London, a city that has a “No Second Night Out” initiative to get people who fall into homelessness inside as quickly as possible. Of course, countries with universal health care and more substantive social safety nets than ours will fare better on that score.
David Chu, a Sunset resident and product manager, visited family in Seoul in May said he saw very little homelessness and no obvious drug dealing or use.
“No, not at all,” he said. “I’m sure you could find it if you looked really, really hard, but it’s nothing like the Tenderloin.”
He said that in Seoul, there’s more civic pride and a sense of the common good. In San Francisco, he said, people regularly fight to prevent new housing or services near them and often get their way at City Hall, making our entrenched problems even worse.
“How is this our level of governance?” he asked. “San Francisco’s a place that should be 100% world-class, and oftentimes it’s sadly the exact opposite.”
