Contemporary Manhattan and downtown Chicago, for one. These things exist, of course, but they aren’t in your face all the time on the major pedestrian corridors.
I believe other states send us their homeless cause here you can find places you wont actually freeze to death in winter. It may skew things a bit. Not sure.
The stench of urine and feces is dominating, the random exposure to homeless folks mental problems is a daily occurrence, drug paraphernalia (eg: heroin needles) and trash are scattered throughout. SF downtown is an absolute dump.
Go ahead, take a 30 minute walk just north of The Mission. Turn a corner and you'll find a homeless dude standing with a vacant look on his face and pants around his ankles, letting his penis sway in the morning sun.
Turn another corner and you'll find someone shooting up with reckless abandon.
Turn another and you'll be an uninvited witness to a homeless dude verbally and physically assaulting someone for no reason.
LA, NYC, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, etc -- at least these have their size to distribute the problem, SF on the other hand is so small and its city council so progressive that there is a critical mass of it all.
Also California is a huge place, not just SF and LA. We have as many national parks as Alaska, 100's of some of the most beautiful state parks and 100's of county parks. Many states have much worse drug problems per capita. Any country of 39M people and the economy we have is going to have upsides and downsides.
This is true for the most part. NYC has more homeless, but they are kept out of Manhattan, and the supportive housing is in the outer boroughs. That said, I think NYC also does a better job of housing their homeless.
But, to your point about being too liberal, I've seen some of the most disgusting things ever in Powell BART station, and when the police try to kick people out, they get too many complaints and have to back off. So we all have to suffer.
