Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by gspr | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

gspr

> Our cities have already collapsed.

Pardon me, but that's the dumbest thing I've read so far in 2021.

> There's crime

Broadly speaking, there's less serious crime than in a long time.

> corruption

Do cities have more corruption than society in general?

> decaying buildings

Are city buildings in a particularly bad state?

> Detroit looks like it was hit by a nuclear bomb.

Detroit has become famous for precisely that, but it's hardly representative.

View on HN

Check out the map here. "Serious" crime may be down, but quality of life has gone down the toilet, even in our richest cities.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/san-francisco-poop-patrol

Who wouldn't want to enjoy the fine scenery while stepping around HIV-infected needles and fresh poop? Ah, this hamburger tastes so much better when I get to interact with the local people while eating it - they are so quirky, they always ask me for a dollar with a threatening gaze.

Is San Francisco a special case, though? It's a one party government that tends to tilt towards the extreme in its decision making, with an extraordinarily wealthy class of citizens, and a very difficult homeless and drug population, all compounded in a small area. I'm old. I remember San Francisco of the 80s, prosperous, wild, open armed, and beautiful. Today it's a concrete jungle with terrible management.

Seattle is pretty much the same. It retained its old Seattle credentials until the mid 2000s and then it started a rapid change politically, maybe due to a tipping point in terms of California transplants or some other such trend. Now it is a one party city with extreme (far left) politics being normalized. The effects of that are apparent daily - despite ever increasing city and state budgets, urban blight is everywhere in all the same forms as SF. The homelessness and drug abuse issues have been induced by a soft on crime local government that takes no responsibility for anything but instead uses these permanent “crises” as political leverage. The spiral of echo chamber politics dooms the city to this direction.

I find it funny when NIMBYs are called far left. LOL!

Far left is literally against conservatism, that is the driving force behind NIMBYs.

It is truly mindbogglingly fascinating to see Americans talk about "the extreme far left", and also very cute how you guys somehow think that left-wing politics cause homelessness and drug abuse.

These people just need a stern order to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, then all the poop will be gone from the streets, am I right?

Portland, Seattle, Austin, Chicago, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Columbus, LA... I guess you're right, it's all in one-party cities.

But, that's like, almost all of the biggest cities?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

I'm sure there's some cities on that list that occasionally vote for the other party, but I think cities inherently become democrat-leaning because the people inside cities tend to be poor.

NYC seems to be doing alright because they had extreme hardass policies in the 90s (kicking out homeless, literally) but that probably won't last much longer.

Ah yes, kicking the homeless out is sure to fix things! Maybe also try banning hunger?

Not saying that's the solution (they gotta go somewhere), just observing that it's remarkably clean for it's size. And that's probably the reason.

Sadly, whichever side is in power, nothing seems to help reduce the homeless problem...

Question, where would you poop if you were homeless?

Over a trash can, bury it in a hole in a park, carry a small bag with me to throw away, in a bucket, at a library or other public building, in a park toilet, at a Target..

Literally anywhere other than the public thoroughfare or someone’s stoop.

Except that the local "progressive" NIMBYs have prevented "a restroom being built in that new waterfront park". Then complained enough to bar you from going to that Target. Etc...

It's considerably harder in US to get to a publicly accessible toilet, than in many countries that I've lived in.

Because they have a tendency to fall asleep drunk with a needle in their arm on the toilet, blocking access for reasonable people.

Personally, I never decided that we should put up with this. I don't recall a vote.

When hiking in the woods, we dig a small hole and cover up. I don’t recommend doing that in a city park, but certainly better than pooping where kids walk to school.

I think you're a bit confused about how this works. You can't mix and match different bad things from different cities, take the union of all of them, come up with some dystopian fictional place that suffers from all, and use that as a basis for your claim that real-world cities have collapsed.

Also, dude, did a city hurt you or something?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com