It should be leftwing paradise. Represented in Congress by Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and run for years by Democrats, San Francisco should be a mecca for the left. But the city is fast becoming one of the worst places in the U.S. to live.

The obvious problem: Homelessness and liberal non-judgmentalism. The other problem: The high price of housing caused by liberal policies.

The Obvious Problem

The homeless problem is out of control. Experts say it “could exceed some of the dirtiest slums in the world.” Around 7,500 homeless people live in the city. And they make their presence known.

Human feces are strewn across public areas. The NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit examined over 150 blocks of downtown San Francisco. It found 96 blocks littered with feces. San Francisco’s new mayor, London Breed, observed, “there are more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen growing up here.”

One resident told The San Francisco Chronicle that her 2-year-old son invented a game called “jumping over the poop.” Another child collects syringe caps and floats them down the gutter for fun.

That resident added: “There is a suitcase full of human s— on the corner of Isis and 13th. Last night, I had to threaten violence to a man smoking crystal meth on my front porch. This morning, my 2-year-old son and I watched a rat rummage through the trash in our gutter. Things have been getting worse and worse on my block since 2010, and the city does NOTHING to fix it.”

Another woman says she struggles “to sleep at night because of the tortuous sounds of screaming and fighting wafting up from the street below.”

Watch Your Backs

And the homeless and others leave a lot of trash as well. A cleaning crew can clean up an area, but “right after they leave, maybe an hour or two later, the place is filled with trash again,” Breed says.

An anonymous woman took out an ad in The San Francisco Chronicle entitled “Watch your backs — nobody else is.” She accuses the city of being negligent in dealing with the homelessness crisis, and describes an incident where a homeless man menacingly carrying scissors left her feeling afraid while eating in a downtown cafe.

A major medical conference is changing its venue to another city because past attendees are afraid to walk amid the open drug use, threatening behavior and mental illness on the streets. This will significantly affect the city, since tourism is its biggest industry. The doctors’ conference generates $40 million from its 15,000 attendees.

The problem arose because the government has looked the other way at the homeless for years. The city didn’t clean up homeless encampments. It let them exist and expand until recently. The city has even encouraged the homeless to continue living this way by providing free needles for drugs. This mindset is all part of the Democrats’ nonjudgmentalism.

Housing Crisis

At the same time, the city hasn’t encouraged the creation of housing for working people. San Francisco now has the highest rent in the world. The average monthly rent is $3,500. Only a paltry 12 percent of residents can afford a median-priced home in the city. Not surprising: that home sells for $1.5 million.

Some people live in RVs because an RV is all they can afford. Residents are leaving the city in droves due to the high cost of housing. San Francisco lost more residents than any other U.S. city in the last quarter of 2017.

Onerous zoning regulations and building codes have increased the cost of housing. Height restrictions waste valuable space. In much of the city, it is illegal to build anything taller than 40 feet. One resident built a “pod” in his friend’s living room in order to obtain affordable rent, but the city found out and made him move out.

Due to the high cost of living, a family making $117,400 annually is considered “low income.” A family making $73,300 is “very low income.” The minimum wage is $15 an hour, but it’s not enough to rent a two-bedroom apartment. In order to live comfortably in San Francisco, a person must make least $110,000 a year.

And the Traffic

San Francisco ranks fifth in the world for worst traffic congestion. One commuter observed, “It’s almost unbearable. And it doesn’t matter what time of day or what day of the week. It’s just unbearable.” Traffic during rush hour is even more congested than in Los Angeles.

Years of putting transportation dollars into mass transit instead of the highways has resulted in a lopsided situation for drivers. Democrats thought by neglecting the highways they could force people into mass transit, but like most Democrats’ delusional ideals it doesn’t work. This doesn’t even touch on the permissiveness of the sanctuary city policy.

There seems to be no end in sight to the misery as long as the Democratic machine stays in power. The flight out of the city is only going to accelerate. The differences between the haves in the red areas of the country and the have-nots in the blue areas like San Francisco will continue to widen.

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