But having lived here now for almost 2 years, that impression is just so wrong. It's a TINY fraction of SF, and that is not what SF is about. Next time you're here, find a boutique hotel in the Marina, or Pacific Heights, or Russian Hill, or the Mission and Uber over to your conference/meetings (the city's small enough that it's $10-$15 each way).

That's the SF that people love (or hate ;)

The only reedeming quality about the Tenderloin is that you expect it to be sketchy and disgusting. When one pays out the nose to be at a giant tech conference at Moscone, or spends hundreds of dollars a night on a hotel room in Union Square, one is very surprised how disgusting that part of the city is.

I have lived and traveled to dozens of major cities around the world. I am an above average sized former linebacker and I felt genuinely unsafe almost every time I went out at night in SF and was walking around. It almost as bad as Tijuana.

SF has tons of potential as a city, but the homeless just ruin it. If SF is so great to it's homeless, then why are they everywhere and making everyone uncomfortable?

I don't know if the problem is wealth inequality or a culture in SF that sees homelessness as a viable lifestyle, but it's just sad.

I am not saying get rid of them by kicking them out. I am saying give them a place to live and sleep so they aren't living on the streets, it's just inhumane.

I don't have a particularly good explanation for this. However, most of what defines SF as a city isn't really along Market St, or even downtown for that matter. It's a city of neighborhoods, and without venturing out from downtown you haven't really experienced what the city has to offer. I moved away last year, and still think of SF as one of the world's most interesting cities.

The tech sector's cogs are moving at an increasingly rapid pace whereas nearly everyone else has been jammed to a standstill or losing ground since 2008. The proliterian hatred of the tech sector is based on jealousy and misplaced blame for the fallout caused by gentrification which follows higher incomes.

The homeless are the most blatant casualties of a depressed economy, but rest assured, there are countless others who suffer without falling onto the streets.

Frankly, lots of businesses don't require "passion" in the eros sense about the product. One doesn't become passionate about dry cleaning, or transmission overhauls, or phlebotomy. The vast majority of jobs pay because they're necessary but not interesting. Products that inspire deep passion, like music or farming, rarely pay well, because passion is its own reward.

If you want to make money, become really good at doing something that doesn't inspire passion, preferably something that most people really hate or fear. Get rewarded with pride in quality work, and the pay that comes with doing something that sucks for people who need it done.

Think about it this way: Google Maps on desktop is IMO much, much more useful than Google Maps on my phone. I can fit a lot more search results, things are much easier to see at a glance, I don't have to zoom in so far to see important map features, etc etc.

But ultimately I still use Maps on my phone a lot more than I do on desktop, because I need maps a lot more while I'm out and about than when I'm sitting still.

Ditto shopping. Surfing Amazon on a desktop is probably always going to be a superior experience to doing it on mobile, but as smartphones get better and connectivity improves, more and more people are going to want to quickly buy something (e.g., notice you need a pack of razors as you're heading out the door - use your phone instead of sitting down at your desktop).

And what we're seeing - at least from the few companies I've had the opportunity to watch this from - is that even traditionally "desktop" use cases are increasingly mobile. Looking for something to do with your significant other this weekend? That used to be a desktop use case, but it's increasingly mobile as well, even though it is of course not an intrinsically or obviously mobile thing to do.

"The future is mobile" means "people want to use this on mobiles, even though it's going to be strictly worse than the desktop experience, so you can either try to close the desktop-mobile UX gap as much as possible or watch your users bleed off to your competitors". The corollary to that is also "you should try to find actual mobile-centric use cases for your product so that your mobile product isn't just a slightly crappier clone of your desktop product".

I feel like San Francisco (and some of the other nearby municipalities like Berkeley) have this lassez faire mentality when it comes to their homeless population where they think that interfering would be a bad thing. That this acceptance is a healthy thing. That some guy in a tent in Golden Gate Park who yells things at passers-by and chases dogs is somehow a charming slice of life in the city and contributes to its uniqueness and not that this poor guy might benefit from antipsychotics.

But again, that's just a feeling I get that I can't really back up with anything but anecdotal evidence.

Chicago is certainly no better in terms of taking care of its homeless, as you point out: the city and state have been deprioritizing spending for years. Homeless shelters, community health organizations, addiction centers have been losing state funding and having to get federal and private grants to get by (when they can get by; certainly the number of beds available are shrinking.)

But Chicago isn't proud of the status quo and I'm surprised that San Francisco, well, seems to be.

San Francisco differs from Chicago on homelessness in two significant ways: the weather and environment is amenable year-round, while Chicago is inhospitable for 1/4 of the year, and San Francisco's politics regarding homeless people are "hands-off".

Based on the last spot counts I could find, Chicago and San Francisco have roughly comparable homeless populations, despite the fact that Chicago is more than 3x larger. That difference is not simply because Las Vegas busses homeless people to SF.

I dispute the notion that SF does a particularly good job taking care of homeless people. It's indeed possible that SF does a better job of this than Chicago and NYC, both of which see clusters of indigent people on the streets as a quality-of-life problem for residents. But if you can find a source that says SF is doing a good job of actually delivering services and getting homeless people off the streets and into society, I'd like to read it; the sources I've found say the opposite.

Homelessness and poverty aren't entrepreneurial problems to be solved by a startup. They are profound socioeconomic and mental health problems that require a big change beyond what's possible with a new social app thingy or an iOS gadget or an agile web framework or whatever. It probably requires country-wide or world-wide political and economic policy change. It's also something that has been going on for centuries, and I doubt this was because there weren't enough enthusiastic startup entrepreneurs in the world.

That I have to even say this makes me wonder if the startup guys in SF are actually Martians experimenting on us Earthlings.

What he's saying is: many socially-driven businesses are pure BS. That doesn't mean he doesn't believe that a genuine socially-driven business can be built to solve that problem.

Which would make sense to me.

That's an..'interesting' parsing of what he's saying. Is it just me or is it fairly apparent to most others that he's likely saying he's surprised that homelessness in general isn't being tackled (without speaking to the likelihood of success) by a startup, and he then follows by stating the obvious: that most startups who talk about 'changing the world' are blowing smoke. Of course, the unstated insinuation being that a startup aiming to reduce homelessness would actually be worthy of that title. Not sure why you jumped to the least generous interpretation possible but I'd bet a lot of money that there's no there there.