San Francisco: A Dystopian Nightmare of Addiction, Homelessness and Criminality
February 2nd, 2020They have been showing it to us for several decades in novels and on screens: Cyberpunk: High Tech, Low Life:
Via: Daily Mail:
‘San Francisco has always had hobos but we’ve never seen anything like this. It’s become a vision of some kind of strange dystopian future,’ says Joel Kotkin, a widely respected professor in urban studies.
He can reel off damning statistics to back his claim that San Francisco symbolises the Golden State’s descent into ‘high-tech feudalism’ including America’s highest poverty levels, its worst rates of property crime and its biggest gap between top and middle incomes.
But one statistic stands out: almost half of homeless people in the United States are in California, according to a recent White House study.
And San Francisco, a comparatively small city that is home to tech giants such as Twitter, Uber and Airbnb, has the highest rate of ‘unsheltered’ citizens – at ten times the national level.
