I find the recent uptick in progressivism in SV refreshing, and sorely needed. Then again, I've lived my entire life in liberal enclaves and do not personally identify with conservative / "family values" viewpoints.
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Conservatives have plenty of issues as well - look at Kansas or Alabama. Don't see those being discussed at a national level, though the politics that drove them into the ground as now steering the federal government.
Coming in from New York, San Francisco’s lack of attention to its homeless population is self inflicted. It’s also a problem that nobody in the city seems very much to care about.
Because all the rich people living in the North West part of the city are completely insulated from it.
Which reminds me of an interesting experience I had. I was living in NY, and took a trip that had me spend about 8 days each in SF and Cuba. It took me a couple days to put a name on a feeling I was experiencing in Havana. I realized that it was the dissonance of the staggering inequality plainly in the Union Square area of SF I was staying and the relative flat deprivation of Havana. The latter lacked the overtly utter destitution of the Tenderloin.
I didn't have any profound takeaways other than that it seemed like there should be some way of getting the benefits of American society, with the baseline of Cuban society, given how much more we have in resources.
And I also do realize that one is simply not allowed to be openly destitute in a place like Havana, as it would discredit The System. By the same token, I think we kind of discredit our own.
Come to think of it, it would be just as illegal to openly compare the living standard of even a third-rate party apparatchick vs. that of a factory worker, for whom the system ostensibly worked.
I am not sure if hiding the rather natural that people end up differently (even though in places like Cuba or USSR where you end up depends far less on your abilities than in the US) is in any way better than having the differences in the open.