San Francisco is still an incredible city to live and work in if you're young and don't have a family (which is a huge part of the workforce). The homelessness problem is blown out of proportion in terms of everyday living (it's still ridiculous from a societal point of view, but still)
To be fair, my experience there was all in 2012-2015.
It’s not just homelessness, though. Stores here in Taipei aren’t shutting down due to huge losses from shoplifting, but that’s happened to multiple places I used to go to regularly in SF. Nobody I know here has been robbed in public, either. In contrast, my friend’s mom had her purse stolen from her in broad daylight on the street in SF and several other friends had their cars broken into.
Wait, you're comparing an American city to Taipei, and saying it has a crime problem?
Why not compare it to another American city? You'll quickly discover that these 'worst' cities are middle of the road when it comes to most forms of crime, the real horrible places in the US are not in the liberal coastal states. The vast majority of them are in the tough-on-crime god-fearing ones.
(I also always found it a little weird how many of the stores citing crime for closing are ones that just happened to have unionized, but maybe that's just a coincidence...)
