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SAN FRANCISCO — In the bluest of blue cities, it can be hard to tell political candidates apart. The four front-runners in the June 5 San Francisco mayoral election, all Democrats, talk about the importance of protecting immigrants and the pernicious effects of income inequality. It goes without saying that they support gay rights, legalized marijuana and more funding for public transportation. Ron Turner, a book publisher and longtime San Francisco resident, compares the election to “trying to pick a leader at a family picnic.”

>And yet on one issue — the roughly 7,000 homeless people and the tent encampments that many of them live in — there are shades of discord. Two of the candidates, London Breed, the current president of the board of supervisors, and Angela Alioto, a past president of the board, speak about using a harder edge when it comes to restoring order to the streets.
“This is an iconic city that is being totally devastated by poverty, filth and crime,” Ms. Alioto said in her law offices across the street from Transamerica Pyramid, the building that defined the San Francisco of a generation ago, when the city still occasionally elected Republicans.

..San Francisco has long represented a certain liberal ideal — an activist city government that led the country on a host of progressive causes, including gay marriage and parental leave. But for the past several years the city has also become a symbol of the failure of America’s wealthiest communities to care for their poorest residents.

>San Francisco, fueled by money from the technology industry, has become unaffordable to all but the very rich, with a median home price of $1.3 million. The contrast with this wealth is sprawled on the sidewalks across the city in tent encampments and cardboard boxes. Sidewalks double as public bathrooms, and a rash of car break-ins has given San Francisco one of the highest property crimes rates of any major American metropolis.
In a city that is only 47 square miles, there are roughly 7,000 homeless people, many of them suffering from mental illness and drug addiction..More, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/us/san-francisco-mayoral-election-homeless.html