Welcome home: Trips abroad put San Francisco’s chaotic streets into perspective

Terry Hamphill seen on Clara Alley on Friday, July 12, 2019 in San Francisco, Calif. Hamphill just returned from a six week vacation in Europe to find a homeless man urinating on his front door, refusing to move and screaming "F off!" at him. less Terry Hamphill seen on Clara Alley on Friday, July 12, 2019 in San Francisco, Calif. Hamphill just returned from a six week vacation in Europe to find a homeless man urinating on his front door, refusing to ... more Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Welcome home: Trips abroad put San Francisco’s chaotic streets into perspective 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

Terry Hemphill flew into SFO in late May elated. He’d just spent six weeks in England, Portugal and Italy, and loved every city he visited.

The European cities Hemphill visited featured mostly clean sidewalks without needles, poop or heaps of trash. He felt safe working on his laptop in parks or cafes without worrying that someone would snatch the device. The public transportation was efficient and tidy. He didn’t encounter people who seemed clearly out of their minds because of drugs or untreated mental illness.

There was some graffiti and litter, yes. And a few homeless people begging for spare change. But nothing like San Francisco.

Hemphill was one of scores of readers to respond to my column about visiting London and noting how the quality of life for visitors and residents of all income levels seems far better than our own.

“It made me think, ‘Why can’t we have decent things here?’” said Hemphill, a marketing contractor who’s lived in San Francisco for 35 years. “Things have become so unhinged.”

On the way home from the airport that May day, Hemphill raved to his Lyft driver about how impressed he’d been with the cities he visited.

But when he arrived at his South of Market condo on Clara Street, he couldn’t get in his own front door. A man who appeared homeless had dropped his pants to urinate against the entryway. When Hemphill asked him to move, the man shouted “F— off!” and continued using the door as a toilet.

Welcome home.

Chronicle readers like Hemphill cited cities on six continents that are faring better than San Francisco when it comes to quality of life. Antarctica didn’t come up, but here’s guessing there aren’t deranged people left to wander into traffic there either.

From A to Z — Auckland, New Zealand to Zurich, Switzerland — and everywhere in between, other cities, including many without our astronomical wealth, are managing better than San Francisco, readers told me.

Spin a globe with your eyes closed, use your finger to stop it, and chances are, you’ve landed on a place that doesn’t feature San Francisco’s disgustingly dirty sidewalks.

Or more than 1,000 homeless people on a waiting list for shelter that never seems to shorten. Or a mental health care system — using the word “care” loosely — that releases people from the psychiatric emergency room back to the streets. Or headlines about how we don’t see as many needles on the sidewalks because the city’s legions of drug users have switched from heroin to the even more dangerous fentanyl and are discarding their foil instead.

For Hemphill, who managed to buy a condo in SoMa in 2002, when real estate was far more affordable, the urinating man with a foul mouth was just an everyday occurrence. On the streets around his little alley, people openly do drugs, dump heaps of old furniture and TV sets, threaten and scream at each other and, as he put it, “lie around in various states of distress.”

His alley got a little cleaner and friendlier for a while thanks to the diligence of a neighbor, Brian Egg, who cleaned the sidewalks, watered trees and chatted with other residents while out walking his dog. That was before Egg’s headless body was found last year decomposed in a fish tank. The case is still under investigation.

What has become of our beautiful-from-afar, but gross-up-close city? We’ve long lured visitors from all over the world here, but for how much longer? There’s still a lot to love about San Francisco, but returning from vacation last week was the first time I can remember not being thrilled to come home.

Readers describing their experiences in other cities attributed the differences to several reasons. Some cities, such as London and Auckland, are in countries offering universal health care and a far more robust social safety net, which tries to catch homeless people and mentally ill patients before they’re sleeping on sidewalks and wandering confused into traffic.

Bevan Dufty, the city’s former homeless czar, praised London’s No Second Night Out program, which tries to get newly homeless people inside immediately. Outreach teams find newly homeless people and bring them to one of three 24-hour hubs where case managers connect them quickly with services, shelter or tickets home.

In San Francisco, outreach teams often have nothing to offer homeless people because all shelters and treatment slots are full.

San Franciscans who have visited other cities recently also attributed differences to higher expectations for decency and civility elsewhere. Several readers talked about visiting Japan, where cleaners with tidy uniforms and even flowers pinned to their caps whisk into bullet trains between journeys and ensure they’re immaculate. Signs are posted everywhere telling people not to litter. Public toilets are pristine.

“We counted the number of homeless people we saw in Japan. Eight,” said a co-worker who visited Tokyo and Kyoto for her two-week honeymoon in May. “I pass at least that many on my way to work.”

I asked her how many people she saw using drugs in public, even though I had a strong suspicion I knew the answer. Yes, zero.

Another co-worker described riding to work on the J-Church the other day and seeing a homeless woman sobbing that she was hungry and throwing herself against the sides of the train. All the passengers stared at their phones and ignored her.

I will never understand why San Francisco allows people to inject needles into their necks outside the Main Library, in BART stations and near City Hall. Safe injection sites? Great. More treatment? Even better. But the status quo? Not remotely OK.

While City Hall deserves much of the blame for playing around the edges while the crisis just gets worse, San Franciscans as a whole deserve some blame too. There are those who fight any shelter or housing near them. There are those who fight programs to compel the severely mentally ill into treatment. And too many of us have become complacent and inured to the misery all around us.

This complacency and paralysis struck Scott Knies while visiting San Francisco the other day. The director of the San Jose Downtown Association is on sabbatical and has been traveling locally and abroad for four months. As he walked along Mission Street, he saw a disheveled woman in Yerba Buena Gardens screaming vague threats. Pedestrians hustled along, and others moved away from her.

As far as Knies knows, nobody did anything to help her. He does not believe that would happen in other cities.

“The mentally unstable living unsheltered deserve a better fate than to be left to fend for themselves on our sidewalks,” he said. “Her voice haunted me for blocks.”

Some local residents described seeing people in other cities giving food to homeless people, shopkeepers regularly cleaning their front stoops and people disposing of their litter properly.

Pratima Gupta, a doctor who lives in the Lower Haight, just returned from Paris, a city that has seen a rise in homelessness, but not nearly to the levels of San Francisco and other cities in California. Gupta said she didn’t notice as much trash in Paris and saw no human feces or discarded needles. She saw some panhandlers, but no major evidence of untreated mental illness.

She recalled her 6-year-old son, Nehru, telling her on their trip that he wished San Francisco was more like Paris. She assumed he was referring to the ever-present croissants and crepes.

“He said, ‘No mom. It’s because there’s no homeless people,’” she recalled, noting her boy’s comparison made her think. “We need to collaborate with other cities and learn from them. What are they doing right and what can we do better? We’re obviously not doing something right here.”

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf