As delays go, it was a long way from leaves on the line. I’d been working in San Francisco for perhaps a year when a wild-looking man with a machete tried to board my bus. The driver objected, and we waited several tense minutes as he waved his blade and yelled things that made no sense before stalking off into the early evening crowds.
Encounters like this are, if not routine, unsurprising in what locals refer to as “the City”. When I first visited in 2016, I was stunned by the open squalor and sickness I saw all around me, beyond anything I’d known in Britain. Now, after nearly five years living in nearby Oakland, where tent villages sprawl for blocks through decrepit industrial districts, it is merely a grim but humdrum reminder of this region’s longstanding triple epidemic of homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness.
