I used to live in the Tenderloin in late 90's early 00's. Nice affordable studio on Turk. There was always a diverse party going on during the day on the streets. Definitely had an old fashion skid-row vibe. Market street wasn't too bad then. Ah the memories.
It's exponentially worse now with fentanyl and meth plus now there are now social repercussions or consequences and you can steal to fund your habit with no consequences. It's a sick sad society that would allow this and not see it as an injustice to man. To not intervene is bad enough, but SF actively enables this crap by giving out cash (adult assistance program) and needles (without requiring them to turn in dirty needles). But the voters get what they vote for.. so I guess they want this. This is what it looks like now on 6th/7th and Market: https://www.instagram.com/p/C-RuONoqOeP/?utm_source=ig_web_c... it's always been bad, but this is insane. I took BART to Civic Center for concerts and bars many many nights and it was never like this until the pandemic. I blame all city leaders, voters, and SFPD for allowing this to continue unabated.
include as much real world problems in your fiction as you want. if you start pushing a political view point (communism is bad; capitalism is bad) without including the nuances of what you'd experience in a real world, then you get less good fiction. this is true of pushing political pov's, or other things when your fiction is out of balance. Author pushing a pov will usually degrade the quality of the work. just like contriving a plot to make it exciting debases your fiction. Generally speaking. in the end it's the delight in the spine the defines the quality of art.
Leave it to Beaver didn't consider the nuances of the impact on redlining and inequality in GI Bill benefits led to white suburbs it portrayed or whether the allocation of funding to car infrastructure rather than public transit left people behind, but it still pushed an idealized portrayal of suburbia regardless.
