PLEASE COME TO BOSTON FOR THE SPRINGTIME: Boston puts San Francisco to shame in terms of clean streets, welcoming vibe.

There are a variety of factors at play here. San Francisco has more homeless people than Boston. The weather is temperate, so it attracts more people year-round. Boston shuffles its homeless population to the outskirts, leaving places like Roxbury to deal with the crisis. There’s a place they call “Methadone Mile” here that sure sounds familiar. So, don’t get me wrong. This is not Shangri-La on the banks of the Charles River.

But Boston seems to understand a core fact that appears lost on San Francisco’s civic leaders. If you’re going to be a world-class city that attracts the best and brightest business travelers and competes with destinations like Paris and Rome for tourist dollars, you can’t let your downtown core be an open air drug market. You just can’t. It should be clean and policed and free of threatening elements. Boston clearly believes this. Same can be said for New York City. A recent trip to Dallas revealed the same. Society’s problems remain, but they’re not front and center.

I’m sure plenty of people will find that sentiment callous. That sweeping the problem to other areas doesn’t solve the root issues. And I’d agree with some of that. But we can’t let our city decay because we don’t have the political will to address the issue. We can’t continue to project this image to the world and expect good things to happen. It’s long past time to clean up downtown and put our best face forward.

There are certainly lessons to be learned from Boston.

Narrator voice: But those lessons won’t be learned by San Francisco politicians anytime soon.