Which large American City has the largest number of mentally ill downtown?

[City Fanatic]

I live in the Atlanta region, and while Buckhead, Midtown, Atlantic Station, Virginia-Highland, and the Centennial Park area of downtown have a lot of people, and are semi vibrant to vibrant, downtown is loaded with homeless and gangsters. There's no getting around it.

Fairlie-Poplar is okay, as is the part of Peachtree Street near the Hard Rock Cafe. The Centennial Park area is okay. However, the rest of downtown is a dangerous, homeless-filled, and gangster-filled area.

[lamexican]

Which large American City has the largest number of mentally ill downtown?

Washington D.C

[rah]

Originally Posted by jman650

Yeah I'd be willing to bet that neighborhood has more ugly people per capita than any other in the nation. So many zombies and drug abuse-transformed facial features.

I wouldn't be surprised, haha. I once heard the tenderloin has the highest concentration of registered sex offenders out of any neighborhood in the US. Don't know how true that is, but i could definitely believe it.

Originally Posted by Huckleberry3911948

san francisco has a lot of crazy people downtown but they all have jobs and make a lota money.

What? Lol, the things some people say.

Originally Posted by trailerguy

I don't know how you quantify this, but the angry, aggressive, irrational and apparently homeless people in San Francisco abound in numbers and intrusiveness. They can be very frightening and can turn violent. There are several possible reasons for the problem: (1) The temperate climate which makes outdoor living tenable, (2) the knee-jerk liberal government which seems to think that treating mentally ill people is oppressive and that allowing the problem to progress unabated makes some kind of political statement, (3) the ill-thought-out deinstitutionalization program from the 1960's with the failure to implement the promised community-based alternatives, (4) a completely useless police department that refuses to do anything about anything, (5) a severely misguided laissez-faire mentality that seems to think mental illness is an alternative lifestyle; not necessarily in that order.
Of course we have them in Chicago too, but (1) they have to go indoors in the winter which increases the likelihood they will receive treatment, (2) we have an administration that thinks keeping the city livable for everyone else is important.

No one thinks the treatment of mentally ill people is oppressive, and no one considers mental illness an alternative lifestyle either...not in SF, and not anywhere else that I know of. Many of the old state run mental institutions that were emptied out in the 1980's WERE "oppressive" though, in a sense. There was a lot of underfunding and neglect, and ineffective as well as sometimes downright cruel treatment of patients. Obviously the next chapter ended up even worse though: kick 'em all out on the street.