There are so many reasons why this happened and it's way more than just San Francisco being supposedly more empathetic.
Rhetorically speaking, how about the fact that China is quite happy to supply precursor drugs to help make fentanyl cheap? How is that related to San Francisco's perceived empathy? Again, rhetorically.
It makes me angry that this problem is reduced so frequently when it's been proven time and time and time to be a complex problem. It's almost like citizens / voters / taxpayers are willing to play sport with this problem in order to score some kinds of points around being right, or to avoid the sense of blaming oneself, because they know they can do something about it and yet they aren't.
Being honest is a big part of making progress with this, and I think honestly this problem is way more complex than many of us have actually appropriately characterized.
The article goes a long way towards characterizing the problem well, by talking about each individuals, perspectives, situations, and how the system succeeded or fails, knocking them off the path to gaining public support.