As someone who's family has been in the bay area for over a century I was disappointed the article didn't mention any of the old money families who've controlled SF politics for decades.
This article[0] mentions some, though not all of the families (The Aliotos aren't mentioned here for example). While I haven't fully kept up, I know in the 90s at least a quarter of the financial district was held by two families. They own a ridiculous amount of the city's most valuable real estate and getting into office without their approval seems impossible.
I've been wanting someone to do a deep dive on them forever but it never happens and any analysis that lacks them feels pretty disappointing.
If SF politics is really controlled by a wealthy cabal then why have they allowed the situation to deteriorate so much? What possible benefit could they derive from homelessness, dirty streets, rampant property crime, and a dysfunctional government? The wealthy people who control NYC politics seem less tolerant of such issues.
> If SF politics is really controlled by a wealthy cabal then why have they allowed the situation to deteriorate so much?
Because they can't influence supervisor elections or school board elections as well as they can elections for mayor. The reason why San Francisco mayors are always re-elected is because they're very middle of the road in terms of politics and risk tolerance. Activist policies are usually the product of the Board of Supervisors, the school board, the district attorney, or public initiative, all of which are completely independent of the mayor's office. Sometimes the mayor's office will try to head off policies by offering watered-downed versions as an alternative. This doesn't always work, but it does contribute to the sense that they share some of the more radical policy preferences.
If you don't believe that the mayor's office has been significantly more conservative than the other political centers of San Francisco, just look at the police department. However dysfunctional you think the police department, it's not because the mayor's office has ever appointed a far left, defund-the-police police chief that seemingly every liberal has been demanding for decades. Police chiefs are appointed by the mayor the same way the monied elite choose a mayor--someone who is middle of the road, will keep their head down, and keep things moving along as best they can amidst the fracas. And as you would expect, their performance always falls short because their job isn't to succeed, but to avoid failure.
In general the mayor's office is expected by the old money elite (and increasingly some of the new money elite, like Benioff) to be the caretaker of a city with often times very extreme and contradictory policy demands. They're expected to avoid controversy, blunt the extremists, negotiate (quietly!) among various interests (e.g. unions), and pick up the pieces when things fail.
> The wealthy people who control NYC politics seem less tolerant of such issues.
Maybe. But I tend to think that a more important factor is that NYC still has a larger working class. The upper middle class, which increasingly dominates San Francisco politically, is disconnected from the city. Their politics come from social media and national narratives. They're more focused on avoiding feeling guilty about drug addicts and the homeless than on actual results. That's why the policies keep getting pushed further and further left (far beyond what was ever demanded 10 years earlier) despite the lack of results.
The thing about the rich elite, especially old money, is that in many ways they're far more grounded than the middle classes, especially modern middle classes. If you own buildings or businesses, local politics matters immensely to you. No matter how conservative or liberal you are, what matters above all else is consistency and avoiding surprises. Consistency and security is critical because you're immobile.
The same is true for the working classes. No matter how pissed you are at economic inequality, the last thing you need is the ground constantly shifting underneath your feet. Similar to old money, consistency and security is critical because you're immobile.
San Francisco has too few of the latter kinds of people. At the end of an election cycle, its votes that matter, not dollars. The result is that moderates, which are still quite powerful, are always playing defense rather than offense.
Activist politics are the product of the Board of Supervisors and the school board for the same reason that activist politics are more popular in the House than in the Senate: the boards are elected district-by-district, and don't need to tend to the views of larger masses of people. They answer to a small group of constituents, and that's it. If you have a small voter pool, being an outspoken, controversial activist helps (as long as you don't cross the specific lines your district cares about): it raises your profile because you're controversial, and since you don't need to please everyone, you're more free to say or promote ideas that many other people — who aren't in your district! — view as outrageous.
You don't really need cabals to explain it. And it's unclear to me what mechanism the cabals supposedly have to choose the mayor; why they'd choose London Breed over say, Angela Alioto (a member of the "old money elite"); why they can choose the mayor but failed to choose their desired DA in the same election cycle; etc.
The situation makes a case for a return to back room politics.
Where as long as you voted for your constituents' priority issues, you were free to strike deals on everything else.
Sunlight and transparency carry responsibility with them... and I'm not sure what we, the public, have done with the additional information (to wit, being outraged about everything, all the time) has been for the best of the entire system.
We don't look kindly on managers who micromanage their employees' work, and yet we're essentially doing the same thing to our politicians. Especially at the local level.
There’s more than one wealthy cabal. There’s the ultra rich power brokers like the Aliotos, Getty’s and then there’s the moderately wealthy people at the top of the government itself. Especially anyone associated with Willie Brown.
Government jobs are extremely lucrative, many pay six figures and opportunities to supplement with graft are plentiful. It’s a powerful club to be in and you’re potentially set for life. My spouse is a lifelong resident and remembers rushing to city hall with other hopefuls every time the city opened up applications.
The FBI is still working it’s way through the public works department with noted criminals like Mohammed Nuru and RoDBIgo Santos. I don’t really know what the Getty’s get out of playing kingmaker, but it’s pretty obvious what Willie Brown et all get out of neglecting the city and funneling money as they see fit.
>Government jobs are extremely lucrative, many pay six figures and opportunities to supplement with graft are plentiful. It’s a powerful club to be in and you’re potentially set for life. My spouse is a lifelong resident and remembers rushing to city hall with other hopefuls every time the city opened up applications.
I think your imagery paints an image of a much more organized group than exists.
There are probably at least two dozen families, each of which has a few powerful members. Getting them all to agree on anything besides their own self-interest of maintaining their own wealth and power is quite hard.
But the city government has delivered very well on that one shared interest of theirs. They own a lot of property and property values are way up over the past few decades.
Why assume that the ultra wealthy should care about the lesser citizens? What about all the rampant looting in NYC? I don't think they cared then.
Maybe many of them just aren't pro American. In almost every other country the media/politics carefully try to project some national pride and sense of unity; it's actually the opposite here in the US isn't it?
Actually the US is not exceptional in that regard. Media and politicians sometimes use patriotic and popular sentiment (usually empty gestures like sport) to boost their popularity, but around the world in most western countries the tone is increasingly that they should be ashamed of themselves, of their original (secular) sin, and by no means should they take any pride or celebration in their society or its achievements.
I guess the problem is, if you're interested in history, you often do find there's lots to be proud of in a nation's past, but it's usually the precise opposite of the people you can find statues of. So when you're proud of your nations past, what past? I think there's a lot of admirable stuff in british history, for example, but the streets and statues generally memorialize a bunch of really shitty people.
That's not what I was talking about. Of course governments are not going to easily admit their own crimes and incompetence and failures -- the same as in the US they don't admit their failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria etc for example.
But they absolutely do love to push the moral and economic burden for such things on to the common person.
And of course people are proud of their country and history and societies because that's normal healthy part of the human condition. This behavior and thought is increasingly shamed and bullied though.
Simple: NIMBY. There are places they can live where they don't have to dip their toes into the literal shit. And they keep the "riff-raff" out with harsh NIMBY-ism.
You have Pacific Heights, Presidio/Richmond (especially where Feinsteins, Pelosis, Cockers, Dorseys, etc. live) as well as Marin and Hillsborough, et al.
They can let it happen because they can create their own little bubble world and never interact with "the deplorables".
I grew up in the Bay Area and went to "good schools" with these peoples' children so I've seen them up-close-and-personal. They are not nice people.
New Yorkers in my experience are far more practical and "based" compared to Western large blue cities.
SF has extremely high land values and the value of the land isn't going down. If you bought land 50 years ago you became rich off the work of other people.
Property taxes have been frozen which basically just throws more money into their throats.
It is rather uncommon to believe that people in a society where everyone can publish their opinions must be artificially manipulated into conflict and dissent. I’d think that harmony and consent must instead be artificially manufactured. I’m curious about your life experience here.
> that everyone forgets about the most significant problem in the USA - the top 5% of the country own over 80% of the wealth
I’ve heard this problem discussed on Joe Rogan’s podcast (the most popular podcast) and by Jordan Peterson (who is fairly popular among the center-right). What percentage of Americans would you say are unaware that wealth inequality is a problem?
That belief is actually really common in the US. Particularly among the upper middle class (the top 10%, and 90% of HN readers) to convince themselves that when they disagree with people in the working class, who outnumber them by far, that it's really not them vs the majority, but rather them vs a few evil billionaire puppet masters. And of course the only way to fight these evil billionaires (on behalf of the poor, of course. lol!) and their prole slave army is through censorship (censorship by companies controlled by, uh, the evil billionaires of course!). It's the mental gymnastics that allow you to be an authoritarian but still nominally believe in "democracy."
I think a story about an ultra wealthy ruling class that stands behind the public political class is not going to get published in mainstream outlets. I mean it will if it's about Russia or China or historical periods like "the Gilded Age", but I guess you don't see it talked about for modern day West.
Well, I think there are some good reasons for that. It's traditionally been an antisemetic trope, and often smoothly blends into antisemitism (Rothschilds, etc). It's also one of those things where the evidence is by necessity weak, and you really can't write weakly-evidenced critical articles about rich people without getting sued.
Personally, I'm very glad that this isn't a mainstream way of understanding problems. Rich people are kind of fungible, in that they usually don't want to pay taxes, but other than that usually have about the same range of politics as everybody else. Focusing on individual malfeasance tends to protect dysfunctional systems.
> about the same range of politics as everybody else
We're not talking about "rich people", that's fine and well. We're talking about classes with .5B+ levels of wealth, where it's not about subscribing to politics, it's about literally having the ability to influence politics, should they wish to. Fyi every country and civilization, ever, has had powerful interest groups that seek to control politics to further secure their position and interests. This is not surprising to anyone that this exists. Maybe the main difference today is that in this era of shell companies and the anonymity that comes with mass, global societies, it's able to be less public than before, e.g. way less public than when societies actually had open aristocracies not that long ago.
Except the aliotos cannot get elected. I'm happy to believe in conspiracies but if they control so much as you say, why can't they get their own elected.
Except Angela alioto has run unsuccessfully for mayor multiple times. The family seeks political power but does not get it. This is just ungrounded conspiracy
Being a member of one of those families is no guarantee that you will be supported in search for office by the wider group or even your own family.
My impression is the prevailing opinion within the families should not be attempting to hold office directly and that Angela's bid was not widely supported even by many of her relatives, let alone the wider group we're discussing.
So who is the alioto power broker if not the child of the last prominent alioto, Sam alioto? If the 'family' has power as a single unit, who is in charge. This is baseless conspiracy meant to distract from the real people who control the occupant of the office of mayor .. the residents of San Francisco
Yes. Angela alioto, daughter of ex mayor Sam alioto has campaigned as a conservative democrat and loses spectacularly. There is no basis to claim they run the city. This is just mindless conspiracy.
Except, the aliotos run unsuccessfully for office. Claiming the politicians work for them is just conspiracy. Clearly they do not exert complete control in the way you claim.
I find the Economist has fairly shallow "analysis" if you can even call what they do analysis. So I am disappointed but not surprised that they missed on the real story.
The Economist is as useful in terms about learning about the world as reading headlines.
I’m sorry you’re getting downvoted but as someone who has subscribed to The Economist for 20+ years now, I feel the same way as you do.
In areas that are on the periphery, their coverage feels shallow and unsatisfying. I would imagine that the writers, who are some of the best in business, are doing their research but trying to make the content accessible. I can’t fault them for that. However, in this day and age, I would expect them to offer more depth.
You’re not wrong but you also miss the point. I subscribe to both the Economist, a newspaper that covers a range of topics and Stratechery, a newsletter that specialises in tech.
On any tech topic Stratechery dives in deep, analysing the incentives, actions and outcomes of each player. Every quarterly report from the big tech companies is analysed. The author also has the courage to make predictions, many of which turn out to be true. It’s worth the money in my book.
The Economist also covers tech topics but at a high level, and for an audience that isn’t tech inclined. Take for example, this gem of an article - Why Companies Struggle With Recalcitrant IT (https://www.economist.com/business/2020/07/18/why-companies-...). For a layman it’s a great intro on software is always delayed and over budget. For those of us who work in IT, it’s all obvious stuff.
A person familiar with IT might say “go deeper, talk about other issues”. In fact, I did just that. I contacted the author and pointed out a couple of difficulties in software that increase complexity, like dependency management. The author was aware of this already but chose not to add this for the sake of keeping the article a manageable length [1].
That’s what the Economist does - covers a wide range of topics, while not assuming the reader is knowledgeable about any of it. Even though finance focussed newspaper, they painstakingly explain every term before they use it. But these two constraints - covering breadth and not assuming knowledge mean there is a limit to how deep they can go on any topic.
If you find a newspaper that analyses every topic in the world to your desired level of detail, please let us know. Also, if the newspaper isn’t staffed by aspiring fiction writers gratifying themselves by writing impossibly large “long reads”, that would be even better.
——
[1] - their response to my letter :
Dear nindalf,
Thank you for your letter. You're right, of course - I've always thought it's a bit like an ancient city like Istanbul, with modern buildings sitting on top of layers of old architecture that's only half-mapped and whose builders are long forgotten. Unfortunately there wasn't space to get too evocative in the piece itself.
I've forwarded your letter for publication, though, because it's an important point.
The Irvine Company is very similar in Southern California. It seems like they own everything when you want office real estate.
So, it's corruption, right?
Well, except that if you talk to any contractors (like your internet provider installer) you find that they love The Irvine Company because there is someone who has a little bit of competence for them to talk to when they need to. As opposed to every other real estate company that seems to be staffed by brain-damaged monkeys.
So, you can posit corruption. Or, you can posit that real estate management is one of those markets that tends toward monopoly because you can amortize the costs more effectively the more properties you own.
To add further color to this, the Irvine Company benefits enormously from Prop 13. This law guarantees that once you hold property for long enough, your tax burden will be so much lower than everyone else you have a cost advantage that newcomers will not be able to match. So the current state law favors older companies over new ones.
Your tax burden would stay the same, relative to future buyers, if prices stay flat. At which some point, they're bound to plateau. How many people or institutions will buy single family homes once they're $10 million each, but the median household income is still somewhere around $100k? It's a subtle point, but the benefits of Prop 13 aren't a function of time, they're a function of appreciation. It just so happens to be the decades following Prop 13 came with great price appreciation, some of that attributable to Prop 13 itself, but most of it attributable to local rule of land use policy.
I think inflationary monetary policy (a good thing) more or less guarantees that in dollar terms (the thing that matters for prop 13) prices will go up every year. I think prop c does allow for some price adjustment for inflation, but it has a crazily low cap
Property taxes can go up 2% per year. That's reasonable from an inflation perspective if you are just living there. (Supposedly inflation has been that low for a long time, but doesn't feel like it in real cost of living)
I mean to the best of my knowledge basically all economists think it is, but beyond that imagine a world where we had stagnation or worse deflation. You would have much less of an incentive to invest money rather than just keep it in the bank.
Well, the corruption comes in when they start influencing politics, and also when they use their monopoly in shady ways to evict people and such. I agree it's problem regardless of corruption.
There you have it. Why is San Francisco’s city government so dysfunctional? Because no matter how bad it gets and how much liberal policies fail, voters can convince themselves that the problem is “moneyed elites” and “not enough liberalism.” Just amazing.
It is kind of ironic, isn't it? These days Tucker Carlson talks about pardoning Assange, the deep state and that house prices in SF are too high for the middle class. Literally Noam Chomsky could be saying the same things.
But people still believe that Republicans will take away your freedoms and Democrats will solve everything (I don't believe either will solve much).
The Republicans are actively eroding voting rights around the country (see Texas) and actually tried to annul the last election. Gee, I wonder why people believe that.
"Erode" compared to what? Texas's voting laws are still vastly more loosey goosey compared to voting in France. The Netherlands didn't even have mail in voting for the elderly last year. Most European countries have very limited early voting compared to even the "restrictive" new Texas rules.
Voting rules should instill confidence in elections among people who are low information and don't trust the other side. You can't build an election system on telling the other side "trust us" and "you can't prove bad things happened." And elections should be decided quickly and decisively, again to foster faith in the system. The NYC Democratic Primary was a shit show in this regard.
Democrats tried to "annul" the 2004 and 2016 elections too. They had Congressional hearings over "voter fraud" in Ohio, based on the supposed mismatch between exit polls and the final results. (And that was with a 2 point margin for Bush, vastly bigger than the ones at issue in 2020.)
I read the article last night. I lived there from '98-'01, during a somewhat different cultural moment, in the Willie Brown era. It was if anything more corrupt and dysfunctional. The music writer Bill Wyman wrote a good article on this back in 1999, which probably still holds up:
I don't think there's that much ideology to it. The place is corrupt and dysfunctional because it's conditioned itself to be corrupt and dysfunctional. Brownback's Kansas government had similar problems; same in Ohio.
Well, it could be true, but not necessarily in a right wing vs left wing sense. People with stupid amounts of money playing stupid political games, propping up people who have no business being in political leadership but are funded to be “our person in office” with some specific agenda but no real attention to the actual roles (buying authority but not desiring or able to actually manage). I don’t know, sounds a lot like USA in the Middle East.
Many social problems in west coast cities are self-inflicted but there's also the 9th circuit's Martin v. Boise decision (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_v._Boise); it prevents criminalizing public camping unless there's shelter space for everyone. This is effectively impossible given the number of homeless people so we're stuck with the encampments.
>One City Hall insider suggests that San Francisco overreacts to issues that are in the national news, and designs solutions to the country’s problems rather than its own. For example, when Mr Boudin ran on his platform of less punitive justice, San Francisco already had one of the lowest incarceration rates in the country. In 2019, 106 adults were in prison for every 100,000 people, one-fifth the rate in California and the nation. If the rest of the country behaved like San Francisco, the prison population would decline by 80%, says James Austin of the jfa Institute, a think-tank that evaluates criminal-justice policies.
Low because they don't arrest anyone. But that isn't on the police - they don't arrest anyone because the DA doesn't prosecute anyone.
Property crime is sky high... if you happen to get caught breaking into a car the penalty is a warning. That is the policy. You have to break into many cars and be caught (which is hard to do) many times for any action.
Boudin has indefensibly ignored violent criminals, too. Like a woman being assaulted while trying to open the door to here condo, fully on video and there was no prosecution. Even a few cases of murder from repeat offenders who were let go repeatedly after violent assault.
If you live in SF, try the Citizen phone app for alerts near you. There is some crazy stuff happening all around the city. Lately, cars keep inexplicably flipping over on city streets.
The craziest update I've seen was an alert about man dressed like a clown wielding a sword-cane.
Police inaction is a long-standing problem that pre-dates the current DA by quite some time. SF police have not responded to garage break-ins or car break-ins for some time. They might show up 5 hours later, very annoyed, and take a report. Even if you have good quality HD video evidence. Even if you have a tracking device on the stolen property proving where it is. They will not gather evidence, collect fingerprints, or bother trying to solve the crime in any way. Even if you had them the case on a silver platter. Forget trying to get a detective involved. This was going on long before Chesa Boudin.
Part of it is housing costs and the department's difficulty filling open positions. Part of it is bad management of the police department: not having competent detectives dedicated to solving quality of life and property crimes. Some part is probably trying to make the current DA look bad because they're fighting.
SFPD has so far resisted any attempt at reform toward community policing or setting up dedicated QOL units. The city's broken NIMBY planning process ensures newly hired officers are not likely to be able to live in the community where they police. Fix those problems, then we can worry about prosecutions.
This response strikes at the heart of the issue. Until the wild distortions in the property market are fixed (imo, specifically until Prop 13 gets repealed or significantly amended) big, expensive cities in California will continue have increasing crime problems.
As you can probably imagine, community policing is difficult if you're not a member of the community. And as the cost of living goes up while property taxes remain artificially depressed due to prop 13, the disparity between what municipalities are able to pay for police (which is partially funded by property taxes), and how much those police will need to afford to live there, will continue to grow. It seems like a slow, self-reenforcing downward spiral that will only get re-set if the quality of life deteriorates to the point where people actually start moving out of these communities.
San Francisco has plenty of cops. They like to write tickets, do crossword puzzles, and play chess. (Go to the basement of any precinct.). Let's not forget drinking too much, and lucky if they finished a community college. I imagine those last few sentences are common observations at most Police Squads across America.
It's not prop 13.
As to homelessness---it's bad all over the west coast for obvious reasons. And no it's not because the widow whom rents out a room to a scary stranger so she can stay in the home she raised her kids in. I guess prop 13 is an easy target? There's a part of me that would like you Know it All's whom didn't live through opening a ever increasing property tax bill your wish of repeal.
Let's be real. Tech hate all unions. Many of you guys will be politely shown the door at 50. If you save a bit, and happened to score a home when younger; when you are puttering around the garage ruining the iPad with tools brought from Amazon, while wearing a fishing vest, calling your wife mom; you will cherish prop 13.
>But that isn't on the police - they don't arrest anyone because the DA doesn't prosecute anyone.
This always struck me as a BS excuse, because if you're trying to demonstrate that the DA is the problem, wouldn't you want to be making arrests and creating a paper trail to prove your point? Apathy by the police just makes them look bad to anyone who's on the receiving end of it.
And getting arrested is still a deterrent without charges. Hell, even "A cop might begin asking me some questions" is a mild deterrent.
It’s also demonstrably false. You can look at clearance and prosecution stats from both the PD and DA and you’ll see little too no change from pre and post Chesa.
Some court activity dropped in 2020, but filing rates are higher in 2021 already, highlighting the impact closed and reduced court capacity has had. Filings, even in 2020, though lower that 2021, were not out of the norm of the last decade. This year, rates are at 2018/2019 levels and close to a high for the decade.
Lots of people come out and like to point a finger at our new DA when the data just doesn’t support it. If there is a problem with prosecutors in SF, it’s existed before Chesa.
You're asking them to publicly humiliate an office that is politically incentivized (in SF) to throw them under the bus if they see the opportunity to do so, opportunities which might come along more frequently the more they actually arrest people.
Making an arrest is not risk free for a cop, the career lowlifes who have been arrested dozens of times aren’t afraid of anything (including incarceration), and burnout affects even tech workers, of course it affects cops who want to make arrests to get people in jail, and can’t find the motivation when it’s to “create a paper trail.”
Indeed. The behavioral science would agree with you. There is no theoretical framework backed up by evidence that would suggest that prosecution and prison works as a deterrent. For punishment to actually work as a behavioral modification tool, it has to be consistent and immediate. Prosecution is neither. At lest getting caught red handed is immediate.
This is a pretty bold statement. And as the poet said: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Do you have evidence to back up your claim that low prosecution rates actually leads to more crimes?
Your current anecdotes sound like hearsay to me, I would need to see some credible sources before I can start believing them.
First you’re putting words in my mouth. We are talking about petty crime not the entire law, and we are talking about prosecution not all enforcement. Prosecution is not the only way to enforce the law, so nobody is talking about “no enforcement”.
And the statement is because it is a falsifiable with no evidence to back it up. Wegner’s statement about plate tectonics was bold by the same measure (although he offered some evidence; but apparently not enough).
I think that's irrelevant to the point which is that in electing a candidate campaigning on criminal justice reform SFs voters are reacting more to national issues than local ones. SFs criminal justice system is already quite "reformed" and probably the issues that people are seeing aren't primarily in SF
They may also be low because there are no state prisons in SF county, so people with longer terms may be counted in the jurisdiction where they're being held.
I think your factor of five is on the “wrong side” of the equation here you’re thinking of. Ie if the crime rate were 5 x that of other cities AND the incarceration rate were 5 x lower, that would mean criminals were 25 x less likely to be prosecuted in SF.
SF has very high property crime, but fairly low violent crime. Most of the America’s incarceration rate is driven by a small number of prisoners serving long sentences. Usually for violent crime or drug trafficking.
An amazing statistics is that if the the US released every prisoner except the murderors and rapsists, we’d still have a higher incarceration rate than the EU.
A city full of bike thieves, shoplifters, and public defecators isn’t going to have a high incarceration. Even if the police are vigorous about arrests, those people just don’t spend very long in jail.
Obviously the latter. Have you read the rest of the article?
"Before covid-19 San Francisco was the car-break-in capital of America; but with fewer tourists, criminals have shifted their attention. Home burglaries are up. Shootings have more than doubled in the past year. Viral videos show daytime heists, with perpetrators sauntering out of stores without consequence. Lax enforcement of drug laws can become fatal when even small amounts can kill."
I sat and chatted to a homeless fella hanging out at Fisherman’s Wharf in SF for a while. He wasn’t from CA, from Missouri IIRC. He was gay, his family disowned him, he got into drugs. He got bitter, did some nasty stuff to people he hated, did some other misguided things and basically had hit rock bottom.
I asked him what he thought would be needed to bring him out of homelessness and keep him inside society. He said he didn’t want that, he said he enjoyed being homeless. He was sleeping in a squat house, he was able to score enough cash from tourists to support his drugs habit, the police left him alone because he didn’t look out of place, he was clean, groomed etc.
How does society help someone with that view?
Here in Glasgow, Scotland we have a relatable challenge. There’s 14 people who refuse accommodation. They are long term homeless, all of them have mental issues and most have addiction problems. There’s over 100 people most nights take up access to a homeless shelter in Glasgow but they accept the help available and on average only spend 3 nights before going into proper accommodation and no longer need the shelter’s help. So It’s not that there’s no systems in place but that hardcore of 14 people who want to live on the streets have no obvious way forward.
It’s played on my mind many times over the years, how do you help someone in that scenario?
I did a short stint with a charity who supports some folks who have been given emergency housing. I was in one of the blocks of flats in Paisley one day helping deliver some food shopping, they’re only just habitable these emergency apartments - extremely basic inside. I understand why, they get trashed often by residents and so the council can’t afford to make them nice. It’s quite a bleak outlook for these folks even if they did decide they want to live indoors again.
This is a long post to say the reality seems like there’s no quick fix or easy win. If you do nothing you make things worse. If you do something, it might not be wanted.
For those that are mentally ill, and especially if they are violent, you force them to get the psychiatric help that they need. It's an unpopular opinion. But frankly it's long overdue. For those that have the option to go to shelters, receive plenty of benefits (which SF most definitely provides) but prefer to be homeless, they need to be separated from major city areas where tourists, business people, and every day people want to live peacefully. I've seen enough of this the last few times I've been to SF and the bay area.
For better or for worse, homelessness in America can largely be attributed to Regan-era changes in policy [1] that prevented people from being committed against their will to psychiatric hospitals. It was done in the name of human rights, but naturally there were ulterior motives.
It's time we reverted it.
About 10% of humans have been addicts across most cultures throughout most of recorded human history, and they desperately need help (even if they claim don't want it).
There should obviously be a ton of safeguards in place before committing someone against their will (e.g. 1 or 2 doctors should declare that the patient is unable to care for themselves and make rational decisions, assessment at regular intervals, ensuring the patient has the right to get a new doctor, etc.), but I don't think we'll be able to solve homelessness without it, because this is what we used to do differently prior to the homelessness epidemic, and this is what other nations have been doing.
But they are making rational decisions, in their own framework. And they are caring for themselves, as much as they care. Sure we could grab them up and throw them into institutions, and call the problem solved.
I’d rather see us hold them accountable for any behavior that harms others, and leave it at that. Sleep on the sidewalk? Fine. Block the sidewalk? Not fine. Litter, endanger, defacate in public? Same penalty as anyone else.
Looking at them as victims is degrading to them and paralyzing to society.
I think the idea of "There's nothing you can do for me given the current social-political reality" too often gets conflated with "This is all I want my life to be". And even if the person has truly given up on society, I don't think society should ever give up on the person.
What are those penalties, and does this penal system actually work to change people's habits, or is it just part of a cycle, e.g. streets -> jail -> streets?
The first step against mental institutions was by Kennedy who's family had bad experiences with the mental health system. Blaming this solely on Reagan is misguided. Reagan just went with the flow.
With respect to the Kennedy’s bad experience, are you referring to Rosemary’s involuntary commitment and subsequent lobotomy? That was pretty awful, was there something more?
No that's it. JFK held a vendetta against mental institutions. He signed legislation to rid the country of them and create community mental health centers which was the first step in deinstitutionalization.
>About 10% of humans have been addicts across most cultures throughout most of recorded human history, and they desperately need help (even if they claim don't want it).
one can wonder why this trait hasn't been selected out by now (or some trait managing it hasn't appeared).
Anecdotally, while 9/10 people with obsessive traits may crash and burn and possibly end up homeless, 1/10 may succeed spectacularly by becoming obsessed with something healthy-ish, or something that benefits people other than themselves. (Even if it's at the expense of their family and friends).
It's not a genetic issue, it's an ecological issue. I imagine almost all humans can become addicted to something or develop mental health issues under the right (wrong) circumstances.
Same reason some young men play chicken with traffic. Paradoxically, it's likely a signal of fitness. A young man who can still manage sex successfully under the burden of multiple addictions probably has decent genes, cardiovascularly speaking. Probably why men are much more likely than women to take such risks, too.
> you force them to get the psychiatric help that they need
The problem is that there’s a long history of people labelling all sorts of things they don’t like as being a mental illness and using that as an excuse to use treatment as violence against them. We called homosexuality a mental illness until very recently and forced people to have violent treatment for it, for example.
If someone is having an episode and causing violence onto other people, we're not gonna look at this 20 years later and question if this isn't a mental illness. We absolutely know what the issue is here, and the situation that I described is not unheard of.
Given that causing violence onto other people is illegal, I suppose what you're talking about could be thought of as a change to the prison system so that it's designed to improve the (mental) health of people committed, rather than just being punitive.
Yes, unfortunately it is and the way we handle this isn't exclusive to SF. Google Andrew Yang NYC homeless. Everyone is avoiding the elephant in the room and refusing to touch this issue.
I don’t know if it’s unpopular or not but it’s certainly not as simple as “you force them to get the psychiatric help that they need.” That’s not how it works at all. You can’t force people to heal or get better — they have to want it themselves. When people make these types of sweeping statements, it makes me really question if they’ve ever been in a situation where a loved one has been resisting getting help for years.
> It’s played on my mind many times over the years, how do you help someone in that scenario?
Acceptance? If he's clean, groomed, not bothering people, and OK with is life as it is, maybe there is room for him in society.
I think a lot of the problem stems from the fact that we all agree that "the homeless problem" should be solved, but we can't agree on what "the problem" is.
To some it's "I don't want to see and be bothered by homeless people"to others its "people are suffering needlessly" to others its "a wealthy nation like ours should be able to provide shelter to everyone" to others its some combination.
It's rare to hear a political plan to "solve homelessness" that addresses the people who want to be homeless.
How about hygiene? Where do you think they relieve themselves? How many times a day do you think they'll need to use a toilet and how many times do they find one? Hint: they don't really care. Source: experience living in SF.
"ALEXANDER THE GRATE: So, one thing about food insecurity — everybody talks about that, but nobody mentions toilet insecurity. What comes in has got to go out, and that’s not readily . . . Before the Eisenhower Memorial, with a free restroom here — that’s back up by the resources by the way — the closest one to the area was at the Washington Monument, a mile away, basically."
Glasgow sounds like they are doing great by those numbers compared to at least my city.
In my city subReddit I advocated for something that sounds similar; yes housing even for addicts who will shoot up in their new place. Got downvoted. Also people bitter that rent is unaffordable for them too and said no one is entitled to free or reduced rent, since they don't get that themselves. though kind of my point housing should be a human right produced by society to everyone without judgement.
I think there is a misguided paternalistic moral-crusading factor in the states that holds back things like housing first, harm reduction strategies & treatment.
Both from reading/researching and talking with people who work directly with the homeless locally, this seems to be the crux.
The really sad thing is just building the housing would be cheaper than what we're doing currently. But as soon as the city proposes it the NIMBYs come out like a hurricane refusing to allow it.
Salt Lake City is an instructive example. They've made a huge impact on homelessness there with a housing centric strategy.
In Denver we have a hidden agenda ballot measure coming up that would allow residents to sue the city if they didn't clear out homeless camps in 72 hours, while also putting into law a maximum cap of only four outdoor homeless spaces (parking lots) - while allowing amenities like porta-potties!
Importantly the measure doesn't allocate money OR require these spaces. Just limits the max number the city can have ;(
funded by Republican PAC.
Oh and when a church tried to put one of the mini-camps in their parking lot in a nice neighborhood, the neighbors sued.
It would be so much cheaper just to continue buying old motels and building apartments. Give them the keys, try to help after that. Free & easy suboxone and immediate access to addiction/mental/health treatment if they want it. Naloxone on stand by with nurses in concentrated areas (e.g. an apartment block) would save a ton of money too, not to mention save lives...
How would you feel as a working class citizen, when homeless drug addicts are given a place to live rent-free while you have to work hard every day just to stay afloat? How would you feel if you had children who lived in the same neighborhood as a drug motel? These problems are complex, and require solutions that are more thoughtful than "just give them a place to live and leave them alone."
I'm mostly in agreement with that, as I follow a "live and let live" philosophy. Where I part ways with that binary choice is when the person is actively a menace to themselves or others; their behavior has a 'high' cost to society. I can't get on board with respecting someone's right to self-determination when they repeatedly and regularly damage property, attack people, or are otherwise damaging to the fabric of society. In this case I believe the person has lost some of their right to self-determination.
What to do about it? I don't really know; software development is my gig so this is far outside my expertise. But from what I observe, prison as it currently is implemented doesn't work, and doing nothing isn't working either.
Given the right environment and help, I'd hope that some (many? most?) can transform themselves and become healthy or at least functional in society. Some options that seem to help: a 12-step program, CBT and other therapy, drugs, low-dose hallucinogens (LSD, mushrooms, etc.).
Nobody has a right to commit crimes. If they do, the police should deal with it.
What I was referring to about rights is people have a right to do as they please as long as they are not infringing on other peoples' rights.
Rights also apply to legally competent adults. For people who are not legally competent, the state is empowered to make decisions and force it on them, though of course this is a dangerous tool.
And then when they defecate on your doorstep and urinate on your porch, what do you do? Offer them treatment, they refuse, so you "respect their rights" and move on? Wash, rinse, repeat?
It is strange that people have absolutely no problem banning camping in national parks but think it is a human right to do it in urban areas. Cities, in order to survive, need to enforce standards of behavior, and those who flaunt those standards need to be coerced into following them if there is to be a large number of people living in a small urban area.
How does someone have the right to take public property as their own? Maybe if the areas were designated but we are talking about people who eschew shelter.
San Francisco and other west coast cities are in the 9th circuit where the Martin v. Boise[0] decision prevents criminalizing public camping unless there's shelter space for everyone.
> I asked him what he thought would be needed to bring him out of homelessness and keep him inside society. He said he didn’t want that, he said he enjoyed being homeless. He was sleeping in a squat house, he was able to score enough cash from tourists to support his drugs habit, the police left him alone because he didn’t look out of place, he was clean, groomed etc.
> How does society help someone with that view?
To play devil's advocate -- does society need to help someone like that right away? It sounds like this man isn't in a great place, but content with what he has. Not so sound callous, but there's likely a deeper rock bottom he can hit -- if he ever gets injured or sick for example. Once that happens he may change his mind, but until then there's likely very little to nothing you can do.
Write 'em off. If they aren't causing problems then ignore them. If they are causing problems, well, probably beat them and kick them out of town. Its going to be that or jail them and some how jail seems crueler than corporal punishment and banishment. I say this because I don't think its crazy or irrational to not want to be a part of society at large, but that society in general depends on people wanting to participate and do good by each other and does not have graceful mechanisms for dealing with people that want to fuck that up.
Thinking more broadly, I suspect you could help people not get to that point with stronger community bonds. If they saw value in society then they'd probably participate right?
You forcibly institutionalize them in a humane and properly funded institution. The public streets are not a place for untreated drug addicts and the mentally ill.
Services for the homeless come with a lot of strings attached, a lot more than you'd think, including a bunch of strings that people who are homed would never accept in their own house.
So it's not as simple as homeless people don't want homes, it's because they want freedom.
Maybe things are different in Glasgow, but I've talked to many people with shelter experience in the U.S., and rarely heard anything good, mostly bad. And it all sounds quite similar to what Orwell wrote about shelters over 100 years ago... dangerous, prison-like places with rules, restrictions, and abuse. It's pretty much a guarantee that you'll experience violence and your belongings will get stolen or damaged, sometimes by the staff themselves.
Compare that to what's essentially minimal camping in the city, with no bears and plenty of quality food... You couldn't pay me enough to go to a shelter.
Maybe the problem is the urge to “help”? As you say, if they don’t want it, is it really help? We have a bias to thinking that if we wouldn’t be happy in that situation, then they must also be unhappy. Not necessarily.
> he was able to score enough cash from tourists to support his drugs habit, the police left him alone because he didn’t look out of place, he was clean, groomed etc.
As long as they aren’t harming anyone why can’t you respect their wishes and leave them alone if that’s what they want? What if someone decided you needed help even after you made it clear you didn’t want it?
Does taking a dump in front of your building count? Because I have many experience of that, including a couple where they entered my building and took a big dump in the lobby.
As long as the homeless people have been offered help and are not harming others why do you feel the need to do anything to them? Why does a class of person need to be reduced to ‘zero’? What if someone decided people like you had to be reduced to zero?
Lets talk about harm. Street people don't have places to dispose of needles, they don't have access to sanitation or toilettes, frequently are struggling with mental health issues in loud and sometimes frightening fashions, oh and I guess if you're a woman in that position you're in incredible danger. With that in mind, is it more clear why other people wouldn't want any one to live like that?
Because your example is just a distraction, no one cares about the people just minding their own business not causing any (visible) problems. Almost definitionally when we're talking about this we are talking about the people that are harming others, either directly or indirectly.
These harmless people who don't want help are still a statistic and so the country is going to look bad in some report so long as they don't forcefully force them to take help they don't need or want.
I don't consider it humane to let someone live on the streets begging until they happen to die of a drug overdose.
I don't care about their wishes, guided by drug addiction and mental health issues. To allow and enable this much squandering of human potential is a moral crime.
Get people clean of drugs, healthy, stable, and educated. By force, if needed. If from that baseline he decides to go back into a life of drugs and onto the streets, then so be it. But don't allow people to commit themselves to a slow death until they've been forced to step onto a better path and see what their life _could_ be.
This is, in all honesty, a terrifying point of view.
Forcing people to take part in a society that has already rejected them and conform to someone else’s view of normal, healthy, stable, etc., that, to me, would be literal torture. I don’t consider it humane to torture people.
How do you feel about all the busywork jobs that enable so so much more squandering of human potential? Should all those folks be forced to live your version of their best life?
I think we should do everything we can to give/push them into treatment, but at the very least they don't get to make streets unsafe and unclean for others, they have to go elsewhere
I hope you never are homeless, drug addicted, or mentally ill. I have been all of these things. I can tell you first-hand forcing people to comply makes things worse.
That you don't care about someone's wishes is deeply indicative of your own moral character -- or lack thereof. That we can't even agree to disagree turns my stomach a bit. I'm deeply disappointed, and you've made it very clear to me that I need to walk away from this "community".
So, my final thought will simply be this:
Silicon Valley and their enablers, through their arrogance, short sightedness, and dare I say.. general lack of humanity are creating a dystopian nightmare. In many places, that nightmare already exists in full force. That you don't or can't see it doesn't matter. It's well underway and it won't leave any of us untouched.
The dystopian nightmare is the thousands of people living in filth on the streets of SF, living and dying short and brutal lives.
If I'm ever drug addicted and homeless, I want you to institutionalize me until I am clean and able to resume a normal life. I'm very confused by anyone who would want anything else for themselves.
"Nor are the police blameless. In the fourth quarter of last year, the “clearance” rate for robbery (which measures the share of reported crimes that result in an arrest) was half that of New York City. The police are notoriously unresponsive."
This. Not only do I RARELY see a police officer in SF, but when I do, they look "beat down" or ambivalent. I'm sure years of police being the political "whipping boy" has taken its tole.
I was watching a twitch streamer who lives in SF, and he told a story about a time he was walking down the sidewalk at night and saw a homeless person peeing on someone's car. He said there was a cop nearby that saw him doing it, but he told the streamer that the homeless guy looked gross and he didn't feel like dealing with him, so the homeless guy just walked away when he was finished.
You want a cop to physically detain a homeless person which will just result in sending him through a pointlessly cruel and expensive criminal justice system where he'll pop-out the other side with nothing but unpayable debts that'll drive him through the same cycle again - all because he urinated on a car of someone who won't even realize it happened?
I'm fairly certain it is permitted in California, but police offers do have the power to write a citation that acts as a summons for the suspect to appear in court.
No arrest, likely no jail time, just ~$20 in court costs plus whatever fine the judge imposes.
Unfortunately that viewpoint is fairly common among contemporary West Coast liberals. A shocking amount of anti-social behavior is tolerated for this reason.
(This got long, I'm not directing this at you or trying to needle you. I hope this will help you or someone else understand what some of the homeless are facing)
I think we see someone peeing on a car as less of an anti-social behavior than puritanical approaches to solving anti-social behavior that are more about punishment than rehabilitation. We are more upset that society wants to pay 70-100k a year to imprison people who likely have neurochemistry or behavioral problems, than to spend a fraction of that on solving the root problems instead of treating symptoms.
I've been in psych wards and rehabs. I would say close to three quarters of people in both institutions were capable of living a somewhat normal life, if they could get meaningful and stable assistance in dealing with their issues. The rest at least deserved a comfortable, safe place to live the best they could under full supervision. If you do any reading about state mental institutions in the US, you will understand they receive the exact opposite.
After my last psychotic episode I was pretty sure I would never be able to work again, but I still wanted to be independent if possible, even if that meant living in public housing and scraping by. I had already maxed out my SS benefits because I was productive up until that point, despite having undiagnosed mental illness and addiction problems. Of course I didn't have any savings and was relying on family.
At this point I had over 100k in hospital bills, thankfully almost completely paid by health insurance before I lost my job. That included multiple hospital visits, trips to psych wards, and visits to rehab. My family had saved paperwork for all of it, and I had two different psychiatrists who agreed I may never be able to work again.
I was told point blank by every single person I talked to, from the non-profits (who were totally worthless), to the disability lawyers I called, to the disability processing agents that it would be at least two years before I had a chance at receiving a dime. So I stayed with family for many months, they paid for my mental health care, and eventually I got on the right meds and I can now work again. My economic privilege is probably the only reason I am not on the streets or dead.
As a society, our expectation is that someone with a mental illness is going to take on that bureaucracy while they are in the most difficult period of their illness in order to get better. And if they display anti-social behavior, what do we do? We imprison them. Some of my behavior during my psychotic episode was violent. I am lucky I was not beat or shot, by a stranger or by the police.
The whole point of my rambling is that I hope we can consider the history of the person that is displaying anti-social behaviors. Some of the smartest, kindest, and most ingenious hackers of every stripe I have ever met were in rehab and in psych wards, but only after they had been stabilized by meds or sobriety. Before they returned, they were different, sometimes scary people.
There is so much potential being wasted, and so much low hanging fruit to help them rehabilitate and give back to society. Even from a purely economical perspective, I think it makes sense to overhaul our safety net so it catches people as early as it can. It serves individual rights, makes efficient use of our collective wealth, and I think it's the right thing to do.
Thanks for sharing your perspective, I found it to be enlightening and perspective widening. One of my close family members is very much like yourself, having been hospitalized many times with periods of independence in between. He was able to get on disability early in life thanks to some foresight by our parents, so luckily he’s never had to go through that awful waiting process, but otherwise a lot of your story is his story too. I am currently and have been for a while the person who supports him and tries to navigate with him through the impossible sea of bureaucracy to meet his most basic needs, and I share your frustration. Most of the institutions we do have in this country are absolutely byzantine to take advantage of and it’s only gotten worse thanks to COVID and the massive staff and doctor shortages at every healthcare facility that accepts patients on Medicare. It’s beyond maddening.
Regarding my original comment, for the most part I am not personally angry with those who are exhibiting the antisocial behavior, with the exception of the violent ones or those who make a habit of stealing from others to support a drug habit. Even the latter I can drum up some sympathy for, although it’s limited. That being said, I am angry that nothing is being done to separate the people who can’t or won’t behave decently in public from those who do. That isn’t fair to those who are willing and able to follow the basic principles and tenants of society. Children deserve to be able to play on a playground without having to worry about stepping on a used needle; something that they can’t currently do in some neighborhoods of the city I live in because the city government is too paralyzed with the fear of our activist community and lawsuits that they won’t evict the homeless camps that have set up shop there. That’s not okay. Neither is the open air chop shop that took over a local dog park. I could go on and on and on with examples like this, but I think my point is pretty clear.
I agree with you about the need to overhaul our safety net. To me it’s an imperative along the same order of importance as responding meaningfully to climate change. I found out recently that a shocking number of foster children become homeless after they turn 18. As I’m sure you know, that’s just one group that isn’t properly cared for under our current system. Sweeping and meaningful change is badly needed, and it’s needed right now.
And yet, outside the West Coast, this is barely a topic of discussion. It’s not on the agenda for either of the national political parties in any meaningful way. For that to happen, people need to get angry. But when people do get angry - say about a person peeing on their car - they often get shut down by well meaning, empathetic people. I see that as a problem. I feel that it’s entirely appropriate to be angry about the situation we find ourselves in, and to allow that anger to build, and to let the people in our government who are currently abdicating their duties to feel it, so they feel motivated to change.
27 year San Francisco resident here. The government here is dysfunctional because that's what people voted for. The fact that people pay so much to live here says that people are willing to put up with a lot in exchange for living in a diverse and beautiful city.
Not sure I would ever call San Francisco "beautiful" - it was a dirty, beat-down city when I lived there in 1999/2000. Unless you can afford a view to just stare over the actual city to the waterfronts, pretending a bum isn't taking a shit on your doorstep right now and leaving their heroine needle for you to clean up.
Working in Manhattan many years later, I expected much the same arriving for the first time, but surprisingly wasn't so. What the hell are they doing wrong there? This article says much.
Underrated observation. S.F. has always had a scraggly personality since the Gold Rush days. It's where Dirty Harry and tons of '70s police procedurals were set in, after all. The issue is that despite tech wealth since the late 2000s, none of it has seemed to better the city and in some ways has increased wealth inequality.
Manhattan's answer is because of Giuliani's authoritarian mayoral reign. Cleanliness came at a cost of mass arrests and evictions of the homelessness, restrictions on shelters, and stop-and-frisk. Probably not a price that S.F. is willing to pay.
Far more than just SOMA/Tenderloin is problematic. Mission, Hunters Point are just as bad.
And more suburban areas like Fillmore, Western Addition Inner Richmond are still subject to rampant petty crime. I’ve lived in a few of these areas and I am well aware.
Didn’t a family just get held up at gunpoint while washing their car near Bernal Heights?
This specific thread was merely talking about the look and feel of the city. If you look at some of my other comments regarding crime, you'll see I very much agree with you.
The quintessential feel of SF, cherry-picked to be outside of known bad areas, is the sound that is produced when, on a quiet street of Inner Richmond at 1am, nearly weekly, people (I use the term loosely) too incompetent to hold a rectangular object drop a recycling bin upon themselves as they steal recycling, and swear profusely.
Sure, there are a couple of attractive areas, but a lot of it is just ugly sprawl. I love driving in to the city and looking over rows of boxes smashed together in rows. It looks a lot like Tijuana. So much of the city is treeless and just poorly maintained old buildings from what looks like the 50s and 60s. Sure, lots of old victorians and some of them are even taken care of. The parks are pretty. Overall though, I don't get the appeal. SF is perpetually cold and dreary. I know some people like that, but it's definitely not my cup of tea. Throw in the high cost of living, the crime, homelessness, the sidewalk poop(stepped over some last time I was there)... But hey, it's expensive, so someone must like living there, right?
I love the hills. Walk up 10 minutes from tenderloin (worst part of the city) and you are on Russian hill. Almost never see homeless there, just 5 start hotels. (In fact this seems to be true of most areas of the city, walk up any hill and there are almost no homeless, they are for the most part too lazy to do it). From there you can see the bay on one side. Just a beautiful view.
Nearby from Russian hill is the biggest Chinatown in the US. Walk 5 blocks into Chinatown and you are in a different world. 95% Chinese people, no Chinese in the grocery stores and food that I have no idea what it is.
I can have a drink and smoke a joint with some friends in the park and no one cares. Where I live now I would be immediately have the cops called and arrested. Speaking of parks, I love golden gate park. It is huge and on the other side you are at the ocean.
Most of the people I have found to be far friendlier than on the east coast. Maybe I am a bit on the spectrum but people in SF don't care. Or maybe it is some other reason. But when I lived in SF I made friends way more easily. Also went on a lot more dates. For me I would be happier to move back to SF and complain about the rent and the homeless than live on the east coast and commute to my soulless suburban office park.
There's human feces everywhere outside the tourist/financial districts, and the entirety of the inner city (Tenderloin) is disintegrated and full of poverty, homelessness and crime - and it's predominantly people of color who accumulate there.
If that's "diverse" and "beautiful" then I'd hate to think what "monocultural" and "dull" looks like...
> There's human feces everywhere outside the tourist/financial districts,
This is not accurate. The Sunset, Richmond, Parkside, Presidio, Marina, and many other parts of the city are very clean (or at least not notably dirty for a city). Perhaps the Marina/Presidio could be called tourist areas but the Sunset and Richmond certainly are not.
Imagine saying "Yeah, there are human feces all over my living room and kitchen, but the bedrooms are clean. Overall it is a great place to live."
Whenever I visit SF I run into someone who looks like an extra from a zombie movie every time, without fail. Sometimes they "violently beg" by lunging at your feet as you walk past. Scream obscenities. Offer stolen goods at red lights. And if you somehow don't see them you can certainly smell them.
Just because we collectively got desensitized doesn't make all this OK.
I’ve seen someone take a shit on the sidewalk in the Marina (chestnut street). And I’ve seen similar stuff in the sunset. And to the OP I see this stuff fairly often in the financial district.
Anywhere near Market is mid to high levels of gross for sure. I think in FiDi and the East Cut companies pay for private cleaning services (and perhaps some private pseudo-policing as well) but these areas are directly adjacent to highly distressed parts of the city.
I've lived here for over 5 years and can absolutely confirm there are a few parts of the city that are dirty and have the feces/needles that people who honestly can't afford to live here love to talk about when they're denigrating the city. As you've noted, there are lots of neighborhoods, MOST of the city, that are very clean, safe, and obviously very desirable to live in.
Hmmm. I lived in the heart of the Castro for 15 years. When I arrived it was lovely. When I left (3 years ago, pre-covid), it was... not. Homeless and vacant storefronts everywhere.
The merchant who has been running the shop below my place longer than I have been alive (and I'm OLD by HN standards) put it this way: The Castro is dying.
Maybe there are neighborhoods changing for the better somewhere to balance it out, but I kinda doubt it. The change is real.
Sunset, Parkside, and Marina are all wealthy areas in the north/west of the city.
Richmond is not in SF city.
Presidio is right next to the pier and thus I would consider it a "touristy area".
You're living under a (perhaps bejeweled) rock if you've lived in SF and never seen human shit, someone peeing between some cars, dead animals, homeless literally everywhere, disheveled buildings, trash piles lining the gutters, etc.
Someone who doesn't know that the Richmond is a district of San Francisco doesn't get to pompously lecture me on not knowing about the city I lived in for seven years. Also, the Sunset is not a particularly wealthy district and it's not in the northwest.
I never claimed that these problems don't exist, but the idea that they're part of life in every part of the city is simply false.
San Francisco has an Inner/Outer Richmond district. It’s the area north of Golden Gate Park. Inner/outer Sunset is south of Golden Gate Park. How can you be such an authority on SF and not know this? Yes there’s a Richmond city but it’s not what’s being referred to here…
Richmond is also a city, hence why people usually say Richmond District if they want to explicitly refer to the NW District of SF when discussing the city and the surrounding area.
Poster you’re replying to isn’t wrong, just as you aren’t.
They were providing a list of neighborhoods in SF. It wasn't ambiguous and would have been well understood by anyone familiar enough with the city to comment on the state of SF. There's also a Richmond Virginia (among many other Richmonds), none would make sense in the context of a list of SF neighborhoods.
You don't even live here. Your twitter bio says you live in Germany... "Homeless literally everywhere" - no, not literally at all. "Trash piles lining the gutters" - you don't even know what you're talking about.
San Francisco was brilliant before tech, and will be shining in the next boom. Some things are bigger than now, and maybe bigger than we can fully understand.
To me the confluence of cultures, like the brackish waters of the bay, are it’s hallmark. The issues around sudden wealth, excess, limited housing, and visionary governance seem to be more about the place than a particular moment.
So according to people voting with their feet: no, San Francisco was not a brilliant place before tech. Or at least it wasn't brilliant enough to attract a net increase in population.
Believe it or not, I met a RE agent who told me back in the early 90s RE agents were leaving SF because business was so bad. It's hard to imagine, but at least an anecdote.
But so was San Jose. Apparently the "downtown" was boarded up in many places till the late 90s when it began emerging from a mini-Detroit like state. MacEnary was feverishly trying to resuscitate it, I don't think it was his effort so much as it was tech to the rescue, else it would have been an Albukerke.
That is completely true, but it's by no means confined to SF.
In SF in the 1980s, SOMA was one of the cheapest places even in a cheap city like SF... lost of broke creative types living in old warehouse/industrial space that would otherwise be going derelict.
In lower Manhattan whole neighborhoods were in a similar state -- bohemian artists occupying loads of space that nobody else would touch.
And in London plenty of neighborhoods were full of squats. Housing stock had become so worthless that it wasn't even worth the effort to prevent people living there for free.
Now those same neighborhoods are among the most expensive urban areas in the English-speaking world. People are literally spending millions of dollars to live at those exact same street addresses... in some cases even living in the same structures, just instead of a half-derelict warehouse it'll now be all marble countertops and the like.
All of these places have their own stories and unique factors, but it's also very remarkable how similar the trajectories and how extreme the swing has been.
I don’t live in California but visit[ed] a bunch for work and family reasons. San Jose has essentially always felt like a rust belt city with better weather. Even up until 2020 the downtown restaurant and bar scene was like going to the cool part of Toledo. I don’t understand why that is, but it’s not surprising to me that any small economic downturn would result in flight.
I’ll also add that 60’s - 80’s San Francisco and the Bay Area at large gave the world counter-culture, organic food, gay rights, and the birth of modern computing. I would attribute the population swing more to general trends towards growth in suburbia.
I've lived in south china pre-2000, in southern Europe and in south America. The first (and only) time I've seen human excrement on the streets was 2 years ago in San Francisco. It's very... odd. I mean, I don't think we should obsessed with the human feces part of it, but it would be nice to understand what's going on that it is so visible.
Let me explain. The authorities there made it ok for people to do that. Police will not arrest you. You can use the streets as your bathroom. They even announced it on the local news (around 2014-2015). Either they are too stupid to realize people would take advantage of that, or they are malevolent and wanted to destroy SF for whatever political reason.
Just because people vote for it, it doesn’t mean it is what people want. There is also the option that the voting system is faulty and that the voters don’t have a real option.
As an example, the city of Reykjavík has 23 representatives in the city council. They are voted proportionally from parties represented distinct views. San Francisco board of supervisors have 11 members, less then half of Reykjavík’s despite having more then 6 times the population. ~And to make it worse, each member is voted on a first past the post system.~ [Edit: Not true as pointed out in a comment]
The San Francisco mayor is voted in a separate election and is not on the board of supervisors. Since this is a position where a lot of political capital is to be gained it is often used as an opportunity for a politician seeking a career, rather then as a passive position willing to let diverse opinions and find consensus among differing views.
None of this is voter’s fault. Rather there is a systemic problem which can only be fixed by the people who are benefiting from the status quo.
> Just because people vote for it, it doesn’t mean it is what people want.
This is really key, and should be a bigger topic of discussion in mainstream political philosophy. Governments that purport to be democracies ought to be responsible for aligning policies and outcomes with the preferences of the electorate. It's far too common for people to dismiss literally any problem in an ostensibly democratic jurisdiction as "well that's what the people voted for," as if the only end goal of a government is to pass some bare minimum threshold of being considered a "democracy" and the rest of the responsibility is on the electorate.
There is accountability at the ballot box, but only if you're willing to vote for the other guy. SF has been under one- party rule for a long time, and if incumbents don't fear for their jobs, they have no incentive to do what they say.
I grew up in SF and still have family sticking it out there. I don't completely disagree with the sentiment here but last I heard I thought SF had a pretty serious diversity problem. Is that no longer the case?
Not sure why this got down voted, I was just asking a question. Thanks HN. Seriously though thanks for the responses, I was legit curious what people thought. I'm gonna go watch last black man in san francisco again.
African-Americans ethnically cleansed from the city, first by Justin Herman’s “revitalization” of the Western Addition, or the shocking fact that black men in Bayview-Hunter’s Point have a life expectancy 20 years less than other SF males, and in fact lower than the US average for black males.
Just because we have a black female mayor does not mean the real racism of SF is gone, just as electing Obama did not miraculously cure the US if it’s racism.
I don't agree that they have been "ethnically cleansed." I'm sure economics has forced some out.
I've live in many parts of the country, and this is by far the least racist, and most racially diverse, place I've lived.
Black men in the city would be expected to have a lower life span than black men nationwide, since urban black neighborhood are more prone to drugs and gangs. Have you compared to other big cities, as opposed to just nationwide?
I once took a Uber ride with an African-American gentleman as the driver. He had previously been a policeman in the SFPD, and his uncle owned a print shop in the Western Addition. He refused to sell his shop when Justin Herman's "renewal" project started. Shortly after, persons unknown vandalized and destroyed the print shop at night.
Ok, well that was over 50 years ago. A lot has changed since. Currently San Francisco is one of the most diverse and liberal large cities in the country. The black population is certainly lower than various surrounding cities such as Oakland, but that doesn't mean it's mostly white.
San Francisco (and much of California) has effectively a one party system. This means that often the real elections are primaries or along party lines. Chesa Boudin and Gavin Newsom are both in the same political party, but their political views are vastly different.
in this social respect though, one party actively promotes 'diverse' lifestyles while the other just accepts them. I don't think SF would have come to be under the latter, nor could the latter exist in SF
IMO there’s kind of a lot. I live a few minutes south of SF on the peninsula and last weekend I walked around the waterfront and the mission with friends. I was struck that I encountered visible piles and marks as well as smells pretty much everywhere we walked. Like, it’s really a lot of public shit compared to any town a few minutes south of the city.
FWIW I blame systemic problems not the individuals responsible. But the problem was viscerally apparent to me.
I reported some shit for the city to clean up. They never cleaned it up. It just sat there for weeks decaying. After weeks, there was only a little bit left... probably ended up on someone's shoe.
Early in the pandemic, the city looked worse. Now it looks somewhat cleaner but still depopulated.
There are some tourists but surprisingly many of the people walking around at Bay Area locals. The tourists are still so few that you can recognize them upon seeing them again.
I've lived in SOMA, the Mission, and Russian hill to name a few... there is a lot of shit here my dude, far more than should exist for a city with this much wealth.
There is literal shit everywhere. A walk down any block needs one eye kept on where you step. If it's not human shit it's dog shit because pet owners can't seem to be bothered.
There are few and dwindling public bathrooms to the point where gig workers struggle to find facilities[1] while they're out there doing critical work. Rich NIMBYs believe that bathrooms (and not the sky-high rents they seek) encourage people to become homeless, so they've successfully shut down the emergency facilities opened up during the pandemic[2].
True, my comment was a bit loaded but 'shit' in my comment was not really mean excrements... I used it to mean 'problems' in a hard, loaded way like 'This is the shit I have to deal with' with some parallels to homelessness but if you read my comment again, it doesn't really say what you think it does
Reminds me of a Star Trek DS9 episode that takes place in an SF of the near future.
"By the 2020s, those without employment, as well as those with mental problems, were moved into the Sanctuary Districts, which would later become no better than slums."
Soylent Green also presents an exaggerated but somewhat plausible view of the cities of the slightly distant future(stepping over piles of homeless people to get out of apartments, not the eating people)
Forget both of those old works. Looper came out in 2012 and oddly has a pronounced depiction of homelessness and poverty in America. And none of it seems exaggerated today. Though it was made after the Great Recession, so maybe Rian Johnson was just merely projecting then-current trends.
I'd like bundle Oakland (across from SF on east bay) with this as well. Totally useless government, unbelievably filthy, utterly third world and embarrassingly woke. Yes, I say this as a liberal who's never voted for Republican candidate ever. Portland, Seattle, LA and SF - this is a west coast phenomenon and a policy-induced suicide.
> In 2017 Portland ranked third. Now it has dropped to 66th out of 80.
Democrats need to get to the bottom of which policies caused the west coast to all simultaneously degrade. May be we should look at other democratic cities and some republican cities and adopt their policies.
Let's start with criticizing our own policies. By pointing fingers, it ain't gonna solve itself.
There are some policy issues at play, particularly the ones that essentially allow people who are in difficult circumstances to completely avoid any kind of consequences for anti-social behavior. For example, Chesa Boudin’s refusal to prosecute quality of life crimes because they would negatively impact those who already have very little. That’s great in principle, but in practice it means that society has no effective way to deal with people who can’t or won’t abide by the basic tenants of societal living. Everyone else’s just has to suck it up and deal with it.
Beyond that, though, there’s a whole complex web of other causes that have converged at this moment in time. These include:
- A massive meth epidemic, which in turn fuels an epidemic in theft and visible mental illness.
- Ditto for the opioid epidemic.
- Inadequate mental healthcare, especially inpatient services.
- Laws and case precedent that makes involuntary commitment of the mentally ill next to impossible.
- The Martin v. Boise ruling, which disallows police from stopping people from camping in public if there isn’t a viable alternative, such as shelter space.
- An extremely vocal activist community that will fight tooth and nail against anything they perceive to be “the man” or “the system” committing anything they perceive to be “injustice” against anyone they consider to be “the downtrodden”. Often these are reasonable things, like sweeping a homeless camp that is openly using intravenous drugs from a public park or the playground of an elementary school.
- Police that avoid anything that could draw the ire of the activist community, or draw condemnation from city leadership. In practice this works out to be just about everything you would normally expect the police to do.
- A populace with a strong sense of learned helplessness who won’t even bother to call the police because they know the police won’t come anyhow.
- A culture that disincentives people from speaking out about social problems, except when blaming systemic causes, for fear of being perceived to be conservative.
Edit:
On top of all that, you also have the systemic stuff, like:
- Severe lack of affordable housing with massively inadequate government intervention.
- Everything that COVID brought.
- Police that run the gamut from exemplary to active white nationalists.
Each of those feeds and is fed by all of the others.
I was thinking of making the move to SF for the higher income. Seeing the past few years of the city have completely changed my mind though. Chesa Boudin physically makes my head hurt so much.
If you want to open a Walgreen's in the FiDi, I'd advise against it, but assuming you're a tech worker, it's a pretty pleasant place to live.
While it all depends on your values, it's very walkable for a US city, relatively safe, and has mild weather. Homelessness is of course an issue as it is for most west coast cities.
SF is great once you convince yourself that crime, lawlessness and misery are "values" rather than the result of poor governance. When I lived in SF, it was fun watching who could admit the government wasn't great, and who did extreme mental gymnastics to avoid unpleasant reality.
I'm not saying "crime, lawlessness and misery" are values, but rather trade-offs for other amenities the city brings, namely walkability, weather, nice parks, decent public transportation, etc.
In the US, I find you either live in a place where you can ignore these problems (e.g. car-centric cities, suburbs, gated communities, etc.) or you live amongst it. In SF, both trade-offs exist—you can live somewhere like Soma, or you can live somewhere like the Outer Sunset. Depending on where you choose to live, you can have a very different experience of SF.
I firmly agree the SF government isn't great and probably won't be here long term because of its various problems, but I'm still glad I moved here to launch my career.
I wouldn't give up the higher income because you don't like the DA. If you don't read the news or hang out with people that are addicted to the news like /r/sanfrancisco you won't even notice. My way to deal with car crime is not owning a car, with the extra income I can afford to mostly use ridesharing for most of my needs and rent a car for the rest of them.
Other than car crime, other forms of violent crime in SF are mostly non-existent and rare statical anomalies.
I'm an Asian American. I have absolutely zero confidence that racist attacks against Asians are going to get better any time soon against people like me especially when a DA like Chesa Boudin refuses to take any single form of accountability in regards to crime.
I'll happily take a smaller paycheck if that means I don't have to constantly watch my back.
> My way to deal with car crime is not owning a car, with the extra income I can afford to mostly use ridesharing for most of my needs and rent a car for the rest of them.
That is mind boggling to Americans outside of SF though. That’s the equivalent of telling people not to “dress slutty” if they don’t want to be raped.
> That’s the equivalent of telling people not to “dress slutty” if they don’t want to be raped.
So crime against your car and your person are two completely different things so I don't think it's equivalent at all. Also I am not "less free" because I don't have a car, everything I would do in my life with one I do with more expensive services. If I needed a car I would get one and deal with car crime in other way, maybe moving to another city, maybe organizing a militia to defend cars. By not dressing however you want because of fear you are giving away something.
I have lived in SF for 11 years. I have worked for nonprofits and ran small businesses, on top of being a renter, so I'm not raking in the big bucks. Before moving here, I lived in Switzerland, Mexico, Canada and the South. I have had less "quality of life" issues here than elsewhere. Sure, some neighborhoods are plagued by homelessness and drug users, but honestly so are some places in Switzerland. Transit is great (could be better), education is too and there's a great sense of community pretty much anywhere. I really don't understand why folks are so upset.
I think some of the responses here are too gloomy. Look things are bad but SF does have a lot going for it and it's a lot less bad than some people think, just don't live in SOMA or the tenderloin and you'll be a lot better off. SF has lots of wealth and resources just waiting to be tapped into, a climate that's likely to get nicer over the next several decades (maybe ignoring smoke), some of the highest densities both of people and of parks in the US. Yes there are problems deep in the politics of SF, but none of them are unfixable.
> just don't live in SOMA or the tenderloin and you'll be a lot better off
I mean, that's basically just saying "lalala can't hear ya". The entire point of calling SF dysfunctional is that a significant number of people in those areas (and others) are on the streets without access to needed psychiatric help and other basic needs. As a result, there's so much petty crime going unreported that any statistics on the matter are bogus.
I think there's a certain kind of voice that's common on here who moved into SF. Got an apartment in one of the new apartments downtown and then experienced a concentrated blast of poverty which isn't representative of the majority of SF. It doesn't help that most new construction in SF has been in these parts of the city either. My point isn't that SF doesn't have huge problems, but that if you live in these parts of the city you'll be seeing a lot more of it on a daily basis than is maybe entirely realistic
Eh, I agree that the problem is most visible to newcomers precisely due to the housing layout around Tenderloin/SOMA, but frankly even once you go past that, it's fairly obvious that north/west SF is where affluent neighborhoods are (the trailer city near Lake Merced notwithstanding) and the south/east side is poor. Correlating school ratings to geographic location, for example, makes that divide abundantly clear.
FWIW, I've personally witnessed theft in inner Richmond - one of the nicer areas - and I know that it's an issue all the way out to the Safeway by Ocean Beach (I used to live in front of it and there were cops posted at the door all the time, and recently I've spotted tents in the parking lot)
Yep, for sure. My point isn't that SF doesn't have problems, but that people form misimpression's of just how bad they are and those views get concentrated in places like hacker news
I mean, the human feces thing is a pretty tired argument for sure. It's not like there isn't also a dog feces problem. The fact that the latter doesn't get brought up at all speaks volumes about classism...
With that said, I don't think the property crime argument is being exaggerated at all. I have another comment highlighting my experience having lived in SF, Toronto and Sao Paulo (Brazil). I've also lived briefly in Brisbane (Australia). Nowhere else have I personally witnessed so much property crime as I have in SF.
Well, there is lots of working being put in by a lot of people to fix parts of it. For example CA is in the process of passing a law to upzone large swaths of single family housing. The YIMBY movement is gaining steam. I think one fo the saddest things in politics at least in the west is this sort of defeatism where large swaths of the electorate think that things are unfixable. I think especially as technologists we should recognize that real problems exist, but also that fundamentally they are all fixable and we should try to fix them.
Well let's work on building the political will then? It is true that individually we're unlikely to have much impact, but there are organizations and groups working for change and they've been having results.
California created the "ballot proposition system" which causes the ballot measure to become part of the California constitution because the state political system has ALWAYS been corrupt and dysfunctional! The system was created in 1856!!! Just 6 years after becoming a state - so FU in its very origins. Because politicians could NOT be trusted to be honest or civilly reliable to the mission of the state!
this is the podcast from the Economist that goes into a little further detail about the failures of the SF gov including the corruption issues and the anti-liberal housing policies:
This isn't an investigation or analysis of what is wrong with SF government, or even a substantive argument that anything is wrong. Instead it's just a very familiar list of complaints. The fact that it quotes someone who moved to Puerto Rico (a place whose government makes SF look like Switzerland), presumably for tax reasons, says everything you need to know.
I've never read about any organization larger than zero people that didn't seem hopelessly corrupt, bureaucratic, toxic, or dysfunctional. Things do occasionally get done, though.
> Per my own experience SF is not a bad place to live.
I have the opposite view. In SF, your risk of the following occurring is non-negligible and in some cases, shockingly quite likely:
- Being mugged/robbed
- Having your car broken into
- Being harangued or even assaulted by someone who is mentally ill and/or under the influence
- Witnessing public urination, defecation, drug use and grab and go retail theft
- Stepping in human feces
I don't see how a place where these things occur on a regular basis, and where, in most cases, such crimes are not investigated and prosecuted, could ever be considered "not a bad place to live".
I've lived in Toronto, SF and Sao Paulo. In 18 years living in Sao Paulo, I've witnessed one gun-related incident and was victim of robbery once (I lived near Heliopolis, one of the largest slums in the city). In 18 years living in Toronto, I was involved in zero. In my first 2 years in SF, I was harassed twice and witnessed retail theft 2 times.
SF is "not bad" in the sense that you won't get shot in the face. It is however quite bad in the sense that the amount of petty crime is so off the charts that you can't even compile accurate statistics because security personnel at retail stores don't even bother reporting it anymore.
A few months ago, I witnessed another theft in inner Richmond (one of the nicer neighbourhoods), the security guy did a half-ass attempt at running after the guy but gave up and came towards the customer support desk I was at. I asked if that was common, and the security guy literally just shrugs.
I've visited SF four or five times and the last time, I was waiting downtown (sorry I don't remember exactly where, but a high wealth, high traffic area) and a man who was clearly down on his luck came up to me and yelled at me. This was about five years ago.
I've lived in NYC for ~9 years and that's never happened to me.
I've lived in San Francisco for 16 years. Yes, I have experienced the homeless problem. I had my car broken into once when I left my backpack inside. I have never been mugged or robbed or had any physical violence occur, or be threatened. We have many lovely friends who live here. San Francisco is under a lot of pressure: population, finance, environmental. It is not a dystopia. It is a community where people build their lives and deserves love and support. I have spent significant amounts of time in New York, Paris and other world cities. I do not find San Francisco to be all that different from New York or Paris.
> I have never been mugged or robbed or had any physical violence occur, or be threatened.
You're lucky (and not that I want to intentionally bring up this card, but I bet you're a burly caucasian male). I saw a guy jump over the Bart ticket gate on literally my first night in SF. I've witnessed multiple retail theft incidents. I've been spat on, literally out of nowhere. A coworker had his garage broken into and a bike stolen. Another mentioned a friend whose backpack was snatched. (All asians)
> It is a community where people build their lives and deserves love and support.
This comes across as an empty platitude. One can say that about literally anywhere, even a place like Kabul. For me, SF is markedly different from other places I've lived, and if we were talking in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it doesn't score very well.
> You're lucky (and not that I want to intentionally bring up this card, but I bet you're a burly caucasian male).
Stop this. I'm a non-burly non-caucasian male and this (being mugged, robbed, or undergoing physical violence) has never happened to me even once. Maybe you're unlucky? Drawing from your personal anecdotes gets tiring.
> I've witnessed multiple retail theft incidents. I've been spat on, literally out of nowhere.
I've seen this in SF. I've also seen it in LA, Dallas, Houston, Salt Lake City, and Chicago. I've seen it in NYC also, but not in Manhattan. The difference is that in most other big cities in the US, everyone drives around everywhere, so you're insulated from the folks on the street, or you clearly know which neighborhoods to avoid.
> A coworker had his garage broken into and a bike stolen. Another mentioned a friend whose backpack was snatched. (All asians)
A garage is race-blind, come on. I've lived in a house full of East Asians in the Sunset and this never happened to me. I lived in SOMA with caucasians and this happened to me (well us, nothing of mine was stolen).
I think what you're seeing is that SF is physically a lot less class-segregated than other US cities and that folks drive around here a lot less than they do in other cities. In LA, the crazies mostly hang around Skid Row and the Arts District and if you spend most of your life outside these places (or in a car, as Angelenos are won't to do) you'll never encounter them. In Chicago if you stick to the Loop and downtown. you'll only see gleaming apartments. In Houston, Austin, and much of Salt Lake City (and honestly almost everyone in LA), most everyone just zooms around in a car and only interacts with the homeless or panhandlers as they drive around. As such most affluent folks know to avoid low-income or run-down neighborhoods and so never really interact with the homeless.
In SF you can walk down Valencia between 17th and 22nd and it'll look shiny and fancy, like something out of a promotional poster about "Modern Living". Then you walk a block over to Guerrero and you'll see someone with scabs all over lying on the street naked. You walk down 7th or 8th and see fancy new cafes, but then you walk down 6th and see folks shooting up in broad daylight. Some of this is SF's more tolerant atmosphere for the mentally-ill homeless; in other cities they just get harassed until they accumulate in a part of town that doesn't have the residents, police funding, or political capital to push them out.
I'm not saying SF is a bed of roses and I do think the police here need to take a much harder line on property crime, but I think a lot of the negative experiences here are motivated by SF's lack of physical segregation and its walking-first culture. America has historically just relegated the poor and homeless to the streets and used cars to literally and figuratively zoom away from them. Now that cities are coming back into vogue, the US will have to confront the fact that it never fixed its poverty problem but just shoved it out of sight.
> Drawing from your personal anecdotes gets tiring.
Perhaps that says more about the impact of high crime stats on real people than my individual luck. The reality remains that various forms of crime are deeply intertwined with various forms of inequality (be it correlation between race/gender/etc and violence/harrassment, or geographic segregation and property crime)
I've lived in Toronto and Sao Paulo, so I have quite a bit of perspective on how far the crime-o-meter range stretches. Even if I did accept that my experience in SF was some sort of freaky statistical anomaly (and I don't, since even y'all "lucky" folks acknowledge being victims of break-ins), that can't fully explain why my volume of bad experiences in SF is so much higher than that of living near a huge slum in a 3rd world city with a ridiculously high crime rate.
> huge slum in a 3rd world city with a ridiculously high crime rate.
If you think Sao Paulo is a 3rd world city, then I don't know what you'd bin Naypyidaw or Monrovia into. 4th world maybe?
You'd probably enjoy living in a South Bay suburb. There's lots of pockets of different races and you'd never have to meet anyone outside of that community and you'd have total local control of police response and other things. Crime rates are low and cultural values are homogeneous in the community.
I try to avoid postulating about places I've not been to. I was born in Sao Paulo, under the reign of military dictatorship, at that (look up its relationship w/ the US if you feel like filling your daily dose of WTFs).
The "3rd world" denomination is not something I came up with, and I certainly don't want to be the one drawing more classist lines as some attempt to distance myself from folks in Liberia or Myanmar or Afghanistan or whatever, as I'm sure they're already going through enough crap as is.
South Bay is, as far as I can tell (I only lived there for a few months), quintessential North American suburbia. It's not that different from Toronto suburbia, to be honest; my wife wants to move to South Bay if we end up settling around these parts. The house prices though :/
Really? Having lived in both for a good period of time, I found New York City to be far more livable and safer. The homeless, petty crime, and general disfunction issues here in SF are laughable for what some might consider to be a "world class city".
The homeless and those issues pretty much only exist in the tourist areas near downtown, the tenderloin, soma, etc. The tourists come and see all of that and get the idea SF is some horrible dystopia, but unless you live in those areas, it's not a problem. I lived in Noe Valley for 3 years and never ran into a single problem from your list. SF is so much more than downtown.
As long as we're giving personal anecdotes, I lived in the mission (the "good side" near dolores park) for 8 years and experienced most of that list. I was physically assaulted last fall while walking back from Noe Valley at 2pm in the afternoon. Nobody answered the police non emergency number while I followed the assailant (who threw a right hook that I only partially dodged as he walked past me on the street).
Sure, you get better at dodging feces and ignoring the drug use, littering, and theft, but let's not pretend it's confined to "downtown, the tenderloin, soma, etc".
I've lived and worked in Manhattan and DC, and spent time in many international cities. I've walked all over all of them, and never felt less safe than I regularly did walking to work in soma.
SF has a unique political situation, a climate that makes homelessness "bearable" and a huge number of absentee landlords (thanks, Prop 13).
We were sad to move out in January. SF is a gorgeous city filled with kind, interesting people. "Horrible dystopia" is certainly an exaggeration, but the situation is bad and has gotten much worse in the past few years.
There are homeless encampments and tents on streets in the Marina district now, so these issues aren't isolated to "tourist areas".
Yes, some parts of the city definitely have it worse than others, but I don't think it's fair to dismiss these issues on the basis that there are small residential enclaves that are less affected.
If you want to enjoy SF's restaurant scene, nightlife, hiking, etc., you will inevitably have to go to areas where this crime is rampant. And this crime should not be happening in an American city, let alone one that is so rich.
The "bad / dangerous" part of the city is now significantly larger than it was even three years ago, when you moved here. It's been expanding rapidly the past few years.
Can confirm. In general, unless you actually step into them, human feces are not a problem. Just watch your step and be alert. How difficult can it be?
I will note that California seems to be America's dumping ground for the nation's homeless problem. There are also long-standing federal and state housing policies impacting San Francisco.
I have no idea how dysfunctional the local city government is in this case, but there are things going on here beyond its control. It's not fair or reasonable to act like the condition the city is in is entirely due to local government stuff.
It doesn't quite say that. Key West says they confirm this, and there is an allusion to the policy being similar to some other cities (not all.) In exchange for checking more strictly, the article claims Key West permanently bans at least some homeless from receiving services again. There is also a counter-assertion in the article that some of these policies in other cities are in name only for various reasons (coercion, contact check done carelessly.)
Outside of the scope of the article, there are unofficial deportations that would not have a delineated process and wouldn't be reported.
California is a net exporter of poor people. Yet it still manages to have more than 25 percent of the nation's homeless population while only holding 12 percent of the nation's overall population.
Everytime this argument has been brought up, instead of owning to the responsibility of causing homelessness, Californians love to point out how kind they are to homeless and how they're a "dumping ground" for homelessness. It is a cop out.
I would love to see data as well, but I don't consider self-reported origins to be all that convincing. If I were homeless and moved to a city where it's "easier" to be homeless, I would probably claim that I was previously housed there if asked.
It's crucial to dig into the criteria for what studies consider living in the state at the time of becoming homeless. Plenty of studies consider prison to be "housing" so someone who was homeless before moving to California, then commits a crime and spends a month behind bars, and is homeless after release becomes categorized as living in California when they become homeless.
My problem with these assertions is that there is no data supporting it, but these stories and anecdotes keep circulating. I could make up 100 reasons to hypothesize how homeless could possible end up in California, but without data this is just thinly supported.
More robust question is to ask where they were living 10 years ago. It turns out half of the homeless weren't living in San Francisco ten years ago. Or put differently, they moved to the city within the last ten years.
Ancestor’s source was about California, yours is San Francisco. Perhaps many of them lived in Oakland, some in Daly City, maybe some were going to the Humboldt State University 10 years ago and are now unhoused because of an overwhelming student dept, and some were agricultural workers in the Valley and weren’t able to gather enough savings to keep them selves housed.
I don't think this article successfully describes "why" SF is dysfunctional. I agree that the government is bureaucratic and slow, and the school system is terrible, and our government is corrupt. That's the "what." I think some of the "why"s mentioned in the article are accurate. It's true that SF residents tend to be transient and only homeowners vote in large numbers. And SF political actors see themselves through a national prism (because SF politicians tend to go on to higher office - like the Senate, Governorship, or the Vice Presidency) that encourages them to focus on relatively less important policies like banning vaping.
But I think saying no mayor hasn't been re-elected in 20 years isn't remotely unique to SF. Guiliani was re-elected, and so was Bloomberg, and so was the widely despised de Blasio. Politicians generally get re-elected everywhere. Further, it's misleading to say that Democrats always win. SF elections are often hotly contested between the dominant political factions of "moderate" and "progressive" (although those labels are always changing meaning), even if it's Democrat vs Democrat. Some candidates are law and order, and some are anti-capitalist. There is plenty of political competition in SF - which brings me to my next point.
I think it's wishful thinking to say that a "Bloomberg-type figure" would solve all these problems. The mayor doesn't have the power to solve these problems. In fact, that's one of the (many) root causes of SF's problems - in order to make progress on all the problems listed in the article, you'd need to pass ballot propositions, change most of the Board of Supervisors, elect a different school board, elect a new mayor, and change some state laws like CEQA too. The real problem is that power is too diffuse, which encourages corruption by encouraging everyone to demand concessions before any reform can be made. It also means that candidates have to run promising things they can't deliver, or things they can deliver that don't solve the city's biggest problems. That, in turn, trains the public to expect even less of their representatives.
I think another factor is that NYC's government controls much more of its metro area than SF's government does. If the Bay Area had a governmental body that covered the whole region, they'd be able to pass broader laws that, for example, funded transit across city borders. Today, most laws like that have to be passed at the state level instead, and the state is split between many metro areas so it doesn't bother to address Bay Area-specific problems.
> There is plenty of political competition in SF - which brings me to my next point.
I beg to differ: the political Overton window in SF is almost comically small. A Bloomberg-type figure is impossible because no big businessman could get elected dogcatcher in SF. And a Giuliani-type figure is even more out of the question. “Republican” is only a slightly more acceptable epithet than “pedophile” in SF, and in some quarters, the latter is probably viewed with less suspicion.
San Francisco is what happens when so many of your citizens are rich enough to opt into private everything and not have to deal with the effects of or take seriously the policies of the people their money puts into power. It’s a type of oligarchy and plutocracy where the patrons can pay to be seen and “adored” by the political class for social standing but can opt-out of every policy choice.
A lot of my family has lived in SF for decades, all of them have moved out in the past 4 years. It's a monstrous dystopia now. The ultra rich completely insulated from the human misery sprawled out in every direction around them while their peasants toil away as tiny ants looked down upon with pity from their gleaming towers.
Er, what? Anyone who has walked through SoMa or the Tenderloin or the financial district or... quite a few other neighborhoods knows that no one here is "insulated from human misery".
Also what "gleaming towers"? We have, like... 5 of those in the entire city? Most residential stock is low-rise or SFH, and the rich certainly mostly live in the latter (see: Pacific Heights and parts of the Sunset).
I'll be the first to not only admit, but scream, that SF has a ton of problems, but you have not characterized them correctly at all.
Huh? The primary issue with San Francisco is that you are in fact not insulated from human misery at all. If you want insulation, check out Atherton or Woodside 20 miles down south.
In addition, the wealthy of San Francisco live in giant single family homes. It’s not a big skyscraper culture.
Sorry, that's just not true. Twitter loves perpetuating the story of what an insane dystopia SF is these days, but if you actually live here and actually spend time in the city instead of complaining about it, you'll see that is just insanely false.
It's got problems (rise in homelessness & property crimes and the Tenderloin is as bad as its ever been re: drugs), but the gap between "big city problems" and "monstrous dystopia" is about as wide as the bay itself.
I can sadly relate to this. Before the pandemic, in my tech company’s offices you could sip free cold brew looking out at the beautiful city from way up above. But if you looked directly down at the plaza below there was a growing sea of homelessness. Often needles and shit littered around them. Everyone seemed to just “tune it out” and pretend they weren’t there, because otherwise you would have to face that we were living in a dystopian reality.
I've lived in SF for decades, it is hardly a monstrous dystopia. It's actually a very nice, if expensive, place to live.
There are homeless in several parts of the city, yes, but those parts are easy to avoid if that's your inclination.
San Francisco is a very liberal city, and with that comes compassion for the less fortunate. Because the Constitution says anyone can move about anywhere in the US, that means that a lot of those unlucky end up here because it is better than living in a conservative city where there are less activists looking out for their interests. San Francisco doesn't create homeless people faster than other cities, but it does attract them, simply because compassion isn't spread evenly across the country.
I'm not convinced it is as dysfunctional as the article states. And I'm very happy I don't live where people are screaming at other people because those people are (god forbid) wearing masks. All of the partisan hatred and vitriol that has consumed so much of the country hasn't really hit us here. At least not among ourselves.
> There are homeless in several parts of the city, yes, but those parts are easy to avoid if that's your inclination.
You’re joking right? If by easy to avoid you mean do not go outside. A friend lives in a very nice neighborhood in a beautiful home in SF. A block away while walking to my car there was a half naked man rambling to himself in the bushes. It is ubiquitous unless you mentally block it out.
Reading from HN, half of Americans are either in jail or homeless dealing with mental issues. Are there proper statistics to get a better assessment of the situation?
"If all prisoners are counted (including those juvenile, territorial, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) (immigration detention), Indian country, and military), then in 2008 the United States had around 24.7% of the world's 9.8 million prisoners."
"About one-quarter of U.S. adults report having a mental health diagnosis such as anxiety or depression or experiencing emotional distress. This is one of the highest rates among 11 high-income countries.
...
The United States has some of the worst mental health–related outcomes, including the highest suicide rate and second-highest drug-related death rate."
The Federal Government estimates that about 0.4% of Californians were homeless in 2020. From what I've seen on the streets the numbers are probably a little worse now.
By comparison, France has 300 000 homeless persons [1], which is about 0.44%. It doesn't seem to be as big an issue here compared to California. Maybe homeless people are more concentrated in SF which makes the problem appear worse than in other countries?
No, it’s actually crazier in a sense. The contrast between the populations, the “virtual fences” created across main streets where you have chaos in one side and first rate everything on the other, seeing all the crazy on the backdrop of Twitter and Uber buildings and ultimately recognizing the futility of a place so rich destroying itself like a misdirected, spoiled trust fund brat. It’s the city that had everything going for it other than a common sense. I love SF but get it the fuck together.
The article touches on why that won’t happen though. Voter demographics won’t allow that. It’s either radical and young liberals which would go for every insane policy or the old and entrenched.
> The contrast between the populations, the “virtual fences” created across main streets where you have chaos in one side and first rate everything on the other
San Francisco was this way since forever. The poor have been systematically corralled into the Tenderloin for over 100 years. The divisions between neighborhoods elsewhere were why San Francisco was always considered so "charming"--you could cross the street and enter an entirely different world.
Setting aside the tremendous increase in drug abuse and homelessness, it's the tearing down of those virtual fences, especially around the Tenderloin, that is really causing people to freak out. It's just that their freak outs are coded in the language of social activism. Excepting the Tenderloin, every other part of San Francisco has become systematically homogenized, not to mention seen increased wealth.
I think many of SF's ultra rich are also very aware of the issues and are moving out in droves. FWIW a lot of my VC friends who have been in VC long enough to have $$$ have moved to other states (or at least other cities in California). I think that's an especially strong signal about SF's dysfunction given how much motivation there is for venture capitalists to be close to SF given its founder density.
I have lived in San Francisco for 12 years and I find the Republican talking points littered through this thread disappointing. Recently a cousin of mine asked me if I’m going to “flee SF” any time soon. I was somewhat confused by the question, but I guess I shouldn’t be. This entire thread is just sad.
>As it is, the city has been safely Democratic for 40 years and seems allergic to choosing a Bloomberg-type figure from one of the big tech companies to try something different.
San Francisco is what New York City would be like if it only had the UWS, Village, and Wall Street/Midtown.
To put another way, if the Bay area had been unified a century ago as "San Francisco" including the Peninsula and East Bay, things wouldn't be so dysfunctional there. Heck, just the Peninsula would be sufficient.
The Peninsula is generally much better run than SF.
It kind of helps that it isn't one big city. It forces the cities to compete and makes the democracy more direct and participatory. It also limits the blast radius of bad decisions.
Also, because of the greater percentage of kids, the parents often vote based on what is best for their kids.
The issues are much more
mundane. Better roads, funding for schools, etc...
The housing crisis is perpetuated by a lack of coherent planning. It's also why transit is suboptimal. It definitely doesn't help that it isn't one big city, it's actively detrimental.
It doesn't make sense for the Bay to be one big city. There is this giant thing in the middle of it that greatly increases travel time. It is called the Bay.
Even travel down the Peninsula is extended because of the linearity of the
Peninsula (you travel up and down it).
It makes more sense for there to be regional centers. Develop Oakland. Develop San Jose even more. Maybe turn Hayward into a regional hub (fat chance but the geography is interesting). San Mateo is growing for a reason.
Hook the centers together with fast regional point to point transit. There should be no stop trains between SF, San Mateo, San Jose, Oakland, and Hayward.
It is all incredibly obvious if you look at a map. It is all driven by geography.
This is also the reason that Mountain View and Fremont have grown rapidly. Just look at the map. Maybe add them
as regional centers.
It definitely helps the quality of life of the Peninsula to not be embroiled in SF politics. Tons of SF natives moved to the Peninsula for those reasons.
You don't need a large city to coordinate transportation. By that logic, the whole Bay Area should be one city.
After all, you have BART running to the East Bay, South Bay, and a tiny part of the Peninsula.
Maybe the best solution is some sort of regional association or federation of governments working on multi-jurisdictional concerns. Representing an entire area you could say.
That assumes SF city politics would take over the suburbs.
The city of Indianapolis years ago merged itself with its surrounding county, to unify city and suburbs. This was instigated by the Republican suburban leadership so that the metro region would remain under Republican control. Indianapolis has been a more politically moderate city than peers as a result.
No, I'm saying that NYC is a very large city (speaking geographically, by population, or by politics). It has the super-liberal UWS and Greenwich/East Village, but also the UES, Staten Island, eastern Queens, Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, old-line Italians in Arthur Avenue, Howard Beach, and a lot of ordinary middle-class areas. All those areas balance out the nutty leftism of other parts of the city.
San Francisco doesn't have anything like that. As the article discusses, the middle class has been fleeing San Francisco for decades. it's never going to elect a Bloomberg, let alone a Giuliani.
There's definitely dysfunction caused by lack of planning at a metro level; many of the problems are arguably burdensome for any one county to address, but aren't high enough priority to attract attention to force coordination at a state level. Merging all the counties into one is certainly one approach to solving it, and would make the governance more addressable to a larger number of people who work in the area, versus the much smaller number who live there.
What is the point of this article? The bulk of it is explaining that things are bad in SF, and that the city government is to blame. Sure I’ll buy that. But then it makes a leap of logic by claiming—or rather insinuating—that the reason for why they don’t fix those issues is because they are dysfunctional. As for why it is dysfunctional. Well:
> As it is, the city has been safely Democratic for 40 years and seems allergic to choosing a Bloomberg-type figure from one of the big tech companies to try something different.
So it is the voters fault, I guess. And specifically, the voters fault for not electing a conservative enough of a mayor.
This is a trash article. And is more of a partisan propaganda piece then actual news.
I mean it's hard to argue that it isn't the voters fault. Whether that is because they are not electing a conservative enough mayor or not isn't the point of the article.
Vote in non-corrupt officials who are willing to clean house and you start to make a dint in the problem. Ideology is irrelevant as a qualification for the candidate. The fact that they choose largey based on ideology rather than integrity is the problem.
At this level of evidence, every problem in a nominally democratic society could be explained by “voters” in the abstract. Would you blame local discretion over land use, Prop 13, or CEQA - semi-permanent features of the Californian democratic system - on today’s San Francisco voters? How about the lack of national healthcare system that can support drug abusers and other mentally incompetent which drives a lot of net migration of homeless people to the city?
In a democracy the answer to all of the above has to be yes. You literally get what you vote for in a democracy. Even more so in the kind of direct democracy that San Francisco engages in so frequently.
At the risk of engaging in a childish yes-no debate—and of using the No true Scotsman fallacy, you are absolutely wrong. In a real democracy you cannot vote your self a dictator. So there are policies—at least on a constitutional—level which you cannot blame the voters for.
Also—at the risk of Godwin’s law—historians usually don’t blame the German voters for the horrors of the Nazi regime, even though it was democratically elected, they blame the Nazis them self. As a current example, voters are not blamed for the current climate crises, even though politicians are.
I agree. I think the only explanations it gives are that the city has no middle class and politicians try to solve national problems with local solutions. Neither are root causes in my opinion. The former is explained by a lack of new home building which is a statewide and national problem and the latter is explained by the fact that the San Francisco political machine generates a lot of national political candidates! The city is hugely over-represented in national politics. I have no clue why, and the causes of both are probably more explanatory than whatever the article provides.
Nope. There are plenty of local problems that the city has been completely inept at solving. Go look at how much it costs to build a mile of tunnel and how late it is. Roughly 1b and 10 years late and the clock is still running.
Yeah, the article completely ignores that the voters are prioritizing other things.
SF voters don't want to send so many people to prison. Yes, that means that criminals and the homeless have more freedom than in other cities. But SF voters feel that the US prison and "justice" systems are too immoral to implement in SF.
SF voters also want to keep low-rise housing and prevent making it easier to change neighborhoods by adding housing. Of course, this also has the bad tradeoff of over-constraining supply, leading to ridiculous housing costs. But this tradeoff is a response to plowing highways through and dumping toxic waste in poor neighborhood.
So yeah, if you hate these tradeoffs, then you'll also feel that SF is dysfunctional. Thanks Economist for your un-insightful article.
