Prop 47 and SF's "criminals are oppressed by society" approach to crime are to blame here. You can't get the grunts to roll on the bosses if all you can charge them with is a misdemeanor, and you can't get police to even arrest thieves if the DA refuses to prosecute.
This doesn't happen in other big cities like NYC, Boston, Chicago, etc.
NYC isn't big on prosecuting crime and Chicago is basically the most dangerous place on Earth to live. There is something in common with all of these places.
It's unbelievable the amount of depravity a single DA can inflict. An unprecedented number of companies and workers are fleeing the city. San Francisco is set to become the next Detroit. What's your exit plan?
This is hyperbole. The Bay Area remains an economic dynamo. San Francisco’s culinary and cultural credentials remain largely untouched. It’s a safe city to be rich around, and that will continue to be the case for the near future.
The distinction important. Threatening the city’s economic elite with ruin is a red herring. Contrast that with Detroit, where the city’s economic elite were directly threatened. That threat forced change, by changing opinions and replacing decision makers. That pressure has been inhibited in San Francisco by its continuing ability to generate wealth independent of its problems.
I don't know about those culinary credentials... other large cities have similar amounts of variety and quality, and a lot better parking and less homeless addicts near the restaurants.
Can you give me some examples of cultural credentials?
> Can you give me some examples of cultural credentials?
San Francisco has a large number of Michelin-rated restaurants. Their clientele are largely insulated from these issues. It also has a large number of independent theatres and performance and exhibition spaces.
One of the city’s problems is its elites can live quite well independent of reality on the ground. That’s essential to the political problem, and why claims that San Francisco is going the way of Detroit can be distracting or even harmfully mollifying. This is not a system that will self stabilise.
I live nearby and I'm pretty sure I've never eaten at one, despite being able to afford to. I don't think most people select the place they live based on the number of literally Michelin-rated restaurants.
I imagine it's more like, do they have reasonable quality international food with say a dozen national varieties, and if they do, that's probably a checkmark on the food option.
Personally, I'd rather have low crime, clean streets, cheap housing, and a good environment for family formation. Anything else can be found on the weekend, even if that means a car ride or a plane trip.
The “elite” part of SF are getting hit all the same - you can’t leave a car parked in pacific heights or cow hollow without risking a break-in. Friends resort to leaving cars unlocked, windows down, just to try and avoid more broken windows or other damage.
You can’t really insulate yourself from the situation on the streets you have to walk/drive.
Comparatively, NYC has better food and culture scenes. LA has excellent food scene as well with arguably better regional varieties and beach is way better.
What SF really has are proximity to great jobs and reputation/network of SV. So long as these hold, people will continue to tolerate the many issues. This is where comparison with Detroit is not that outlandish - Detroit was once the place to be for good paying automotive jobs. In those days, real estate was booming and prices were high for their day.
If you take away to tech booms, there is still a lot to like - nature, weather, aforementioned food/culture stuff. Unfortunately, that’s offset by issues discussed here, as well as huge amounts of pollution and superfunds, so without the great jobs/industry, it might get a lot less appealing quickly.
> The “elite” part of SF are getting hit all the same
This is key. The bad parts of a lot of cities have these sorts of problems to some degree. What makes San Francisco uniquely bad is that even its "good" parts have them.
The problem is that if you are rich, there is very little that SF has that you can't find in any large city or that you can't visit/travel to. But sidewalks filled with feces, public spaces soaked in urine and covered with disposed needles are truly unique. People lying around naked in the streets or walking around without pants or underwear, screaming at the air, dragging blankets around them right in the middle of Columbus avenue by the transamerica building -- that's something that truly distinguishes san francisco and is now what the city is known for. I was in Pabu and saw a man take off his pants and defecate in the flower pots in the public space on california and market. While some wealthy people may not care, I would assume many more want a different dining experience.
I agree. I don’t live in San Francisco. But assuming some self correction through economic ruin is, in my view, optimistic. The current situation can sustain itself for longer than those comparing San Francisco to Detroit might think.
People expecting some kind of judgement or cost to be levied on the city for its foolish ethics and reckless policies are forgetting that the quality of life issues are the cost. There is no further punishment needed. You want to pretend every homeless person is a victim worthy of massive subsidies and a blind eye by the police? Fine, you will have a city overrun with homeless and streets filled with feces.
Trying to predict how many people are willing to put up with these costs in order to build their ideal utopia is a risky enteprise. As Neitszche said, man can bear any how as long as he knows the why. The majority of SF voters are convinced that they are being moral by tolerating this behavior and so they are prepared to bear the burden of living with what they tolerate. In the big picture, this is nothing compared to the human costs of other utopian projects we've tried in the 20th century, so I don't think the voters of SF have reached anything close to peak disgust. Feces and an epidemic of drug overdoses is nothing compared to gulags, and even the ones who built the gulags were absolutely certain that they were doing the moral thing. Thus I am not predicting any change of heart by those who run the city. A few hundred overdose deaths and tens of thousands of property crimes are a small price to pay in order to feel that you are being compassionate.
What I do know is that many people who have different values are leaving the city in droves, trying to find places that are managed more wisely. Thus my prediction is that San Francisco will develop a poor reputation as a mismanaged city that is run by people who think disastrous policies should be continued as long as they are based on good intentions. I am not predicting that SF turns into a Detroit, or becomes a poor city. I am not predicting that most of the tech jobs will leave. My only prediction is that the city will become an object lesson for other cities to learn from.
They are literally threatening to split Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google. Crime is up 1000% and people like you are dismissing it. It is a safe city if you never bother to walk into the city, and the problem is expanding. It won't be a safe city for much longer, or a rich city.
There are no restaurants in the world that can change that.
There’s a really weird political element in San Francisco which claims this reporting is all a conspiracy. While it’s true the violent crime coverage has been misleading, there has been an unprecedented normalisation of all manner of property crimes in a way that, to this New Yorker, is shocking in its banality. That dismissal of criticism as a conspiracy is thwarting civic discussion on this trend.
The unfortunate effect of this is it’s setting back reasonable police reform movements in other major cities by a decade or more.
Why are you so sure it will set back police reform? The idea that "the police should be held accountable" and the idea that "the police are necessary and should be funded" are not mutually exclusive.
> Why are you so sure it will set back police reform?
The effect is palpable in New York. The current lead candidate is campaigning on a promise of increasing police powers. There was direct campaigning on not letting New York become San Francisco, and keeping the Chesas out of the DA seats.
Not letting New York become San Francisco is not mutually exclusive with police reform. Is the current lead candidate against police accountability/police reform?
> Is the current lead candidate against police accountability/police reform?
Yes, he is a former cop and law and order candidate [1]. (It’s not cut and dry. He opposed stop and frisk in our Senate but wants to reinstate solitary confinement, for example.)
Yep. The reason why San Francisco has to be seen failing is because of the national implications of success. It's been a punching bag for decades, it just had a brief respite for a while.
The best way is to remove police rights on some case and to have multiple social services and not just police.
But the way to sell it? Call those social services police.
"Neighborhood police", "Homeless/mean drug addict police", "road police", "proximity police". They should be able to coordinate (share a police precinct) or even have multiple roles in smaller cities.
35 years ago, my grandmother pushed for highly coordinated social services in our 15k hab town, and coordinate those with the two distinct police force we had in the area (think state level police and local police). The local police accepted, and from what i'm told, there was a decrease in small crimes, more people going to the formation center and more people involved in association, and even more people going to church (disclaimer: i'm not a believer, but i think church as a social mean of emancipation is good), all around the city, and the state-level police commander decided to help after ~5 years to increase the range (ex-farmers, alcoholics were a true danger on the roads). Even drove them to the formation center (my father is really anti-olice and even he told me they were the best cops he ever encountered, i think it is just social determination). Lasted into the 2000s, but the population decline and job going elsewhere were too much.
I work for a large foreign (but global retailer) with locations in the Bay Area including San Francisco. The bill for our monthly necessary armed security exceeds $20,000 a month.
My foreign coworker’s minds were blown that even every starbucks location needs security.
Not my experience at all with most cities in the US, as someone who has lived in many and visited far more. I wouldn't categorize NYC, Boston, Chicago, LA, Philly, or DC that way when you're not in literal capitol buildings. I live in one of the densest US cities, take transit all over the place and have felt unsafe maybe one time in the past 3 years. No weapon was involved.
I've personally witnessed more violent crime in approximately two month's total presence in SF over the last seven years than I have in a total of 14 years living in Boston. Maybe I'm an outlier, though.
Why is your first reaction to any description or decrease in safety to go directly to the phrase "third world country"? Even forgetting the phrase, what you likely mean by it is also not true in all or even most aspects. It's incredibly reductive to use a single category classification of "how nice do I feel something is" for everyone to project on their own ideas how they will.
SF can be both having an increase in homelessness and petty crime at the same time as it maintains a top economy of the US, a big arts scene, many diverse cultures, and more. It's not as simple as "is this a country I would label a bad place".
With that said, SF's latter categories have also slowly eroded, but these symptoms needs to be examined individually. The tech industry did much itself to destabilize SF's arts and culture long before any crime issues. More of a tangent there, but the point is you can't forgo nuance here.
The tech industry didn't do shit, San Francisco NIMBYs were the ones who refused to build housing causing the price of everything to only be affordable for tech workers.
I don't know how you can blame a high paying employer for causing "destabilization". People getting pushed out by gentrification are getting pushed out because there is no new supply of housing but massive new demand for housing.
You need both NIMBY's and a large population influx to cause the core issue here. The tech industry indisputably caused the latter. You also imply some/many tech workers were also not NIMBY's as well, as if these two groups are entirely separate.
Growth is not inherently good, and the tech industry absolutely did not help alleviate the issues NIMBY's helped to cause. There was no reason SF couldn't have gone on being the same size city it was decades before in a healthy way. It takes two to tango here, and I see no reason why we wouldn't blame both. The tech industry chose profits for its own companies over the good of the city.
They had no legal obligation to make any other choice, but maybe if they cared about the city for itself or even the longterm health of the area, if not only in self interest, they would have regulated their own growth. That's just not in line with the philosophy that took root there though, which was growth at all costs. These ideas expand out beyond the tech world it turns out.
The problem with this argument is that, if not for NIMBYs, growth really could have helped all the people of San Francisco. Dense cities are the places with the greatest opportunity and the greatest mobility (see for example Chetty). But for this to be the case, housing has to be affordable enough for working people to afford. So basically, NIMBYs took something that could have been great and made it awful instead. How is tech to blame for this? Tech provided a wonderful opportunity and the people of SF blew it.
I'd also add that I am a San Francisco native and it was not some midsize paradise in the 80s. It was broker, the schools were worse, the public transportation was worse, there were already plenty of homeless, and, like every other major US city, it was far more violent. The only thing that was better was housing affordability and the niners.
There's plenty of nuance here, but I must say I am a bit surprised "the tech industry was a contributing factor to SF's decline" needs to be explained in this much detail. With that said, a few points:
1. As you said yourself, no city was a paradise in the 80's in the US for many reasons, and SF, regardless of a massive tech influx, would have risen with the same tide many other cities experienced from the 80's to now.
2. There's an implicit implication here that if it were not for NIMBY's, all of SF's problems would be solved. While I think they would be better, there's a lot of challenges with building housing that fast even outside of zoning. SF has a severe lack of density to start with that would cause issues even with aggressive construction. It's also not a large land area. Compare to NYC who had a huge land area that had way more density. NYC is not an exception here, you can find at least more density or land mass for most other major cities that helped alleviate the problem even with a NIMBY population present.
3. I think again, you're separating the tech industry from NIMBY's when there is much overlap. Many early tech workers wanted the picturesque victorian style house and helped to enact the problematic zoning themselves.
4. The larger thesis here is that the companies coming is a gift to the city, which I think completely ignores the social factors. People come to cities for the people as much as the jobs, sometimes more so in the modern era. It's why NYC has had no problem bouncing back in even the past 6 months despite many offices remaining empty. The decline of SF is very much highlighted by the past few months not seeing the same effect there yet.
5. With point 2 and 4 in mind in particular, it's hard to make a case that first it was a reasonable expectation for people, the flawed beings they are, to simply rebrand/build the entire city to accommodate the incoming industry, and second that even if they did it would have done anything more than slow the decline. Heck, the drastic cultural shift could have even killed it faster.
There are again complex reasons for this, but one of the patterns that is somewhat unique to SF due to the bay area is that you have people commuting out of the city rather than into the city often given Mountain View, San Jose, etc. That adds even more housing pressure on the area compared to the jobs in SF proper. Add in building constraints around earthquakes and the large set of towers in the SOMA / Financial District, and that recipe for disaster is going to be hard to avoid.
Hindsight is 20/20 and no single tech company caused this, but at the end of the day I just don't think it's a stretch to say that a big influx in tech companies was a big part of killing SF and we may have a much better version of the city today if that influx was moderated or even was not there at all. A monoculture of any industry is not good for a city. Cities exist for humans, not economic purposes. They are powered and somewhat caused by them, but a city does not have much value to me if it doesn't serve the people who live there primarily. There's lots of urban theory to back this up looking at company towns and the like.
I've posted about this general thread before here, and I fear the tech industry has not learned its lesson and is simply moving on to another city to slowly squeeze the life out of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563775
There are good points here. But San Francisco is woefully less dense than most major cities on this planet, including those like Tokyo which are subject to earthquakes. Blaming anything other than NIMBYism is a red herring.
Tech is the proximate, not ultimate, explanation foe the problem. The bed was laid by San Francisco’s housing policy. At the end of the day, most other cities and polities would have turned a massive influx of wealth into an asset, not a symbol of institutional failure.
> But San Francisco is woefully less dense than most major cities on this planet, including those like Tokyo which are subject to earthquakes.
San Francisco is denser than Tokyo by about 2,000 people/mi.² (now, whether it is fair to compare tiny—both in geography and population, for a “major city”—SF to massive Tokyo—where the “city proper” by UN terms is roughly twice the population of the 9-county bay area—is another question.)
San Francisco isn't a major city except in the sense of GDP. Which makes it more impressive that it is a major city considering economic footprint, but makes attempts to compare it to cities that are among the world’s largest urban centers kind of ridiculous.
I don't have the link handy, but I remember seeing something on Twitter a couple weeks back where a news site published something like, "The video of a man looting a store while police watch in San Francisco has gone viral, but is it really a problem?"
The comments basically pointed out that if people aren't being punished for a crime, then police reports don't get written because why bother, and then some politician can point out "Hey, fewer police reports. Crime is down!"
There's a huge element of "Believe what you're told, not what you see" in politics lately. (Probably always, but the past year has really brought it into focus)
We have the same DA-refuses-to-prosecute issue here in Madison, WI - except the issue is car theft by teens. The DA is an elected position. Our chief of police resigned last year because the police would arrest them and they'd be let out hours later on a signature bond. There are kids who have gotten arrested more than 10 times for the same thing - stealing cars and shoplifting - but either the DA is afraid of appearing racist or his office is so overworked it's impossible to be effective.
Society is running on auto-pilot with no enforcement of everyday laws, and sooner or later things are going to break down in a big way.
There's a difference between "everybody jay-walks so the police always have an excuse to pick you up" and violent crimes that the community as a whole notices go unpunished by repeat offenders.
Guessing that it being normal to wear a mask helps a bit as well. Less worry about being on camera.
I would think SF could charge people with more than shoplifting if it's an organized event. California has "Section 490.4 - Organized retail theft" that covers this sort of thing.
> I would think SF could charge people with more than shoplifting if it's an organized event. California has Section 490.4 - Organized retail theft that cover this sort of thing.
Could? Certainly. The problem is that Chesa Boudin won't.
Why does the DA refuse to prosecute? Prop 47 or not misdemeanors can easily earn a 6 month incarceration in case of a repeat offender. So these while obviously related it doesn't seem that Prop 47 is the big bad wolf here.
In many countries delivery to doorsteps is not a thing (due to risk of theft). You either have to be home or need to pick it up from a post office or from a locker. I wonder why Amazon doesn't install lockers where one can pick up a parcel in cities like SF?
My gut feeling is that this post is going to be flagged very quickly. It's one of the issues that is dividing America right now and there is no chance a consensus is going to be reached during a discussion on HN. Even though this particular event is new, the phenomenon itself is not, and so far nobody has found a good solution.
I agree that it's probably going to get flagged, but unjust flaggings can be undone by the site's moderators. I have found them to be surprisingly quick to respond via email, even during weekends. The email address can be found at the bottom of this page.
I'm not sure I understand. How is the rampant crime wave in SF a matter that divides people? I don't think there's a significant amount of Americans who believe that shoplifting is acceptable, is there?
You'd be surprised if you've ever talked to any left-wing (and I mean actually left-wing, not what Fox News calls left-wing) people. To shoplift from big stores is to "fight the corporate power". This demographic is particularly pronounced in the Bay Area. My personal experience has been that most of them also came from fairly wealthy families and have never experienced actual crime.
During the recent protests this past year it seems that there were quite a number of people (including members of the press and politicians) who had no problems with theft and vandalism if done for the right reason(s).
Have you read this thread? The division isn't about pro-crime vs anti-crime, obviously. It's about blaming people based on their politics, which, while not always wrong in theory, in practice is the most common dividing line and source of hostile noise. E.g. "San Francisco, collectively, is just not that smart" (because of how they vote).
The entire reason SF is having this problem is that the majority of the city believe shoplifting is fine based on their voting patterns the last few decades.
The basic premise of the state is that it exists to protect life & property. The past 18 months have shown that the state will do neither if it doesn't feel like it.
But you had better keep paying those taxes, because reasons.
In NYC we call that art. I just went to a museum exhibit in Boston about graffiti art on public transit in the 80's. Point being, something so benign being that strongly and violently punished does indeed sound crazy to me.
There is a law, it was broken and the person was sentenced. I'd rather live in a place that enforces laws rather than one where people run loose, but to each their own I suppose.
Yes I do not live there currently (as you have noticed by my previous comments) but that is where I consider myself "from".
While I think SF (and most of the West) has us beat in terms of clickbait headlines, it still exists. I found these two today while scrolling through our main tabloid site.
Your first link is about someone just making a threatening video. Your second link is about a new fine for not returning plates, silverware, etc. to restaurants. Neither one of those are even remotely similar to someone intentionally lighting another person on fire.
I don't understand how you can compare someone being lit on fire to someone being fined for not returning a tray or someone carrying a knife in public.
Yes it is that high. A lot of it is also unreported just because it is everywhere, and people have grown numb to it - especially because the city is not doing anything about it. Public defecation, open drug abuse, littering, car break-ins, burglaries of private homes, looting of stores, and so on are rampant. I would say crime that results in physical bodily harm is not as pronounced but other crimes are rampant.
In my opinion it is the result of public policies that view criminals as victims and aims to be soft on them, viewing that as a path to reduced recidivism. However in practice it is simply inducing a significant increase in crime because the deterrents to crime (arrests, charges, fines, jail time) are removed.
Pretty random fluctuations across crime categories year over year (5% up for robbery, vehicle theft, 11% down for larceny/theft, which is what this articles about...). For reference, it looks like a few years ago SF was 9th in the us for robbery, at 34 per 10k residents. The current sf stats come to about 40 per 10k residents.
That's because police don't even bother to report these crimes anymore. See: the article posted recently with the video of shoplifters straight up clearing out an entire Walgreens and no police in sight.
The police are never around when crimes are going on, though: showing up later is what always happens... Good forbid one should bring stats to an pity party though.
Nice snark, I guess, but it totally misses the point, which is that if the narrative is right, you can't trust those statistics. So trying to use the statistics to disprove the narrative is completely not going to work. You need to have objectively verifiable statistics in order to disprove the narrative (or at least something better than "reported to police").
So your position is unfalsifiable. Have fun with that.
Can you prove that the SF stats are of worse quality than any other city? If not, they're still of use for comparison. Can you prove that the reporting percentage has gotten worse over time? If not, they're still useful for year over year.
Can we prove that the reporting percentage has gotten worse over time? No, but we can make a plausible argument that a change in policy to not prosecute X will result in people not bothering to report X. We also have anecdotal information that places like Targets and Walgreens are facing increased losses. We now have multiple anecdotes supporting the plausible scenario. That's not unfalsifiable, it's just unfalsifiable by using the statistics that are plausibly wrong.
You could think about trying to falsify it by, for example, surveying businesses about their rate of losses due to shoplifting. To my knowledge, we don't have that data. What we do have is reason to question the statistics you're quoting.
Here is a really broad, and hopefully neutral, take on the subject. There is now a popular movement in America that believes the Justice System is too harsh, especially on minor crimes. This is also coupled with the perception that police officers are prone to using force when it is unnecessary, and, that they use deadly force way too often and haphazardly. There is also a huge racial component to all of this, which I'm sure you're probably aware of and I don't want to wade into.
The result is that a lot of cities have begun to avoid sending police offers for petty theft and other reported misdemeanors. This is not to say the police don't show up at all, but when they do its so that the victims can file a police report. It's usually not to stop the theft or vandalism in-progress. Criminals have gotten wise to this, and often steal brazenly knowing that the police won't put serious effort into apprehending them as long as each theft is relatively minor. Many homeless people defecate and urinate freely in public because the police have simply stopped issuing citations for such behavior. The cumulative effect is that many areas feel lawless and that only enables more lawbreaking to take place.
I think this is a pretty decent summary, but I do genuinely have one factual question here:
> Many homeless people defecate and urinate freely in public because the police have simply stopped issuing citations for such behavior.
What was a citation doing previously on this given that homeless people would simply ignore a citation? Has this actually increased in a way we can measure? I haven't been in SF since the pandemic, but none of my friends have complained about this in the area, and it seems to me like this assessment appears to be very much split on agreement by political lines.
I'm also skeptical of this because I've seen claims of this in my current city (NYC) yet have not seen and general increase save one neighborhood, Times Square. From what I gather, the business district of SF (SOMA) might also just be getting a slight increase here, expanding out from the tenderloin which has always had this as far as the past decade is concerned. Is there anything more widespread than that? It seems like that simply was due to the lack of people actually working in both areas now due to the pandemic, not any police enforcement.
>"What was a citation doing previously on this given that homeless people would simply ignore a citation? Has this actually increased in a way we can measure?"
I cannot provide you with an empirical answer, but I can give you an anecdote from a small business owner. That citation used to come with other consequences such as an arrest and a court date. So, many homeless people knew that it was better to do 'their business' somewhere out of sight rather than have to deal with the police. But now that the police don't show up for such things, why bother trying to be discreet?
I think you're being way too neutral. San Francisco is really sliding into chaos. There is an entire population that steals, sells and buys drugs, lives on the street and has a full time party. the church and the leftists even bring them food every day.
do I feel sorry for them? a little. are they making it difficult to live, work, and run a business in the city? absolutely.
have a drug dealer operating outside your bedroom window all night for months at time? cops don't care. tweakers start a big bonfire in the middle of the street? cops don't care. homeless persons dogs attacking anyone that tries to use the sidewalk? cops don't care.
before the pandemic, it was bad, but the cops would step in if this got too out of line. there was a bit of a detente.
if you were a homeless tweaker with nothing but contempt for the idiots that work at jobs and live in houses, and it was clear you could do anything you wanted without fear of repercussion. what would you do?
This trend has been going on for much longer than that. I've been hearing complaints all of that behavior for years.
About 20 years ago, I had an RV broken into in Austin, Texas. When I reported it, the police offered a case number for insurance purposes but no investigation.
Sure, police have only done the CSI "The fiber analysis shows that perp had been wearing a baseball cap sold only as a promotional item at Target and there is pollen from an orchid that grows only in Bahamas, so let's cross check all the Target's customers from that time with the tickets to Bahamas, meanwhile I will call the judge for the warrant for our newspaper thief!" on TV, they probably only do this for high profile murders or $100K+ heists in real life so nobody is going to investigate who broke into your RV past asking any potential witness if available.
Showing up to the crime in progress and stopping it is different. It used to happen quite regularly even in California.
It's high in reality but the politicians deliberately re-classified a large class of crimes to be misdemeanor to skew the statistics, so they can say - look the violent crime stat is down under my watch.
I know it's just an anecdote but, a good friend of mine went to SF about a year ago with four other friends. Much of their stuff (macbooks etc) got stolen from their car on their first day.
Of course silly to leave things in the car. Still, these are all guys from Europe who've travelled every continent extensively and never experienced something like this. In fact none of us can remember a single break-in of any kind into our cars or homes in our entire lives in any country.
It really just is an anecdote, I've never set foot in SF myself. But as a non-American who was surprised by the narrative around this city home to some of the world's ultra rich, the anecdote easily fit in.
This is counter intuitive. I expected the coming (here?) surveillance state would lower crime in cheaper real estate neighborhoods. Here the opposite is happening, the priciest real estate in the world is becoming more crimeful. I suspect it’s all just theater.
Also, the Target across the street from us, one of the smaller Target Express concept stores on trial in San Francisco, just shut down permanently last week. The store manager cited crime and the cost of hiring off duty police as security (in addition to normal security personnel) as making the store too expensive to operate. Walgreens closing down smaller stores as well citing the same reason. Driving though our neighborhood and an adjacent neighborhood, during the past couple of weeks and I've seen no fewer than four businesses with glass doors or display windows smashed in.
I read about how this is a conspiracy in reporting, but the businesses are leaving and many storefronts in our neighborhood are empty. I also read how some citizens are trying to shame companies like Walgreens from leaving their neighborhoods... But the blame seems terribly misplaced. A more reflective, thoughtful population might make the connection between the policies they support in being against something and the negative outcomes that arise by not actually being for something that addresses these issues. San Francisco, collectively, is just not that smart
This is a very interesting historical phenomenon. Basing my views strictly on objectivism, isn't that a side effect of what residents are being actively manipulated to vote (and blindly/aggressively stand) for?
There is definitely a negative financial impact of being discriminatory and "prosecutory" towards individuals with a high potential (high mental capacity) aka resources we need to use which haven't been "discovered" or "utilized" yet and it makes total sense to pull those out of the system ASAP (in this case prevent them from going through the system in the first place) which seems like a very profitable direction for the industries involved (see the rise of coding bootcamps) but has an extreme and unintended second order effect no-one planned for: uncontrolled crime.
Maybe 1 out of 100.000 could make it to be a Craig Federighi of sorts, but is it really worth it if other 99.999 are looting, shoplifting, and defecating on your porch?
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadThis doesn't happen in other big cities like NYC, Boston, Chicago, etc.
This is hyperbole. The Bay Area remains an economic dynamo. San Francisco’s culinary and cultural credentials remain largely untouched. It’s a safe city to be rich around, and that will continue to be the case for the near future.
The distinction important. Threatening the city’s economic elite with ruin is a red herring. Contrast that with Detroit, where the city’s economic elite were directly threatened. That threat forced change, by changing opinions and replacing decision makers. That pressure has been inhibited in San Francisco by its continuing ability to generate wealth independent of its problems.
Can you give me some examples of cultural credentials?
San Francisco has a large number of Michelin-rated restaurants. Their clientele are largely insulated from these issues. It also has a large number of independent theatres and performance and exhibition spaces.
One of the city’s problems is its elites can live quite well independent of reality on the ground. That’s essential to the political problem, and why claims that San Francisco is going the way of Detroit can be distracting or even harmfully mollifying. This is not a system that will self stabilise.
I imagine it's more like, do they have reasonable quality international food with say a dozen national varieties, and if they do, that's probably a checkmark on the food option.
Personally, I'd rather have low crime, clean streets, cheap housing, and a good environment for family formation. Anything else can be found on the weekend, even if that means a car ride or a plane trip.
You can’t really insulate yourself from the situation on the streets you have to walk/drive.
Comparatively, NYC has better food and culture scenes. LA has excellent food scene as well with arguably better regional varieties and beach is way better.
What SF really has are proximity to great jobs and reputation/network of SV. So long as these hold, people will continue to tolerate the many issues. This is where comparison with Detroit is not that outlandish - Detroit was once the place to be for good paying automotive jobs. In those days, real estate was booming and prices were high for their day.
If you take away to tech booms, there is still a lot to like - nature, weather, aforementioned food/culture stuff. Unfortunately, that’s offset by issues discussed here, as well as huge amounts of pollution and superfunds, so without the great jobs/industry, it might get a lot less appealing quickly.
This is key. The bad parts of a lot of cities have these sorts of problems to some degree. What makes San Francisco uniquely bad is that even its "good" parts have them.
Trying to predict how many people are willing to put up with these costs in order to build their ideal utopia is a risky enteprise. As Neitszche said, man can bear any how as long as he knows the why. The majority of SF voters are convinced that they are being moral by tolerating this behavior and so they are prepared to bear the burden of living with what they tolerate. In the big picture, this is nothing compared to the human costs of other utopian projects we've tried in the 20th century, so I don't think the voters of SF have reached anything close to peak disgust. Feces and an epidemic of drug overdoses is nothing compared to gulags, and even the ones who built the gulags were absolutely certain that they were doing the moral thing. Thus I am not predicting any change of heart by those who run the city. A few hundred overdose deaths and tens of thousands of property crimes are a small price to pay in order to feel that you are being compassionate.
What I do know is that many people who have different values are leaving the city in droves, trying to find places that are managed more wisely. Thus my prediction is that San Francisco will develop a poor reputation as a mismanaged city that is run by people who think disastrous policies should be continued as long as they are based on good intentions. I am not predicting that SF turns into a Detroit, or becomes a poor city. I am not predicting that most of the tech jobs will leave. My only prediction is that the city will become an object lesson for other cities to learn from.
The unfortunate effect of this is it’s setting back reasonable police reform movements in other major cities by a decade or more.
The effect is palpable in New York. The current lead candidate is campaigning on a promise of increasing police powers. There was direct campaigning on not letting New York become San Francisco, and keeping the Chesas out of the DA seats.
Yes, he is a former cop and law and order candidate [1]. (It’s not cut and dry. He opposed stop and frisk in our Senate but wants to reinstate solitary confinement, for example.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Adams_(politician)
But the way to sell it? Call those social services police.
"Neighborhood police", "Homeless/mean drug addict police", "road police", "proximity police". They should be able to coordinate (share a police precinct) or even have multiple roles in smaller cities.
35 years ago, my grandmother pushed for highly coordinated social services in our 15k hab town, and coordinate those with the two distinct police force we had in the area (think state level police and local police). The local police accepted, and from what i'm told, there was a decrease in small crimes, more people going to the formation center and more people involved in association, and even more people going to church (disclaimer: i'm not a believer, but i think church as a social mean of emancipation is good), all around the city, and the state-level police commander decided to help after ~5 years to increase the range (ex-farmers, alcoholics were a true danger on the roads). Even drove them to the formation center (my father is really anti-olice and even he told me they were the best cops he ever encountered, i think it is just social determination). Lasted into the 2000s, but the population decline and job going elsewhere were too much.
My foreign coworker’s minds were blown that even every starbucks location needs security.
Fear, weapons and violence as soon as it gets dense. Every large/chain business comes with lots of armed protection.
I haven't travelled to all the cities in the entire US, but whenever you enter/exit such areas is seems very distinct.
SF can be both having an increase in homelessness and petty crime at the same time as it maintains a top economy of the US, a big arts scene, many diverse cultures, and more. It's not as simple as "is this a country I would label a bad place".
With that said, SF's latter categories have also slowly eroded, but these symptoms needs to be examined individually. The tech industry did much itself to destabilize SF's arts and culture long before any crime issues. More of a tangent there, but the point is you can't forgo nuance here.
I don't know how you can blame a high paying employer for causing "destabilization". People getting pushed out by gentrification are getting pushed out because there is no new supply of housing but massive new demand for housing.
Growth is not inherently good, and the tech industry absolutely did not help alleviate the issues NIMBY's helped to cause. There was no reason SF couldn't have gone on being the same size city it was decades before in a healthy way. It takes two to tango here, and I see no reason why we wouldn't blame both. The tech industry chose profits for its own companies over the good of the city.
They had no legal obligation to make any other choice, but maybe if they cared about the city for itself or even the longterm health of the area, if not only in self interest, they would have regulated their own growth. That's just not in line with the philosophy that took root there though, which was growth at all costs. These ideas expand out beyond the tech world it turns out.
I'd also add that I am a San Francisco native and it was not some midsize paradise in the 80s. It was broker, the schools were worse, the public transportation was worse, there were already plenty of homeless, and, like every other major US city, it was far more violent. The only thing that was better was housing affordability and the niners.
1. As you said yourself, no city was a paradise in the 80's in the US for many reasons, and SF, regardless of a massive tech influx, would have risen with the same tide many other cities experienced from the 80's to now.
2. There's an implicit implication here that if it were not for NIMBY's, all of SF's problems would be solved. While I think they would be better, there's a lot of challenges with building housing that fast even outside of zoning. SF has a severe lack of density to start with that would cause issues even with aggressive construction. It's also not a large land area. Compare to NYC who had a huge land area that had way more density. NYC is not an exception here, you can find at least more density or land mass for most other major cities that helped alleviate the problem even with a NIMBY population present.
3. I think again, you're separating the tech industry from NIMBY's when there is much overlap. Many early tech workers wanted the picturesque victorian style house and helped to enact the problematic zoning themselves.
4. The larger thesis here is that the companies coming is a gift to the city, which I think completely ignores the social factors. People come to cities for the people as much as the jobs, sometimes more so in the modern era. It's why NYC has had no problem bouncing back in even the past 6 months despite many offices remaining empty. The decline of SF is very much highlighted by the past few months not seeing the same effect there yet.
5. With point 2 and 4 in mind in particular, it's hard to make a case that first it was a reasonable expectation for people, the flawed beings they are, to simply rebrand/build the entire city to accommodate the incoming industry, and second that even if they did it would have done anything more than slow the decline. Heck, the drastic cultural shift could have even killed it faster.
There are again complex reasons for this, but one of the patterns that is somewhat unique to SF due to the bay area is that you have people commuting out of the city rather than into the city often given Mountain View, San Jose, etc. That adds even more housing pressure on the area compared to the jobs in SF proper. Add in building constraints around earthquakes and the large set of towers in the SOMA / Financial District, and that recipe for disaster is going to be hard to avoid.
Hindsight is 20/20 and no single tech company caused this, but at the end of the day I just don't think it's a stretch to say that a big influx in tech companies was a big part of killing SF and we may have a much better version of the city today if that influx was moderated or even was not there at all. A monoculture of any industry is not good for a city. Cities exist for humans, not economic purposes. They are powered and somewhat caused by them, but a city does not have much value to me if it doesn't serve the people who live there primarily. There's lots of urban theory to back this up looking at company towns and the like.
I've posted about this general thread before here, and I fear the tech industry has not learned its lesson and is simply moving on to another city to slowly squeeze the life out of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563775
Tech is the proximate, not ultimate, explanation foe the problem. The bed was laid by San Francisco’s housing policy. At the end of the day, most other cities and polities would have turned a massive influx of wealth into an asset, not a symbol of institutional failure.
San Francisco is denser than Tokyo by about 2,000 people/mi.² (now, whether it is fair to compare tiny—both in geography and population, for a “major city”—SF to massive Tokyo—where the “city proper” by UN terms is roughly twice the population of the 9-county bay area—is another question.)
San Francisco isn't a major city except in the sense of GDP. Which makes it more impressive that it is a major city considering economic footprint, but makes attempts to compare it to cities that are among the world’s largest urban centers kind of ridiculous.
The comments basically pointed out that if people aren't being punished for a crime, then police reports don't get written because why bother, and then some politician can point out "Hey, fewer police reports. Crime is down!"
There's a huge element of "Believe what you're told, not what you see" in politics lately. (Probably always, but the past year has really brought it into focus)
Society is running on auto-pilot with no enforcement of everyday laws, and sooner or later things are going to break down in a big way.
Almost like selective enforcement of the law is a step towards tyranny and we’ve know that for hundreds of years.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMtqRir7dco
I would think SF could charge people with more than shoplifting if it's an organized event. California has "Section 490.4 - Organized retail theft" that covers this sort of thing.
Could? Certainly. The problem is that Chesa Boudin won't.
Because he is extremely pro-criminal. This is why there's a recall campaign against him.
> it doesn't seem that Prop 47 is the big bad wolf here.
I agree that Chesa is a much bigger problem, but Prop 47 is still a problem too.
Edit: No responses, just moderation. It is a political solution, like I thought.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/cbs-anchor-muses-if-famed-wal...
But you had better keep paying those taxes, because reasons.
Citation Needed
https://www.newsoptimist.ca/opinion/columnists/how-high-taxe...
San Francisco sounds like a lovely place...
https://www.foxnews.com/world/singapore-sentences-swiss-man-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_P._Fay
EDIT: time spent in prison was off by 7 months
In NYC we call that art. I just went to a museum exhibit in Boston about graffiti art on public transit in the 80's. Point being, something so benign being that strongly and violently punished does indeed sound crazy to me.
Sometimes. And sometimes it's shitty. And even more so, if you tag over someone else art you'll get more than a caning in NYC.
Yes I do not live there currently (as you have noticed by my previous comments) but that is where I consider myself "from".
https://mothership.sg/2021/07/lgbtq-instagram-live-knife-vio...
https://mothership.sg/2021/07/return-tray-fine-commentary/
In my opinion it is the result of public policies that view criminals as victims and aims to be soft on them, viewing that as a path to reduced recidivism. However in practice it is simply inducing a significant increase in crime because the deterrents to crime (arrests, charges, fines, jail time) are removed.
I wrote more about this in a different discussion if you're interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27726777
https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...
Pretty random fluctuations across crime categories year over year (5% up for robbery, vehicle theft, 11% down for larceny/theft, which is what this articles about...). For reference, it looks like a few years ago SF was 9th in the us for robbery, at 34 per 10k residents. The current sf stats come to about 40 per 10k residents.
https://www.safety.com/home-security/cities-with-high-rates-...
Can you prove that the SF stats are of worse quality than any other city? If not, they're still of use for comparison. Can you prove that the reporting percentage has gotten worse over time? If not, they're still useful for year over year.
You could think about trying to falsify it by, for example, surveying businesses about their rate of losses due to shoplifting. To my knowledge, we don't have that data. What we do have is reason to question the statistics you're quoting.
The result is that a lot of cities have begun to avoid sending police offers for petty theft and other reported misdemeanors. This is not to say the police don't show up at all, but when they do its so that the victims can file a police report. It's usually not to stop the theft or vandalism in-progress. Criminals have gotten wise to this, and often steal brazenly knowing that the police won't put serious effort into apprehending them as long as each theft is relatively minor. Many homeless people defecate and urinate freely in public because the police have simply stopped issuing citations for such behavior. The cumulative effect is that many areas feel lawless and that only enables more lawbreaking to take place.
There is often no public restroom available for the homeless to use. They have no choice.
> Many homeless people defecate and urinate freely in public because the police have simply stopped issuing citations for such behavior.
What was a citation doing previously on this given that homeless people would simply ignore a citation? Has this actually increased in a way we can measure? I haven't been in SF since the pandemic, but none of my friends have complained about this in the area, and it seems to me like this assessment appears to be very much split on agreement by political lines.
I'm also skeptical of this because I've seen claims of this in my current city (NYC) yet have not seen and general increase save one neighborhood, Times Square. From what I gather, the business district of SF (SOMA) might also just be getting a slight increase here, expanding out from the tenderloin which has always had this as far as the past decade is concerned. Is there anything more widespread than that? It seems like that simply was due to the lack of people actually working in both areas now due to the pandemic, not any police enforcement.
I cannot provide you with an empirical answer, but I can give you an anecdote from a small business owner. That citation used to come with other consequences such as an arrest and a court date. So, many homeless people knew that it was better to do 'their business' somewhere out of sight rather than have to deal with the police. But now that the police don't show up for such things, why bother trying to be discreet?
[1] https://twitter.com/BrebDaily/status/1411561425110126593
If real, then at least in NYC 'their potty training' persists.
do I feel sorry for them? a little. are they making it difficult to live, work, and run a business in the city? absolutely.
have a drug dealer operating outside your bedroom window all night for months at time? cops don't care. tweakers start a big bonfire in the middle of the street? cops don't care. homeless persons dogs attacking anyone that tries to use the sidewalk? cops don't care.
before the pandemic, it was bad, but the cops would step in if this got too out of line. there was a bit of a detente.
if you were a homeless tweaker with nothing but contempt for the idiots that work at jobs and live in houses, and it was clear you could do anything you wanted without fear of repercussion. what would you do?
About 20 years ago, I had an RV broken into in Austin, Texas. When I reported it, the police offered a case number for insurance purposes but no investigation.
Showing up to the crime in progress and stopping it is different. It used to happen quite regularly even in California.
Sam Francisco Crime Rate (per 1,000 residents): Violent 6.91, property 56.73, total 63.64. (https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime)
Of course silly to leave things in the car. Still, these are all guys from Europe who've travelled every continent extensively and never experienced something like this. In fact none of us can remember a single break-in of any kind into our cars or homes in our entire lives in any country.
It really just is an anecdote, I've never set foot in SF myself. But as a non-American who was surprised by the narrative around this city home to some of the world's ultra rich, the anecdote easily fit in.
[1] https://www.recallchesaboudin.org/
I read about how this is a conspiracy in reporting, but the businesses are leaving and many storefronts in our neighborhood are empty. I also read how some citizens are trying to shame companies like Walgreens from leaving their neighborhoods... But the blame seems terribly misplaced. A more reflective, thoughtful population might make the connection between the policies they support in being against something and the negative outcomes that arise by not actually being for something that addresses these issues. San Francisco, collectively, is just not that smart
There is definitely a negative financial impact of being discriminatory and "prosecutory" towards individuals with a high potential (high mental capacity) aka resources we need to use which haven't been "discovered" or "utilized" yet and it makes total sense to pull those out of the system ASAP (in this case prevent them from going through the system in the first place) which seems like a very profitable direction for the industries involved (see the rise of coding bootcamps) but has an extreme and unintended second order effect no-one planned for: uncontrolled crime.
Maybe 1 out of 100.000 could make it to be a Craig Federighi of sorts, but is it really worth it if other 99.999 are looting, shoplifting, and defecating on your porch?