“ In February 2021, at a corner in the lovely Japantown neighborhood, just a few feet from a house that would soon sell for $4.8 million, a 37-year-old homeless man named Dustin Walker died by the side of the road. His body lay there for at least 11 hours. He wore blue shorts and even in death clutched his backpack.
I can’t stop thinking about how long he lay there, dead, on that corner, and how normal this was in our putatively gentle city. San Franciscans are careful to use language that centers people’s humanity—you don’t say “a homeless person”; you say “someone experiencing homelessness”—and yet we live in a city where many of those people die on the sidewalk.”
"Actions speak louder than words," as an adage I think applies here. "Words are cheap," is another one.
>you don’t say “a homeless person”; you say “someone experiencing homelessness”
This is San Francisco's version of "thoughts and prayers." I suppose it would be better for overall humanity if we still called them "bums," but actually did something to help them.
The poor people were basically not punished for crimes and allowed to pitch tents wherever they pleased. Also free housing if they wanted, so long as they didn't use drugs. Rehab if they wanted it.
If people believe in thinks despite data that proves those things are wrong (Marxists), ignore them and move on. You can’t placate mentally ill people at the expense of society at large
Because it implies a cut and dried solution, which does not exist. It's implies sf wants to care, but is too busy virtue signaling to do anything about it. Like as if the city doesn't want to put it's money where it's mouth is.
Instead, sf has one of the most well funded social networks in the country. And they tried to take an innovative approach on policing, one that would not disportionately target poor people or people of a certain race.
The remaining solutions are essentially to forcibly remove people from the streets, and revert to the standard American policing playbook. At least, those are the tools traditionally used to clean up these problems in other parts of the country.
So, it's a comment that sounds nice but isn't actually true. Sf was taking actions. And now, as of last night, the citizenry are also taking action (by recalling the DA)
> solutions are essentially to forcibly remove people from the streets
Solution is to build more housing. This, however, cuts against two powerful San Francisco voting blocs, and the source of its problems: homeowners and entrenched subsidized renters.
This is probably a correct take but not really immediately actionable. It's up the the residents of the city to decide they want to change their neighborhoods. And most new construction ends up market rate which takes a while to free up housing supply for the affected group (which is at the bottom of the market.)
I'm a yimby fwiw, but as new york has shown you can have both density and an affordability issue—density isn't a a cure-all.
And what's perhaps most annoying is that certain minority activist groups also actively block new development. The mission hasn't been developed much, but it's not for lack of trying.
So we should just pretend that first attempts for government to provide housing were not an unmitigated disaster that created nearly endless cycles of poverty and crime?
Sorry, but it’s my hope we actually learn from our mistakes.
It speaks to the hierarchy of concern. It is similar to the school debate where many millions of dollars would be spent renaming schools like Lincoln and Jefferson to PC names. Meanwhile, teachers are paying out of pocket to provide student menstrual products.
You can make quick wins on small problems while working on big problems. However, if you are spending most of your time and money on small or trivial problems while your house burns down, you have a priority issue.
I understand abstractly what you're saying, but I don't understand concretely.
Do you have a way of fix the homelessness issues in San Francisco that the city has overlooked because it was too hard? I've thought about the problem a lot, I never came up with obvious solutions that didn't obviously end up with removing liberties from minorities or homeless (might fly in other parts of the country/state but not sf, until recently).
I think there are a number of partial solutions that would help, at least in the long run.
A couple realistic policies are:
First and foremost is addressing the affordability crisis. Roll back zoning regulations. Allow smaller housing spaces, reduce building costs, and streamline the building approval process.
Crack down on drug dealing and theft. These issues perpetuate and feed into the homelessness problem.
A less realistic possibility that would be dead on arrival is converting some of the copious green spaces in SF into low income housing units. Converting half of the presidio of GG park to SROs and RV camping would drastically improve the stable housing options for homeless.
A lot of people would disagree with those proposals, though. They're not new ideas. The most recent DA did exactly what he said he was going to do, which was (essentially) work at fixing the underlying problems, and not promote a system of spiraling inequality by ruining people's lives (and preventing them from ever getting ahead) by criminalizing them for pretty crime.
Some people see that as humane. I think SF has rebuked the idea. Still, I don't know that fixing theft and drug dealing is enough to fix tent cities.
And the affordability crisis is also equally unclear. It's easy as an outsider to say "make things more affordable, build more!" but it also requires ignoring a set of stakeholders' wishes and desires in favour of someone who might have less basis in the city.
Who is more entitled to a discussion about what gets built: someone who has lived in the city for 40 years, or someone who just arrived to work, or someone who lives in the city but without a home? What about the peole who own property and pay taxes, but can't legally vote? a
> Converting half of the presidio of GG park to SROs and RV camping would drastically improve the stable housing options for homeless.
uhh how about we start with ugly things like parking lots and urban freeways rather than destroying the priceless parks that make san Francisco beautiful and materially wealthy?
There is no “presidio of GG park”; Golden Gate Park (a city park, and the third most visited urban park in the US) and the Presidio of San Francisco (a national park on the grounds of a former Spanish, then Mexican, then US military base) are different things.
Converting the Presidio is outside of San Francisco’s scope of legal options, converting half of GG park to low-cost housing is legally possible for the city, but fiscally dubious.
Changing nomenclature is not at all enough toward actual aid and a solution, but it's not contrary to those ends either — i.e. I don't foresee a situation in which city politicians call the homeless "bums" while actually allocating adequate resources to helping them.
It's also just bad English. It's both more verbose and less precise than what it replaces. If I walk down the street in SF, I've experienced homelessness. But I'm not necessarily homeless.
Unfortunately the same people who will chastise you about your insensitive language will also vote down every housing project.
They're all millionaires, because they did an internship, were hired onto a full time role, and then rented an apartment that is rent controlled that was below their means and saved aggressively.
Unfortunarely, absent the same level of income I cannot make those choices, even with perfect or near perfect information.
Or they live with their family, who are loving and supportive, but also encourage them to go out a bit so their housemates have privacy, so they'd run into someone like me at Red Rock or whatever.
I don't think folks understand that the bay has a lot of rental protections not present in other places. (Eg someone can't just suddenly decide not renew a lease, etc)
HN folks focus in a bit too much on rent control, I found a blog detailing some of the other protections (though it's quite obviously an ad for a particular firm):
Ultra rich Americans absolutely love socialism ... for the ultra rich. Getting bailed out in 2009, having the central bank buy their broken assets in the bad times (they enjoyed the profits privately in the good ofc)
Since it has worked so well for the rich, you'd think socialism for all would get a better write up. But apparently poor americans getting universal healthcare is an unaffordable catastrophe and harbinger of the apocalypse.
> Ultra rich Americans absolutely love socialism ... for the ultra rich. Getting bailed out in 2009, having the central bank buy their broken assets in the bad times (they enjoyed the profits privately in the good ofc)
The much more obvious conclusion here is that socialism for the rich has insulated them from the consequences of their actions and has led to even worse behavior. Any reasonable person would conclude that socialism for the rich has been a catastrophic failure and should be done away with rather than expanded across society.
The government coddling the wealthy while trampling the poor is not socialism. I know there are folks who use "socialism" to mean "the government doing bad things I don't like" but this is a hangover from the Cold War, and it doesn't really belong anywhere near a civilised discussion.
Agreed. Socialism is defined better as workers owning the means of production. In "socialism for the rich", it is still the rich owning the means of production, aka capitalism.
>>The government coddling the wealthy while trampling the poor is not socialism<<
It's the failed, self serving, and corrupt program of "Trickle Down Economics" that's been used by Republicans and Democrats since the Reagan era in one form or another. It brings in the donor classes and benefits the wealthy, all of whom happen to be our politicians. It was BS when it was sold to the American people then and it's BS now.
Way to throw out the baby with the water. Inequality did not happen because of socialism for the rich. It happened because the winner takes it all, and the government did not do more about it. Without intervention it is natural for winners to gain access to more, and eventually all opportunities. The goal is to create opportunities for others too, if you want a healthy, sustainable system.
The government is meant to promote opportunities for all, promoting the rich is not socialism. Not to mention that socialism originally meant social ownership, that's also not something people want. People just want opportunities.
Socialism, first, is the wrong word - the state is not owning the assets.
And welfare for the rich and for the poor are two very different things
The rich will still be just fine after their assets crash with or without welfare for the rich, although they may lose some power - all this socialism is about assets far above any reasonable survival line - it's all about disposable income and assets.
Socialism for all is ensuring everyone has basic needs to function in a modern society - food, housing, healthcare, education. Above that line of basic functioning and nondisposable income, it should be up to the individual.
The fight against universal healthcare has nothing to do with actual costs, and everything to do with employer provided benefits. If you need to get benefits from your employer, it requires you to take jobs that are less favorable or desirable, or prevents you from leaving your current one because you're afraid of losing healthcare.
The bailouts weren't really socialism unless you define socialism the same way online right wingers do (i.e., any government policy you couldn't find in 1776 rural Virginia).
There is no rational reason to assume universal healthcare is going to work here just because the bailouts did. Apples and oranges, really.
A lot of the fear of universal healthcare in the USA is because the voters think people like the progressives in charge of SF will run the program into the ground. I personally am not opposed to universal healthcare paid by the government, but I'm pretty skeptical our current political leaders would device a system that actually works better than what we have.
From what I gather, the US actually has a lower rate of homelessness than many Western European welfare countries, but the homeless in the US are apparently bunched up in a few cities. Is this right?
Man, I cannot wait for you to tell me about the major conservative metropolis that does so much better for all of its citizens, and does not suffer under the yoke of Trumpism or whatever 'Wokism' (?!) is. I'm scouring a map and I'm sure I'll find it soon, but maybe you could drop a hint?
I don't have that stats in front of me, but I'd be surprised if they have more wealth inequity than blue state urban areas. Those are still the places in the country where the middle class can afford a house.
But they certainly have drug and poverty problems too.
The highest level of income inequality in the US is in the region around New York City. It's also quite high in the "blue" states of California and Massachusetts.
> This quote from the article could be the motto of progressive cities everywhere, it certainly applies to the ones near me:
> "...making the citizens of our city miserable in service of an ideology that made sense everywhere but in reality"
It should be the motto of more than just those cities. I think people often get blinkered by ideologies that are "satisfyingly simple" and fall into a kind of "ideology-X realism" trap, where they confuse the ideological formulations for reality, and so stop paying attention to actual reality.
You see the same thing lot with "econ 101" style thinking that omits the rough edges and complexity of reality to make a "free market" ideological program feel silky-smooth and perfect.
I think a lot of people ignore the realities of progressive policies, because to them, progressive policy means fighting systemic racism/sexism/etc. It doesn't have to work - all that matters is the intention. And you can't even argue, because then you're just a racist/sexist/etc, because who else would argue against them?
There's a whole lot of wishful thinking in that sort of attitude - Progressives used to be pro-eugenics (even explicitly arguing for racially supremacist views) and against gender equity as late as the 1950s. People will say anything to support their preferred ideological stance.
I want to push back on your use of the word “ideology” in this context.
The original comment and your response seems to react to what some academics call “complex systems”—people and preferences (in this case).
If I’m reading this response correctly, there is a charge that simple models are being applied to complex systems. And some peoples don’t like the outcomes. (I have to be careful here myself, making such a simple statement lest I go from the pan into the fire-—I recognize some people who “don’t like outcomes” are fighting for social recognition and civil rights).
Back to my point…the definition of ‘ideology’ which I find useful comes from Peter Sloterdijk's 1983 book, “Critique of Cynical Reason” where he explored the rationale of cynicism and social discontent.
Sloterdijk describes the difficulty of an argument with someone intent on lying to you. Take that a step further. Its an order of magnitude more difficult to find agreement with someone who has a false belief (ie. a witness to an event who has a false belief because of a unconscious bias). Finally, he defines “ideology” as an personal and internal idea—unexpressed—of how the world works.
In the above example of a queer woman of color objecting to the appointment of a queer white person, that’s not an internal and unexpressed personal belief driving their argument. Her argument is right there in the open.
The first one is impossible problem and the second one is a complex problem.
Using wokism and progressivism interchangably, as you do in other comments, is a mistake.
You also agree with other people down the thread to "look outside the US". Well, there are cities and countries with real progressive ideals that are operating quite well for their citizens.
I believe reforms to better care for the homeless and the addicted, to provide better social safety nets, requires a host of changes and may need to be done at a scale higher than a city.
That all said, it does seem SF has fucked up in ways that need backed out or tried a different way.
"But people addicted to drugs come from all over the country in part for the services San Francisco provides."
So, because other cities are tough on drugs (including the famous "three strikes" laws where you can receive a life sentence if you get caught with drugs three times), and San Francisco treats drug addicts more humanely, drug addicts from all over the US tend to migrate to San Francisco. Making the citizens of the city miserable. Hmmm...
Three strikes was part of a Clinton led crime bill passed in the 90’s by a tough on crime Democratic Party. Supported enthusiastically by Republicans as well of course — a “team effort”.
The article was written back in ~2016~(the end of 2017),it really needs to be revisited, but the sentiment of "go to where there are services for your problem" does indeed exist.
Leaving mentally insane (temporarily due to drug use or permanently) people to rot on the street next to a trailer with showers, sack lunches, and an endless supply of clean needles is more humane than placing them in custody with a slim possibility of getting sober? Not everyone is able to ask for help; sometimes there needs to be an intervention.
You don't think having a DA who didn't believe in the mission of his own organization had any influence on police morale? Why would officers risk their safety arresting people they know the DA's office had no intention of charging?
The rate at which the DA’s office has charged arrestees has been about the same for decades and is slightly up under Boudin compared to his immediate predecessor. The rate at which the SFPD solves crimes stands at an all-time low.
If you were paid to write PR’s knowing full well that absolutely 0 of them would get merged, and you’d make the same money whether you wrote any or not, what would you do?
I can’t imagine a job where doing nothing would be acceptable. If we’re going to use faulty analogies I’ll add one of my own. Imagine doctors deciding they won’t help an addict because they’ll just keep using.
The officers choosing to do nothing are guaranteeing a given outcome with inaction.
> Imagine doctors deciding they won’t help an addict because they’ll just keep using.
This happens all the time. If you're an alcoholic no doctor is going to give you a liver transplant.
I personally know several dentists who will not work with meth addicts because they feel it's unethical to take money to fix someone's teeth when they know full well that person is just going to destroy them in short order.
Plenty of SFPD folks would love to do arrests, but when called made it clear that was no point because the DA would refuse to prosecute. At least that’s what they said on scene.
> Plenty of SFPD folks would love to do arrests, but when called made it clear that was no point because the DA would refuse to prosecute. At least that’s what they said on scene.
Assuming that there are legitimate grounds for arrest, this is what it means for police not to do their jobs. AFAIK, there is no "aw, what's the use, anyway?" exception.
I don't want to defend the cops, but when the DA expressly states they aren't going to enforce certain laws, then its really not their job to arrest people for that anymore. At that point the DA has made is clear that its not a legitimate grounds for arrests even if the law is on the books.
The cops are often caught between multiple conflicting and individually impossible goals, many political.
‘Keep the streets safe!’
‘Stop scaring people away by standing around all the time when there is no trouble!’
‘Enforce the law!’
‘Don’t arrest grandma because she was driving drunk, you’re scaring the old people’
They pragmatically have to pick and choose what to do based on what actually works. If the DA won’t prosecute something, arresting someone for it is just a bunch of paperwork, time, and effort that doesn’t accomplish anything most of the time, so will get deprioritized.
The city council, chief of police, and associated other folks elected to oversee and appoint them disagree, as does the electorate apparently, based on the recall election results.
If the police were refusing to do their jobs, ultimately it would be the city council held to account, and you’d see rather different types of political pressure being applied.
It seems instead that folks want a different DA.
How we got there and whatever finger pointing was happening and if it was justified is of course part of the debate we’re having.
There totally is such an ‘aww what’s the use’ exception by the way.
It’s called discretion. It’s also used to not arrest someone who may technically have committed a crime, but for when it would be a injustice/unfair/politically untenable to arrest them for it.
It’s not supposed to be abused of course, but people are people. It would be impossible and undesirable for them to no have it however, in real life. You’d end up with the worst of Barney fife type behavior at the best.
Yet the stats tell a different story as prosecution rates don't back that up.
So what actually happened is that the cops aggressively campaigned against this DA and then threw a hissy fit when the DA won and decided to stop doing their jobs and blame the DA for it.
Nope. A lot of high profile incidents with explicit statements from the DA disagree.
A friend of mine recently (lives in SF) had a mentally ill, homeless man try to set his dog on fire. Literally took out a lighter and tried to light him on fire while they were standing at a bus stop.
When called, the police did the right procedural things, but noted that since the animal had not been killed, it was unlikely any charges would likely be persued by the DA. They offered to call animal control however if he wanted, which they did.
The animal control officer related a recent situation where a mentally ill homeless man had picked up a small dog being walked by it’s owner, and had smashed it into a wall repeatedly. The dog needed to be euthanized. The DAs office declined to prosecute.
Theft and property damage has skyrocketed in SF recently as well. So that prosecutions stay flat doesn’t tell the proper story.
The DA in SF has always in recent memory been this way - it isn’t JUST Chesea, but boy does he seem to be a good example.
I'm not trying to defend the prosecution policies. I don't know what evidence the DA was presented with in those cases or how winnable they might be. I do think it is reasonable to place some of the responsibility for rising property crime rates on the DA.
That said, don't give the police a pass here. They have been actively hostile to the DA and spent a lot of money opposing this election. Their attempts to pass the buck to the DA for their failure to make arrests is a talking point that is part of their opposition to the DA. While the DA shares some blame for the rising property crime rates, the police share some blame for the lowered prosecution and conviction rates since the DA is dependent on the police to bring them strong, winnable cases.
In reality, I think that both the DA and the police should be held to account for letting politics interfere with their ability to work together to solve issues that are their joint responsibility and require cooperation. Unfortunately, it is harder to hold the police accountable than the DA.
> When called, the police did the right procedural things, but noted that since the animal had not been killed, it was unlikely any charges would likely be persued by the DA.
Did they arrest the attacker, gather sufficient evidence and refer the case to a prosecutor? Or did they assume the case wouldn't be prosecuted because that assumption made their job easier?
They didn’t bother wasting their time because the DA had made it clear in prior worse cases (with witnesses, including security camera footage) that they wouldn’t prosecute that class of crime.
> They didn’t bother wasting their time because the DA had made it clear in prior worse cases (with witnesses, including security camera footage) that they wouldn’t prosecute that class of crime.
So instead of doing their job, they tried to do the DA's job instead. If they had still made the effort, but warned you it was likely to go nowhere, that would be entirely reasonable. They had justification to arrest the individual and try to get them connected with mental health services even if the DA declined to prosecute.
Instead, the police showed up and blamed someone else for why they wouldn't do their jobs.
None of this is to defend the choices the DA made about prosecution, but those choices don't absolve the police of the responsibility to do their jobs.
Meh, this is a bad plan because they could be booking people, building stats, and busting out Willie Horton redux ads to get the politicians they want.
But they don’t do that, because maybe they really are lazy assholes.
I suppose they could raise taxes to build a lot more jails and lock all the homeless up. Out of sight, out of mind.
(Sorry if this is not obvious sarcasm. To be sure, I think a city where residents try not to make eye-contact with the man possibly dying in the street is a failed city, it seems the solutions on the other end of the spectrum are tragic as well. Is the middle-solution going back to pre-Reagan mental hospitals?)
The cost of housing a non-functional (drug addicted or mentally ill) unhoused person with the services they need is around $100k/year. Jailing them for a crime they commit is actually cheaper, we aren’t saving money by keeping such people who commit crimes out of jail (regardless of whether that is the right thing to do or not).
How much of that price difference is those needed services not being available in jail? What is the difference in outcomes long term and do the associated long term savings of providing those services outweigh the short term costs of providing them.
I convinced there are economic benfits (not just moral ones) of helping these people. The problem is that cities that work to help end up having the economic benefits stolen by cities that offload thier people in need on others. There is a sort of "prisoners dilema” game theory problem here that I think can only be solved at the national level.
For drug issues, jails solve that already by restricting freedom. However, the drug addict with socially provided housing is still free to continue using, even if they going to treatment at the same time. Economically speaking, most of these people will never be productive members of society again no matter how many resources we throw at them. Fentanyl destroys your mind fairly quickly.
The moral question of giving them a chance to recover even though it is unlikely to succeed still remains.
> For drug issues, jails solve that already by restricting freedom. However, the drug addict with socially provided housing is still free to continue using
If you think drugs aren't available in jails, I have a bridge to sell you. The effectiveness of jail time on drug cessation is marginal at best. We need better options.
> Economically speaking, most of these people will never be productive members of society again no matter how many resources we throw at them.
This is an incredibly strong statement for which I know no evidence exists because we have never tried. Additionally, the bar for productive member of society is fairly low and is not the only goal. Simply getting some people into a stable, semi-functional state can improve their lives and reduce the long term state costs.
> Fentanyl destroys your mind fairly quickly.
I know an individual with significant brain damage resulting in severely impaired mental functioning who is a productive member of society. He does require ongoing support from the state and can't live independently, but does have a job and does contribute some back to society.
I doubt we will see 100% recovery rates in our lifetimes, but don't be so quick to write people off before we even try.
Practically speaking, drug use and living on the street form a vicious cycle. Each increases the likelihood and severity of the other.
> If you think drugs aren't available in jails, I have a bridge to sell you.
They are available, just much harder to get.
> This is an incredibly strong statement for which I know no evidence exists because we have never tried.
This is from my own heartbreaking experiences. Once you get down that path, your chances of coming back are very slim even with lots of help. "Productive" means able to get a job at McDonalds or a grocery store, both of which are desperate for people but neither of which would consider the guy at the homeless encampment next door. It just isn't going to end well.
> I know an individual with significant brain damage resulting in severely impaired mental functioning who is a productive member of society. He does require ongoing support from the state and can't live independently, but does have a job and does contribute some back to society.
Not the same thing at all. If the individual you know is coasting down Highway 99 on a shopping cart while having a very bad Fentanyl trip, then I guess they are similar? These people are gone in a way that someone with brain damage isn't.
> I doubt we will see 100% recovery rates in our lifetimes, but don't be so quick to write people off before we even try.
We are trying it right now. We have a whole homelessness industrial complex that has sprung up to collect and spend massive amounts of resources on trying to help these people ($100k/year/person is actually an underestimate). They aren't making progress, perhaps intentionally (so they can continue collecting the money) but probably because progress can't be had here. It might be better just to cut our losses and focus on making sure people don't fall into the homeless/drug abuse trap at all, because once there coming back is really really hard.
> Practically speaking, drug use and living on the street form a vicious cycle. Each increases the likelihood and severity of the other.
> "Productive" means able to get a job at McDonalds or a grocery store, both of which are desperate for people but neither of which would consider the guy at the homeless encampment next door. It just isn't going to end well.
Which seems like a huge part of the problem to me. We need better reintegration paths that make the climb back easier.
> These people are gone in a way that someone with brain damage isn't.
I don't know what you mean. It's harder to be gone than severe brain damage. It took several dedicated foster families and ongoing support from social workers to get him to the point he is at. He has a job, but he can't function independently and didn't find it on his own.
Severe drug addiction does have different challenges, but the possibility of reaching a stable, productive place is always possible.
> It might be better just to cut our losses and focus on making sure people don't fall into the homeless/drug abuse trap at all, because once there coming back is really really hard.
You are absolutely correct about the second part. Providing support for those on the edge is the most effective way to reduce homelessness. The longer you are on the street and the worse conditions you are living in, the harder it is to climb back out.
However, I think that writing off people is a mistake in the long run. If you let the problem fester, it gets worse and costs more to deal with.
> We have a whole homelessness industrial complex that has sprung up to collect and spend massive amounts of resources on trying to help these people ($100k/year/person is actually an underestimate). They aren't making progress, perhaps intentionally (so they can continue collecting the money)
There is a problem here, but I'd also be cautious to paint the whole industry with such broad a strokes as there are some very dedicated, selfless people working in that field. Unfortunately, I think those are the people who are more likely to burn out and leave when they see poor results (I've known a several who have gone this route.) This leaves the less scrupulous / caring to lead the industry.
I think those poor results there are due to structural problems around housing access, affordability, the path back to employability and the mental health system that we need to solve on a much larger scale. Only the can we start seeing significant progress at the smaller scales that these organizations work at.
Sure, the SFPD should absolutely be judged if nothing changes despite a new DA, and obviously, especially if it's clear that it's because they are the ones dropping the ball.
And the new DA should likewise be judged. District Attorney is at its core a political job, and being able to win over/beat an antagonistic bureaucracy is one of the requirements.
The next line of argument would be that the police are underfunded and understaffed and that they need a larger budget.
It's the same thing they do everywhere else. Here in Austin the police do absolutely nothing even when you have hard evidence of someone committing a crime, partially because the police union's realized they could use 'doing nothing' as a bargaining chip for larger budgets. It's maddening that you can simply not do the job you're paid to do and use that as a way to get paid more.
Question for people who actually live in SF now and have lived there for a long period of time:
Is it as bad as I see online? 10-15 years ago I would have loved to live in SF, work for a startup etc. and all I heard were good things about the city. There was a homelessness problem but I didn't hear much more than that.
Now it sounds like a hell hole. Crime seems to be the main issue and I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable visiting as a tourist never mind living there.
Is my perspective skewed by the sources I'm reading or have things really deteriorated to that extent?
> Now the artists were priced out and they moved to Oakland
This is the main part of the problem to me. There's nothing even remotely interesting going on in that city's culture. The entire city is split between people who can afford a 2-million-dollar house, retirees, and people who sleep on the street.
Crime is about the same. When I moved to SF in '98 the very first thing that happened to me was my bicycle got stolen, and my convertible car got its top slashed so many times that I started leaving the doors unlocked, at which point people started sleeping in my car, so I sold it.
Violent crime is actually much lower but that's a long-term trend.
IMHO the problems with that city all stem from the inequality caused by the housing crisis. It drives property crime and it's the reason the city is intensely boring.
This is just not true... Car break ins happen almost everywhere in SFBA as long as you're in a relatively populated area. It's unlikely to happen in Loma Mar because no one is going to Loma Mar to steal shit. Catalytic converter theft is incredibly common in the rest of the SFBA along with other forms of theft.
It’s not that bad. It’s normal to have your car window broken overnight or to see people shoplifting openly at the pharmacy or grocery store. In certain parts of the city there’s fairly open drug dealing & use. And the homelessness is heartbreaking.
Violent crime / theft happens - but not at a noticeably different rate than other large cities.
Still the most beautiful city in the US (imo) and the natural beauty 30 min outside the city in any direction is insane.
“to have your car window broken overnight or to see people shoplifting openly at the pharmacy or grocery store. In certain parts of the city there’s fairly open drug dealing & use. And the homelessness is heartbreaking.”
- Well, no, this is NOT normal. these are the points of a failed city.
I’ve seen Violent crime happen at a much higher rate. Same goes for car theft. Covid caused a huge surge.
SF will likely have tax rev shortfalls this year, and their reserves were already tapped into. The surrounding communities however are much more fiscally conservative with large reserves still in tact.
> I’ve seen Violent crime happen at a much higher rate.
That's an anecdote I guess but according to SFPD's own stats violent crime hit an all-time low in 2020 and was the same in 2021 and up only slightly in the first 5 months of 2022.
Why report crime if the police don’t do anything and they make it difficult to report.
All my SF network stopped calling the police when crime happened. That includes violent crime such as street fights.
I was walking in SF and saw a guy holding a machete. He looked at me and said “don’t worry I’m not going to hurt you.” He then pointed down the street and said, “This is for him”. I called the SFPD and they never showed up. Later on a death was reported.
That told me all I needed to know about SFPD. you dont rely on them.
A peer once told me if you want the SFPD to show up, state you have a weapon and will use it in a public setting if necessary in defense of your life as the law permits.
I’ll never understand this mentality. “Sure, you’ll likely be violently assaulted and your car will be broken into regularly, but there are a lot of nice restaurants!”
I moved to Boston. Those things you describe I saw daily in SF - broken car windows, theft at retail stores, and rampant homelessness.
I can go months in Boston without seeing a single homeless person, drive around all winter with all my skiing gear in the back of my car, hell even leave my car unlocked with my laptop in it while running into a store, and never once seen a robbery or violent attack.
No, what happens in SF is extremely disproportionate to normal around the rest of the US.
I mean, homeless people freeze to death if they stay in places like MA - is it really hard to think that CA with a far more temperate climate would see more homeless people?
I can offer some local perspective but not as a San Francisco dweller. My grandmother's family lived in San Francisco and they moved across the Bay, before WWII. Later I did research and a relative of hers was actually the real Mayor of San Francisco from her large Catholic German family. When I was small I heard that San Francisco "had problems with disease" and that was part of why they moved away, apparently. Nothing said about money but that family was not rich.
So forward to more modern times, Gay-everything in your face at every corner, obvious hard core drug abuse on the sidewalks, yet world-class views, architecture, food and steady tourism made the city go.. No overview is complete without mentioning that the quiet side of San Francisco is the Chinese-American community. The highest density of ethnic chinese population in the USA. Aside from Mayor Ed Lee dying of a heart attack in office, you just don't see many obvious attention-getting events with the SF chinese population overall.
The cost of living, the excess of all kinds, the reliable income, all came to a grinding car-crash result with covid-19. The balance on the street of healthy daily people versus dying-in-front-of-you, was lost. The ability of individuals of lots of non-dot-com people, to cope with expenses, was lost. Tourism dollars ceased. Restaurants closed. Of course it is a train-wreck. It really is a train-wreck, with nowhere to hide. Yet "billionaire-in-training" dot-com'ers and Bloomberg employees and 23andMe people and whatnow, glide through on a levitation walkway made of money. As others have said, some people are so well insulated from the consequences of these changes that there is no incentive.. in fact a badge of membership to overlook and ignore it seems.. no "community" .. the literally-insane people at Mozilla have indeed changed the world, and they can step over the bodies to get to their electric BMWs in the secure parking lot to move through it.
Putting "gay-everything in your face at every corner" next to "obvious hard core drug abuse on the sidewalks" could be misconstrued as homophobic, which I hope wasn't your intention, especially during pride month.
addendum -- San Francisco had a Black Plague outbreak just after 1900 (see wikipedia on Plague), that lasted several years, and spread from there. That would fit the timeframe of my grandmother's story.
I’ve been here for 7 years now. The best way to describe San Francisco is that it feels like living in a cyberpunk utopia.
Alita Battle Angel, the movie, is almost exactly how San Francisco feels.
There are actually 2 cities. San Francisco, the tech town, is booming like crazy. New highrises and shiny skyscrapers are coming online almost every month. Areas that were barren wastelands when I moved here in 2015 are now bustling with new construction, street level businesses, full of upper middle class rich people running to and fro enjoying their lives.
The skyscrapers are fast encroaching on the other San Francisco, the poor and troubled city. They’re squeezing homeless people, drug addicts, etc into a smaller and smaller area. In some neighborhoods the concentration of shanty towns and “bad elements” is so high it looks and feels like a slum. Because that’s what it is.
Look at the actual numbers though and, at least officially, it’s not that bad. A city of ~800,000 residents has ~8,000 people living on the streets[1]. Around 1%, same as the ratio for USA as a whole with 580,000 homeless people[2].
What has changed during the pandemic is that these homeless people became more visible because while the upper middle class retreated into working from home. Now that people are coming back to the office, the city is again filling with commuters and the “undesirables” are slowly retreating back to wherever they were hiding before.
As others have said, lots of downtown businesses shut down due to lack of foot traffic. Because few people actually live downtown. Hopefully that gets restored as commuters come back.
Another way to sum up San Francisco is that seeing a person shooting up on the street is normal and seeing a Tesla is about as remarkable as a Toyota Corolla.
I think your comment can teach an important lesson in statistics. Without proper segmentation, totals and averages and medians can obscure real and important results. (This is only one part of the general "garbage in garbage out" data-quality problem BTW.) If the arbitrary political boundary that defines "San Francisco" were changed so that it actually became two cities, it would be abundantly clear that one of them has severe problems and it would probably qualify for all sorts of state/federal assistance that the current aggregate does not.
> The best way to describe San Francisco is that it feels like living in a cyberpunk utopia.
Utopia? More like a Cyberpunk Dystopia...
> Look at the actual numbers though and, at least officially, it’s not that bad. A city of ~800,000 residents has ~8,000 people living on the streets[1]. Around 1%, same as the ratio for USA as a whole with 580,000 homeless people[2].
I think that depends where you land. San Francisco is in the top 10 cities in the world for “billionaires per capita”. SFBA as a whole takes the cake if I remember correctly.
"dystopia: an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice"
That doesn't preclude rich people. In fact having rich people help with the contrast, like in the article where a human beings body rotted on the sidewalk for a day outside a 5 million dollar home.
I live in SF and volunteer in the Tenderloin. I absolutely love it here. No idea what is going on with the public perception of this city. Just seems like a lot of political hot air.
When you get down to the street level and actually talk with some of the people out here, you realize that they are people too. There’s a lot of humanity missing from the discussions about SF.
Things might be dirty or smelly or even unsafe in particular areas, but I wouldn’t trade living here for anywhere else. And I’ve lived in a lot of places.
How long have you lived there? Are you "poor" by SF standards?
These are the long term trends I've seen in my lifetime (50 years, nonresident but visited ~5 times):
- dotcom/SV pricing out almost everyone else
- leading to, unsurprisingly a homeless crisis
- also worsening the property value NIMBYism continuing to exacerbate the housing crisis
- the dystopian culture destruction effects of a host of services designed for apartment shutins built in-town or south of town
- finally, a host of policy failures enacted due to excessive virtue signalling and a social left wing gone rampant, although actually this is political paralysis of various NIMBY virtue signalers doing what they can to stop the undermining of their property values.
A lot of these are issues faced by other cities as well, hamstrung by two party deadlock at various levels of government.
> No idea what is going on with the public perception of this city
Really?
> I’ve lived in a lot of places.
Really?
How much broken car window glass have you seen in SF, vs other cities? It’s easily the top for me, by far.
How many times have you personally seen someone shooting up on the sidewalk, or shitting on it, vs other cities? San Francisco takes the cake here vs any other city I’ve seen, in the US or abroad.
I’m born and raised in SF. I love it here. It’s a beautiful city with a nice temperate climate, great food, and some culture. At the same time it does have a huge homeless problem. This has actually always been a problem, but it has gotten worse in the past few years and more deadly with the arrival of fentanyl.
I cannot stand the majority of the current city government and I do think they are responsible for a lot of the issues in SF. SF was blessed by a huge economic boom. Normally this is a great thing for a region: more jobs and higher pay. But the board of support (BOS) has turned it into a nightmare by refusing to build housing. And the worst part is that the wrap their NIMBYism in a veil of smarmy self-righteousness, oblivious that they have ruined the city. When I was a kid, SF was a middle-class city. Now it’s a city of extremes. It’s still a great city, but it could be so much better.
Interesting point on the city being blessed by a boom and then failing to build and take advantage of that. I wonder how things will go now with the potential for a lot of capital to start flowing out of the city (with tech companies going remote etc).
Yes - it is bad. San Francisco always has bad parts: but the problem now is that it is kinda everywhere. For tourists, the biggest shock is Market Street: they closed it for traffic and that caused that it is very dangerous to walk there in evenings.
I think crime and all problems are caused by drug epidemic. Or maybe because they kept schools closed for 2 years causing a lot of families to leave the city? Or maybe because they terrorized restaurants with COVID mandates cause less tourists and more restaurant closures? Or maybe because they closed street for car traffic causing less foot traffic in evenings? Or because BART is scary to ride so there less visitors from other parts of Bay Area? Or maybe just because offices got closed?
Not sure what is caused this but what I’m concerned that city leaders are doing absolutely nothing to fix issues. Thus all these recalls…
I've lived here since the early 90s, with a break in 00s.
The city has gone down hill, no doubt. Rent increases have chased off my artsy friends, which is the primary reason I'm going to follow - I'm far less fond of greedy nerds than I am artists. San Francisco just isn't very interesting anymore.
Crime is really no worse than anywhere else - look at the stats, don't listen to the hyperventilating. Crime did weird things during COVID and still looks different than it used to. It is no more San Francisco-specific than inflation is US-specific.
That said, my local neighborhood has gone to hell - that's mostly a function of cops deciding to funnel campers on our street. (I'm not going to argue with people who claim the cops don't do this - they do and will admit it is "verbal policy", but only off the record.)
So yeah, on balance, I would not have moved back here today. But that is not because of crime or shit on the streets, it is because the town's character is mostly gone.
Anyone who thinks SF crime was the result of Chesea's policy needs to explain two things about Jacksonville, Florida: (1) why they're seeing murder spikes, and (2) why nobody is calling for their DA's head.
From the outside, all the SF "crime wave" stories feel an awful lot like someone with money pushing an agenda. It's hard to know the truth of the matter without living there.
No. There's a weird concerted media push to just vilify the city recently. I don't know if it's new, very rich, residents who shudder at the sight of anything outside their sheltered worldview (like homeless people or people addicted to opioids on the streets, which probably was exacerbated by the pandemic), or if it is a political agenda like the post elsewhere in this thread talking about how bad "progressive cities" are (I wonder how progressive SF really is, given its policies around housing, zoning, taxing, political funds going to non-progressive groups like Grow SF nd Together SF, etc...).
It's expensive and that is certainly as bad as it ever has been, but if you're a social being, there's always stuff going on to do, and it is surrounded by beautiful natural features! Today, there are other great cities where you can work at a start up though, probably because of how expensive SF is.
>> I don't know if it's new, very rich, residents who shudder at the sight of anything outside their sheltered worldview (like homeless people or people addicted to opioids on the streets, which probably was exacerbated by the pandemic)
I wouldn't say that shuddering at open drug use on the streets indicates a sheltered world view. In most major cities that is not a normal problem. I live in a much larger city than SF for example and, although you occasionally see people walk by who are high, the only open drug use I've seen anywhere in the city is weed. I've never seen someone shoot up, I never see used needles, and this includes in more deprived areas of the city. It's just not normal.
I wouldn't say that shuddering at open drug use on the streets indicates a sheltered world view.
Why would you? I just said that addicts and homeless people are on the street. Before covid, there was, and still is, an opioid epidemic. It sucks how we got here and it sucks that it's where we're at and it sucks that nearly all levels of government have failed to address it properly. It sucks that while some people have the means to deal with it on their, a lot of people run out of options and end up on the street. I'm happy that where you live you don't have to see the effects of it, but despite your anecdata, it's still issue and it doesn't mean the people affected by it aren't normal in some way.
> or if it is a political agenda like the post elsewhere in this thread talking about how bad "progressive cities" are (I wonder how progressive SF really is, given its policies around housing, zoning, taxing, political funds going to non-progressive groups like Grow SF nd Together SF, etc...)
You put "progressive cities" in quotes here, but everyone knows SF as a progressive city because that's how it brands itself. I agree that SF is probably not as "progressive" as some will claim, given the massive wealth inequality (among other things), but to say it's a "political agenda" to brand SF as a progressive city is nonsense. Sure, people will use that sentiment to paint it in a bad light, but the leaders of SF very much want SF to be known as a progressive city.
to say it's a "political agenda" to brand SF as a progressive city is nonsense. Sure, people will use that sentiment to paint it in a bad light
Well, which is it?
but the leaders of SF very much want SF to be known as a progressive city.
This is beside the point, but whether a city is progressive or not is defined by its policies, who the people are voting out, etc., not by what people say about it.
To bring it back on topic, to point at SF and say "see, progressive cities are bad" (as people posting here) isn't really right because SF isn't as progressive as they claim.
Okay, if we change it to "see, cities controlled by politicians who claim to be progressive are bad!", is that more correct? Because either way, the fault seems to lie with progressive politicians, whether they are "real progressives" or not.
Okay, if we change it to "see, cities controlled by politicians who claim to be progressive are bad!", is that more correct?
If you want to explore who calls themselves progressive or not and compare the locales they run, you're on your own, because again, that's a different discussion.
Because either way, the fault seems to lie with progressive politicians, whether they are "real progressives" or not.
This sentence makes no sense. The only progressive politicians are real progressives, no? Why are you so intent on arbitrarily labeling people as something despite their actions? Or are you still stuck on this branding thing? Cause if so, I've got a bridge to sell you...
>Why are you so intent on arbitrarily labeling people as something despite their actions?
I am intent on illustrating my point that the leaders of SF have successfully labelled themselves as progressives so that the progressives that live there will vote for them. I get your point that they aren't really progressive, but people vote for them because they sell themselves as progressive.
I'm also not "stuck on this branding thing" - just because you disagree with me doesn't mean I'm dumb :)
Lived in SF for ~12 years. 8 years in the Mission.
> Is my perspective skewed by the sources I'm reading or have things really deteriorated to that extent?
SF has always been a mess, for the entire decade I've been here. I used to walk to/from work along Mission. Over the last 10 years, things got a lot better - 16th/Mission was unsafe. Most of the mission used to literally smell like a toilet.
You couldn't walk between 5th and 7th along Market. I once watched a lady in a wheelchair chasing someone down the street. She was rolling as fast as she could with one hand, and holding a knife out in front of her with the other while the guy ran.
Crime was always an issue. The planters along the street with the trees used to be a prime place to drop used heroin needles. Like, you could occasionally stumble on a planter with 5-10 used hypodermic needs in it. On Market.
The mid-Mission and Capp area used to run thick with prostitutes.
I don't see nearly as much of this anymore. It got worse in the midst of COVID, but petered out. I think the quantity of all the above issues went down, but so did the population. As such, the albeit lower crime stands out more. And SF is such a transient city that the people complaining about it now (rightly, imo) didn't see how bad it was because they weren't here.
[edit] It's bad - but it's not any worse now than before. There's a lot of great reasons to live here too though! It's so pretty, great food, bars, activities, it's small, walkable, bikeable. I know a ton of folks here so it's kind of hard to leave now, heh.
> You couldn't walk between 5th and 7th along Market.
I walked down Market back and forth from New Montgomery to Guerrero every day for work for many years. It is not true that there was some impassable section of Market. Most of the people out on the street were just normal people.
It is true though that there are now places you literally cannot walk down the street because the sidewalk encampments are so thickly settled that there's no space to pass. For example the west side of Folsom between 14th and 15th. They keep clearing the encampment but it just comes right back.
I feel SF is just difficult to live in for people not making ridiculous tech salaries or have enough wealth to afford it there. You can enjoy life in any city if you make 100k+, and some people that do will still complain about being poor ...
One of the thousand of so times this came up recently, I tried to look up actual data and found property crime rates had increased quite a bit in San Francisco in the last decade and were higher than comparable cities, but every other kind of crime was a normal or lower-than-normal rate and hadn't changed much. Of course, that doesn't mean anything if the real problem is behaviors pissing off residents aren't classified as crimes.
It is far from impossible to quantify quality of life using measures other than crime rates, but I'm not sure who still does that. I haven't personally been in San Francisco since 2007, but I do remember back then that world rankings of livable cities consistently included San Francisco as the only American city in the global top ten, so to drop from that lofty position to this perception of a post-apocalyptic hellhole is quite a contrast.
It does seem to me that the nature of the complaints don't seem unique to San Francisco. I've had my catalytic converter sawed off twice in the last five years, my car ransacked once, power tools taken from my garage, and gigantic homeless encampments are all over the place around me, in good old Dallas. My work office that I visit quarterly is in downtown San Antonio, and they have the same issues, too. Streets are overloaded with people wearing rags who haven't showered in ten years wandering out into the street and yelling at ghosts, sleeping in the doorways you have to step over to get into the building.
From the outside, it seems to me like residents of San Francisco are mostly pissed off that they're paying so much to live there, yet still experiencing all of the problems normally associated with poor neighborhoods in cities. Even that isn't unique to San Francisco, though, as city centers have becoming increasingly hip places to live. My neighborhood is not poor, and I don't think downtown San Antonio is poor, but rapidly increasing property values don't just eliminate all of the poor people if they live on the street. It only eliminates the low end of the buyer market, not extreme poverty.
This is just my perspective, but it's gotten extremely bad. I was frequently traveling to SF 10-15 years ago, and crime and homelessness felt on par with the average American city. I enjoyed the area so much that 5 years ago I decided to move to SF proper, and lived in a few different neighborhoods in the city.
In the approximately 3 years I lived there I saw a dramatic decline in the safety and cleanliness of the city. It's a shame because SF has the potential to be a beautiful place to live, offering a lot of unique benefits. There are few cities you can live in that have the proximity to nature offered by SF, with the variability you find in the landscape of Wine Country as well.
Now, I avoid even traveling there. While it's anecdotal, I had too many close calls to bad situations where I or my wife was followed, harassed, assaulted, etc. I have too many friends and colleagues who have also been assaulted or robbed. I really hope SF is able to enact policies that make sense, because the trend has only worsened.
I left in 2018. It was a crime ridden, filty, disgusting hellhole then and my friends still there tell me it's gotten much worse. They'd all leave except they're executives at tech companies and are making too much.
I've lived in SF for ~12 years and the way my mother speaks about SF from what she sees in the news you would think I'm living in Mad Max. My own 2 cents:
1. The problems with crime and homelessness is not particularly worse than it was 11 years ago. When I first moved here my boss, an SF native, proudly told a story of being bit by a homeless guy on Market while protecting his date and getting tested for every disease. Many parts of the Mission, SOMA and Market used to be _worse_ before they gentrified. Today most people consider 6th street to be rough, but when I moved here, 6th street all the way 10th street was rough. The day I landed in SF I was told by multiple people not to leave items in the car or they would be broken into (again, this was in 2011).
2. What has changed is the media reception of San Francisco; drastically. During the Obama years there was no effort to paint any city as falling over to crime. I remember back in 2014 or so, there a guy who wrote a post complaining about having to step over poop on his way to work on Medium and he was practically exiled. Now the atlantic can post the same story without worry.
My own feelings are that San Francisco effectively priced out 20-somethings and all that's left is jaded 30-somethings who are tired of living in the city and are just sour grapes about it. Without the younger crowd to constantly defend how magical it is everyone is free to shit on the city. Anyone who's telling you about how much better San Jose/Mountain View/Palo Alto probably wouldn't have liked San Francisco 10 years ago either.
My ongoing gripe with the city isn't crime; it's housing. Almost everyone interesting, even in tech, who was working on getting their weird startup ideas off the ground can no longer do that in SF. Likewise the city is filled with spick and span elite school grads who work for FAANG but would have never considered Facebook over Deloitte 10 years ago. The cost of housing has made experimentation impossible.
I visited SV/SF recently for the first time. First impression of the city was how much it reminded of NYC in 80s in parts (read: not good). But I then spent the day just walking the city and finally visited Pacific Heights and dman it, I wish I was a zillionaire so I could live there. Just simply beautiful & immaculate.
As always, everything boils down to money. Rich SF is sublime. The rest, meh. Also, I only ran into ~crazed homeless in Mountain View (on Castro).
A "failed city" and "$#!+hole" with some of the most expensive housing in the country? That can't possibly be a seriously-intended claim. If SF is in such obvious trouble, why is it that everyone still wants to live and locate there?
Probably because they can earn good money for a few years and then move somewhere they actually desire?
Personally seen this play out in Dubai, Hong Kong and Singapore for a long time. There's a huge contingent of knowledge workers who have no intent of putting down long term roots there. It's just somewhere to extract wealth from with high paying jobs and housing costs are simply another acceptable tax on that.
Stay a decade, make bank, move somewhere where you can work at leisure. Isn't that the dream?
Because this BS about crime in SF is just a republican pushback against "defunding the police" which never actually happened. It's a propaganda effort to push the pendulum further fascist. Villainizing and smearing a well known progressive city to let others know that won't fly.
And rich white tech bros complaining about crime and homelessness from their ivory tower is disgusting. You're so detached from how humans actually live that you're threatened by just SEEING them, not even experiencing it.
Bullshit. Have you seriously walked around SF recently? Had your car broken into, watched someone shit on the street in broad daylight? Watched blatant brazen shoplifting?
It’s impossible to avoid. It’s worse and worsening. Pretending it’s not is the worst sort of self-deception.
People come for a variety of reasons. The mystical allure of the historical vibrancy of the city shouldn’t be discounted. Mostly work though. That’s changing as tech flees SF.
What I don't get, living in NYC, is why it's so much safer (seemingly) than SF. Yes, we have homelessness and crime, and it has sharply risen during COVID, but not to this point.
NYC is a much bigger city, politically very liberal, and our politicians aren't exactly amazing, so what's different?
To wildly speculate, NYC is much more walkable and has better public transit than SF. This puts the people more in touch with each other and increases the feeling of community, and also makes it harder to smash a car window when no one is looking.
Or maybe NYC is just bigger and the crime happens further away from where you personally live? The feeling of safety is so subjective.
Could be a contributing factor. As for me I live downtown in Manhattan in a 'nice' neighborhood (though in downtown they're nearly all nice). The equivalent in SF is the opposite.
One thing could be that there are real neighborhoods where people live in the denser parts of the city. Our public schools (in Manhattan) are extremely good, so families do actually live there. AFAIK folks generally leave SF once they have kids.
As JumpCrissCross suggests, NYC includes its suburbs. All those colorful folks south and east of Washington Square can be outvoted by Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island.
NY has a law that requires the city to provide shelter to everybody. So despite the fact that it also has an acute housing crisis, it does not have thousands of people, or even tens of people, sleeping in tents on the sidewalks. The recent book "Homelessness is a Housing Problem" dives into inter-city comparisons of housing and homelessness and discusses in detail the difference in outcomes between NY and SF.
>> A couple of years ago, one of my friends saw a man staggering down the street, bleeding. She recognized him as someone who regularly slept outside in the neighborhood, and called 911. Paramedics and police arrived and began treating him, but members of a homeless advocacy group noticed and intervened. They told the man that he didn’t have to get into the ambulance, that he had the right to refuse treatment. So that’s what he did. The paramedics left; the activists left. The man sat on the sidewalk alone, still bleeding. A few months later, he died about a block away.
This is appalling. What kind of morons are in this advocacy group? If you're going to talk him out of getting 'official' help the least you can do is help him yourself.
Same type of morons which "advised" people to not get to the hospital to get treated for COVID because the doctors will kill them, harvest their organs and send them to the aliens.
This and all of the posts below show SF as a failed city. I work in tech and I'd never move there. Failed = "good people" doing things to cause more problems, which you illustrate very well
this is a pendulum-swing reversal of a previous era where you could be institutionalized without redress. Similar arguments (rightly) are going on about the seriously-mentally ill. Another part of it is that super powerful painkillers are readily available and highly addictive. Like the crack "epidemic" in the 1980s, these drugs are so strong and pervasive that it visibly changes whole cities.
The activist is right. The man did not have to get into the ambulance. He did have the right to refuse treatment. That is literally his right. He gets the decision on whether or not to get treatment for his injuries. The man then exercised those rights. Now, he may not have exercised them in a way you agreed with, or even in a way that was beneficial, but it was still his choice.
And there's good reason why the homeless don't trust police and other emergency services.
The fact that the man died a few months later is almost inconsequential. But it's tied into the story to make it seem like a correlation. The man refused treatment, therefore he died (a few months later a block away).
They persuaded a vulnerable person not to receive medical care. There's no mental dance you can do that will make that ethical to me. He wasn't being arrested or harassed, he was being offered care.
Why do you say the activists were "persuading" the homeless man, but the EMTs were "offering" care.
In the story itself, it says the EMTs were actively treating him. Not offering to treat him, just straight to it. No mention of them even asking if it was ok to treat him.
In the story itself, it also says the activists just told the man his options. Nothing in that story indicates they tried to convince him of one option or the other, only that he had them.
You're the one doing a waltz here trying to add things to the story as presented.
In medicine there are always trade-offs, tough situation here -- I have some experience dealing with people on the street in this locale.. What others do not realize is that the actual experience of being arrested for your own good, can do a lot of harm and is certainly dirty and harsh. Overall new guidelines are needed.
> People walking down the street bleeding need help not a decision to make.
As someone who has walked down a street bleeding before, please do not try to take that choice away from me.
I have a feeling some of this story is missing. It is being presented to support a specific narrative rather than examined to see what can be learned from it.
How bad was the cut? Why was the person resistant ro recieving care? Where responders pressuring a resistant person to accept care or did the activists convince a compliant person to resist?
Reality is complicated and the nuance matters in situations like these.
> In the story itself, it says the EMTs were actively treating him. Not offering to treat him, just straight to it. No mention of them even asking if it was ok to treat him.
Your attitude mirrors one that the article is criticizing, I think correctly:
> What happened to the man at the Safeway, what happened to Dustin Walker—these are parables of a sort of progressive-libertarian nihilism, of the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice.
> the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all.
That is a strawman argument. I don't know anyone who believes in a ”fundmental flaw” in imposing interventiom. There are with imposing it and one of those risks is that your intervention is not actually helpful. Historically, many of these interventions have beem harmful and intended to prevent society from having to see the suffering rather than eliminating it.
The current state of our mental health system (especially the affordable options) is pretty abysmal. If you want support for more imposed mental helthy interventions, you need to work with us to improve treatment options and facilities. I think if treatment options were better, you would find that the need to impose them would diminish.
I don't see any such argument, just a commentor questioning you reading far more into the presented facts than warranted. I see zero content in that comment that could even be construed as arguing for the statment I quoted and called out as a strawman.
> The temerity of those EMTs to treat a homeless man, probably mentally ill, bleeding in the street, without obtaining his consent!
Obtaining consent is literally part of the job and those EMTs absolutely have been trained in how to do it and when they don't have to. The borders can be complicated and aren't always drawn correctly IMHO, but that doesn't mean that the requirement to obtain consent before treating someone should be removed.
I think you have a problem with understanding any kind of nuance. "There are sometimes you should get consent before treatment and sometimes you don't need it" != "treatment without consent is fundamentally flawed"
>> In the story itself, it says the EMTs were actively treating him. Not offering to treat him, just straight to it. No mention of them even asking if it was ok to treat him.
You're assuming they hadn't already offered to treat him and he said yes which is the most likely scenario.
>> In the story itself, it also says the activists just told the man his options. Nothing in that story indicates they tried to convince him of one option or the other, only that he had them.
He's a vulnerable person and they were offering him a bad option. They make the good option (treatment) sound risky just by suggesting he doesn't have to accept it. They did absolutely no good in this case.
There's bleeding and there's bleeding. I've walked around bleeding. I've cut myself pretty badly. I've never needed emergency services to tend to any cut I've received.
You are using language to color the situation in a way that the only possible solution is the one you want to present. When we don't actually know the details of the event, just what the author presented. Like you keep referring to him as "a vulnerable person". Why? Simply because he's injured? Maybe the wound is superficial. We don't know. All we know is that the author's friend called 911. And the man wound up refusing care.
Maybe there was no "good" option or "bad" option here, just options.
I think you're hanging on the part of the story where the man winds up dead. Because that's what the author wants you to do, associate his death with his refusal of care in this instance.
But his death occurred at a much later time in a different place. The two events are only related by happening to the same guy.
And not to mention, you want to rob this man of all of his agency. The implication from you is that the man was not capable of making a rational decision about his own care. Take away this man's housing situation and are you this adamant about forcing care upon him?
> You're assuming they hadn't already offered to treat him and he said yes which is the most likely scenario.
Complete conjecture and is not supported by the story at all. You don't get to imagine what likely happened, draw conclusions based on that imagined scenario, then declare your conclusions correct. We were told what we were told. I could say that the most likely scenario is that the wound was superficial which is why he refused aid.
To be perfectly fair, as someone who had a suicide attempt in SF and was held under a 5150 at SF general, what came after the attempt was much, much, much worse than the attempt itself. Inpatient mental health treatment and healthcare in SF in general is abysmal and horrifying. Myself, along with what felt like half of the homeless population in SF, was put in a large gymnasium filled to the brim and given a 1/2" foam cot for 72 hours with no water, food, treatment, access to a phone, or access to counsel. It was much worse than being arrested, especially for someone who had just suffered a mental break.
I made two mental notes. One, if I ever got to that point again, not to fail, and two, if I did try, definitely not to call 911. They aren't your friends.
The movie depiction of gently waking up in a sunshine filled private hospital room with your family there waiting for you to support you after a failed suicide attempt could not possibly be further from the truth. You wake up in literal HELL ON EARTH and immediately wish you had succeeded and regret calling 911.
> I made two mental notes. One, if I ever got to that point again, not to fail, and two, if I did try, definitely not to call 911. They aren't your friends.
This is exactly the kind of progressive-libertarianism the article is arguing against. As if we should tolerate suicides to avoid infringing on the rights of the suicidal.
And of course emergency services aren't your friends. They're supposed to prevent you from harm not be nice to you. It would be lovely if they could do both but interacting with unwell, pyschotic, sometimes violent people takes a major toll. There aren't many people who can do those jobs without compartmentalizing their emotions.
Well, hear me and hear me well, the movie depiction of waking up in a clean hospital room after a failed suicide attempt with your family there to support you is basically the polar opposite of reality. You wake up in HELL and immediately regret your decision to call 911.
> They're supposed to prevent you from harm not be nice to you.
Treating someone with mental illness effectively requires compassion. If being put on a psychiatric hold is a unnecessarily traumatic experience, you prevent some short term harm while causing long term damage. Not only do you add additional trauma that complicates recovery but you teach those in need of help to hide their suffering as long as possible.
> There aren't many people who can do those jobs without compartmentalizing their emotions.
So let's pay them well and not overwork them while holding to high standards for how they treat the vulnerable people in their care.
> This is exactly the kind of progressive-libertarianism the article is arguing against. As if we should tolerate suicides to avoid infringing on the rights of the suicidal.
Not only are you misconstruing the point of the comment you are replying to, your response lacks a single drop of empathy for those affected, including the commentor who shared a painful and personal experience.
Please try to practice more empathy, it might help you think of better solutions rather than just defending decades-old failed policies that created our current crisis.
By demanding a mental health system that keeps people from harm while being perfectly compassionate, you're preferring the utopian social ideal to the possible. It's just too much to ask of doctors, nurses, and orderlies to be compassionate all the time. These people are human beings.
Mush-brained calls for empathy are a dime a dozen and they lead to failed policies, in SF and elsewhere.
> By demanding a mental health system that keeps people from harm while being perfectly compassionate, you're preferring the utopian social ideal to the possible.
Nowhere did I demand perfection, only improvement. Refusing to even try to improve because perfection is impossible is irrational.
> It's just too much to ask of doctors, nurses, and orderlies to be compassionate all the time. These people are human beings.
That does not mean that we shouldn't find ways to improve the system to allow more compassion to be displayed. The hours and workloads we place on these workers are a significant contributing factor. We have a large problem with burnout, especially among our lower tier healthcare providers.
> Mush-brained calls for empathy are a dime a dozen and they lead to failed policies, in SF and elsewhere.
Name calling isn't a very effective communication strategy and won't hide the fact that your argument is based on falsehoods and misrepresentation.
The ”failed policies” are the ones that created our drug and homelessness crises over that last several decades. The war on drugs is a failed policy, busing homeless is a failed policy, jailing drug addicts is a failed policy.
That isn't to say that the new policies don't have problems and won't fail, but we need better options that just sticking with the failed policies that created the problem in the first place.
Actually, you're kind of off base. The first responders couldn't have been nicer. The firemen, EMTs, and policemen who responded were very kind and courteous. They didn't restrain me in the ambulance or anything. I thought I was being rescued and taken somewhere safe. I was not. It was the mental health infrastructure that was abysmal, not the first responders.
> The first responders couldn't have been nicer. The firemen, EMTs, and policemen who responded were very kind and courteous.
Yes, I mostly agree. Fear of being treated poorly by the EMTs and firemen is not a reason to avoid calling 911. Even many police departments have been doing a much better job about making sure that their officers have a better training and mindset for calls involving mental health crises. There are still enough horror stories about police responses that I would evaluate the track record of your local department when deciding whether to be afraid of them when considering making that 911 call.
> It was the mental health infrastructure that was abysmal, not the first responders.
This was indeed the intended thrust of my comment. I think fixing the remaining issues with police training and attitude is a much smaller and less important problem than figuring out how to revamp, operate and fund our mental health system more effectively.
> Treating someone with mental illness effectively requires compassion. If being put on a psychiatric hold is a unnecessarily traumatic experience, you prevent some short term harm while causing long term damage. Not only do you add additional trauma that complicates recovery but you teach those in need of help to hide their suffering as long as possible.
This is where you demanded perfection.
Empathy and compassion are not the only values and the result of treating them as such is negative.
There is no call for perfection there. Stop pretending nuance doesn't exist. A system that helps 75% and harms 25% is better than a system that helps 25% and harms 75%. Improving the system so that compassion and empathy are a larger part of the process helps bring us closer to the former than the later for the reasons I explained. You ignored those reasons, and instead tried to attack a strawman... again. If you want to convey your arguments effectively, you need to try to understand what the person you are arguing with is saying rather than insisting they are saying what you want to argue against.
> Empathy and compassion are not the only values and the result of treating them as such is negative.
Another strawman. Nobody ever said they were the only values, just that they are important ones, especially when trying to treat mental illness.
Continuing the easy click bait money of isht posting san francisco. Republicans love it; progressives hate it. Chesa Boudin recall happened. It's just another easy dollar story you can sell to the rest of the country
Are the problems? Yes - are some getting worse? Yes. We also are two years into a pandemic that has had an insane disruption on cities.
This story is as old as the city itself. Save yourself the bother and don't click.
Do you live in San Francisco or do you just post when there's a story about it? Seems like everyone in the country has an axe to grind against the city - has been that way for sometime. I'm just pointing out the consistent anti sf narrative in US media.
Having had lived there for 3 years, it’s worth having the discussion. SF could be a fantastic place to live but the state that the city is in is abhorrent. Despite the weather not being as great, NYC is an infinitely better place to live and I couldn’t be happier having made the move.
It's funny I had a lot of friends move from NYC to SF and swear that they would move back to NYC and then completely flip after a year and wouldn't leave. If you came 3 years ago it sounds like you experienced pandemic SF which isn't really a fair shake. Glad you found your place to be though.
I was there 2017-2020 so I had a good amount of time pre pandemic. I had never felt like I belonged in SF. But I also detested the homeless and drug problems there
I’m sorry. You’re wrong. This is new and worthy of attention. The right loves to hold up San Francisco as a failed city. But that doesn’t make any of the reports of dysfunction untrue.
The author describes in detail exactly how specific well-meaning politics have caused great harm by exacerbating the:
Housing crisis
Drug crisis
Crime crisis
Education crisis
The story is told with love and reverence and hope. It’s hope I don’t share, but I can appreciate it.
San Francisco is actually terrible. This article describes precisely how and why it went wrong. (And who’s trying to fix it)
At the end of the day, the DA was kicked out of office for doing exactly what he said he'd do.
It's a good step, but you'll have to excuse me if I have a hard time believing that the people who have voted for Nancy Pelosi every two years since before I was born actually will learn their lesson.
> It's a good step, but you'll have to excuse me if I have a hard time believing that the people who have voted for Nancy Pelosi every two years since before I was born actually will learn their lesson.
This is what I don't get. There are these politicians, across the board that don't seem to be well liked within their own party, but they win their election everytime. Either their state must really love them, or voting must be some sort of ritual where people just mark what they always have and go home.
And look, I get it. CA doesn't want a Republican and KY doesn't want a Democrat. Great, that doesn't mean you have to elect the same person every damn time.
While Congress as a whole has a net approval rating of something like -50%, in general everyone likes their own representatives and hates everyone else's. It doesn't matter what 330 million Americans think about Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnel. It only matters what the 780,000 people in CA-12 or the 4.5 million people in KY think about them (well, the majority of voters within the populations in question).
Is the problem that prison in the US doesn't focus on rehabilitation, leading to a revolving door of recidivism?
Decriminalising drugs has been seen by many to have been a positive policy change in Portugal, is it just being done differently? Are there other externalities at play, like the opiod issue being much larger in the US, and states not minding foisting their homelessness problem on CA?
1. San Francisco is a city that approximately zero people can afford to buy hosing in.
2. The weather in coastal California is mild compared to the rest of the country
3. The drug laws in California are more liberal (both in theory and in practice) than most of the rest of the country
4. The drug laws in San Francisco are more liberal (both in theory and in practice) than most of the rest of California.
5. It's not just drug laws that were de-facto liberalized in San Francisco, it's most non-violent crimes, including petty theft and shop-lifting.
So if you want to steal lots of low volume items to buy drugs to shoot up and live on the street, this is the city for you. The city hasn't crashed under the weight of this because (due to the approximately in #1) there are enough wealthy people living their and paying taxes to fund a lot of these programs.
There are, of course, lots of other reasons why the bay area has issues (e.g. There are many small cities across nine counties, so any central planning is difficult).
The closest I can think of for Portugal might be "What if Faro, while in the middle of a real-estate boom, significantly liberalized its drug laws and a large fraction of the drug addicts from points west of Austria relocated there"
Realistically, people single out San Francisco because it's hip to do so. It's easy to point to SF and say it's failed. Because of progressive politics, because of gentrification or whatever else you want to say.
But the actual problem is endemic. It's an issue in almost every city across the US, from Seattle to New York. From red states to blue states. Even here in Austin we have a large portion of homeless people and homeless camps that shuffle around as the laws shift and change.
The problems started years ago, it's only recently that they became more visible because class stratification is getting worse. Not only that, but there's a strong tendency among cities to simply 'solve' this problem by buying homeless people bus tickets and shipping them off to cities in fairer climates. The actual solution to this problem is a federal one, understanding that our safety nets and healthcare systems are ineffectual for a large portion of our society but even then that would take decades to take effect.
Cities like San Francisco have looked at the homeless crisis and our decades of failed policies and are trying to actually solve the problem.
Unfortunately, it ia a national problem and attempts at creating better tools to solve the problems in specific areas mean that those areas naturally experience immigration of those in need of those tools.
So while the types of approaches to homelessness that San Francisco have adopted are better for actually helping the homeless, they come with negative effects for the residents.
I am sickened by the people effectively saying ”haha sucker" while they offload their people in need on San Francisco.
I do have sympathy for the residents of San Francisco who are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They want to help solve the problem but are being put in a untenable position.
This article is low on solutions besides ”arrest drug addicts so they get sober in prison" and "forcibly place mentaly ill homeless in institutions". These solutions don't help the target long term, but what they do accomplish is making life more difficult and driving the targeted population towards friendlier cities. This is just the same BS policy of not helping and competing to make life as misey as possible so these people go away.
This does not just apply to SF. The same problems exist in many left leaning cities like PDX.
The far left cannot solve these problems (nor can the far right) because they are inherently reactionary. We need more middle-ground moderates in charge.
Calling San Francisco a "failed city" is like calling Tesla a "failed company."
It has been wildly, ridiculously successful over a short period of time (in the grand scheme of things), and has hit a recent rough spot. That doesn't make it a "failed city" by any stretch.
I thought I was pretty liberal but the section of this article about the school board is astounding.
>> One night in 2021, the meeting lasted seven hours, one of which was devoted to making sure a man named Seth Brenzel stayed off the parent committee.
>> Brenzel is a music teacher, and at the time he and his husband had a child in public school. Eight seats on the committee were open, and Brenzel was unanimously recommended by the other committee members. But there was a problem: Brenzel is white.
>> “My name’s Mari,” one attendee said. “I’m an openly queer parent of color that uses they/them pronouns.” They noted that the parent committee was already too white (out of 10 sitting members, three were white). This was “really, really problematic,” they said. “I bet there are parents that we can find that are of color and that also are queer … QTPOC voices need to be led first before white queer voices.”
Diversity on the board is a great idea but denying perfectly qualified people the role because they don't meet a laundry list of criteria (criteria they can't change) is mad.
That part struck me too, but especially the part about using "intersectionality" as a weapon. I put the word in quotes because I want to highlight that it's the use of the word rather than the concept that offends. AIUI the whole idea of intersectionality is to recognize that even someone who's privileged in one way might be deprivileged in another, and vice versa. It's supposed to be inclusive. Using it as a trump card (pun/insult very much intended) to exclude others or shut down conversation seems abusive.
To be honest - the only way I've seen intersectionality used - was as a way to divide not unite, essentially as a weapon.
Broadly with intersectionality in practice that I've seen is its used to divide people into ever smaller groups, sliced up by their differences - it can make it incredibly hard to get people grouped into rational communities of interests, who can work together to fix problems.
As a concept, it shouldn't divide it should instead allow people to acknowledge that everyone is not at the relative same privilege level, and that we need to be aware of hidden disadvantages, but humans being like we are, it never seems to work out that way outside of academic discourse.
This is a broader problem with concepts for academic discourse making it into the broader world, without the intense educational background, they turn into a form of either buzzword or checkbox compliance.
Except that even "privilege level" as such is not a concept from academic discourse. It's a concept from Maoist discourse-- in its original form of "bourgeois privilege", which applied to such elite things as being basically literate-- which got picked up by academics; and largely bourgeois, privileged academics at that.
It's not an entirely harmful way of thinking - a bunch of us have hidden disabilities, and forcing people to think about it, is broadly, helpful.
I don't think its useful for determining public policy, in general practice intersectionality is harmful to minority groups because it makes our pool to form a community of interest out of smaller.
The problem isn’t the people, it’s the very concept of a school board.
I could go on all day about the Xtian school boards I grew up under. Athiests, Jews, non-whites not welcome. That’s still the norm in a majority of America.
I think what makes the progressive blend of discrimination so much worse is that they do what they do in the name of not being discriminatory. It's just so disgusting to me to call yourself "antiracist" and then quite literally discriminate based on race. It also just seems like a massive waste of effort - what does this accomplish? How does it help anyone?
Because it's not real antiracism. True "progressives" have practically never cared about marginalized races by and large, that sort of concern has most frequently been either religious or (quite rarely) broadly humanitarian/humanist in nature. The only concern of political radicals is power itself.
I have similar struggles with affirmative action as well. At least I understand the logic there that creating critical mass of URMs will make things for them more comfortable. The focus on rave leaves a bitter taste in my mouth though, but I also understand that there are issues with the,ore intuitive to me, goal of going straight to colorblindness.
>It's just so disgusting to me to call yourself "antiracist" and then quite literally discriminate based on race.
Interestingly enough, the concept of anti-racist (despite the way it sounds) is racism by definition. I think some people use a different definition of racism to make this not be the case, but if you list out "anti-racist" policies you'll see they all contain racial discrimination in them.
Sickening. Twisting normality like that has always ended up in annihilation as reality has proven to be quite immutable. Problem is that the process is quite slow in human-lifespan term so such people have to be endured for a while.
Liberal "diversity" is skin deep. And as long as everything under the skin thinks and acts just like a white "woke" businessman, then it can be business as usual.
A few years ago, we had our first black President, Obama. He was quite open about governing like a 1980s moderate conservative. Black President Reagan. That's the diversity we have today. Thanks, liberals!
It's just so easy to use diversity as a weapon. That's exactly how righteousness was used in history. Why bother trying to be objective or build consensus when you can call upon morality to quash your components? Students in elementary school beat their principals to death in 1960s in China? It was the morally the right thing to do. Intellectuals were the most counter revolutionary, right? Killing millions of people in Cambodia? Of course it was the right thing to do. Those damn people were counter revolutionary, right? Killing locals and toppling government in Bolivia? Of course it was the right thing to do, right? The Bolivian bourgeoisies were oppressors after all and the suffering I saw justified my action, right? Raiding millions of homes in China? Of course it was the right thing to do. Capitalism was the root of all evil, and property owners were the worst, no?
What the liberals in SF have been doing is no different. The moral high ground is simply intersectionality, whatever that is.
"Americans always do the right thing after exhausting all other options."
I lived in the Bay Area from 1999 to 2014. I didn't leave because of crime or homelessness; I just got bored and wanted a change of scenery. Every few years I visit.
And every time I visit, I can't believe what I see in terms of the increase of the homeless, tent cities, drug use.
But the place I live now has also changed radically in the same ways in the same timeframe, just on a smaller scale. And this place is considerably less liberal than San Francisco.
I don't think the whole "left/right" fight covers it, and prevents progress by distracting us from the underlying, difficult issues. There's almost certainly at least one more axis here that we're not considering.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadI can’t stop thinking about how long he lay there, dead, on that corner, and how normal this was in our putatively gentle city. San Franciscans are careful to use language that centers people’s humanity—you don’t say “a homeless person”; you say “someone experiencing homelessness”—and yet we live in a city where many of those people die on the sidewalk.”
Makes you think…
>you don’t say “a homeless person”; you say “someone experiencing homelessness”
This is San Francisco's version of "thoughts and prayers." I suppose it would be better for overall humanity if we still called them "bums," but actually did something to help them.
Given the results of SF, the actions say, “fuck poor people” while the words are the opposite.
What part of that seems inhumane?
Instead, sf has one of the most well funded social networks in the country. And they tried to take an innovative approach on policing, one that would not disportionately target poor people or people of a certain race.
The remaining solutions are essentially to forcibly remove people from the streets, and revert to the standard American policing playbook. At least, those are the tools traditionally used to clean up these problems in other parts of the country.
So, it's a comment that sounds nice but isn't actually true. Sf was taking actions. And now, as of last night, the citizenry are also taking action (by recalling the DA)
Solution is to build more housing. This, however, cuts against two powerful San Francisco voting blocs, and the source of its problems: homeowners and entrenched subsidized renters.
I'm a yimby fwiw, but as new york has shown you can have both density and an affordability issue—density isn't a a cure-all.
And what's perhaps most annoying is that certain minority activist groups also actively block new development. The mission hasn't been developed much, but it's not for lack of trying.
Yeah, we have been there, tried that and it was a disaster.
More housing might be the answer, but more public housing projects is definitely not the answer.
> but more public housing projects
Who brought this up, other than you?
Sorry, but it’s my hope we actually learn from our mistakes.
You can make quick wins on small problems while working on big problems. However, if you are spending most of your time and money on small or trivial problems while your house burns down, you have a priority issue.
Do you have a way of fix the homelessness issues in San Francisco that the city has overlooked because it was too hard? I've thought about the problem a lot, I never came up with obvious solutions that didn't obviously end up with removing liberties from minorities or homeless (might fly in other parts of the country/state but not sf, until recently).
A couple realistic policies are:
First and foremost is addressing the affordability crisis. Roll back zoning regulations. Allow smaller housing spaces, reduce building costs, and streamline the building approval process.
Crack down on drug dealing and theft. These issues perpetuate and feed into the homelessness problem.
A less realistic possibility that would be dead on arrival is converting some of the copious green spaces in SF into low income housing units. Converting half of the presidio of GG park to SROs and RV camping would drastically improve the stable housing options for homeless.
Some people see that as humane. I think SF has rebuked the idea. Still, I don't know that fixing theft and drug dealing is enough to fix tent cities.
And the affordability crisis is also equally unclear. It's easy as an outsider to say "make things more affordable, build more!" but it also requires ignoring a set of stakeholders' wishes and desires in favour of someone who might have less basis in the city.
Who is more entitled to a discussion about what gets built: someone who has lived in the city for 40 years, or someone who just arrived to work, or someone who lives in the city but without a home? What about the peole who own property and pay taxes, but can't legally vote? a
There's lots to consider here.
Disagree that the proposals would work, or disagree that they want execute them?
I agree that there are complex stakeholders for issues like building more homes, but I think that underscores my point.
It is not that this solution to homelessness is unknown or impossible, it is that people generally don't like it and don't want to do it!
uhh how about we start with ugly things like parking lots and urban freeways rather than destroying the priceless parks that make san Francisco beautiful and materially wealthy?
There is no “presidio of GG park”; Golden Gate Park (a city park, and the third most visited urban park in the US) and the Presidio of San Francisco (a national park on the grounds of a former Spanish, then Mexican, then US military base) are different things.
Converting the Presidio is outside of San Francisco’s scope of legal options, converting half of GG park to low-cost housing is legally possible for the city, but fiscally dubious.
Unfortunately the same people who will chastise you about your insensitive language will also vote down every housing project.
Unless they own their homes or lucked into a rent controlled unit that isn't a dump then they are probably very much NOT FINE.
Unfortunarely, absent the same level of income I cannot make those choices, even with perfect or near perfect information.
Or they live with their family, who are loving and supportive, but also encourage them to go out a bit so their housemates have privacy, so they'd run into someone like me at Red Rock or whatever.
I don't think folks understand that the bay has a lot of rental protections not present in other places. (Eg someone can't just suddenly decide not renew a lease, etc)
HN folks focus in a bit too much on rent control, I found a blog detailing some of the other protections (though it's quite obviously an ad for a particular firm):
https://www.tobenerlaw.com/san-francisco-just-cause-eviction...
Since it has worked so well for the rich, you'd think socialism for all would get a better write up. But apparently poor americans getting universal healthcare is an unaffordable catastrophe and harbinger of the apocalypse.
The much more obvious conclusion here is that socialism for the rich has insulated them from the consequences of their actions and has led to even worse behavior. Any reasonable person would conclude that socialism for the rich has been a catastrophic failure and should be done away with rather than expanded across society.
It's socialism, just as other forms of government. Nobles vs peasants. Is there a head of state that doesn't live in a palace?
It's the failed, self serving, and corrupt program of "Trickle Down Economics" that's been used by Republicans and Democrats since the Reagan era in one form or another. It brings in the donor classes and benefits the wealthy, all of whom happen to be our politicians. It was BS when it was sold to the American people then and it's BS now.
The government is meant to promote opportunities for all, promoting the rich is not socialism. Not to mention that socialism originally meant social ownership, that's also not something people want. People just want opportunities.
And welfare for the rich and for the poor are two very different things
The rich will still be just fine after their assets crash with or without welfare for the rich, although they may lose some power - all this socialism is about assets far above any reasonable survival line - it's all about disposable income and assets.
Socialism for all is ensuring everyone has basic needs to function in a modern society - food, housing, healthcare, education. Above that line of basic functioning and nondisposable income, it should be up to the individual.
There is no rational reason to assume universal healthcare is going to work here just because the bailouts did. Apples and oranges, really.
A lot of the fear of universal healthcare in the USA is because the voters think people like the progressives in charge of SF will run the program into the ground. I personally am not opposed to universal healthcare paid by the government, but I'm pretty skeptical our current political leaders would device a system that actually works better than what we have.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of Americans who believe that not prosecuting people for stealing is part of socialism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeles...
Really depends on how each country is counting.
"...making the citizens of our city miserable in service of an ideology that made sense everywhere but in reality"
Brother, wait until you find out that Trumpism and Wokism are not the only ways to run a government.
But they certainly have drug and poverty problems too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
> "...making the citizens of our city miserable in service of an ideology that made sense everywhere but in reality"
It should be the motto of more than just those cities. I think people often get blinkered by ideologies that are "satisfyingly simple" and fall into a kind of "ideology-X realism" trap, where they confuse the ideological formulations for reality, and so stop paying attention to actual reality.
You see the same thing lot with "econ 101" style thinking that omits the rough edges and complexity of reality to make a "free market" ideological program feel silky-smooth and perfect.
I think a lot of people ignore the realities of progressive policies, because to them, progressive policy means fighting systemic racism/sexism/etc. It doesn't have to work - all that matters is the intention. And you can't even argue, because then you're just a racist/sexist/etc, because who else would argue against them?
The original comment and your response seems to react to what some academics call “complex systems”—people and preferences (in this case).
If I’m reading this response correctly, there is a charge that simple models are being applied to complex systems. And some peoples don’t like the outcomes. (I have to be careful here myself, making such a simple statement lest I go from the pan into the fire-—I recognize some people who “don’t like outcomes” are fighting for social recognition and civil rights).
Back to my point…the definition of ‘ideology’ which I find useful comes from Peter Sloterdijk's 1983 book, “Critique of Cynical Reason” where he explored the rationale of cynicism and social discontent.
Sloterdijk describes the difficulty of an argument with someone intent on lying to you. Take that a step further. Its an order of magnitude more difficult to find agreement with someone who has a false belief (ie. a witness to an event who has a false belief because of a unconscious bias). Finally, he defines “ideology” as an personal and internal idea—unexpressed—of how the world works.
In the above example of a queer woman of color objecting to the appointment of a queer white person, that’s not an internal and unexpressed personal belief driving their argument. Her argument is right there in the open.
The first one is impossible problem and the second one is a complex problem.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system
[2]: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Critique_of_Cynical_Rea...
You also agree with other people down the thread to "look outside the US". Well, there are cities and countries with real progressive ideals that are operating quite well for their citizens.
I believe reforms to better care for the homeless and the addicted, to provide better social safety nets, requires a host of changes and may need to be done at a scale higher than a city.
That all said, it does seem SF has fucked up in ways that need backed out or tried a different way.
"But people addicted to drugs come from all over the country in part for the services San Francisco provides."
So, because other cities are tough on drugs (including the famous "three strikes" laws where you can receive a life sentence if you get caught with drugs three times), and San Francisco treats drug addicts more humanely, drug addicts from all over the US tend to migrate to San Francisco. Making the citizens of the city miserable. Hmmm...
(But within the state, San Francisco County is indeed perhaps the laxest with regards to sentencing.)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
The article was written back in ~2016~(the end of 2017),it really needs to be revisited, but the sentiment of "go to where there are services for your problem" does indeed exist.
Why are we taking the police narrative at face value? It’s usually not correct.
The officers choosing to do nothing are guaranteeing a given outcome with inaction.
This happens all the time. If you're an alcoholic no doctor is going to give you a liver transplant.
I personally know several dentists who will not work with meth addicts because they feel it's unethical to take money to fix someone's teeth when they know full well that person is just going to destroy them in short order.
I guess we’ll find out.
Assuming that there are legitimate grounds for arrest, this is what it means for police not to do their jobs. AFAIK, there is no "aw, what's the use, anyway?" exception.
Did they quit? If they are still recieving a paycheck then it is quite literally still their job.
Instead of doing their job, the police decided to try to do the DA’s job, which is deciding which cases should be prosecuted.
But if they are doing the rest of their job, but not arresting people for crimes the DA won't charge, that is doing their full job.
‘Keep the streets safe!’ ‘Stop scaring people away by standing around all the time when there is no trouble!’ ‘Enforce the law!’ ‘Don’t arrest grandma because she was driving drunk, you’re scaring the old people’
They pragmatically have to pick and choose what to do based on what actually works. If the DA won’t prosecute something, arresting someone for it is just a bunch of paperwork, time, and effort that doesn’t accomplish anything most of the time, so will get deprioritized.
If the police were refusing to do their jobs, ultimately it would be the city council held to account, and you’d see rather different types of political pressure being applied.
It seems instead that folks want a different DA.
How we got there and whatever finger pointing was happening and if it was justified is of course part of the debate we’re having.
It’s called discretion. It’s also used to not arrest someone who may technically have committed a crime, but for when it would be a injustice/unfair/politically untenable to arrest them for it.
It’s not supposed to be abused of course, but people are people. It would be impossible and undesirable for them to no have it however, in real life. You’d end up with the worst of Barney fife type behavior at the best.
Yet the stats tell a different story as prosecution rates don't back that up.
So what actually happened is that the cops aggressively campaigned against this DA and then threw a hissy fit when the DA won and decided to stop doing their jobs and blame the DA for it.
A friend of mine recently (lives in SF) had a mentally ill, homeless man try to set his dog on fire. Literally took out a lighter and tried to light him on fire while they were standing at a bus stop.
When called, the police did the right procedural things, but noted that since the animal had not been killed, it was unlikely any charges would likely be persued by the DA. They offered to call animal control however if he wanted, which they did.
The animal control officer related a recent situation where a mentally ill homeless man had picked up a small dog being walked by it’s owner, and had smashed it into a wall repeatedly. The dog needed to be euthanized. The DAs office declined to prosecute.
Theft and property damage has skyrocketed in SF recently as well. So that prosecutions stay flat doesn’t tell the proper story.
The DA in SF has always in recent memory been this way - it isn’t JUST Chesea, but boy does he seem to be a good example.
That said, don't give the police a pass here. They have been actively hostile to the DA and spent a lot of money opposing this election. Their attempts to pass the buck to the DA for their failure to make arrests is a talking point that is part of their opposition to the DA. While the DA shares some blame for the rising property crime rates, the police share some blame for the lowered prosecution and conviction rates since the DA is dependent on the police to bring them strong, winnable cases.
In reality, I think that both the DA and the police should be held to account for letting politics interfere with their ability to work together to solve issues that are their joint responsibility and require cooperation. Unfortunately, it is harder to hold the police accountable than the DA.
> When called, the police did the right procedural things, but noted that since the animal had not been killed, it was unlikely any charges would likely be persued by the DA.
Did they arrest the attacker, gather sufficient evidence and refer the case to a prosecutor? Or did they assume the case wouldn't be prosecuted because that assumption made their job easier?
So instead of doing their job, they tried to do the DA's job instead. If they had still made the effort, but warned you it was likely to go nowhere, that would be entirely reasonable. They had justification to arrest the individual and try to get them connected with mental health services even if the DA declined to prosecute.
Instead, the police showed up and blamed someone else for why they wouldn't do their jobs.
None of this is to defend the choices the DA made about prosecution, but those choices don't absolve the police of the responsibility to do their jobs.
But they don’t do that, because maybe they really are lazy assholes.
(Sorry if this is not obvious sarcasm. To be sure, I think a city where residents try not to make eye-contact with the man possibly dying in the street is a failed city, it seems the solutions on the other end of the spectrum are tragic as well. Is the middle-solution going back to pre-Reagan mental hospitals?)
I convinced there are economic benfits (not just moral ones) of helping these people. The problem is that cities that work to help end up having the economic benefits stolen by cities that offload thier people in need on others. There is a sort of "prisoners dilema” game theory problem here that I think can only be solved at the national level.
The moral question of giving them a chance to recover even though it is unlikely to succeed still remains.
If you think drugs aren't available in jails, I have a bridge to sell you. The effectiveness of jail time on drug cessation is marginal at best. We need better options.
> Economically speaking, most of these people will never be productive members of society again no matter how many resources we throw at them.
This is an incredibly strong statement for which I know no evidence exists because we have never tried. Additionally, the bar for productive member of society is fairly low and is not the only goal. Simply getting some people into a stable, semi-functional state can improve their lives and reduce the long term state costs.
> Fentanyl destroys your mind fairly quickly.
I know an individual with significant brain damage resulting in severely impaired mental functioning who is a productive member of society. He does require ongoing support from the state and can't live independently, but does have a job and does contribute some back to society.
I doubt we will see 100% recovery rates in our lifetimes, but don't be so quick to write people off before we even try.
Practically speaking, drug use and living on the street form a vicious cycle. Each increases the likelihood and severity of the other.
They are available, just much harder to get.
> This is an incredibly strong statement for which I know no evidence exists because we have never tried.
This is from my own heartbreaking experiences. Once you get down that path, your chances of coming back are very slim even with lots of help. "Productive" means able to get a job at McDonalds or a grocery store, both of which are desperate for people but neither of which would consider the guy at the homeless encampment next door. It just isn't going to end well.
> I know an individual with significant brain damage resulting in severely impaired mental functioning who is a productive member of society. He does require ongoing support from the state and can't live independently, but does have a job and does contribute some back to society.
Not the same thing at all. If the individual you know is coasting down Highway 99 on a shopping cart while having a very bad Fentanyl trip, then I guess they are similar? These people are gone in a way that someone with brain damage isn't.
> I doubt we will see 100% recovery rates in our lifetimes, but don't be so quick to write people off before we even try.
We are trying it right now. We have a whole homelessness industrial complex that has sprung up to collect and spend massive amounts of resources on trying to help these people ($100k/year/person is actually an underestimate). They aren't making progress, perhaps intentionally (so they can continue collecting the money) but probably because progress can't be had here. It might be better just to cut our losses and focus on making sure people don't fall into the homeless/drug abuse trap at all, because once there coming back is really really hard.
> Practically speaking, drug use and living on the street form a vicious cycle. Each increases the likelihood and severity of the other.
Yes.
Which seems like a huge part of the problem to me. We need better reintegration paths that make the climb back easier.
> These people are gone in a way that someone with brain damage isn't.
I don't know what you mean. It's harder to be gone than severe brain damage. It took several dedicated foster families and ongoing support from social workers to get him to the point he is at. He has a job, but he can't function independently and didn't find it on his own.
Severe drug addiction does have different challenges, but the possibility of reaching a stable, productive place is always possible.
> It might be better just to cut our losses and focus on making sure people don't fall into the homeless/drug abuse trap at all, because once there coming back is really really hard.
You are absolutely correct about the second part. Providing support for those on the edge is the most effective way to reduce homelessness. The longer you are on the street and the worse conditions you are living in, the harder it is to climb back out.
However, I think that writing off people is a mistake in the long run. If you let the problem fester, it gets worse and costs more to deal with.
> We have a whole homelessness industrial complex that has sprung up to collect and spend massive amounts of resources on trying to help these people ($100k/year/person is actually an underestimate). They aren't making progress, perhaps intentionally (so they can continue collecting the money)
There is a problem here, but I'd also be cautious to paint the whole industry with such broad a strokes as there are some very dedicated, selfless people working in that field. Unfortunately, I think those are the people who are more likely to burn out and leave when they see poor results (I've known a several who have gone this route.) This leaves the less scrupulous / caring to lead the industry.
I think those poor results there are due to structural problems around housing access, affordability, the path back to employability and the mental health system that we need to solve on a much larger scale. Only the can we start seeing significant progress at the smaller scales that these organizations work at.
And the new DA should likewise be judged. District Attorney is at its core a political job, and being able to win over/beat an antagonistic bureaucracy is one of the requirements.
It's the same thing they do everywhere else. Here in Austin the police do absolutely nothing even when you have hard evidence of someone committing a crime, partially because the police union's realized they could use 'doing nothing' as a bargaining chip for larger budgets. It's maddening that you can simply not do the job you're paid to do and use that as a way to get paid more.
Is it as bad as I see online? 10-15 years ago I would have loved to live in SF, work for a startup etc. and all I heard were good things about the city. There was a homelessness problem but I didn't hear much more than that.
Now it sounds like a hell hole. Crime seems to be the main issue and I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable visiting as a tourist never mind living there.
Is my perspective skewed by the sources I'm reading or have things really deteriorated to that extent?
Back in 2014 you had a mesh of artistic and tech. This lead to a great social scene.
Now the artists were priced out and they moved to Oakland. The SF tech workers left in droves. What’s left is the homeless and crime.
Much of the city still hasn’t recovered from covid. Soma and fidi are in shambles. Feels like only 1 out of every 4 places is still in business.
However Silicon Valley (San Mateo & Santa Clara county), San Jose, and east bay are all thriving relative to their past
This is the main part of the problem to me. There's nothing even remotely interesting going on in that city's culture. The entire city is split between people who can afford a 2-million-dollar house, retirees, and people who sleep on the street.
Crime is about the same. When I moved to SF in '98 the very first thing that happened to me was my bicycle got stolen, and my convertible car got its top slashed so many times that I started leaving the doors unlocked, at which point people started sleeping in my car, so I sold it.
Violent crime is actually much lower but that's a long-term trend.
IMHO the problems with that city all stem from the inequality caused by the housing crisis. It drives property crime and it's the reason the city is intensely boring.
It’s still 3k for a 1 bedroom, so I’m assuming there are still some tech workers left
A 1 bedroom apartment in SF has been ~3k for half a decade now. With inflation this means effective price was lowered.
Nah. SoMa is exactly the same as it always was, fidi is just quiet but otherwise also unchanged.
Are car break ins relatively common in San Mateo and Santa Clara?
Violent crime / theft happens - but not at a noticeably different rate than other large cities.
Still the most beautiful city in the US (imo) and the natural beauty 30 min outside the city in any direction is insane.
- Well, no, this is NOT normal. these are the points of a failed city.
SF will likely have tax rev shortfalls this year, and their reserves were already tapped into. The surrounding communities however are much more fiscally conservative with large reserves still in tact.
That's an anecdote I guess but according to SFPD's own stats violent crime hit an all-time low in 2020 and was the same in 2021 and up only slightly in the first 5 months of 2022.
All my SF network stopped calling the police when crime happened. That includes violent crime such as street fights.
I was walking in SF and saw a guy holding a machete. He looked at me and said “don’t worry I’m not going to hurt you.” He then pointed down the street and said, “This is for him”. I called the SFPD and they never showed up. Later on a death was reported.
That told me all I needed to know about SFPD. you dont rely on them.
A peer once told me if you want the SFPD to show up, state you have a weapon and will use it in a public setting if necessary in defense of your life as the law permits.
I couldn't imagine living in a place like that, let alone having kids grow up there.
Some level of crime happens in most large cities, but if it became 'normal' something is extremely wrong. It does not have to be like this.
I can go months in Boston without seeing a single homeless person, drive around all winter with all my skiing gear in the back of my car, hell even leave my car unlocked with my laptop in it while running into a store, and never once seen a robbery or violent attack.
No, what happens in SF is extremely disproportionate to normal around the rest of the US.
- there is homelessness, but also something expensive that I enjoy
- there is crime, but also something expensive that I enjoy
- there is open drug use, but also there is something expensive I enjoy
It seems like a 'let them eat cake' response. "Why doesn't everyone just spend the money I do so I don't have to see all these problems?"
I don’t go there anymore - too many drug addicts using drugs openly on the streets, people assaulted by mentally ill people.
Also, I will never/ever drive there in my car unless my destination has a gated/closed parking. Otherwise the car’s windows will be smashed.
Another anecdotal point: my sister just escaped a war in Ukraine. She is too afraid to go visit SF because it seems way too unsafe.
The homelessness (mentally ill), open drug use, and theft/vandalism are pretty draining.
I lived for a long time in Cambridge/Boston and very, very rarely had any similar experience.
-2c in MA is not (and it's often far colder than that)
So forward to more modern times, Gay-everything in your face at every corner, obvious hard core drug abuse on the sidewalks, yet world-class views, architecture, food and steady tourism made the city go.. No overview is complete without mentioning that the quiet side of San Francisco is the Chinese-American community. The highest density of ethnic chinese population in the USA. Aside from Mayor Ed Lee dying of a heart attack in office, you just don't see many obvious attention-getting events with the SF chinese population overall.
The cost of living, the excess of all kinds, the reliable income, all came to a grinding car-crash result with covid-19. The balance on the street of healthy daily people versus dying-in-front-of-you, was lost. The ability of individuals of lots of non-dot-com people, to cope with expenses, was lost. Tourism dollars ceased. Restaurants closed. Of course it is a train-wreck. It really is a train-wreck, with nowhere to hide. Yet "billionaire-in-training" dot-com'ers and Bloomberg employees and 23andMe people and whatnow, glide through on a levitation walkway made of money. As others have said, some people are so well insulated from the consequences of these changes that there is no incentive.. in fact a badge of membership to overlook and ignore it seems.. no "community" .. the literally-insane people at Mozilla have indeed changed the world, and they can step over the bodies to get to their electric BMWs in the secure parking lot to move through it.
Alita Battle Angel, the movie, is almost exactly how San Francisco feels.
There are actually 2 cities. San Francisco, the tech town, is booming like crazy. New highrises and shiny skyscrapers are coming online almost every month. Areas that were barren wastelands when I moved here in 2015 are now bustling with new construction, street level businesses, full of upper middle class rich people running to and fro enjoying their lives.
The skyscrapers are fast encroaching on the other San Francisco, the poor and troubled city. They’re squeezing homeless people, drug addicts, etc into a smaller and smaller area. In some neighborhoods the concentration of shanty towns and “bad elements” is so high it looks and feels like a slum. Because that’s what it is.
Look at the actual numbers though and, at least officially, it’s not that bad. A city of ~800,000 residents has ~8,000 people living on the streets[1]. Around 1%, same as the ratio for USA as a whole with 580,000 homeless people[2].
What has changed during the pandemic is that these homeless people became more visible because while the upper middle class retreated into working from home. Now that people are coming back to the office, the city is again filling with commuters and the “undesirables” are slowly retreating back to wherever they were hiding before.
As others have said, lots of downtown businesses shut down due to lack of foot traffic. Because few people actually live downtown. Hopefully that gets restored as commuters come back.
Another way to sum up San Francisco is that seeing a person shooting up on the street is normal and seeing a Tesla is about as remarkable as a Toyota Corolla.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/New-data-shows-fewer-...
[2] https://theweek.com/briefing/1013082/living-on-the-streets
I think your comment can teach an important lesson in statistics. Without proper segmentation, totals and averages and medians can obscure real and important results. (This is only one part of the general "garbage in garbage out" data-quality problem BTW.) If the arbitrary political boundary that defines "San Francisco" were changed so that it actually became two cities, it would be abundantly clear that one of them has severe problems and it would probably qualify for all sorts of state/federal assistance that the current aggregate does not.
Utopia? More like a Cyberpunk Dystopia...
> Look at the actual numbers though and, at least officially, it’s not that bad. A city of ~800,000 residents has ~8,000 people living on the streets[1]. Around 1%, same as the ratio for USA as a whole with 580,000 homeless people[2].
1% of the US would be around 3 Million people...
I think that depends where you land. San Francisco is in the top 10 cities in the world for “billionaires per capita”. SFBA as a whole takes the cake if I remember correctly.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2022/04/05/where-t...
> 1% of the US would be around 3 Million people...
You are right, I decimal’d wrong. USA as a whole is 0.2% homeless
"dystopia: an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice"
That doesn't preclude rich people. In fact having rich people help with the contrast, like in the article where a human beings body rotted on the sidewalk for a day outside a 5 million dollar home.
When you get down to the street level and actually talk with some of the people out here, you realize that they are people too. There’s a lot of humanity missing from the discussions about SF.
Things might be dirty or smelly or even unsafe in particular areas, but I wouldn’t trade living here for anywhere else. And I’ve lived in a lot of places.
These are the long term trends I've seen in my lifetime (50 years, nonresident but visited ~5 times):
- dotcom/SV pricing out almost everyone else
- leading to, unsurprisingly a homeless crisis
- also worsening the property value NIMBYism continuing to exacerbate the housing crisis
- the dystopian culture destruction effects of a host of services designed for apartment shutins built in-town or south of town
- finally, a host of policy failures enacted due to excessive virtue signalling and a social left wing gone rampant, although actually this is political paralysis of various NIMBY virtue signalers doing what they can to stop the undermining of their property values.
A lot of these are issues faced by other cities as well, hamstrung by two party deadlock at various levels of government.
Really?
> I’ve lived in a lot of places.
Really?
How much broken car window glass have you seen in SF, vs other cities? It’s easily the top for me, by far.
How many times have you personally seen someone shooting up on the sidewalk, or shitting on it, vs other cities? San Francisco takes the cake here vs any other city I’ve seen, in the US or abroad.
I cannot stand the majority of the current city government and I do think they are responsible for a lot of the issues in SF. SF was blessed by a huge economic boom. Normally this is a great thing for a region: more jobs and higher pay. But the board of support (BOS) has turned it into a nightmare by refusing to build housing. And the worst part is that the wrap their NIMBYism in a veil of smarmy self-righteousness, oblivious that they have ruined the city. When I was a kid, SF was a middle-class city. Now it’s a city of extremes. It’s still a great city, but it could be so much better.
I think crime and all problems are caused by drug epidemic. Or maybe because they kept schools closed for 2 years causing a lot of families to leave the city? Or maybe because they terrorized restaurants with COVID mandates cause less tourists and more restaurant closures? Or maybe because they closed street for car traffic causing less foot traffic in evenings? Or because BART is scary to ride so there less visitors from other parts of Bay Area? Or maybe just because offices got closed?
Not sure what is caused this but what I’m concerned that city leaders are doing absolutely nothing to fix issues. Thus all these recalls…
The city has gone down hill, no doubt. Rent increases have chased off my artsy friends, which is the primary reason I'm going to follow - I'm far less fond of greedy nerds than I am artists. San Francisco just isn't very interesting anymore.
Crime is really no worse than anywhere else - look at the stats, don't listen to the hyperventilating. Crime did weird things during COVID and still looks different than it used to. It is no more San Francisco-specific than inflation is US-specific.
That said, my local neighborhood has gone to hell - that's mostly a function of cops deciding to funnel campers on our street. (I'm not going to argue with people who claim the cops don't do this - they do and will admit it is "verbal policy", but only off the record.)
So yeah, on balance, I would not have moved back here today. But that is not because of crime or shit on the streets, it is because the town's character is mostly gone.
Anyone who thinks SF crime was the result of Chesea's policy needs to explain two things about Jacksonville, Florida: (1) why they're seeing murder spikes, and (2) why nobody is calling for their DA's head.
https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/news/crime/like-covid...
No. There's a weird concerted media push to just vilify the city recently. I don't know if it's new, very rich, residents who shudder at the sight of anything outside their sheltered worldview (like homeless people or people addicted to opioids on the streets, which probably was exacerbated by the pandemic), or if it is a political agenda like the post elsewhere in this thread talking about how bad "progressive cities" are (I wonder how progressive SF really is, given its policies around housing, zoning, taxing, political funds going to non-progressive groups like Grow SF nd Together SF, etc...).
It's expensive and that is certainly as bad as it ever has been, but if you're a social being, there's always stuff going on to do, and it is surrounded by beautiful natural features! Today, there are other great cities where you can work at a start up though, probably because of how expensive SF is.
I wouldn't say that shuddering at open drug use on the streets indicates a sheltered world view. In most major cities that is not a normal problem. I live in a much larger city than SF for example and, although you occasionally see people walk by who are high, the only open drug use I've seen anywhere in the city is weed. I've never seen someone shoot up, I never see used needles, and this includes in more deprived areas of the city. It's just not normal.
Why would you? I just said that addicts and homeless people are on the street. Before covid, there was, and still is, an opioid epidemic. It sucks how we got here and it sucks that it's where we're at and it sucks that nearly all levels of government have failed to address it properly. It sucks that while some people have the means to deal with it on their, a lot of people run out of options and end up on the street. I'm happy that where you live you don't have to see the effects of it, but despite your anecdata, it's still issue and it doesn't mean the people affected by it aren't normal in some way.
You put "progressive cities" in quotes here, but everyone knows SF as a progressive city because that's how it brands itself. I agree that SF is probably not as "progressive" as some will claim, given the massive wealth inequality (among other things), but to say it's a "political agenda" to brand SF as a progressive city is nonsense. Sure, people will use that sentiment to paint it in a bad light, but the leaders of SF very much want SF to be known as a progressive city.
Well, which is it?
but the leaders of SF very much want SF to be known as a progressive city.
This is beside the point, but whether a city is progressive or not is defined by its policies, who the people are voting out, etc., not by what people say about it.
To bring it back on topic, to point at SF and say "see, progressive cities are bad" (as people posting here) isn't really right because SF isn't as progressive as they claim.
If you want to explore who calls themselves progressive or not and compare the locales they run, you're on your own, because again, that's a different discussion.
Because either way, the fault seems to lie with progressive politicians, whether they are "real progressives" or not.
This sentence makes no sense. The only progressive politicians are real progressives, no? Why are you so intent on arbitrarily labeling people as something despite their actions? Or are you still stuck on this branding thing? Cause if so, I've got a bridge to sell you...
I am intent on illustrating my point that the leaders of SF have successfully labelled themselves as progressives so that the progressives that live there will vote for them. I get your point that they aren't really progressive, but people vote for them because they sell themselves as progressive.
I'm also not "stuck on this branding thing" - just because you disagree with me doesn't mean I'm dumb :)
Did you happen to see the results of yesterday's election?
Or when Breed defeated progressive challengers?
> Is my perspective skewed by the sources I'm reading or have things really deteriorated to that extent?
SF has always been a mess, for the entire decade I've been here. I used to walk to/from work along Mission. Over the last 10 years, things got a lot better - 16th/Mission was unsafe. Most of the mission used to literally smell like a toilet.
You couldn't walk between 5th and 7th along Market. I once watched a lady in a wheelchair chasing someone down the street. She was rolling as fast as she could with one hand, and holding a knife out in front of her with the other while the guy ran.
Crime was always an issue. The planters along the street with the trees used to be a prime place to drop used heroin needles. Like, you could occasionally stumble on a planter with 5-10 used hypodermic needs in it. On Market.
The mid-Mission and Capp area used to run thick with prostitutes.
I don't see nearly as much of this anymore. It got worse in the midst of COVID, but petered out. I think the quantity of all the above issues went down, but so did the population. As such, the albeit lower crime stands out more. And SF is such a transient city that the people complaining about it now (rightly, imo) didn't see how bad it was because they weren't here.
[edit] It's bad - but it's not any worse now than before. There's a lot of great reasons to live here too though! It's so pretty, great food, bars, activities, it's small, walkable, bikeable. I know a ton of folks here so it's kind of hard to leave now, heh.
I walked down Market back and forth from New Montgomery to Guerrero every day for work for many years. It is not true that there was some impassable section of Market. Most of the people out on the street were just normal people.
It is true though that there are now places you literally cannot walk down the street because the sidewalk encampments are so thickly settled that there's no space to pass. For example the west side of Folsom between 14th and 15th. They keep clearing the encampment but it just comes right back.
It is far from impossible to quantify quality of life using measures other than crime rates, but I'm not sure who still does that. I haven't personally been in San Francisco since 2007, but I do remember back then that world rankings of livable cities consistently included San Francisco as the only American city in the global top ten, so to drop from that lofty position to this perception of a post-apocalyptic hellhole is quite a contrast.
It does seem to me that the nature of the complaints don't seem unique to San Francisco. I've had my catalytic converter sawed off twice in the last five years, my car ransacked once, power tools taken from my garage, and gigantic homeless encampments are all over the place around me, in good old Dallas. My work office that I visit quarterly is in downtown San Antonio, and they have the same issues, too. Streets are overloaded with people wearing rags who haven't showered in ten years wandering out into the street and yelling at ghosts, sleeping in the doorways you have to step over to get into the building.
From the outside, it seems to me like residents of San Francisco are mostly pissed off that they're paying so much to live there, yet still experiencing all of the problems normally associated with poor neighborhoods in cities. Even that isn't unique to San Francisco, though, as city centers have becoming increasingly hip places to live. My neighborhood is not poor, and I don't think downtown San Antonio is poor, but rapidly increasing property values don't just eliminate all of the poor people if they live on the street. It only eliminates the low end of the buyer market, not extreme poverty.
In the approximately 3 years I lived there I saw a dramatic decline in the safety and cleanliness of the city. It's a shame because SF has the potential to be a beautiful place to live, offering a lot of unique benefits. There are few cities you can live in that have the proximity to nature offered by SF, with the variability you find in the landscape of Wine Country as well.
Now, I avoid even traveling there. While it's anecdotal, I had too many close calls to bad situations where I or my wife was followed, harassed, assaulted, etc. I have too many friends and colleagues who have also been assaulted or robbed. I really hope SF is able to enact policies that make sense, because the trend has only worsened.
1. The problems with crime and homelessness is not particularly worse than it was 11 years ago. When I first moved here my boss, an SF native, proudly told a story of being bit by a homeless guy on Market while protecting his date and getting tested for every disease. Many parts of the Mission, SOMA and Market used to be _worse_ before they gentrified. Today most people consider 6th street to be rough, but when I moved here, 6th street all the way 10th street was rough. The day I landed in SF I was told by multiple people not to leave items in the car or they would be broken into (again, this was in 2011).
2. What has changed is the media reception of San Francisco; drastically. During the Obama years there was no effort to paint any city as falling over to crime. I remember back in 2014 or so, there a guy who wrote a post complaining about having to step over poop on his way to work on Medium and he was practically exiled. Now the atlantic can post the same story without worry.
My own feelings are that San Francisco effectively priced out 20-somethings and all that's left is jaded 30-somethings who are tired of living in the city and are just sour grapes about it. Without the younger crowd to constantly defend how magical it is everyone is free to shit on the city. Anyone who's telling you about how much better San Jose/Mountain View/Palo Alto probably wouldn't have liked San Francisco 10 years ago either.
My ongoing gripe with the city isn't crime; it's housing. Almost everyone interesting, even in tech, who was working on getting their weird startup ideas off the ground can no longer do that in SF. Likewise the city is filled with spick and span elite school grads who work for FAANG but would have never considered Facebook over Deloitte 10 years ago. The cost of housing has made experimentation impossible.
As always, everything boils down to money. Rich SF is sublime. The rest, meh. Also, I only ran into ~crazed homeless in Mountain View (on Castro).
Personally seen this play out in Dubai, Hong Kong and Singapore for a long time. There's a huge contingent of knowledge workers who have no intent of putting down long term roots there. It's just somewhere to extract wealth from with high paying jobs and housing costs are simply another acceptable tax on that.
Stay a decade, make bank, move somewhere where you can work at leisure. Isn't that the dream?
And rich white tech bros complaining about crime and homelessness from their ivory tower is disgusting. You're so detached from how humans actually live that you're threatened by just SEEING them, not even experiencing it.
It’s impossible to avoid. It’s worse and worsening. Pretending it’s not is the worst sort of self-deception.
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=b6fab72091...
NYC is a much bigger city, politically very liberal, and our politicians aren't exactly amazing, so what's different?
Or maybe NYC is just bigger and the crime happens further away from where you personally live? The feeling of safety is so subjective.
One thing could be that there are real neighborhoods where people live in the denser parts of the city. Our public schools (in Manhattan) are extremely good, so families do actually live there. AFAIK folks generally leave SF once they have kids.
Sf doesn’t have that much violent crime. It’s mostly theft or quality of life related.
Then you have a police force who are forced to release criminals due to chesa (DA).
Open drug use and pitching tents are not tolerated.
If you see a homeless person "in need of assistance" (their phrasing), you just call 311 and a team of people will come and deal with the "issue."
The same articles saying how rampant drug use is on public transit exist for Seattle, SF and NYC with the only difference being the city names.
This is appalling. What kind of morons are in this advocacy group? If you're going to talk him out of getting 'official' help the least you can do is help him yourself.
Same type of morons which "advised" people to not get to the hospital to get treated for COVID because the doctors will kill them, harvest their organs and send them to the aliens.
This world is filled with idiots.
The activist is right. The man did not have to get into the ambulance. He did have the right to refuse treatment. That is literally his right. He gets the decision on whether or not to get treatment for his injuries. The man then exercised those rights. Now, he may not have exercised them in a way you agreed with, or even in a way that was beneficial, but it was still his choice.
And there's good reason why the homeless don't trust police and other emergency services.
The fact that the man died a few months later is almost inconsequential. But it's tied into the story to make it seem like a correlation. The man refused treatment, therefore he died (a few months later a block away).
Why do you say the activists were "persuading" the homeless man, but the EMTs were "offering" care.
In the story itself, it says the EMTs were actively treating him. Not offering to treat him, just straight to it. No mention of them even asking if it was ok to treat him.
In the story itself, it also says the activists just told the man his options. Nothing in that story indicates they tried to convince him of one option or the other, only that he had them.
You're the one doing a waltz here trying to add things to the story as presented.
People walking down the street bleeding need help not a decision to make.
As someone who has walked down a street bleeding before, please do not try to take that choice away from me.
I have a feeling some of this story is missing. It is being presented to support a specific narrative rather than examined to see what can be learned from it.
How bad was the cut? Why was the person resistant ro recieving care? Where responders pressuring a resistant person to accept care or did the activists convince a compliant person to resist?
Reality is complicated and the nuance matters in situations like these.
Your attitude mirrors one that the article is criticizing, I think correctly:
> What happened to the man at the Safeway, what happened to Dustin Walker—these are parables of a sort of progressive-libertarian nihilism, of the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice.
That is a strawman argument. I don't know anyone who believes in a ”fundmental flaw” in imposing interventiom. There are with imposing it and one of those risks is that your intervention is not actually helpful. Historically, many of these interventions have beem harmful and intended to prevent society from having to see the suffering rather than eliminating it.
The current state of our mental health system (especially the affordable options) is pretty abysmal. If you want support for more imposed mental helthy interventions, you need to work with us to improve treatment options and facilities. I think if treatment options were better, you would find that the need to impose them would diminish.
The temerity of those EMTs to treat a homeless man, probably mentally ill, bleeding in the street, without obtaining his consent! How dare they!
> The temerity of those EMTs to treat a homeless man, probably mentally ill, bleeding in the street, without obtaining his consent!
Obtaining consent is literally part of the job and those EMTs absolutely have been trained in how to do it and when they don't have to. The borders can be complicated and aren't always drawn correctly IMHO, but that doesn't mean that the requirement to obtain consent before treating someone should be removed.
You're assuming they hadn't already offered to treat him and he said yes which is the most likely scenario.
>> In the story itself, it also says the activists just told the man his options. Nothing in that story indicates they tried to convince him of one option or the other, only that he had them.
He's a vulnerable person and they were offering him a bad option. They make the good option (treatment) sound risky just by suggesting he doesn't have to accept it. They did absolutely no good in this case.
You are using language to color the situation in a way that the only possible solution is the one you want to present. When we don't actually know the details of the event, just what the author presented. Like you keep referring to him as "a vulnerable person". Why? Simply because he's injured? Maybe the wound is superficial. We don't know. All we know is that the author's friend called 911. And the man wound up refusing care.
Maybe there was no "good" option or "bad" option here, just options.
I think you're hanging on the part of the story where the man winds up dead. Because that's what the author wants you to do, associate his death with his refusal of care in this instance.
But his death occurred at a much later time in a different place. The two events are only related by happening to the same guy.
And not to mention, you want to rob this man of all of his agency. The implication from you is that the man was not capable of making a rational decision about his own care. Take away this man's housing situation and are you this adamant about forcing care upon him?
> You're assuming they hadn't already offered to treat him and he said yes which is the most likely scenario.
Complete conjecture and is not supported by the story at all. You don't get to imagine what likely happened, draw conclusions based on that imagined scenario, then declare your conclusions correct. We were told what we were told. I could say that the most likely scenario is that the wound was superficial which is why he refused aid.
I made two mental notes. One, if I ever got to that point again, not to fail, and two, if I did try, definitely not to call 911. They aren't your friends.
The movie depiction of gently waking up in a sunshine filled private hospital room with your family there waiting for you to support you after a failed suicide attempt could not possibly be further from the truth. You wake up in literal HELL ON EARTH and immediately wish you had succeeded and regret calling 911.
This is exactly the kind of progressive-libertarianism the article is arguing against. As if we should tolerate suicides to avoid infringing on the rights of the suicidal.
And of course emergency services aren't your friends. They're supposed to prevent you from harm not be nice to you. It would be lovely if they could do both but interacting with unwell, pyschotic, sometimes violent people takes a major toll. There aren't many people who can do those jobs without compartmentalizing their emotions.
Treating someone with mental illness effectively requires compassion. If being put on a psychiatric hold is a unnecessarily traumatic experience, you prevent some short term harm while causing long term damage. Not only do you add additional trauma that complicates recovery but you teach those in need of help to hide their suffering as long as possible.
> There aren't many people who can do those jobs without compartmentalizing their emotions.
So let's pay them well and not overwork them while holding to high standards for how they treat the vulnerable people in their care.
> This is exactly the kind of progressive-libertarianism the article is arguing against. As if we should tolerate suicides to avoid infringing on the rights of the suicidal.
Not only are you misconstruing the point of the comment you are replying to, your response lacks a single drop of empathy for those affected, including the commentor who shared a painful and personal experience.
Please try to practice more empathy, it might help you think of better solutions rather than just defending decades-old failed policies that created our current crisis.
Mush-brained calls for empathy are a dime a dozen and they lead to failed policies, in SF and elsewhere.
Nowhere did I demand perfection, only improvement. Refusing to even try to improve because perfection is impossible is irrational.
> It's just too much to ask of doctors, nurses, and orderlies to be compassionate all the time. These people are human beings.
That does not mean that we shouldn't find ways to improve the system to allow more compassion to be displayed. The hours and workloads we place on these workers are a significant contributing factor. We have a large problem with burnout, especially among our lower tier healthcare providers.
> Mush-brained calls for empathy are a dime a dozen and they lead to failed policies, in SF and elsewhere.
Name calling isn't a very effective communication strategy and won't hide the fact that your argument is based on falsehoods and misrepresentation.
The ”failed policies” are the ones that created our drug and homelessness crises over that last several decades. The war on drugs is a failed policy, busing homeless is a failed policy, jailing drug addicts is a failed policy.
That isn't to say that the new policies don't have problems and won't fail, but we need better options that just sticking with the failed policies that created the problem in the first place.
Yes, I mostly agree. Fear of being treated poorly by the EMTs and firemen is not a reason to avoid calling 911. Even many police departments have been doing a much better job about making sure that their officers have a better training and mindset for calls involving mental health crises. There are still enough horror stories about police responses that I would evaluate the track record of your local department when deciding whether to be afraid of them when considering making that 911 call.
> It was the mental health infrastructure that was abysmal, not the first responders.
This was indeed the intended thrust of my comment. I think fixing the remaining issues with police training and attitude is a much smaller and less important problem than figuring out how to revamp, operate and fund our mental health system more effectively.
This is where you demanded perfection.
Empathy and compassion are not the only values and the result of treating them as such is negative.
There is no call for perfection there. Stop pretending nuance doesn't exist. A system that helps 75% and harms 25% is better than a system that helps 25% and harms 75%. Improving the system so that compassion and empathy are a larger part of the process helps bring us closer to the former than the later for the reasons I explained. You ignored those reasons, and instead tried to attack a strawman... again. If you want to convey your arguments effectively, you need to try to understand what the person you are arguing with is saying rather than insisting they are saying what you want to argue against.
> Empathy and compassion are not the only values and the result of treating them as such is negative.
Another strawman. Nobody ever said they were the only values, just that they are important ones, especially when trying to treat mental illness.
Are the problems? Yes - are some getting worse? Yes. We also are two years into a pandemic that has had an insane disruption on cities.
This story is as old as the city itself. Save yourself the bother and don't click.
That said thanks for your insightful comment.
The author describes in detail exactly how specific well-meaning politics have caused great harm by exacerbating the: Housing crisis Drug crisis Crime crisis Education crisis
The story is told with love and reverence and hope. It’s hope I don’t share, but I can appreciate it.
San Francisco is actually terrible. This article describes precisely how and why it went wrong. (And who’s trying to fix it)
https://brownstone.org/articles/was-it-the-pandemic-or-the-r...
It's a good step, but you'll have to excuse me if I have a hard time believing that the people who have voted for Nancy Pelosi every two years since before I was born actually will learn their lesson.
This is what I don't get. There are these politicians, across the board that don't seem to be well liked within their own party, but they win their election everytime. Either their state must really love them, or voting must be some sort of ritual where people just mark what they always have and go home.
And look, I get it. CA doesn't want a Republican and KY doesn't want a Democrat. Great, that doesn't mean you have to elect the same person every damn time.
Decriminalising drugs has been seen by many to have been a positive policy change in Portugal, is it just being done differently? Are there other externalities at play, like the opiod issue being much larger in the US, and states not minding foisting their homelessness problem on CA?
2. The weather in coastal California is mild compared to the rest of the country
3. The drug laws in California are more liberal (both in theory and in practice) than most of the rest of the country
4. The drug laws in San Francisco are more liberal (both in theory and in practice) than most of the rest of California.
5. It's not just drug laws that were de-facto liberalized in San Francisco, it's most non-violent crimes, including petty theft and shop-lifting.
So if you want to steal lots of low volume items to buy drugs to shoot up and live on the street, this is the city for you. The city hasn't crashed under the weight of this because (due to the approximately in #1) there are enough wealthy people living their and paying taxes to fund a lot of these programs.
There are, of course, lots of other reasons why the bay area has issues (e.g. There are many small cities across nine counties, so any central planning is difficult).
The closest I can think of for Portugal might be "What if Faro, while in the middle of a real-estate boom, significantly liberalized its drug laws and a large fraction of the drug addicts from points west of Austria relocated there"
But the actual problem is endemic. It's an issue in almost every city across the US, from Seattle to New York. From red states to blue states. Even here in Austin we have a large portion of homeless people and homeless camps that shuffle around as the laws shift and change.
The problems started years ago, it's only recently that they became more visible because class stratification is getting worse. Not only that, but there's a strong tendency among cities to simply 'solve' this problem by buying homeless people bus tickets and shipping them off to cities in fairer climates. The actual solution to this problem is a federal one, understanding that our safety nets and healthcare systems are ineffectual for a large portion of our society but even then that would take decades to take effect.
Unfortunately, it ia a national problem and attempts at creating better tools to solve the problems in specific areas mean that those areas naturally experience immigration of those in need of those tools.
So while the types of approaches to homelessness that San Francisco have adopted are better for actually helping the homeless, they come with negative effects for the residents.
I am sickened by the people effectively saying ”haha sucker" while they offload their people in need on San Francisco.
I do have sympathy for the residents of San Francisco who are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They want to help solve the problem but are being put in a untenable position.
This article is low on solutions besides ”arrest drug addicts so they get sober in prison" and "forcibly place mentaly ill homeless in institutions". These solutions don't help the target long term, but what they do accomplish is making life more difficult and driving the targeted population towards friendlier cities. This is just the same BS policy of not helping and competing to make life as misey as possible so these people go away.
The far left cannot solve these problems (nor can the far right) because they are inherently reactionary. We need more middle-ground moderates in charge.
It has been wildly, ridiculously successful over a short period of time (in the grand scheme of things), and has hit a recent rough spot. That doesn't make it a "failed city" by any stretch.
>> One night in 2021, the meeting lasted seven hours, one of which was devoted to making sure a man named Seth Brenzel stayed off the parent committee.
>> Brenzel is a music teacher, and at the time he and his husband had a child in public school. Eight seats on the committee were open, and Brenzel was unanimously recommended by the other committee members. But there was a problem: Brenzel is white.
>> “My name’s Mari,” one attendee said. “I’m an openly queer parent of color that uses they/them pronouns.” They noted that the parent committee was already too white (out of 10 sitting members, three were white). This was “really, really problematic,” they said. “I bet there are parents that we can find that are of color and that also are queer … QTPOC voices need to be led first before white queer voices.”
Diversity on the board is a great idea but denying perfectly qualified people the role because they don't meet a laundry list of criteria (criteria they can't change) is mad.
Broadly with intersectionality in practice that I've seen is its used to divide people into ever smaller groups, sliced up by their differences - it can make it incredibly hard to get people grouped into rational communities of interests, who can work together to fix problems.
As a concept, it shouldn't divide it should instead allow people to acknowledge that everyone is not at the relative same privilege level, and that we need to be aware of hidden disadvantages, but humans being like we are, it never seems to work out that way outside of academic discourse.
This is a broader problem with concepts for academic discourse making it into the broader world, without the intense educational background, they turn into a form of either buzzword or checkbox compliance.
I don't think its useful for determining public policy, in general practice intersectionality is harmful to minority groups because it makes our pool to form a community of interest out of smaller.
I could go on all day about the Xtian school boards I grew up under. Athiests, Jews, non-whites not welcome. That’s still the norm in a majority of America.
Interestingly enough, the concept of anti-racist (despite the way it sounds) is racism by definition. I think some people use a different definition of racism to make this not be the case, but if you list out "anti-racist" policies you'll see they all contain racial discrimination in them.
A few years ago, we had our first black President, Obama. He was quite open about governing like a 1980s moderate conservative. Black President Reagan. That's the diversity we have today. Thanks, liberals!
What the liberals in SF have been doing is no different. The moral high ground is simply intersectionality, whatever that is.
I suspect because "whites are evil". I am open to hearing any rational explanation, though.
I lived in the Bay Area from 1999 to 2014. I didn't leave because of crime or homelessness; I just got bored and wanted a change of scenery. Every few years I visit.
And every time I visit, I can't believe what I see in terms of the increase of the homeless, tent cities, drug use.
But the place I live now has also changed radically in the same ways in the same timeframe, just on a smaller scale. And this place is considerably less liberal than San Francisco.
I don't think the whole "left/right" fight covers it, and prevents progress by distracting us from the underlying, difficult issues. There's almost certainly at least one more axis here that we're not considering.
A real shame, truly it is a place you fall for. The crisp clean air at 10am welcomes each new day and anything can happen.