In the minds of SF folks, covid policies came to represent resistance to Trump. Those asking for schools and businesses to be opened sounded like the MAGA crowd -- i.e. the Enemy. The policymakers, blind with agenda, doubled down on restrictive policies, with a faulty theory of "everything will come back". The result is a city that works for neither the rich nor poor. SF truly is a social experiment and more capable minds than me may some day cast these events into a coherent social theory.
In a scientific sense, it is obviously impossible to know whats in someone's mind. Also, I don't live in SF proper, but more like south bay. However, listening to the rhetoric at the time, it was not hard to guess that COVID policy came to represent the political gap between the two sides. So it stands to reason that in hyper progressive SF, any opposition to absolute closure would be seen as 'siding with the enemy'. If this does not sound reasonable, I'm afraid I cannot convince you and wish you best.
It does not sound reasonable, as the concerns (and actions in response to those concerns) in the city during 2020 were driven by the actual documented damage COVID was already causing elsewhere (especially NYC), not based on some hypothetical “dunk on The Donald” point scoring exercise.
Many people seem to forget how in the dark we were about COVID at that time, and are now criticizing the actions public health organizations took with the benefit of hindsight.
San Francisco has always been a boom and bust place, as anyone who was here during the 2008 crash, the dotcom bubble, or probably even the gold rush would tell you. The author of this seagull* article needs to take a deep breath, wait a couple of years, observe, and then realize that they could have saved themselves the effort.
Mature cities like NYC* find ways to incorporate new industries and grow with them. SF doesn't want to grow up apparently. That's fine, but the seagulls aren't to blame. SF could have used their tax revenue to build something awesome.
[*] I guess the cities which successfully do this have a long history of being centres of trade and commerce. Those activities facilitate pro-tolerance and anti-zero-sum thinking.
You’re comparing apples (the Big Apple, it turns out) and oranges. SF is 7 miles by 7 miles of hilly, earthquake prone land, surrounded on 3 sides by water. There is literally no “new land” available to build on, and redeveloping existing lots to rezone, or increase density, or whatever is costly and slow (and that’s true in most US cities, not just SF).
These are _essential_ complexities of land use in SF that are fairly unique to it, and hence comparisons to other cities are rarely useful.
I agree that it's an apples-to-oranges comparison, but for the record: Manhattan is surrounded on 4 sides by water, and is much hillier than people think (only the southern part of the island is flat). The parts that flat are filled-in salt marsh.
There's a reason the top 8[1] most dense municipalities are in the NYC area: there's limited developable land.
Second densest large city. But if you do it by municipality, SF is the 21st most dense in the country. Four of NYC's five boroughs (coextensive with counties, the way SF is coextensive with SF county) are individually denser than SF.
Right, that's why it's still apples-to-oranges. My only claim was that "surrounded by water" and "has hills" are not the reasons why comparisons between NYC and SF are invalid.
Which is one reason why "Silicon Valley" never included San Francisco: There's no place to build fabs there. It's only been in the last 20 years with the rise of software-only startups that everybody decided they needed to be in the city proper (mostly because VCs wanted to live there and they wanted their funded companies to be close by).
Not that San Mateo and Santa Clara are much easier to find real estate in these days, but they're easier than San Francisco. Just not as cool.
I mean, TFA literally pulls up NYC as a supposedly-flattering point of comparison:
> An ambitious young person can now have that awesome Google job while living in the Meatpacking district and walking to the Google office in Chelsea.
Although this is in itself a bit of an odd take given that this has been the case for over fifteen years— I was literally living this life as an intern at Google NYC in 2007.
The same thing happened in Seattle. The council talked about defunding police but only parking enforcement was moved out. And because of the hiring crunch, we lost police officers and weren't able to replace them (but this was a problem nation wide).
What I do blame the city and county for is not taking crime seriously enough. Even when police arrest someone who has broken the law, the DA refuses to prosecute, the jail refuses to book them in, and judges let them off repeatedly with light to non-existent sentences. People shop lift with impunity these days because the system simply doesn't care if they do. It isn't really the police's fault (though they are understaffed also).
It's felt like a 'emperor has no clothes' situation at least for the past few years, maybe longer. The only difference being that people are pointing it out, and others just sit with their fingers in their ear. Maybe more of a 'Don't Look Up' situation then, I guess.
I'm not so sure things are as dire as the article makes them out to be. As long as you avoid soma, lower nob hill, civic center, fidi, and the tenderloin it's been a great place to live during/after the pandemic. Rent is actually cheaper than pre-pandemic, the city is still super walkable and bikeable, there are more than enough bars, restaurants, and live events every weekend to keep me busy and then some.
Shameless pitch for people who may be new to the area and can only see the negative side of the SF bay area, me and another local started a conversational podcast loosely about awesome bay area events & activities:
https://bawcast.com/
> The first rule of SF should be that you should not talk about this. Better to repeat the dystopian hellscape meme to dissuade the locusts.
This is also the first rule of Seattle: mention how much it rains, how the homeless have taken over, and maybe earthquakes and volcanoes. Anything to dissuade more people from moving here.
I do have a real parking spot for it. At my home. In a whole other state. The mistake I made was visiting my friend. I wasn't aware of the out-of-town window smashing policy.
I got my window smashed in the first time a few weeks after I moved to Salt Lake City from Seattle, it was a pretty big shock. But that was in SLC, the Foothills even, which should have been safe-ish (I wasn't even parked on the street, but in a driveway). I guess it is just the way they greet new neighbors. I guess the crime in Utah at the time is now also common in Seattle.
It's very "in" right now to hate on San Francisco. It's a Nietzschean sort of thing, hating things you are secretly are afraid are better - which is why California is so unpopular.
>California has the same age-adjusted excess mortality as Florida, so the destruction was wrought for naught.
Seems arbitrary to compare with Florida when the linked data shows California ranked 38, and nearly half the excess mortality of states at the top that seemingly didn’t take the same COVID-19 precautions.
When the article begins with such a false premise, it’s hard to take the rest of it seriously
If I’m reading that data correctly, it also looks like Florida’s age-adjusted COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 is 8% higher than California’s. Is that supposed to be interpreted as equivalent?
This seems to be a rag-bag of right-wing talking points e.g.
* Covid lockdowns - bad
* Harsh policing - good
So the chances of it being based on anything other than the writers pre-concieved political biases is basically nil.
In particular, SF seems to be getting blamed for partly Californian and Federal policies in a somewhat loose manner. Even if you disagree with them, and you think the people in charge of SF at various levels agree with them, it's silly to heap it all onto SF as some kind of hate-focus.
During the pandemic, SF had in-person schooling at private schools, but not in public schools.
This continued long after it was clear that (a) in person schooling was not a significant risk and (b) remote education was not adequate. (You're basically insane if you think sitting on videochat hours a day, with no in-person contact with other children, is in any way a healthy lifestyle for an elementary-school aged kid.)
This was SF policy, not state policy!
It was just a totally fucked, unafir situation: only those w/ enough cash to afford private education could get even the most minimal level of quality education for their kids.
Besides failing at the basic public service of educating children, SF also struggles with things like providing safe, sanitary streets and public transit. All this while having a huge budget.
Here's a memory that has stuck with me, from just before the pandemic started:
A man lying on the sidwalk at the intersection of Colombus and Broadway, covered in his own shit, calling out, "help me, call an ambulance, help me". A constant stream of people, passing by, doing nothing.
That's SF in a nutshell: people are in a sort of state of denial about the condition of their city. Sure, there are lots of great things, and you can ignore the badness and pretend it's not happening, but it's there.
(Or at least it was when I was there, from 2011-2021.)
I hope they figure it out and improve things! It's truly a geographically blessed area. And I've still got a bunch of family there.
Source: I know many families with kids in various private schools in SF, and not one of them had uninterrupted in-person learning throughout the pandemic.
That said, SF public schools were slower to reopen to in-person learning than private schools, which seems to me to have mostly been due to pushback by the SFUSD teacher’s union (who, imvho, responded to this crisis poorly).
I wasn't intending to claim that there were no interruptions at all to in-person learning in private schools, but rather, that for much of the pandemic private schools were open and public schools were closed. My dad and his wife had to switch my half-sister to private school, so she could attend in person. I have never seen a kid so happy to go to school...
> During the pandemic, SF had in-person schooling at private schools, but not in public schools.
This is patently false. All of the private schools in SF that I’m aware of switched to remote learning from March 2020 to the end of that school year, and many had “hybrid” models (e.g. alternating one week in-person, one week remote) when they resumed in August / September.
Fair enough. FTR I think you’re trying to dunk on SF using factually incorrect claims about what actually happened at local schools during the course of 2020 and into 2021.
It's surprisingly hard to find an authoritative history of this.
Like you, my source is having been there and experienced it: my cousins, who were in private school, were quickly able to go back to in-person instruction; my sister, who was in public school, was not (until she switched).
Kids without the financial resources to do that just lost out.
Here's an NYT article from Nov 4, 2020, headline "In San Francisco, Closed Public Schools, Open Private Schools":
Sure I'm dunking on SF city gov, because it deserves it! Its citizens are uniquely poorly served, especially its poorer citizens, in a city that is one of wealthiest on earth.
Nope. I literally meant what I wrote - that I do, in fact, know enough families in the city to personally know what happened at most of the schools, both public and private, in the city.
Recall that SF isn’t that big a city - only 800,000 people (and with a low %age of children to boot) - so there aren’t that many schools in the city.
[edit] it’s also the case that the only variation in response was on the private school side - SFUSD took a monolithic approach to their schools (which are the greatest in number and have most of the students in the city)
This article is full of misleading claims and outright falsehoods.
Police were never defunded, Chicago does not have as many tech companies as San Francisco does, SFs age-adjusted mortality from COVID is way lower than Florida, etc. etc.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadMany people seem to forget how in the dark we were about COVID at that time, and are now criticizing the actions public health organizations took with the benefit of hindsight.
*fly in, crap all over everything, fly out
[*] I guess the cities which successfully do this have a long history of being centres of trade and commerce. Those activities facilitate pro-tolerance and anti-zero-sum thinking.
These are _essential_ complexities of land use in SF that are fairly unique to it, and hence comparisons to other cities are rarely useful.
There's a reason the top 8[1] most dense municipalities are in the NYC area: there's limited developable land.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
* NYC is a lot more than Manhattan.
* NYC is a substantially larger area than SF.
* SF is also substantially built on top of reclaimed mud flats.
* NYC is tectonically stable.
All of these things mean that comparisons between the two cities approach to land use are basically meaningless.
[edit] to fight HN’s formatting
Not that San Mateo and Santa Clara are much easier to find real estate in these days, but they're easier than San Francisco. Just not as cool.
> An ambitious young person can now have that awesome Google job while living in the Meatpacking district and walking to the Google office in Chelsea.
Although this is in itself a bit of an odd take given that this has been the case for over fifteen years— I was literally living this life as an intern at Google NYC in 2007.
When was SF police de-funded? Budgets have only increased [1] each year, any rhetoric notwithstanding
1. https://abc7news.com/sfpd-budget-defund-the-police-departmen...
This year and last year.
2019-2020: 692.3M 2020-2021: 667.9M 2021-2022: 657.4M
Source: your link
Edit: sorry about the formatting. For some reason HN is selectively throwing away line breaks.
What I do blame the city and county for is not taking crime seriously enough. Even when police arrest someone who has broken the law, the DA refuses to prosecute, the jail refuses to book them in, and judges let them off repeatedly with light to non-existent sentences. People shop lift with impunity these days because the system simply doesn't care if they do. It isn't really the police's fault (though they are understaffed also).
Shameless pitch for people who may be new to the area and can only see the negative side of the SF bay area, me and another local started a conversational podcast loosely about awesome bay area events & activities: https://bawcast.com/
But good luck with the cast.
This is also the first rule of Seattle: mention how much it rains, how the homeless have taken over, and maybe earthquakes and volcanoes. Anything to dissuade more people from moving here.
Good luck with your comment.
Seems arbitrary to compare with Florida when the linked data shows California ranked 38, and nearly half the excess mortality of states at the top that seemingly didn’t take the same COVID-19 precautions.
When the article begins with such a false premise, it’s hard to take the rest of it seriously
* Covid lockdowns - bad
* Harsh policing - good
So the chances of it being based on anything other than the writers pre-concieved political biases is basically nil.
In particular, SF seems to be getting blamed for partly Californian and Federal policies in a somewhat loose manner. Even if you disagree with them, and you think the people in charge of SF at various levels agree with them, it's silly to heap it all onto SF as some kind of hate-focus.
This continued long after it was clear that (a) in person schooling was not a significant risk and (b) remote education was not adequate. (You're basically insane if you think sitting on videochat hours a day, with no in-person contact with other children, is in any way a healthy lifestyle for an elementary-school aged kid.)
This was SF policy, not state policy!
It was just a totally fucked, unafir situation: only those w/ enough cash to afford private education could get even the most minimal level of quality education for their kids.
Besides failing at the basic public service of educating children, SF also struggles with things like providing safe, sanitary streets and public transit. All this while having a huge budget.
Here's a memory that has stuck with me, from just before the pandemic started:
A man lying on the sidwalk at the intersection of Colombus and Broadway, covered in his own shit, calling out, "help me, call an ambulance, help me". A constant stream of people, passing by, doing nothing.
That's SF in a nutshell: people are in a sort of state of denial about the condition of their city. Sure, there are lots of great things, and you can ignore the badness and pretend it's not happening, but it's there.
(Or at least it was when I was there, from 2011-2021.)
I hope they figure it out and improve things! It's truly a geographically blessed area. And I've still got a bunch of family there.
Source: I know many families with kids in various private schools in SF, and not one of them had uninterrupted in-person learning throughout the pandemic.
That said, SF public schools were slower to reopen to in-person learning than private schools, which seems to me to have mostly been due to pushback by the SFUSD teacher’s union (who, imvho, responded to this crisis poorly).
> During the pandemic, SF had in-person schooling at private schools, but not in public schools.
This is patently false. All of the private schools in SF that I’m aware of switched to remote learning from March 2020 to the end of that school year, and many had “hybrid” models (e.g. alternating one week in-person, one week remote) when they resumed in August / September.
Like you, my source is having been there and experienced it: my cousins, who were in private school, were quickly able to go back to in-person instruction; my sister, who was in public school, was not (until she switched).
Kids without the financial resources to do that just lost out.
Here's an NYT article from Nov 4, 2020, headline "In San Francisco, Closed Public Schools, Open Private Schools":
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/us/san-francisco-closed-p...
Here's an SFUSD memo six months later announcing the partial return of some kids to in-person learning:
https://www.sfusd.edu/covid-19-response-updates-and-resource...
Sure I'm dunking on SF city gov, because it deserves it! Its citizens are uniquely poorly served, especially its poorer citizens, in a city that is one of wealthiest on earth.
Recall that SF isn’t that big a city - only 800,000 people (and with a low %age of children to boot) - so there aren’t that many schools in the city.
[edit] it’s also the case that the only variation in response was on the private school side - SFUSD took a monolithic approach to their schools (which are the greatest in number and have most of the students in the city)
Police were never defunded, Chicago does not have as many tech companies as San Francisco does, SFs age-adjusted mortality from COVID is way lower than Florida, etc. etc.
Citation needed.