> But because the income distribution is such that the median income is greater than its simple arithmetic average, the median income of taxpayers who left San Francisco would probably have been around $250,000.
What? That would be extremely unusual, if true. (The long tail on the upper end is unbounded, while on the lower end income is bounded at 0. So for income, usually mean >>> median.)
Did they get mean and median reversed?
= = = = =
Edit I drew a random sample of incomes for 1,000 people (between $0 and $1 million) and used Pytorch to update these incomes to achieve mean $196,000 and median $250,000. (I also heavily penalized income < $0.)
The shape of the distribution of incomes to achieve such a feat, as one would predict, is absurd. X axis is income in $, Y axis is the number of people with that income out of 1,000. (First image.)
If instead the economist got his understanding of mean and median reversed, you get the second image, which is zero-inflated but otherwise uniform in income.
This is like the old saying, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.”
No, he is speculating about the people that left based on the general distribution:
> But because the income distribution is such that the median income is greater than its simple arithmetic average, the median income of taxpayers who left San Francisco would probably have been around $250,000.
I'm sympathetic to the argument that there might be something unusual about the income distribution of the people who left San Francisco for various ski resort towns but pulling a very specific number like $250k out of the air is weird.
The silliest part is that it doesn't change the argument. $196k is a good income, $250k is better but not qualitatively different by any means.
It is not pulled out of thin air. It's Stanford/Hoover, if they have access to the mean they have access to the median, probably more fine grained data too.
You would think that, but the article text says otherwise:
> the median income of taxpayers who left San Francisco would probably have been around $250,000.
I am as puzzled as you, why not just calculate the median or email the people with the data and ask for it? Otherwise it feels like reaching for anything to embellish a partisan talking point.
No major American city has failed at the same level as Detroit, whose population dropped from 1.85 million people in 1950 to about 630,000 today. Move over Detroit, here comes San Francisco, which lost 6.3 percent of its population between 2019 and 2021, a rate of decline larger than any two year-period in Detroit’s history and unprecedented among any major US city.
New York City lost 3.5% in the same time period, which is way, way more people in the absolute sense. So if SF is an abyss, then NYC must be apocalyptic right now.
Also these figures are census estimates which are not accurate down to this level of precision anyways.
But it's hard to say with a straight face that SF losing 50k people is unprecedented among major US cities when by the same measurement in the same time period NYC lost 300k.
San Francisco empowered some of the most wealthy people not only in the US currently but in all human history. When working from home became not only possible but necessary many left. Most of those who left ended up nearby in other less dense parts of the roughly eight million strong metropolitan area of which San Francisco is merely a central part.
The failure comparison context that saturates this piece is based on analysis that is mistaken about the composition and goals of urban areas. This is because this piece is not about analysis, but political slant. The Hoover Institution has a very strong agenda and beliefs that drive its actions. This is perhaps most clear in the final sentence that explains that all these problems can be changed by voting differently. This conclusion is not clear and not supported by the piece. Much of what is going on in and around San Francisco is driven by the population and commerce there over which the government has limited control.
It is difficult to make progress with complex social programs when one's agenda is preset in long static beliefs and prevents taking the situation seriously.
> San Francisco empowered some of the most wealthy people not only in the US currently but in all human history
Bullshit, they could've done it anywhere else, it just happened to be there. The idea that "San Francisco" empowered anything is just complete delusion, it was the people that did it.
Between weather (Miami and Houston both regularly suffer weather conditions that can kill from exposure), geography (SF is uniquely constrained, it's almost like an island), and reputation (SF has historically been considered both a cultural and queer refuge, and queer people make up a large amount of the unsheltered), you have a series of unique factors that make SF an ideal destination for homeless people, or people on the brink of homelessness.
Now, add Regan's removal of mental health services (something we're still dealing with today), skyrocketing rent (removing the bottom rung of renting), and a sudden population pressure, and you have a uniquely awful set of circumstances.
And no, this does not absolve SF and Bay Area leadership. They have repeatedly thrown money at the problem without any accountability whatsoever, but if the unique factors that affect SF were to hit Miami or Houston, they'd probably find themselves with the same problem overnight.
You know, for many years I also echoed this point but then I realized that it's been almost 50 years since he gutted mental health services. That's plenty of time for the largely democratic leadership in Sacramento to reinstate those services. Why have they not chosen to do so?
Because, it really wasn't an issue until relatively recently. It's more fair to say, why haven't they done it in the past 10 years? And the answer is, they are.
The state has been pledging increasing amounts of money into the system, and has been working to draft legislature that allows for extended holds.
Spinning up an entire new hospital system is difficult. It's not something you can do in a year or two, and expect to have positive long term outcomes from.
Implementing longer holds past the 72 hours is difficult to do, unpopular legislation (because of potential for abuse), and fraught with legal challenges. The laws required basically have to say that the state has the right to hold someone against their will, and force medication upon them. That is a very difficult thing to write, implement, and monitor.
Furthermore, implementing these facilities and conservatorships in a humane and ethical way is difficult - Reagan was right to shut down the facilities, but wrong to not instead spend the money and effort to improve and overhaul them.
Reagan signed the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, but it was initiated by 2 Democrats and one Republican. There was this well-meaning effort to curb the abuse of involuntary committal (mental asylums) that was unfortunately completely disconnected from reality that some people do need to be committed for society and their own safety. Perhaps this was due to the romanticization of mental illness as in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (released a decade after LPS but partaking of the same zeitgeist).
Curious about the homeless rates in Miami vs SF, I used the links at the bottom of this comment to estimate 1570 homeless living in Miami city limits vs 7754 living in SF. With SF's larger population, this corresponds to a 0.35% homeless rate in Miami vs 0.95% in SF.
Trying to capture more of how the homeless problem would "feel" from the perspective of someone walking around the city, I also calculated the homeless people per square mile of the two cities as Miami: 43.61, and SF: 165.33.
By either metric, SF does measure out worse than Miami by 3-4x
Quite the opinion piece largely devoid of citations. A two-year trend where people who had to move to the city are moving out is totally indicative of a fall into the abyss exactly like what happened when the auto industry pulled out of Detroit.
You couldn't pay me enough to move to California, but this article is nothing but the exaggerated ramblings of someone who thinks that progressive policies will be the downfall of civilization.
Hmm... who do we trust, the liberal Vox or the conservative Hoover? It's great to live in an age when anyone can find evidence to support their existing politics.
Objective reality doesn’t care about political spin. So trust neither, but look for context. Bias tends to show up in what’s left out of the conversation rather than outright lies.
In this case it’s clear the conservative narrative is objectively false, but that’s not always the case.
Take that with a huge grain of salt since LinkedIn claims to have significantly more than 100% of the US workforce using their site (191 million US LinkedIn members versus an official US workforce size of 165 million).
Not only is their data junked up by abandoned accounts, duplicate accounts, and fake accounts, but their real user base skews heavily towards salaried office workers. I would be surprised if 50% of Americans used LinkedIn.
Because the poster has an agenda and wants to blame San Francisco politics for everything. Were that San Francisco’s problems as easy as voters “voting differently” - the truth is that some of the problems San Francisco faces like homelessness and pandemic work pattern shifts are way above the pay grade of a metro mayor to combat, but they make convenient scapegoats.
It’s certainly the policies SF pursues that lead to crime/homelessness increases. While the state of CA tacks on a few more that’s harder for a mayor and council to overcome, still no excuse not to correct what they can.
The various vetoes different groups get on what someone can build on their own land is a good example a thing to get rid of. Assuming there’s any developers left at this point not friends with the gov there.
I think property prices actually dropped as more people left SF during the pandemic timeframe, so it doesn’t appear to contradict the point: cheaper housing leads to less homelessness, and sf gov is mostly still in the way from that happening.
Exactly started reading with an open mind, but hard to get past the first two paragraphs
> which lost 6.3 percent of its population between 2019 and 2021, a rate of decline larger than any two year-period in Detroit’s history
This is not an apples to apples comparison?
> Detroit’s fall was primarily driven by the relocation of the US auto industry to southern, right-to-work states, where auto producers, including foreign firms who build autos here, have avoided the union conflict that was endemic in Detroit. San Francisco’s decline is driven by absurdly bad local economic policies.
That's not what drove San Francisco's primarily. No mention of home prices? cost of living? or the pandemic?
San Francisco is not the only major city that suffered a pandemic. Why did people decide to leave San Francisco at much higher rates than any other major city? The pandemic is what catalyzed the event by giving people the ability to move. But ultimately the reason they moved was because San Francisco was worse than other options.
Pretty sure that’s anywhere on the west coast due to the mild weather. Homelessness and drug use is also high and endemic in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver Canada.
What is with all the homeless people so against shelters?
In every interview of a homeless person, every time someone asks them about taking them to shelter for help, they recoil in fear and say "No, they steal/are violent/evil." etc...
I have no doubt that homeless people are treated poorly by society. Maybe they are also treated poorly by shelters. But I can't believe how common the general dislike/avoidance of shelters seems to be.
It comes with all the social dynamics of being "institutionalized." All things being equal, they'd rather go on their own than be in a prison. Being in a low-trust environment is stressful in itself, and you run a good chance of having whatever possessions you carry around with you getting stolen.
>What is with all the homeless people so against shelters?
…
> In every interview of a homeless person, every time someone asks them about taking them to shelter for help, they recoil in fear and say "No, they steal/are violent/evil." etc...
…
> Maybe they are also treated poorly by shelters.
I would venture to say that if every person interviewed said the same thing every time, “What’s the problem??” becomes much less of a head scratcher.
The only way you could arrive at “Maybe they are treated poorly” logically would be if you think that there is a good chance that every person interviewed was lying every single time. If that’s your view on things, you’ll literally be mystified forever.
The shelters are full of folks who are homeless for whatever reason. Presumably the people who are homeless because they are assholes that feel entitled to other people's things and those who are homeless because they're mentally ill and don't understand what they're doing make it an unpleasant place for those who are in dire straights for the same or other reasons. The tragedy of the commons distilled down to those who found themselves unable to afford a place to live.
If we roll back in history, England sent theirs off to the colonies. Largely the US and Australia. Now that there's quite the (legitimate) general outcry against transportation as a punishment, we have to deal with them here.
It's uncharted territory, not sending the less fortunate to prison or into exile to die in places where Europeans haven't yet settled.
This whole rant is so cringe it reads almost like satire. From the sound of things, the people leaving for other expensive areas were just wealthy semi-tourists who weren't contributing anything meaningfully positive to the city to begin with. The sorts of people the author expects SF-ers to look up to as parental figures or something. Good riddance.
The only thing that is likely to cause SF to experience a Detroit-level exodus is climate crisis. Where will the people migrate to? Probably Detroit!
I have watched a lot of talks from the Hoover institute because I like some of the people they have on, but after awhile I noticed a certain lack of intelligence, not because they are not smart or educated, but because their ideology gets in the way Victor David Hanson is a good example.
Detroit is "motor city". It didn't fail. Everybody bought cars and moved to the suburbs. I don't know how you can blame that on the city government.
That's what I mean - they want to support their dislike if liberals by saying dumb things. Do they think we won't notice? Or is it the wealthy people who leave their money to the institute won't notice?
> Today, you need a permit to get fully naked in San Francisco. Or, if you’re not into paperwork, you can always go to a nude-approved park, like the north end of Baker Beach, where the National Park Service has said it’s legal to be naked.
Is this not how it works in most other major cities? I'd imagine most cities have protection of kids against flashing...
The comparison is absurd. No one would live in Detroit because it’s bleak and sprawling. San Francisco is beautiful and cosmopolitan. The trajectory of Detroit is irreversible and structural, while for San Francisco it’ll be an enduring global destination for as long as it stands. Two year blips during a pandemic aren’t sufficient to mark a trend, and SF city politics have been broken for generations.
I lived in SOMA in the 1990’s, and 5th and mission was an open air drug festival too. The tender groin was foul, and civic center was a wasteland of feces, condoms, needles, and occasionally people who died overnight and hadn’t been cleaned up yet. The streets were covered in human waste even in residential areas.
When I’ve come back to SF, it is generally a lot cleaner than it was, and has gentrified. I’ve not been back post pandemic, and I can imagine it’s reverted. But it was not possible to be worse than it was when I lived there.
Yet, people loved it there and I miss it. If it weren’t for the vacuous tech culture chasing VC and exits I might be back some day.
While I don’t endorse most of this piece, it’s worth pointing out that Detroit has not always been bleak. Within living memory it was a very prosperous city
> No one would live in Detroit because it’s bleak and sprawling. San Francisco is beautiful and cosmopolitan. The trajectory of Detroit is irreversible and structural
As someone who just moved to Detroit (in October of 2022), I could not disagree more.
This city is clearly on the upswing and it is immensely beautiful.
Do not sleep on Detroit.
If anything, it is absurd for this "article" to compare whatever is happening in San Francisco to a completely unrelated population decline event in Detroit that spanned over 70 years.
In other words, I am not sure why Detroit would be brought into this "analysis" at all. That is what is absurd.
Who else is there to blame? Autoworkers ganged up on their employers and attempted to capture more value than they contributed. The employers reacted predictably, and diversified their production across (many) other states.
Unsustainable is unsustainable, regardless of politics.
Regardless of the political slant of the article, I really wish the city didn't have to be such a shithole. It's like twice the price of the south bay, way farther away from most tech companies, filled with angry crazy homeless people and criminals, not really that walkable, inundated with needles and trash and feces... I'm jealous of people who moved to the bay area already with relationships because I hate hate hate the fact that my best chances to find someone are to move to SF.
I used to commute to SF for a year and it was shocking to me how the home to one of the wealthiest companies and residents are overwhelmed with homelessness and crimes.
The scene of downtown was something out of a dystopian movie where you see wealthy people walking by a drug addict with needles on the ground and yet everyone appears to conform that this is the norm
I'm definitely oversimplifying the problem here but intuitively shouldn't a city with high income have more money to spend on infrastructure?
The rate of houselessness has actually been decreasing. But I expect the rate of forced relocation by neighboring towns is also increasing
I've lived in 3 suburbs so far and all 3 of them bus their houseless folks to the nearest city. The cops often take all their stuff in the process too so they usually lose everything and are especially vulnerable once they arrive
most people do not know that a very significant portion of the residential population in SF is ethnic Chinese. Workers and excecutives alike travel to San Francisco each day from nearby residential areas that are not at all like the commercial streets of San Francisco. Many people there, like New Yorkers, had developed an aversion to interacting with the skid row and excess-party crowds that line the popular areas, long ago. That aversion was part of the formula on how it went so badly, in the modern chapter.
The credibility of the assertions in the article aside, most of the problems that SF is experiencing are of its own creation, so I cannot commiserate too hard with its plight. And I recently moved away, so I care less.
Every city, whether you admit it or not as part of a deliberate strategy to succeed, is building itself a reserve of advantages and points against future adversity. SF has natural bonus points for geography, weather, etc. And intangible bonus points for talent pools, etc.
SF chose to squander points over the years by letting conservative liberals prevent it from modernizing its policies and infrastructure, letting tax money be spent on ridiculous homeless-favoring policies, underinvesting in long-term improvements while diverting money to enrich union Muni drivers and city workers. Favoring people who are here already, over those who want to be here but couldn't afford it, who gladly pick up and leave from their rental properties with no attachments.
All leaving it with a fragile tax base and city services so entrenched with lazy interests that it collapsed at the pandemic's pressure.
If you want a lesson in how a city with so many advantages can sink its own ship, study SF.
In Detroit, the memory of abandonment is kept alive with the constant visual reminder of abandoned manufacturing infrastructure and homes from 70+ years ago. You can't escape it. I used to drive in from Lansing with my friends to see concerts back in late 90s. Miles and miles of abandoned factories, warehouses, and neighborhoods right next to the highway. Take the wrong exit and you felt like you entered a post apocalyptic world. We would brave the concert, then drive back to a factory town that somehow didn't receive the same treatment.
The article claims the median income is higher than the arithmetic mean. Since income is typically exponential or even pareto this is almost inconceivable. It then claims (in parenthesis) that Florida has a state income tax.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadWhat? That would be extremely unusual, if true. (The long tail on the upper end is unbounded, while on the lower end income is bounded at 0. So for income, usually mean >>> median.)
Did they get mean and median reversed?
= = = = =
Edit I drew a random sample of incomes for 1,000 people (between $0 and $1 million) and used Pytorch to update these incomes to achieve mean $196,000 and median $250,000. (I also heavily penalized income < $0.)
The shape of the distribution of incomes to achieve such a feat, as one would predict, is absurd. X axis is income in $, Y axis is the number of people with that income out of 1,000. (First image.)
If instead the economist got his understanding of mean and median reversed, you get the second image, which is zero-inflated but otherwise uniform in income.
https://imgur.com/6OiIF3V
Indeed in SF average household income is $167k while median is $120k.
> But because the income distribution is such that the median income is greater than its simple arithmetic average, the median income of taxpayers who left San Francisco would probably have been around $250,000.
The silliest part is that it doesn't change the argument. $196k is a good income, $250k is better but not qualitatively different by any means.
> the median income of taxpayers who left San Francisco would probably have been around $250,000.
I am as puzzled as you, why not just calculate the median or email the people with the data and ask for it? Otherwise it feels like reaching for anything to embellish a partisan talking point.
Also these figures are census estimates which are not accurate down to this level of precision anyways.
But it's hard to say with a straight face that SF losing 50k people is unprecedented among major US cities when by the same measurement in the same time period NYC lost 300k.
The failure comparison context that saturates this piece is based on analysis that is mistaken about the composition and goals of urban areas. This is because this piece is not about analysis, but political slant. The Hoover Institution has a very strong agenda and beliefs that drive its actions. This is perhaps most clear in the final sentence that explains that all these problems can be changed by voting differently. This conclusion is not clear and not supported by the piece. Much of what is going on in and around San Francisco is driven by the population and commerce there over which the government has limited control.
It is difficult to make progress with complex social programs when one's agenda is preset in long static beliefs and prevents taking the situation seriously.
Bullshit, they could've done it anywhere else, it just happened to be there. The idea that "San Francisco" empowered anything is just complete delusion, it was the people that did it.
Why don't cities like Miami and Houston have a homeless problem like San Francisco's?
Now, add Regan's removal of mental health services (something we're still dealing with today), skyrocketing rent (removing the bottom rung of renting), and a sudden population pressure, and you have a uniquely awful set of circumstances.
And no, this does not absolve SF and Bay Area leadership. They have repeatedly thrown money at the problem without any accountability whatsoever, but if the unique factors that affect SF were to hit Miami or Houston, they'd probably find themselves with the same problem overnight.
You know, for many years I also echoed this point but then I realized that it's been almost 50 years since he gutted mental health services. That's plenty of time for the largely democratic leadership in Sacramento to reinstate those services. Why have they not chosen to do so?
The state has been pledging increasing amounts of money into the system, and has been working to draft legislature that allows for extended holds.
Spinning up an entire new hospital system is difficult. It's not something you can do in a year or two, and expect to have positive long term outcomes from.
Implementing longer holds past the 72 hours is difficult to do, unpopular legislation (because of potential for abuse), and fraught with legal challenges. The laws required basically have to say that the state has the right to hold someone against their will, and force medication upon them. That is a very difficult thing to write, implement, and monitor.
Furthermore, implementing these facilities and conservatorships in a humane and ethical way is difficult - Reagan was right to shut down the facilities, but wrong to not instead spend the money and effort to improve and overhaul them.
If the leadership in Miami or Houston decided to behave the same way toward the communities they govern; I'd expect similar results as well.
Trying to capture more of how the homeless problem would "feel" from the perspective of someone walking around the city, I also calculated the homeless people per square mile of the two cities as Miami: 43.61, and SF: 165.33.
By either metric, SF does measure out worse than Miami by 3-4x
[Current Miami-Dade county homeless counts: 3738](https://web.archive.org/web/20220827094121/https://www.miami...)
[Miami city population: 439,890 at time of posting](https://www.google.com/search?q=miami+city+population&sxsrf=...)
[Proportion of Miami county homeless located in the city proper: 42%](http://ci.miami.fl.us/communitydevelopment/conplan/content/0....)
[SF homeless population: 7754 people](https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population#....)
[SF total population: 815,201](https://www.google.com/search?q=san+francisco+city+populatio...)
[Miami land area: 36.00 sq mi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami)
[SF land area: 46.9 sq mi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#:~:text=It%20cov....)
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...
And a place where you can lose money at record speed.
You couldn't pay me enough to move to California, but this article is nothing but the exaggerated ramblings of someone who thinks that progressive policies will be the downfall of civilization.
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/2023/1/18/23542444/s...
In this case it’s clear the conservative narrative is objectively false, but that’s not always the case.
The various vetoes different groups get on what someone can build on their own land is a good example a thing to get rid of. Assuming there’s any developers left at this point not friends with the gov there.
https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population
> Compared with other major U.S. cities, S.F. boasts lower-than-average rates of violent crime
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/fixing-san-francis...
> which lost 6.3 percent of its population between 2019 and 2021, a rate of decline larger than any two year-period in Detroit’s history
This is not an apples to apples comparison?
> Detroit’s fall was primarily driven by the relocation of the US auto industry to southern, right-to-work states, where auto producers, including foreign firms who build autos here, have avoided the union conflict that was endemic in Detroit. San Francisco’s decline is driven by absurdly bad local economic policies.
That's not what drove San Francisco's primarily. No mention of home prices? cost of living? or the pandemic?
In every interview of a homeless person, every time someone asks them about taking them to shelter for help, they recoil in fear and say "No, they steal/are violent/evil." etc...
I have no doubt that homeless people are treated poorly by society. Maybe they are also treated poorly by shelters. But I can't believe how common the general dislike/avoidance of shelters seems to be.
…
> In every interview of a homeless person, every time someone asks them about taking them to shelter for help, they recoil in fear and say "No, they steal/are violent/evil." etc...
…
> Maybe they are also treated poorly by shelters.
I would venture to say that if every person interviewed said the same thing every time, “What’s the problem??” becomes much less of a head scratcher.
The only way you could arrive at “Maybe they are treated poorly” logically would be if you think that there is a good chance that every person interviewed was lying every single time. If that’s your view on things, you’ll literally be mystified forever.
If we roll back in history, England sent theirs off to the colonies. Largely the US and Australia. Now that there's quite the (legitimate) general outcry against transportation as a punishment, we have to deal with them here.
It's uncharted territory, not sending the less fortunate to prison or into exile to die in places where Europeans haven't yet settled.
The only thing that is likely to cause SF to experience a Detroit-level exodus is climate crisis. Where will the people migrate to? Probably Detroit!
Only money
Detroit is "motor city". It didn't fail. Everybody bought cars and moved to the suburbs. I don't know how you can blame that on the city government.
That's what I mean - they want to support their dislike if liberals by saying dumb things. Do they think we won't notice? Or is it the wealthy people who leave their money to the institute won't notice?
https://www.kqed.org/news/11613510/the-history-of-nudity-in-...
Is this not how it works in most other major cities? I'd imagine most cities have protection of kids against flashing...
I lived in SOMA in the 1990’s, and 5th and mission was an open air drug festival too. The tender groin was foul, and civic center was a wasteland of feces, condoms, needles, and occasionally people who died overnight and hadn’t been cleaned up yet. The streets were covered in human waste even in residential areas.
When I’ve come back to SF, it is generally a lot cleaner than it was, and has gentrified. I’ve not been back post pandemic, and I can imagine it’s reverted. But it was not possible to be worse than it was when I lived there.
Yet, people loved it there and I miss it. If it weren’t for the vacuous tech culture chasing VC and exits I might be back some day.
As someone who just moved to Detroit (in October of 2022), I could not disagree more.
This city is clearly on the upswing and it is immensely beautiful.
Do not sleep on Detroit.
If anything, it is absurd for this "article" to compare whatever is happening in San Francisco to a completely unrelated population decline event in Detroit that spanned over 70 years.
In other words, I am not sure why Detroit would be brought into this "analysis" at all. That is what is absurd.
Unsustainable is unsustainable, regardless of politics.
The scene of downtown was something out of a dystopian movie where you see wealthy people walking by a drug addict with needles on the ground and yet everyone appears to conform that this is the norm
I'm definitely oversimplifying the problem here but intuitively shouldn't a city with high income have more money to spend on infrastructure?
Where are the taxpayers money spent on?
I've lived in 3 suburbs so far and all 3 of them bus their houseless folks to the nearest city. The cops often take all their stuff in the process too so they usually lose everything and are especially vulnerable once they arrive
Every city, whether you admit it or not as part of a deliberate strategy to succeed, is building itself a reserve of advantages and points against future adversity. SF has natural bonus points for geography, weather, etc. And intangible bonus points for talent pools, etc.
SF chose to squander points over the years by letting conservative liberals prevent it from modernizing its policies and infrastructure, letting tax money be spent on ridiculous homeless-favoring policies, underinvesting in long-term improvements while diverting money to enrich union Muni drivers and city workers. Favoring people who are here already, over those who want to be here but couldn't afford it, who gladly pick up and leave from their rental properties with no attachments.
All leaving it with a fragile tax base and city services so entrenched with lazy interests that it collapsed at the pandemic's pressure.
If you want a lesson in how a city with so many advantages can sink its own ship, study SF.
The article claims the median income is higher than the arithmetic mean. Since income is typically exponential or even pareto this is almost inconceivable. It then claims (in parenthesis) that Florida has a state income tax.