Really not sure what to make of this. I love Andrew Callaghan for the most part but curious what people's takes are on the summary of the city's problems and the role of tech.
I like that Andrew brought up the idea of containment. I've lived in the major cities he described and it's the same pattern. It's invisible to the well off neighborhoods. The poor neighborhoods have to live with it. The fact that it's always been there - just hidden.
Re: tech - it def disrupted the fabric of the city. As quickly as it came (gentrification, raising rents) and as quickly as it left (residents losing adjacent jobs), it's been bad for the people who had to live through it without high paying tech jobs.
I liked that Andrew touched on the opioid epidemic and how it's spiraled. Heavy policing historically disenfranchised poor minorities so that's not the way to go. Progressive policies were tried and the people pushed back.
I wish there was a single solution. It feels like we fell off a cliff and the only way up is to crawl back up.
The role of tech is no different than any other industry. The problems were created by politicians making bad decisions. Easier to blame tech than fix things.
I can’t claim to understand how things got to be the way they are, but grossly oversimplifying the issue like this is the surest way to be wrong about it.
> The role of tech is no different than any other industry.
I agree with this. Doesn’t mean industry shares no blame.
It makes no sense for the tech industry to take the blame unless you want tech to take up government responsibilities. The tech industry wants more housing and frequently loses battles with local government. Do we want a tech industry which is capable of outweighing governments?
The blame ultimately does rest on the local government.
The solution to a lot of problems here are more high density housing. The way you get that is taxes and eminent domain to tear down and rebuild. But that will weaken current SF residents political power, so they fight against it. Pushing labor out of the city removes their power to affect change.
The only point I'd bring up about the tech industry is the SF residents putting up these barriers are often old time tech folks that "made it".
I think Seattle has some of the same issues, but at least seams to be handling things a lot better.
> The way you get that is taxes and eminent domain to tear down and rebuild.
Can we try not making it illegal to build densely on the property you own first? The government doesn’t need to do anything; no tax breaks or incentives. It just needs to stop taking the opinion that any amount of profit taken by a real estate developer is necessarily immoral.
I don’t really blame tech, so much as I blame real estate speculators. The problem isn’t all the money and industry entering the city, it’s people trying to parasitically rent-seek off that productive economic activity. If San Francisco was able to build at the level of say a Tokyo or had social housing like Vienna, it’s a pretty much a non-issue. The problem comes when wealthy, land-owning elites conspire with corrupt politicians to prevent housing and other infrastructure from rising to meet the demand of the city’s growth. That being said, the overlap between wealthy tech investors and wealthy landowners blocking construction is not exactly zero.
Institutions in the us have never really worked for the people. It's always been an oligarchy of one type or another. Sf is just the latest chapter in this story.
Places like Vienna are more functional because they have governments that are working for the people rather than corporate interests. They have centuries of real social development, rather than what the us has which is only economic development.
I think most people in america don't really understand the concept of society. They see the state as a mechanism to keep just enough peace to enable money to be made, and to fight wars. They don't see it as a tool to craft a society that benefits the main thrust of it's people. Despite all the lofty ideals and language in our founding documents it's never been that type of endeavor.
As a bay area native, i believe he did a good job. I’ve spent my life volunteering in the community, and i think my most radical take is that i don’t hate street criminals because i mean the life is miserable. Its easy and understandable to fear being robbed (been there), but really, those kids get murdered quick. Nobody i grew up with that wanted to live crazy made it past 21.
I’ve always felt that the increase in crime was a direct result of the fucking rent. Its been empty for a minute now, it reminds me of disneyland in the sense that people all go in to shop and work but leave back home at night, leaving a ghost town. So it’s community got weak, lost the electorate to protect itself.
I do get frustrated by outsiders making fun of us. Its a complex problem that you can’t solve with a gun like some other commenters are suggesting. Try saving a life for once and then get back to me on how to make my city less miserable. I also get frustrated by the outsider voyeurism that comes with suffering.
I like how another commenter put it. Its as if we took a really painful fall off a cliff, alone. The only way out is to slowly crawl back up.
You're not alone though. Many many American cities are similarly awful, it's just that SF being the symbol it is gets the punching bag treatment more than most.
It's just that America bet everything on capitalism, yet americans are starting to realize that it is making their lives miserable in many, many different ways.
Before the pandemic, there was bad stuff (in particular poop all over all the sidewalks) but there was relatively more good stuff because white collar workers commuted in on the weekdays and (at least) bought lunch. Post-pandemic, it’s all gone, so crime etc now has outsized leverage.
Uber eats and Doordash have had a particularly negative impact, not just that stolen car in the video. Restaurants are strangled and Uber both raises all prices and cuts into margins when the order load doesn’t scale. Even the original Little Star on divisadero is now closing due to Uber gouging. Combine with the fact that the drivers are out-of-town unsafe drivers and block roads everywhere, makes the suburbs look more appealing.
>Before the pandemic, there was bad stuff (in particular poop all over all the sidewalks) but there was relatively more good stuff because white collar workers commuted in on the weekdays and (at least) bought lunch. Post-pandemic, it’s all gone, so crime etc now has outsized leverage.
And yet there are people in denial about just how dead downtown SF is. This /r/sanfrancisco post is unintentionally hilarious. <https://np.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/11z2cz5/americ...> I think they think that "People leaving SF" = "Trump wins", or something.
I think part of the right's fixation with SF is that it was the first major city to shelter in place in early 2020 and 'cross the rubicon' into the world we live in today.
Why do you 'love' him? According to multiple people, perhaps including himself, he is a sex predator.[1] Regardless of whether you think a figure like that should be at the forefront of the public eye (I don't), it's strange to express 'love' for a person of such low character.
There’s so much hard evidence in this video - you can see real people and hear from them. Then on the tech side there’s - nothing - just some hollow rhetoric. Industries come and go - gold, shipbuilding, tourism. It’s SF’s attempts to keep tech out that pushed house prices so high that the locals had to leave - that’s on them. Every city lost workers in the pandemic and every city except for SF has seen many return - nobody wants to return to somewhere where the streets are in such a dire state and housing consumes their salary.
>A note to my fellow San Franciscians: I’m sorry. I know. There’s always some story in the East Coast press about how our city is dying. San Franciscians hate—HATE—these pieces. You’re a stooge and a traitor for writing one. When I set out reporting, I wanted to write a debunking-the-doom piece myself. Yet to live in San Francisco right now, to watch its streets, is to realize that no one will catch you if you fall. In the first three months of 2023, 200 San Franciscans OD’d, up 41 percent from last year. “It’s like a wasteland,” the guard said when I asked how San Francisco looked to him. “It’s like the only way to describe it. It’s like a video game — like made-up shit. Have you ever played Fallout?”
>I shook my head.
>“There’s this thing in the game called feral ghouls, and they’re like rotted. They’re like zombies.” There’s only so much pain a person can take before you disintegrate, grow paranoid, or turn numb. “I go home and play with my wife, and we’re like, ‘Ah, hahahaha, this is SF.’”
The law must rule in order for us to effectively speak on the rule of law. The degree to which there is a vacuum of power over violence is the degree to which another force can step in.
"He's not playing by the rules so why should we" is a childish notion and I'm quite surprised you're tone-deaf enough to admit you hold this opinion out loud in such frank terms.
Most of my friends were drug dealers at one point in my life. I'm used to the idea of not being able to go to the police to solve disputes. These guys who are doing armed robberies know what they're getting into.
Yes many conflicts are resolved "internally" so to speak, and the legal system effectively treats them as outlaws. That's a separate issue from uninvolved bystanders inciting violence from other previously uninvolved vigilantes. User carlgreene is effectively encouraging anyone with a gun to go out and start killing people they think are part of that outlaw group.
He changed his look a little bit, but doubt that it has anything to do with becoming less easy to recognize. Pure speculation on my part tho.
For one, he is still extremely recognizable. And two, he is still wearing the same type of (rather iconic at this point) suits and outfits that made him recognizable in the first place.
I also don't blame him for wanting to at least somewhat distance himself from looking like the awkward pimply teenager he once was, and it's association with his accusation of being a sexual harasser.
Speaking of which, I'm surprised I haven't seen any mention of it. What became of that?
> I also don't blame him for wanting to at least somewhat distance himself from looking like the awkward pimply teenager he once was, and it's association with his accusation of being a sexual harasser.
Probably 0% the above, and 90% changing his look because he got too well-known. His thing is doing more candid interviews, not being recognized as a famous person helps the interview subject relax more.
I used to live on the same block as the federal building, where much of this is filmed. Video gave me PTSD vietnam flashbacks to skipping over needles and human waste on my way to the gym or the office.
Got a tour of the Japanese office of a SFO-HQ'ed tech company last Friday. The exec giving the tour mentioned (in Japanese) about their SFO office and how they are going to stop doing global offsites there b/c it is so unsafe. This blight is a national embarrassment and people outside US don't understand how the world's (ostensibly) most advanced city in the most advanced country could tolerate this.
One issue is the failure of the straight-and-narrow status quo to appeal to normal people. When you can't work an entry-level or low-skilled job and afford housing in the area you live in, or when working the job you'd need is more undignified and unappealing than hustling, you're going to hustle to make things work. What came through in the video to me was desperation for dignity, to be seen as a controller of your own fate. For most of the people in the video their "legal" alternative is to be underpaid and mistreated, to have their free time totally consumed by labor and traveling to and from it, and to have nothing left to show after the basic costs of life. It's no wonder they turn to a criminal life where boldness and recklessness earn you either respect or hatred. Lower rent costs and better jobs would fix most of this issue with no recourse to the legal system.
On the other hand, criminal justice in the US is anything but. Voters have decided — I think correctly! — that mere theft and drug use don't warrant the kind of punitive, criminogenic long-term caging and low-grade torture that constitutes our penal system, but there is simultaneously little appetite for improving conditions or exploring alternative rehabilitation so that those going down this road can be firmly turned around or given better choices. So the current situation is that our society, given two bad options, is experimenting with accepting a somewhat elevated crime rate in the interest of reducing over-incarceration and the mass human suffering it creates.
Ultimately my feeling is that you pay for everything one way or another. The stolen laptop and broken window are coming out of the extra money made selling a home in an area with artificially constrained housing supply. People save on property taxes but spend more on Ubers to avoid the train full of poor and needy people who have been screwed by the same system. IMO creating a spectrum of options, rather than the constant debate between extremes, would let people narrow in more strongly on the best balance.
Failing to either incarcerate or rehabilitate criminals is cruel for everyone. When the state fails at its most basic duty in the social contract---that we put justice in the state's hands exclusively instead of doled out arbitrarily in the street---, people will justifiably ask what's the point of having a state at all. That's a dangerous path to go down.
Remember, this was all cleaned up recently for an international conference. So it CAN be done; they just won’t, because they prefer virtue signaling over the wellbeing of the residents paying their salaries.
54 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadRe: tech - it def disrupted the fabric of the city. As quickly as it came (gentrification, raising rents) and as quickly as it left (residents losing adjacent jobs), it's been bad for the people who had to live through it without high paying tech jobs.
I liked that Andrew touched on the opioid epidemic and how it's spiraled. Heavy policing historically disenfranchised poor minorities so that's not the way to go. Progressive policies were tried and the people pushed back.
I wish there was a single solution. It feels like we fell off a cliff and the only way up is to crawl back up.
> The role of tech is no different than any other industry.
I agree with this. Doesn’t mean industry shares no blame.
The solution to a lot of problems here are more high density housing. The way you get that is taxes and eminent domain to tear down and rebuild. But that will weaken current SF residents political power, so they fight against it. Pushing labor out of the city removes their power to affect change.
The only point I'd bring up about the tech industry is the SF residents putting up these barriers are often old time tech folks that "made it".
I think Seattle has some of the same issues, but at least seams to be handling things a lot better.
Can we try not making it illegal to build densely on the property you own first? The government doesn’t need to do anything; no tax breaks or incentives. It just needs to stop taking the opinion that any amount of profit taken by a real estate developer is necessarily immoral.
The municipality controls housing and homeless policy. The state controls the mental healthcare system. The feds allowed the opium epidemic.
If we want to focus on solutions, talking about the tech industry is a distraction.
Places like Vienna are more functional because they have governments that are working for the people rather than corporate interests. They have centuries of real social development, rather than what the us has which is only economic development.
I think most people in america don't really understand the concept of society. They see the state as a mechanism to keep just enough peace to enable money to be made, and to fight wars. They don't see it as a tool to craft a society that benefits the main thrust of it's people. Despite all the lofty ideals and language in our founding documents it's never been that type of endeavor.
I’ve always felt that the increase in crime was a direct result of the fucking rent. Its been empty for a minute now, it reminds me of disneyland in the sense that people all go in to shop and work but leave back home at night, leaving a ghost town. So it’s community got weak, lost the electorate to protect itself.
I do get frustrated by outsiders making fun of us. Its a complex problem that you can’t solve with a gun like some other commenters are suggesting. Try saving a life for once and then get back to me on how to make my city less miserable. I also get frustrated by the outsider voyeurism that comes with suffering.
I like how another commenter put it. Its as if we took a really painful fall off a cliff, alone. The only way out is to slowly crawl back up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38426649
Uber eats and Doordash have had a particularly negative impact, not just that stolen car in the video. Restaurants are strangled and Uber both raises all prices and cuts into margins when the order load doesn’t scale. Even the original Little Star on divisadero is now closing due to Uber gouging. Combine with the fact that the drivers are out-of-town unsafe drivers and block roads everywhere, makes the suburbs look more appealing.
And yet there are people in denial about just how dead downtown SF is. This /r/sanfrancisco post is unintentionally hilarious. <https://np.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/11z2cz5/americ...> I think they think that "People leaving SF" = "Trump wins", or something.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/01/20/1149748975/a-full-guide-to-th...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD8g_ZfcrEo&t=80s&ab_channel...
There’s no reason you shouldn’t take it at face value. There’s no reason to believe these are “normal city problems”.
>A note to my fellow San Franciscians: I’m sorry. I know. There’s always some story in the East Coast press about how our city is dying. San Franciscians hate—HATE—these pieces. You’re a stooge and a traitor for writing one. When I set out reporting, I wanted to write a debunking-the-doom piece myself. Yet to live in San Francisco right now, to watch its streets, is to realize that no one will catch you if you fall. In the first three months of 2023, 200 San Franciscans OD’d, up 41 percent from last year. “It’s like a wasteland,” the guard said when I asked how San Francisco looked to him. “It’s like the only way to describe it. It’s like a video game — like made-up shit. Have you ever played Fallout?”
>I shook my head.
>“There’s this thing in the game called feral ghouls, and they’re like rotted. They’re like zombies.” There’s only so much pain a person can take before you disintegrate, grow paranoid, or turn numb. “I go home and play with my wife, and we’re like, ‘Ah, hahahaha, this is SF.’”
I found it notable that no one in the Reddit discussion <https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/13dvrjs/san_franci...> mentioned the Fallout comparison despite the fact that, well, this is Reddit. I think it hit too hard.
This is a call for violence.
> in what world are those people “ordinary citizens”
In the world where rule of law exists and extends to providing every person the right to a fair trial.
For one, he is still extremely recognizable. And two, he is still wearing the same type of (rather iconic at this point) suits and outfits that made him recognizable in the first place.
Speaking of which, I'm surprised I haven't seen any mention of it. What became of that?
Probably 0% the above, and 90% changing his look because he got too well-known. His thing is doing more candid interviews, not being recognized as a famous person helps the interview subject relax more.
On the other hand, criminal justice in the US is anything but. Voters have decided — I think correctly! — that mere theft and drug use don't warrant the kind of punitive, criminogenic long-term caging and low-grade torture that constitutes our penal system, but there is simultaneously little appetite for improving conditions or exploring alternative rehabilitation so that those going down this road can be firmly turned around or given better choices. So the current situation is that our society, given two bad options, is experimenting with accepting a somewhat elevated crime rate in the interest of reducing over-incarceration and the mass human suffering it creates.
Ultimately my feeling is that you pay for everything one way or another. The stolen laptop and broken window are coming out of the extra money made selling a home in an area with artificially constrained housing supply. People save on property taxes but spend more on Ubers to avoid the train full of poor and needy people who have been screwed by the same system. IMO creating a spectrum of options, rather than the constant debate between extremes, would let people narrow in more strongly on the best balance.