The local political scene in San Francisco is beyond broken, but the idea that it's a failed city was always a media fabrication. Based on yet more terrible politics, but just political wish casting from outside of San Francisco.
To be surprised, you'd have to believe the media and propaganda more than your own eyes and ears.
Not sure why you are downvoted. I lived there 8 years, relocated to the east side (because of work initially but decided to stay) and would never want to (or even be able to afford) to come back. Homelessness, drugs, expensive housing, traffic, car break-ins, theft in broad daylight (you can steal up to I think $800 worth of stuff and not get punished), underground street racing gangs (they block intersections in broad daylight to do donuts and cops just stand there and watch unable to do anything about them), red light traffic cameras everywhere, paid freeway lanes, gender politics is being forced on elementary/middle school kids while science like math is being simplified (instead of encouraging smart kids to study harder material they bring curriculum to a lower level to match the level of kids who struggle with math) - it’s not a city where I would want to raise children in.
It’s easy to dismiss everyone who doesn’t like being surrounded by fentanyl and meth addiction and crime as “right wing,” but it just makes them sound pretty sensible.
All my friends moved away over a span of about three years. I held on as long as I could but I finally threw in the towel too.
Easy way to tell which longtime SF residents have Stockholm Syndrome: they blame everything that is completely broken in the city on "right wing media."
Really? I lived there. It felt pretty failed to me. Utter corruption at the planning department. Lawlessness, open injection of opioids in broad daylight on city streets. No police response for anything. People just stop reporting theft and property crime because police obviously don’t give a shit. Speaking of shit. All over the streets. Smash and grab theft so rampant that there’s a cop on every corner downtown during Christmas season.
The only thing they can get done is the one city service that is cash flow positive. Writing you tickets for street cleaning.
Honestly, couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
The solution is pretty simple, don't go to downtown. Downtown, at least many parts of it, is a containment zone for the homeless and the addicted and their various services. It's not that different from Skid Row/Flower District in DTLA.
You can enjoy Pac Heights, Noe, the Dogpatch, the Sunset, the Richmond, North Beach etc. etc. just fine without ever making contact with downtown, the same way most people don't hang out on 5th and San Pedro in LA and can still enjoy Silver Lake. You can pretend it doesn't exist and never cross paths, unless you really insist on spending quality time on 6th and Mission and other fine intersections.
Would I like it better if the Tenderloin was more Fifth Avenue and less World War Z? Sure, but that's not happening with the way SF politics work, so I might as well live with the cards we were dealt.
What the media calls "Downtown" is really mostly offices. There also isn't really any district called "Downtown". There is FiDi (financial district), which is definitely all offices (dead on weekends), and SoMa (south of market), which is also mostly offices in the north-east part and ex-industrial/residential in the south-west part. Then there is the mid-Market area which has some newish residential development. Any remaining bars, restaurants etc are basically all just serving either the office crowd or the residents of SoMa (the former is getting smaller, so those businesses are unsurprisingly not doing so well). There is some stuff like a Target with an AMC and a convention center in SoMa too but that's basically it.
All the tourist attractions are in different, older parts of the city (Powell St, Embarcadero, etc). I don't see a reason a tourist would want to go to downtown (aka SoMa or FiDi).
It’s 7x7 and as it turns out, you can fit a lot of stuff if you don’t have highways and parking lots everywhere. A wild concept for Texans for whom the other opposite sidewalk may be a 6 minute drive away.
Or just no sidewalks. A company flew me to Dallas for a conference. Me and a colleague saw that the restaurant we wanted to go to was one block away, so no point in taking a taxi. Staff at the front desk looked at us like we were crazy. We found out why once we left the hotel: we had to walk on landscaping to get there, no pavement that wasn't road and absolutely nobody else out walking anywhere that could be seen.
Same happened to me when I interviewed in Austin. Had to walk through high grass on the median to get to a restaurant in the evening. Afterwards, someone told you that there occasionally were rattlesnakes living in the same grass…
The Haight, Cole Valley, Hayes Valley, Chinatown, Valencia Street, the Sunset District, the Embarcadero, Van Ness Avenue, Ocean Beach, the Golden Gate, Golden Gate Park, Lake Merced, Mission Bay, Fort Mason etc.
I was harassed at the SF Public Library in the Civic Center so I do avoid the library. I drive through the Tenderloin although I try not to walk there.
Adding to the list... Alamo Square, Presidio, Twin Peaks, North Beach, Mission, Treasure Island, Castro, Noe Valley, Potrero Hill, Russian Hill, Financial District... and 10 others.
Its more insightful to ask about the parts of San Francisco that you don't enjoy. Oh, yes, there's one such area. It's one of the smallest in terms of geography but receives the most media attention.
You do bring up a good point though that a lot needs to get fixed even though the city is enjoyable, high up on my list.
1. Crime
2. Education
3. Cleanliness
4. Illogical supervisors who harm not help the city
5. Dirt bikers riding in city illegally for the sole purpose of harassing others
Police not giving a shit actually has a reason. I know that many officers quit SFPD because they grew tired of the DA not prosecuting anything. Criminals know this and openly taunt cops. So the best cops who actually cared have quit the force. Source: know people at a South Bay police department that has a lot of SFPD refugees.
That DA was recalled more than 18 months ago. The excuse is starting to wear thin.
And the real reason cops went after him (to the extent of refusing to participate in a raid on a shop used for fencing stolen goods: https://sfist.com/2022/05/23/report-sfpd-refused-to-particip...) was that he wanted to hold corrupt cops accountable. Now that he's gone, police have what they want and they went back to doing nothing.
you'd have to believe the media and propaganda more than your own eyes and ears.
So basically, you'd have to be any human. We parrot propaganda all the time. Rarely is any of it fact based.
You don't need facts to get people to buy into your narrative. You just need a story that fits your world view. Truth or falsehood is largely irrelevant.
Yes, many I say. When you see the poverty, malcontent, and crime right before your eyes every day on the streets of your city, it is a problem. Atlanta does not have the level of open lawlessness than San Francisco does. Atlanta has its problems but it's a nice place to live for anyone. San Francisco is only a place to live for the wealthy, everyone else is crushed by the insanity.
Atlanta has more violent crime than San Francisco (as do many other cities). The one crime where San Francisco really stands out is theft, everything else is more or less middle of the pack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
First time driving through San Francisco I saw someone shooting up heroin on the sidewalk. Seen lots of stuff in NYC, Trenton, Camden, etc., but never such obvious issues with drug addiction and homelessness.
We definitely have what we like to call an 'opioid' problem here.
I lived in Houston from Rita to Harvey. Also had serious drug problems. Needles and all. There is no way other people living in Houston could not have noticed these issues. Homelessness, drugs, rampant crime.
For San Fran to be different from Houston, there would need to be something more.
It was an anecdotal example. Other examples I saw include drug paraphernalia (e.g. needles) littered all over the sidewalks, vast encampments of homeless people, and no police presence. Maybe a bad day? I've been to Houston many times and never seen anything like that. I've also seen shadier parts of NYC but the level of despair appeared much higher in SF.
Drove through Hollywood and saw a man pull over on a very busy and well-lit street, open his car door, and proceed to piss between his car and the busy sidewalk. That's just normal city stuff. Has a certain charm to it imo
The first time I saw someone shooting up in public was in Vancouver BC back in the 90s. But then I found out they had a bunch of safe needle exchanges and repositories and such.
> but the idea that it's a failed city was always a media fabrication.
Let me copy a piece of my comment I already wrote as a reply to a different comment deeper in this thread:
> Homelessness, drugs, expensive housing, traffic, car break-ins, theft in broad daylight (you can steal up to I think $800 worth of stuff and not get punished), underground street racing gangs (they block intersections in broad daylight to do donuts and cops just stand there and watch unable to do anything about them), red light traffic cameras everywhere, paid freeway lanes, gender politics is being forced on elementary/middle school kids while science like math is being simplified (instead of encouraging smart kids to study harder material they bring curriculum to a lower level to match the level of kids who struggle with math).
So no, it’s not just “media fabrication”. San Francisco is in a state of chaos and lawlessness and it is getting worse.
> but the idea that it's a "failed city" was always a media fabrication.
And you mention:
> Homelessness, drugs, expensive housing, traffic, car break-ins, theft in broad daylight (you can steal up to I think $800 worth of stuff and not get punished), underground street racing gangs (they block intersections in broad daylight to do donuts and cops just stand there and watch unable to do anything about them), red light traffic cameras everywhere, paid freeway lanes, gender politics is being forced on elementary/middle school kids while science like math is being simplified (instead of encouraging smart kids to study harder material they bring curriculum to a lower level to match the level of kids who struggle with math).
"Things I don't like" does not make SF a failed city, it doesn't mean property values will fall (let alone go to zero) as everyone flees. It does mean that SF will continue being a city not for everyone.
> So no, it’s not just “media fabrication”. San Francisco is in a state of chaos and lawlessness and it is getting worse.
Again, that's really just your opinion and outlook, you don't have to live in SF, you probably don't.
Sure, but also, maybe don't come, the cost of living for locals doesn't need to get any higher. Maybe wait until there's new construction, so it's not a zero sum situation where the only way to get in is to elbow someone else out. Let's not go back to 8 grand per mo for a 2br at Nema.
SF does everything in its power to not grow, to restrict access. The city population grew barely 20% over the last 70 years, while places like Austin TX went up by 830% during the same time period. Might as well be on different planets.
Nobody gets excluded except for people with jobs. The people who are the cogs in the machines that keep some of your fave technology companies operating.
Huge swathes of the population are excluded from SF that would love to live there, as you note, by the high rents.
But the high rents come from locals explicitly deciding that they don't want more people, and blocking housing. And that leads to lots of scapegoating of particular classes of people based on group characteristics, in order to justify the exclusion. Whether it's people moving from the Midwest, or people in tech, or (when my wife lived in the inner subset) all those people at UCSF.
There's a huge amount of "othering" in SF that people use to justify their need to keep people out. And I would say that it's far more prevalent and accepted than anti-immigrant bias in the Midwest, for example.
There are way too many people in SF that try to be "cool" by distancing themselves from all those people that arrived in the city after them. The core problem is the idea that a city is for the people that were born there, rather than cities are for everyone.
SF is very dense, only behind NY in the US. It's quite a bit denser than Tokyo and London. If SF wants to build then we need a massive public works project for London-class public transportation. Which does not exist anywhere in the US.
SF is not very dense. It could legalize Paris level of densities everywhere in its very small footprint. The entire western side is low density sprawl. It has a very tiny land area, there absolutely no reason all this very tiny land area can not have moderate density like in Pairs.
As the city then develops, it could use the increased tax levels to build subways to replace bus lines. It could start making more effective use of its streets, banning storage of personal vehicles that obstruct traffic, for example.
Greater population and better transit need to happen at the same time, not one before the other.
SF is very dense because Paris and Tokyo are considered much larger jurisdictions. They aren't very fair comparisons anyways, where the latter are more the more the size of the entire Bay Area.
SF should worry about trying to house the number of people that want to live in SF, a solvable problem. The idea that "everyone" want to live in SF is ridiculous, almost no one, relative to everyone, wants to live in SF. Equally ridiculous is the idea that SF has allowed enough people to live there.
> SF is very dense because Paris and Tokyo are considered much larger jurisdictions.
I can't fully parse what you mean here, but it seems that the reality is exactly the opposite of what you intend, given the rest of you comment.
Enough people want to live in SF that there are lots of complaints about why SF can’t be even more dense than it is. I would have loved to live in SF when I was rooming in San Carlos, but I simply couldn’t afford it so Caltrain it was. SF has plenty of people, multi story housing, transit, traffic, already. It seems like a poor target for claiming its a city that isn’t dense enough. And given the problems people have now, it most definitely is at it’s carrying capacity.
> I can't fully parse what you mean here, but it seems that the reality is exactly the opposite of what you intend, given the rest of you comment.
Both Paris and Tokyo are large municipalities that cover as much area as the Bay Area, not the smaller area city of SF which is only the second most populous city in that area. Tokyo has 847 sqm compared to SF’s 47 sqm, they aren’t comparable. Paris is 1000 sqm.
> Let's not go back to 8 grand per mo for a 2br at Nema.
Interesting. That would be considered cheap for Manhattan depending on some factors: south of 90th St, 5 mins walk from a subway station and ~1250 sq ft.
* The fact that a "two bedroom" would be called "one bedroom a living room, a bathroom, and a kitchen" anywhere that's civilized, so I expect you're getting maybe 800 square feet.
in a pretty crummy location (which is even worse now with the collapse of Downtown and FiDi).
Fake Edit: Actually, bullet point #2 is totally incorrect. The two-bedrooms that are currently (or soon) available are actually "two bedroom, living room, kitchen, and at least one bathroom" at ~1300 sq ft. I'm fucking shocked.
The building is _still_ in a pretty crummy location, though.
Manhattan's density of housing and massive tax base allows much better services in almost every respect in walking (and certainly public transit) distance.
Public transport isn’t world class, but it’s functional and better than most US cities. Public safety also isn’t really an issue for anyone that doesn’t identify as an unattended backpack in the backseat of a locked car with out of state plates.
> Public safety also isn’t really an issue for anyone that doesn’t identify as an unattended backpack in the backseat of a locked car with out of state plates
Don't travel to San Francisco, your car will be vandalized and robbed, got it.
I mean, why is that the standard? Nowhere I go do I ever have to worry about something like that.
My car got broken into with absolutely nothing to steal, along with 5 others in Texas. The police wouldn’t even come out despite clear camera footage of the perpetrator. Why is that the standard? The AG and DAs could not be more polar opposites than in SF, yet the result is the same.
This hasn't been my experience in Texas at all, or any mid-west state. The police have always been timely and responsive, for both myself and my colleagues.
Wow that was not my experience. They were just as eager to call up their friends and hold a kick back while making my partner and I wait only to refuse to file a report for a break and entry of our rental in Houston.
The police exist as an institution to harass the poor and the homeless. They were founded as escaped slave hunters. Their primary purpose isn't to protect or serve the public at large, no matter what their latest marketing claims.
What you are seeing are the effects of ignoring widespread calls for reform and the doubling down on funding of a broken institution.
So you're comparing residents of SF to bears rummaging through your camping stuff. Not sure if it's disingenuous to the bears or to the residents of SF.
Thank you for the feedback, I didn’t think that would be a conclusion that somebody would come to in good faith, but I guess I can see it. I’ve removed that example.
I lived there more than 10 years and developed something like PTSD because of all my encounters with the "unhoused". I feared for my life multiple times (actual physical threats), and the police consciously ignored it after filing a police report. This was just a fraction of the experience not even mentioning the how filthy most of the downtown area is, and how expensive the rent and food are.
My conclusion was that SF does not care about law abiding, rent paying citizens, while at the same time the people there have something like Stockholm syndrome and will never admit they have a huge problem.
Either way I don't care, I will never go near it again.
> Public safety also isn’t really an issue for anyone that doesn’t identify as an unattended backpack in the backseat of a locked car with out of state plates.
You have got to be shitting me. SF crime is third world level, obvious to anyone within first 30m of visit. My two previous employers instituted buddy system bc female employees got jumped on the street repeatedly. Stores are closing bc of high crime, etc. i mean ffs
When I was paying $6,000/month for a publicist, we had articles written like this
and would also conveniently be number 2 or 3 in buzzfeed listicles, but that wasn’t really for humans
never number 1, we would put our competitors at number 1 and assume their google alerts or network picked it up. then congratulate them for winding up in the same article, and use that coincidence with conference organizers to have us or our publicist invite them to be on the same fireside chats on stage. that was for humans.
our Google results look impeccable
great for our other assumption that our dates would cyberstalk us, I mean investors
I dont pay the publicist anymore but all those assumptions were true and still pay dividends
95 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadTo be surprised, you'd have to believe the media and propaganda more than your own eyes and ears.
it's in the interest of the right-wing media to push the narrative that san fran is failing due to the left's "interference".
there was a real problem. the city as a whole thought it and voted to recall their district attorney for his policies of not prosecuting crimes
I used to live there and now I don't.
The homeless situation really did get out of control after 2015 or so. I hear it's only gotten worse.
Maybe owning a home shouldn't take longer than a SWE's working lifespan.
If you're very wealthy and can afford to be isolated in SF, it's probably still a lovely experience.
Pardon my poor English.
All my friends moved away over a span of about three years. I held on as long as I could but I finally threw in the towel too.
What part of sf do you still enjoy?
You can enjoy Pac Heights, Noe, the Dogpatch, the Sunset, the Richmond, North Beach etc. etc. just fine without ever making contact with downtown, the same way most people don't hang out on 5th and San Pedro in LA and can still enjoy Silver Lake. You can pretend it doesn't exist and never cross paths, unless you really insist on spending quality time on 6th and Mission and other fine intersections.
Would I like it better if the Tenderloin was more Fifth Avenue and less World War Z? Sure, but that's not happening with the way SF politics work, so I might as well live with the cards we were dealt.
All the tourist attractions are in different, older parts of the city (Powell St, Embarcadero, etc). I don't see a reason a tourist would want to go to downtown (aka SoMa or FiDi).
The city is what, 5 miles by 5 miles? This isn't LA where you just skip the bad parts your whole life.
I was harassed at the SF Public Library in the Civic Center so I do avoid the library. I drive through the Tenderloin although I try not to walk there.
Its more insightful to ask about the parts of San Francisco that you don't enjoy. Oh, yes, there's one such area. It's one of the smallest in terms of geography but receives the most media attention.
You do bring up a good point though that a lot needs to get fixed even though the city is enjoyable, high up on my list.
1. Crime 2. Education 3. Cleanliness 4. Illogical supervisors who harm not help the city 5. Dirt bikers riding in city illegally for the sole purpose of harassing others
And the real reason cops went after him (to the extent of refusing to participate in a raid on a shop used for fencing stolen goods: https://sfist.com/2022/05/23/report-sfpd-refused-to-particip...) was that he wanted to hold corrupt cops accountable. Now that he's gone, police have what they want and they went back to doing nothing.
So basically, you'd have to be any human. We parrot propaganda all the time. Rarely is any of it fact based.
You don't need facts to get people to buy into your narrative. You just need a story that fits your world view. Truth or falsehood is largely irrelevant.
Real question here, is there a city who's residents don't say this?
We definitely have what we like to call an 'opioid' problem here.
I lived in Houston from Rita to Harvey. Also had serious drug problems. Needles and all. There is no way other people living in Houston could not have noticed these issues. Homelessness, drugs, rampant crime.
For San Fran to be different from Houston, there would need to be something more.
Let me copy a piece of my comment I already wrote as a reply to a different comment deeper in this thread:
> Homelessness, drugs, expensive housing, traffic, car break-ins, theft in broad daylight (you can steal up to I think $800 worth of stuff and not get punished), underground street racing gangs (they block intersections in broad daylight to do donuts and cops just stand there and watch unable to do anything about them), red light traffic cameras everywhere, paid freeway lanes, gender politics is being forced on elementary/middle school kids while science like math is being simplified (instead of encouraging smart kids to study harder material they bring curriculum to a lower level to match the level of kids who struggle with math).
So no, it’s not just “media fabrication”. San Francisco is in a state of chaos and lawlessness and it is getting worse.
> but the idea that it's a "failed city" was always a media fabrication.
And you mention:
> Homelessness, drugs, expensive housing, traffic, car break-ins, theft in broad daylight (you can steal up to I think $800 worth of stuff and not get punished), underground street racing gangs (they block intersections in broad daylight to do donuts and cops just stand there and watch unable to do anything about them), red light traffic cameras everywhere, paid freeway lanes, gender politics is being forced on elementary/middle school kids while science like math is being simplified (instead of encouraging smart kids to study harder material they bring curriculum to a lower level to match the level of kids who struggle with math).
"Things I don't like" does not make SF a failed city, it doesn't mean property values will fall (let alone go to zero) as everyone flees. It does mean that SF will continue being a city not for everyone.
> So no, it’s not just “media fabrication”. San Francisco is in a state of chaos and lawlessness and it is getting worse.
Again, that's really just your opinion and outlook, you don't have to live in SF, you probably don't.
SF does everything in its power to not grow, to restrict access. The city population grew barely 20% over the last 70 years, while places like Austin TX went up by 830% during the same time period. Might as well be on different planets.
It's the core problem of pretty much every issue it has.
Instead of building a city on exclusion, it needs to be accepting again, become a city that wants to welcome every human.
But the high rents come from locals explicitly deciding that they don't want more people, and blocking housing. And that leads to lots of scapegoating of particular classes of people based on group characteristics, in order to justify the exclusion. Whether it's people moving from the Midwest, or people in tech, or (when my wife lived in the inner subset) all those people at UCSF.
There's a huge amount of "othering" in SF that people use to justify their need to keep people out. And I would say that it's far more prevalent and accepted than anti-immigrant bias in the Midwest, for example.
There are way too many people in SF that try to be "cool" by distancing themselves from all those people that arrived in the city after them. The core problem is the idea that a city is for the people that were born there, rather than cities are for everyone.
As the city then develops, it could use the increased tax levels to build subways to replace bus lines. It could start making more effective use of its streets, banning storage of personal vehicles that obstruct traffic, for example.
Greater population and better transit need to happen at the same time, not one before the other.
Not everyone can live in SF, obviously.
> SF is very dense because Paris and Tokyo are considered much larger jurisdictions.
I can't fully parse what you mean here, but it seems that the reality is exactly the opposite of what you intend, given the rest of you comment.
> I can't fully parse what you mean here, but it seems that the reality is exactly the opposite of what you intend, given the rest of you comment.
Both Paris and Tokyo are large municipalities that cover as much area as the Bay Area, not the smaller area city of SF which is only the second most populous city in that area. Tokyo has 847 sqm compared to SF’s 47 sqm, they aren’t comparable. Paris is 1000 sqm.
Interesting. That would be considered cheap for Manhattan depending on some factors: south of 90th St, 5 mins walk from a subway station and ~1250 sq ft.
* That price (8K? Jesus Fucking Christ.)
* The fact that a "two bedroom" would be called "one bedroom a living room, a bathroom, and a kitchen" anywhere that's civilized, so I expect you're getting maybe 800 square feet.
in a pretty crummy location (which is even worse now with the collapse of Downtown and FiDi).
Fake Edit: Actually, bullet point #2 is totally incorrect. The two-bedrooms that are currently (or soon) available are actually "two bedroom, living room, kitchen, and at least one bathroom" at ~1300 sq ft. I'm fucking shocked.
The building is _still_ in a pretty crummy location, though.
TLDR
The GDP of the city is way up. Everything else still sucks.
Don't travel to San Francisco, your car will be vandalized and robbed, got it.
I mean, why is that the standard? Nowhere I go do I ever have to worry about something like that.
What you are seeing are the effects of ignoring widespread calls for reform and the doubling down on funding of a broken institution.
If you are driving in a snowy area, go slow. Bring warm clothes in case your car gets stuck.
Sometimes you have to modify your behavior based on your environment.
My conclusion was that SF does not care about law abiding, rent paying citizens, while at the same time the people there have something like Stockholm syndrome and will never admit they have a huge problem.
Either way I don't care, I will never go near it again.
You have got to be shitting me. SF crime is third world level, obvious to anyone within first 30m of visit. My two previous employers instituted buddy system bc female employees got jumped on the street repeatedly. Stores are closing bc of high crime, etc. i mean ffs
and would also conveniently be number 2 or 3 in buzzfeed listicles, but that wasn’t really for humans
never number 1, we would put our competitors at number 1 and assume their google alerts or network picked it up. then congratulate them for winding up in the same article, and use that coincidence with conference organizers to have us or our publicist invite them to be on the same fireside chats on stage. that was for humans.
our Google results look impeccable
great for our other assumption that our dates would cyberstalk us, I mean investors
I dont pay the publicist anymore but all those assumptions were true and still pay dividends