12 ms·

I used to think that this was the solution, but it's now clear to me that the state and local governments are too incompetent to fix this problem. Over the past

by chroma 8y ago

I used to think that this was the solution, but it's now clear to me that the state and local governments are too incompetent to fix this problem. Over the past decade, the bay area has gotten so much worse. The cost of living has skyrocketed. Commutes have gotten longer. The homeless problem has become something out of a George Romero movie. None of these show signs of improving, and it's not due to lack of trying. The city of San Francisco spends a quarter billion dollars a year on homelessness.[1] That's $33,000 per homeless person per year![2] The city is experiencing the greatest economic success in its history, but it can barely keep Muni running. Imagine how bad things will get in a downturn. What laws do we see being passed? Plastic bag bans. Plastic straw bans. Scooter bans. Tech company cafeteria bans. Laws that demonstrate a total lack of knowledge of economics, incentives, or any sort of numerical analysis. I've given up on the bay area and am preparing to move. I know the tech jobs and community won't be as good, and I'll miss my friends, but I can no longer stand being governed by complete nincompoops. 1. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/29-million-increase-for-San-Francisco-12902707.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/29-million-incre... 2. There are approximately 7,500 homeless in SF according to http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Point-in-Time-Count-General-FINAL-6.21.17.pdf http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Poin...

justinzollars 8y ago
Sorry to see you go. Honestly we need people here that can see these problems. Your facts are spot on.
edoceo 8y ago
""governed by complete nincompoops"" This will be true after you move too.
- chroma 8y ago
  I've lived in three countries and a half-dozen states. The bay area's governance is easily the worst I've encountered.
  - edoceo 8y ago
    Yea, it thought it was bad too, till I moved. Bad news, the grass is not greener.
kelp 8y ago
Isn't it quite an oversimplification to say that the homelessness issues in SF are due to stupid politicians? Do other cities somehow have better smarter politicians? I think it's more likely that a series of cultural, historical, systemic and environmental issues have lead to the current situation, and that our politicians are generally average in competence and intelligence compared to other similarly sized cities, but are dealing with some particularly challenging issues. Some possible factors: Cultural: Other cities, such as NYC, house many people in large shelters, on cots, outside of the city center. SF wants to put people in a higher standard of living than a room full of cots, so we can only afford to house about half the people who need it. (Much of that $250M/year we spend goes to housing people) It's hard for the BART police to kick people out of the stations because homeless advocacy organizations complain about abuse. So the problem stays visibile. Places like Salt Lake City also see the Mormon church active in improving these problems. I don't think there is any such non-govermental organization working at such scale in SF. Generally we think it's the goverments problem to solve, other places think it's a community problem, and take action. We seem to tolerate people visibily using drugs, leaving needles around. More conservative cities would not let that happen a block from city hall. Historical: Most of SF's services, such as shelters, needle exchange, healthcare, etc, are downtown, this makes the problem very visible. NYC pushes this out of Manhattan and has for years. Neighborhood groups in SF usually protest adding a navigation center to their neghborhood. Imagine if we started putting shelters and navigation centers in the richmond? Systemic: This could be an essay alone. Rising housing costs, due to downzoning, prop13, discrtionary review, etc etc, and then a job loss, and you can't make rent, you lose your apartment. Now you're out on the street. The city doesn't have enough shelters. And see previous mention of neghorhoods not wanting navigation centers or shelters near them. The city actually has to go in front of the planning comission, just like a private developer, to argue for a new navigation center. Not only do we have a system that makes it hard to build new high end housing, it's hard to build navgation centers, because of all the process involved. Environmental: California cities have a much higher rate of unsheltered homelessness. NYC has a legal right to shelter. I do wonder if part of this has to do with climate. If NYC had the same number of people living unsheltered through the winter, they would have thousands of people freezing to death. NYC has 75K people experiencing homelessness at any given time. This creates the political will to house people. So you're elected to the board of supervisors, or as the mayor, you have all this history, all these factors that are making your job of reducing homeless, very hard. What do you do? We've had many many bonds to increase funding to provide housing for people experiencing homelessness, but the electorate consistently votes them down. So your hands are also fairly tied with regards to money. You're left with small incremental imrovements over many years. I can see why you'd be fed up with San Francisco for these reasons. I just don't think it's fair to blame it entirly on stupid politicians. All that said, I do agree with you that I'd rather see the time spent on more pressing issues than tech company cafeteria bans, and plastic bag bans. Part of this is because we elect people like Aaron Peskin who seem very interested in 1. having the ear of local small business groups, and passing protectionist laws. 2. Putting forward sensational laws that get a lot of media attention. Peskin and his ilk operate on the emotional appeal side of politics. Things that sound good as long as you don't think too hard about them. We'll find those types of politicans everywhere. We have to work to expose them for what they are.
whazor 8y ago
Why would anyone capable work in the government if you can make many times the amount elsewhere? I think this is the economic curse.
- tormeh 8y ago
  You can do what Singapore does and just pay senior bureaucrats more than what the private sector can afford to pay them. Good public administration isn't cheap, and excellent public administration is expensive. The benefits are enormous, of course.
  - pjlegato 8y ago
    This seems to work well for Sinagpore. Competent people actually want to work in government. There's another key element: government officials are also required to open their personal finances to public inspection. This goes a long way to rein in corruption and graft.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Highly competent technology practitioners took paycuts to work at USDS and 18F to transform government IT delivery.
  - chroma 8y ago
    If your system relies on people going against their incentives, it's going to produce substandard outcomes. While some tech workers did decide to take pay cuts to work at USDS & 18F, most didn't. I considered both, but then I realized that best case I'd make 1/2 as much as my current compensation. On top of that I'd be fixing or replacing legacy code, not developing skills that would be useful elsewhere. I have a sense of civic duty, but it doesn't go that far. I'm sure the same is true for many others. The net result is the same as if the government paid mechanics or doctors substandard wages: Some good talent would join out of civic duty, but the overall effect would be to lower the quality of workers relative to the private sector.
- solatic 8y ago
dacompton 8y ago
I just moved from San Francisco to Nashville, TN last week. For me, it was a combination of the cost of living and lack of family in the area. I'll always miss San Francisco, but our rent has halved, our square footage has doubled, and I no longer pay state income taxes. I'm still doing interesting work (remotely) for the same company, so I can't complain!
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  Congrats on the move! How's the tech scene?
- pascalxus 8y ago
  Congrats on getting out of the bay! so many of us think of it, but with family and friends around here, it makes it much harder to leave.
- caseysoftware 8y ago
  As you're getting connected in the local community, check out a little service I built: https://twitter.com/NashTechEvents https://twitter.com/NashTechEvents It's driven by ML using Meetup, Eventbrite, and a bunch of other data sources. And always open to feedback. Feel free to drop me a note. :)
rhizome 8y ago
but it's now clear to me that the state and local governments are too incompetent to fix this problem. Don't forget NIMBY residents. Just down the street from me is a building that used to be a church. The church wanted to start providing services and shelter for homeless LGBTQ teens. The neighbors threw a shitfit, the shelter never happened, the church closed and moved, and now the building is a dentist's office.
- philsnow 8y ago
  NIMBYism is a real problem in the bay area, but it doesn't sound like this one case was caused by NIMBYism. The people who would want to nix such a shelter would probably want it nixed whether it was in their proverbial "backyard" or not.
  - arthur_pryor 8y ago
    > The people who would want to nix such a shelter would probably want it nixed whether it was in their proverbial "backyard" or not i guess i don't have any more hard evidence at hand than what you present here, but my gut feeling is totally the opposite on this. i think there are a lot of people in SF (in the SF bay area in general or the city in particular) who would get behind this sort of program in principle, but who would be scared to be close to the implementation of such a program. i think this particular flavor of NIMBYism (overblown fears about e.g. safety and/or property values) is more prevalent in the burbs, and especially the more affluent suburbs, but i'm sure you get some of it in the more affluent neighborhoods and gentrified pockets of other neighborhoods in SF and oakland too.
  - rhizome 8y ago
    >but it doesn't sound like this one case was caused by NIMBYism That's fine, I'm not interested in #notalldevelopment reasoning because my point was not to ascribe all of the behavior to NIMBYs. I was only countering the idea that "politicians, amirite?" is the problem.
- seem_2211 8y ago
  I dunno if the system is broken to be honest - and I don't think it's incompetence that's the problem here. I don't believe a lot of people in City Government honestly care about fixing the problem.
HillaryBriss 8y ago
> ...it's now clear to me that the state and local governments are too incompetent to fix this problem On a related note, I feel the same thing holds true for LA and Southern California's car traffic problem.
- sizzle 8y ago
  We can only hope self driving cars will fix rush hour grid lock in our lifetimes.
briandear 8y ago
Is it strange to anyone else that the more you spend on the homeless, the more homeless you seem to get? Why does San Francisco have more homeless than Houston despite Houston being far bigger? We could argue housing costs, however many homeless in San Francisco aren’t even from the area, they gravitate there, in my opinion, because of permissive policies. San Francisco’s homeless problem is among the worst in the country, with Portland and Seattle quickly closing the gap. Less “progressive” places seem to have a much lower level of homelessness. Camping on sidewalks, shooting up, and shitting in doorways is rarely tolerated in most other places in the country, yet at least we’re working to stop plastic straws! It might seem that San Francisco is more apt to arrest smugglers of plastic straws long before they arrest those shooting up in public and tossing their needles on the sidewalk. You are more likely to get fined for a polluting car than you would for smashing the windows of that same car.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  Why does San Francisco have more homeless than Houston despite Houston being far bigger? One factor is weather. Is it strange to anyone else that the more you spend on the homeless, the more homeless you seem to get? The Shirky Principle: "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution" And a few thoughts on that and homelessness in specific. https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-shirky-principle-and-homelessness.html https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-shirky-...
pascalxus 8y ago
government in the bay area has been broken for a long time. this mess of a housing issue has been in the making for the last 40 years!
joeblau 8y ago
> Over the past decade, the bay area has gotten so much worse. The cost of living has skyrocketed. To be fair, your'e talking about a period that started from the biggest stock market crash since the Great Depression. I'm not saying that the housing costs aren't crazy (I paid 2900 for a 600sqft studio in SOMA in 2013), but 10 years a go was an extremely low point.
mcpherrinm 8y ago
> That's $33,000 per homeless person per year! This is a disingenuous way to represent spending. Much of the spending goes to keeping people off the streets, to shelters, and to medical care. If you spent a money and everybody but 1 person got off the street, would you say that they spent a quarter billion dollars on 1 homeless person? No.

by chroma 8y ago

justinzollars 8y ago

Sorry to see you go. Honestly we need people here that can see these problems. Your facts are spot on.

edoceo 8y ago

""governed by complete nincompoops"" This will be true after you move too.

chroma 8y ago
I've lived in three countries and a half-dozen states. The bay area's governance is easily the worst I've encountered.
- edoceo 8y ago
  Yea, it thought it was bad too, till I moved. Bad news, the grass is not greener.

kelp 8y ago

Isn't it quite an oversimplification to say that the homelessness issues in SF are due to stupid politicians? Do other cities somehow have better smarter politicians? I think it's more likely that a series of cultural, historical, systemic and environmental issues have lead to the current situation, and that our politicians are generally average in competence and intelligence compared to other similarly sized cities, but are dealing with some particularly challenging issues. Some possible factors: Cultural: Other cities, such as NYC, house many people in large shelters, on cots, outside of the city center. SF wants to put people in a higher standard of living than a room full of cots, so we can only afford to house about half the people who need it. (Much of that $250M/year we spend goes to housing people) It's hard for the BART police to kick people out of the stations because homeless advocacy organizations complain about abuse. So the problem stays visibile. Places like Salt Lake City also see the Mormon church active in improving these problems. I don't think there is any such non-govermental organization working at such scale in SF. Generally we think it's the goverments problem to solve, other places think it's a community problem, and take action. We seem to tolerate people visibily using drugs, leaving needles around. More conservative cities would not let that happen a block from city hall. Historical: Most of SF's services, such as shelters, needle exchange, healthcare, etc, are downtown, this makes the problem very visible. NYC pushes this out of Manhattan and has for years. Neighborhood groups in SF usually protest adding a navigation center to their neghborhood. Imagine if we started putting shelters and navigation centers in the richmond? Systemic: This could be an essay alone. Rising housing costs, due to downzoning, prop13, discrtionary review, etc etc, and then a job loss, and you can't make rent, you lose your apartment. Now you're out on the street. The city doesn't have enough shelters. And see previous mention of neghorhoods not wanting navigation centers or shelters near them. The city actually has to go in front of the planning comission, just like a private developer, to argue for a new navigation center. Not only do we have a system that makes it hard to build new high end housing, it's hard to build navgation centers, because of all the process involved. Environmental: California cities have a much higher rate of unsheltered homelessness. NYC has a legal right to shelter. I do wonder if part of this has to do with climate. If NYC had the same number of people living unsheltered through the winter, they would have thousands of people freezing to death. NYC has 75K people experiencing homelessness at any given time. This creates the political will to house people. So you're elected to the board of supervisors, or as the mayor, you have all this history, all these factors that are making your job of reducing homeless, very hard. What do you do? We've had many many bonds to increase funding to provide housing for people experiencing homelessness, but the electorate consistently votes them down. So your hands are also fairly tied with regards to money. You're left with small incremental imrovements over many years. I can see why you'd be fed up with San Francisco for these reasons. I just don't think it's fair to blame it entirly on stupid politicians. All that said, I do agree with you that I'd rather see the time spent on more pressing issues than tech company cafeteria bans, and plastic bag bans. Part of this is because we elect people like Aaron Peskin who seem very interested in 1. having the ear of local small business groups, and passing protectionist laws. 2. Putting forward sensational laws that get a lot of media attention. Peskin and his ilk operate on the emotional appeal side of politics. Things that sound good as long as you don't think too hard about them. We'll find those types of politicans everywhere. We have to work to expose them for what they are.

whazor 8y ago

Why would anyone capable work in the government if you can make many times the amount elsewhere? I think this is the economic curse.

tormeh 8y ago
You can do what Singapore does and just pay senior bureaucrats more than what the private sector can afford to pay them. Good public administration isn't cheap, and excellent public administration is expensive. The benefits are enormous, of course.
- pjlegato 8y ago
  This seems to work well for Sinagpore. Competent people actually want to work in government. There's another key element: government officials are also required to open their personal finances to public inspection. This goes a long way to rein in corruption and graft.
toomuchtodo 8y ago
Highly competent technology practitioners took paycuts to work at USDS and 18F to transform government IT delivery.
- chroma 8y ago
  If your system relies on people going against their incentives, it's going to produce substandard outcomes. While some tech workers did decide to take pay cuts to work at USDS & 18F, most didn't. I considered both, but then I realized that best case I'd make 1/2 as much as my current compensation. On top of that I'd be fixing or replacing legacy code, not developing skills that would be useful elsewhere. I have a sense of civic duty, but it doesn't go that far. I'm sure the same is true for many others. The net result is the same as if the government paid mechanics or doctors substandard wages: Some good talent would join out of civic duty, but the overall effect would be to lower the quality of workers relative to the private sector.
solatic 8y ago

dacompton 8y ago

I just moved from San Francisco to Nashville, TN last week. For me, it was a combination of the cost of living and lack of family in the area. I'll always miss San Francisco, but our rent has halved, our square footage has doubled, and I no longer pay state income taxes. I'm still doing interesting work (remotely) for the same company, so I can't complain!

Apocryphon 8y ago
Congrats on the move! How's the tech scene?
pascalxus 8y ago
Congrats on getting out of the bay! so many of us think of it, but with family and friends around here, it makes it much harder to leave.
caseysoftware 8y ago
As you're getting connected in the local community, check out a little service I built: https://twitter.com/NashTechEvents https://twitter.com/NashTechEvents It's driven by ML using Meetup, Eventbrite, and a bunch of other data sources. And always open to feedback. Feel free to drop me a note. :)

rhizome 8y ago

but it's now clear to me that the state and local governments are too incompetent to fix this problem. Don't forget NIMBY residents. Just down the street from me is a building that used to be a church. The church wanted to start providing services and shelter for homeless LGBTQ teens. The neighbors threw a shitfit, the shelter never happened, the church closed and moved, and now the building is a dentist's office.

philsnow 8y ago
NIMBYism is a real problem in the bay area, but it doesn't sound like this one case was caused by NIMBYism. The people who would want to nix such a shelter would probably want it nixed whether it was in their proverbial "backyard" or not.
- arthur_pryor 8y ago
  > The people who would want to nix such a shelter would probably want it nixed whether it was in their proverbial "backyard" or not i guess i don't have any more hard evidence at hand than what you present here, but my gut feeling is totally the opposite on this. i think there are a lot of people in SF (in the SF bay area in general or the city in particular) who would get behind this sort of program in principle, but who would be scared to be close to the implementation of such a program. i think this particular flavor of NIMBYism (overblown fears about e.g. safety and/or property values) is more prevalent in the burbs, and especially the more affluent suburbs, but i'm sure you get some of it in the more affluent neighborhoods and gentrified pockets of other neighborhoods in SF and oakland too.
- rhizome 8y ago
  >but it doesn't sound like this one case was caused by NIMBYism That's fine, I'm not interested in #notalldevelopment reasoning because my point was not to ascribe all of the behavior to NIMBYs. I was only countering the idea that "politicians, amirite?" is the problem.
seem_2211 8y ago
I dunno if the system is broken to be honest - and I don't think it's incompetence that's the problem here. I don't believe a lot of people in City Government honestly care about fixing the problem.

HillaryBriss 8y ago

> ...it's now clear to me that the state and local governments are too incompetent to fix this problem On a related note, I feel the same thing holds true for LA and Southern California's car traffic problem.

sizzle 8y ago
We can only hope self driving cars will fix rush hour grid lock in our lifetimes.

briandear 8y ago

Is it strange to anyone else that the more you spend on the homeless, the more homeless you seem to get? Why does San Francisco have more homeless than Houston despite Houston being far bigger? We could argue housing costs, however many homeless in San Francisco aren’t even from the area, they gravitate there, in my opinion, because of permissive policies. San Francisco’s homeless problem is among the worst in the country, with Portland and Seattle quickly closing the gap. Less “progressive” places seem to have a much lower level of homelessness. Camping on sidewalks, shooting up, and shitting in doorways is rarely tolerated in most other places in the country, yet at least we’re working to stop plastic straws! It might seem that San Francisco is more apt to arrest smugglers of plastic straws long before they arrest those shooting up in public and tossing their needles on the sidewalk. You are more likely to get fined for a polluting car than you would for smashing the windows of that same car.

DoreenMichele 8y ago
Why does San Francisco have more homeless than Houston despite Houston being far bigger? One factor is weather. Is it strange to anyone else that the more you spend on the homeless, the more homeless you seem to get? The Shirky Principle: "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution" And a few thoughts on that and homelessness in specific. https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-shirky-principle-and-homelessness.html https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-shirky-...

pascalxus 8y ago

government in the bay area has been broken for a long time. this mess of a housing issue has been in the making for the last 40 years!

joeblau 8y ago

> Over the past decade, the bay area has gotten so much worse. The cost of living has skyrocketed. To be fair, your'e talking about a period that started from the biggest stock market crash since the Great Depression. I'm not saying that the housing costs aren't crazy (I paid 2900 for a 600sqft studio in SOMA in 2013), but 10 years a go was an extremely low point.

mcpherrinm 8y ago

> That's $33,000 per homeless person per year! This is a disingenuous way to represent spending. Much of the spending goes to keeping people off the streets, to shelters, and to medical care. If you spent a money and everybody but 1 person got off the street, would you say that they spent a quarter billion dollars on 1 homeless person? No.