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Sonoma County, CA here. We've lost more people from our county than any other in the state between 2017-2018 [1], and it is only continuing. From the few of th

Sonoma County, CA here. We've lost more people from our county than any other in the state between 2017-2018 [1], and it is only continuing. From the few of these people I have spoken with - anecdotally: - None left because of the fire risk, specifically. [though some obviously did - 2] - Most left because of the cost of living: $600k avg home price. - Some also left because of political and human environment: We have homeless encampments on our bike trails. We have fires caused by illegal cooking fires at these encampments. Petty crime is increasing, and state laws are only enabling this - people are sick of it. 1 - https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/9149705-181/sonoma-county-population-continues-to https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/9149705-181/sonoma-county... 2 - https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2019/04/24/sonoma-county-residents-leaving-california-move-arizona-heres-why/3563636002/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2019/04/2...

triceratops 7y ago
> $600k avg home price. > homeless encampments on our bike trails These seem linked somehow...
- option 7y ago
  Are they really? An honest question - suppose the housing does a nosedive to 100K. I still find it hard to believe that those living on the streets in tents with no jobs will rush to buy houses. The other category of “invisible” homeless - those living in cars and at friends places/garages will of course benefit if the average price of the housing drops
  - Touche 7y ago
    You understand rent would also go down too right?
  - ivanbakel 7y ago
    That would be the most naive interpretation of the relationship - what if, for example, the invisible homeless also burden charities and other support systems in a way that leads to more visible homelessness? What if, given that high prices are a sign of lack of supply, visible homelessness is just a symptom of lack of construction in the county? "Suppose the house price drops" is a very non-specific hypothetical. Why would the house price drop, and what impact could that have on homelessness?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - michaelbuckbee 7y ago
    I think "linked" is probably the right term. It's certainly a spectrum of people with issues (substance abuse, mental health, opportunity, bad luck). A drop in housing prices doesn't immediately fix any of those things, but it unlocks some options. Looking at Zillow, rent of a 1 bedroom unit is around $2000/mo (put another way, that's 100% of the income of a person working at minimum wage), that's just an impossible situation. If housing prices come down, rents come down, the most functional 1/3 of the homeless population gets off the street, resources can be applied to the more difficult cases, etc.
  - Fauntleroy 7y ago
    Obviously people with no real income will not be rushing out to buy houses... however, lowering home prices would help prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place. If you only have to manage to pay for a $100,000 home, it's going to be much easier to keep those payments up. For those already homeless, special assistance will be required to get them back into "moneyed" society. However, a lower entry point to homeownership would make this assistance less costly.
  - jimhefferon 7y ago
    > Are they really? An honest question Not an economist. But many of us perceive that in the US today the middle class is contracting. A few people from that class may migrate to the upper class-- good for them-- but probably the overwhelming majority of folks migrate downwards. So if OP means that in a context where there is a lot of quite expensive real estate you would expect also to find a good number of people who are so marginalized that they are living in their cars or on the streets, then yes, they are linked.
  - triceratops 7y ago
    If housing prices nosedive, so does rent. Not everyone in a tent encampment needs to be a buyer.
    - option 7y ago
      I’d say my point still applies, perhaps with a smaller degree. If rents drop 3x (an economic disaster pretty much) are tent encampment inhabitants rushing to rent, coming up with deposits and getting pre-approved?
      - 34679 7y ago
        You keep using that word "rushing" but there's no solution that I'm aware of that would cause hordes of homeless to rush towards housing. What we can do is judge whether a policy helps or hurts. Higher housing costs causes more homelessness. Period.
      - triceratops 7y ago
        > If rents drop 3x (an economic disaster pretty much) are tent encampment inhabitants rushing to rent, coming up with deposits and getting pre-approved? If we're dealing in hypotheticals, why do you seem to be asserting that they would not do so? If they can hold down some sort of job, and they can afford the lower rent why wouldn't they go for a real roof over their head? Or are you saying that campers simply don't want that? I have no idea what you're on about with these questions...
Ididntdothis 7y ago
I work remotely but just moved to Sonoma county because my partner got a job here. The house prices are really insane. Seems most people here are either rich retirees or people whose families have lived here for a long time and made a ton of money with real estate bought before prices exploded. I don’t see any jobs here that would even remotely justify the house prices. It’s a beautiful area but the economy is pretty weird.
- borkt 7y ago
  I'm born and raised Sonoma County (as is my wife) and we are about the only people we grew up with who still live here. We saved/worked through college bought a house at a decent time (2014), and our mortgage payment for 3BR/2BA is less than many friends pay for a room. If my wife wasn't a winemaker we would most likely not be living here either. I cannot begin to understand how or why people would move here, and many people have come from out of the area to work at the City I work for only to leave after a year or two of living in a home 1/4 the size of where they come from and saving absolutely no money despite their pay increase. We've had 3 people hired for the same position all decline after a month or so of looking for housing, saying they cannot find a place where they could afford based on the salary (and the salaries are high).
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    It’s hard to beat CA weather, scenery, and access to outdoors. And be a drive from a major city like SF. Hence lots of rich people are willing to pay a lot for housing. Plus, CA has some decent socially liberal laws that set it apart.
    - borkt 7y ago
      If one can afford to live here I get it - sorry writing during short breaks at work. I don't understand how someone who is young and in an entry level service industry job could make the decision to live in Sonoma County, however with my wife supervising 10-40 seasonal interns a year (shes worked in different sized wineries) I have become friends with a lot of them. I wish them the best but more often than not I see them give up after a year or two and move home. This has led to a lot of well loved restaurants slowly decreasing in quality and closing, or offering limited menus (I eat out only a few times a year so I am not decrying the loss of restauarants, but rather pointing out a visible expression of the rising cost of living).
claudeganon 7y ago
> We have fires caused by illegal cooking fires at these encampments. Be careful about tossing around this kind of rhetoric. I heard the same story about a fire in my old neighborhood in LA. It turned out that the son of the head of Chamber of Commerce started it trying to firebomb an encampment. https://ktla.com/2019/09/04/suspects-in-eagle-rock-brush-fire-were-targeting-homeless-encampment-officials-say/ https://ktla.com/2019/09/04/suspects-in-eagle-rock-brush-fir...
- borkt 7y ago
  Please research the facts before posting this. The fires have been caused by people using Propane tanks with attachments to heat their flammable tents.
  - claudeganon 7y ago
    The Kincade Fire was started by PG&E, but somehow whenever wildfires get mentioned, people immediately point to the homeless... I only made this comment because it seems to be feeding into exterminationist sentiments among the wealthy and homeowners. As I pointed out, this led to an attack on an encampment in my old neighborhood.
    - sologoub 7y ago
      Your example is deplorable and should not happen. The other points are not baseless: Skirball fire in LA is currently attributed to a cooking fire as the source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skirball_Fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skirball_Fire My view is that this is not the homeless fault either - people have to eat and shelter. What we need is a right to shelter or similar approach to actually address the root problem. Medical care and development (lack of it) are also contributing issues.
    - ttwwmm 7y ago
      OP didn't say that the wildfires were caused by the homeless. There have been three small fires at an encampment between Santa Rosa and Sebastopol in the last few months: https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/10578855-181/fire-crew-responds-to-small https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/10578855-181/fire-crew-re...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
MeltySmelty 7y ago
even the leftists are waking up, good stuff!
smsm42 7y ago
> Petty crime is increasing, and state laws are only enabling this - people are sick of it. I wonder if people considered voting the politicians who made these laws out. Judging from CA voting patterns, probably not. And then when it gets really bad, they move to another state and likely vote for the same policies that caused them to move in the first place.
- cft 7y ago
  They not only don't vote them out, but they double down on their voting patterns.
- bronco21016 7y ago
  I first heard of this phenomenon the other day from a coworker that lives south of Atlanta, near the major movie/tv production area. People, from what are typically blue areas, are moving in and radically changing the political landscape according to him. He wasn’t necessarily against liberal ideas but his complaint was that they seem to vote for taxes just for the hell of it because every tax proposed is still significantly less than where they came from. Either way, interesting times.
  - jorblumesea 7y ago
    But that's not what the data shows. People from blue states are moving to blue cities in red states. Left leaning people are moving to similarly left leaning areas. Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Atlanta, when was the last time these were Republican bastions? Look at the areas experiencing huge population growth. Texas might be red but the populations centers haven't been for years.
    - bronco21016 7y ago
      I think in the particular case of my co-worker the blue is spilling into the traditionally red rural areas. The population centers inevitably must expand to handle the migration.
      - 7y ago
jelliclesfarm 7y ago
Sonoma county needs to clean up. Rampant drug abuse, crime(prop 47) and homeless encampments everywhere. I can’t even begin to explain the hassle I had to deal with my farm there. My farm business is literally trashed due to Sonoma county’s lack of law and order.
34679 7y ago
Former Sonoma County resident from 2009-2017 here. Three break-ins in my last year and a half caused my exodus. A new skate park had been built across the street that included bathrooms and a bus stop. A homeless camp immediately sprang up in the woods behind it, and I started getting robbed. That combined with the fact that the garden I had was 100% legal locally until the state legalized recreational cannabis and the county went for the cash grab. What Sonoma County did to their small cannabis farmers is another huge reason people are heading elsewhere. It left me in the position of leaving or having an illegal garden that was being robbed. I can tell you that I didn't move to Northern California to grow cannabis illegally and I didn't move to the woods to get robbed, so the choice to leave was tough but unambiguous.
- jvanderbot 7y ago
  Edit: I misunderstood.
narrator 7y ago
Forcing homeless services into an area and the subsequent homeless people entering your neighborhood is the politically correct 21st century version of blockbusting[1]. I suspect this is probably why Amazon, not exactly a friend of poor people, is putting homeless shelters in their offices, so they can lower the surrounding real estate prices and more easily expand[2]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting [2]https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-headquarters-homeless-shelter-seattle-opening-2019-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-headquarters-homeless...
- jimmaswell 7y ago
  Drifting the topic but I've wondered why they don't section off some good wilderness land to let homeless people make a kind of wild west type town for themselves. If I was homeless I'd certainly rather live off the land in that setting with a nice cabin even without electricity, catch my own meat, and generally be able to be self-sustaining than sleep on concrete and panhandle.
  - zootam 7y ago
    There are different kinds of homeless people. Some of them might do well in such a setting. But more than a few of them would be disruptive and ruin the land and ruin it for everyone else. There are plenty of articles and videos about what ends up happening to these encampments- they turn into dumps with piles of used needles and lots of human waste. The last thing you'd want is something catching fire and spreading. Generally, most habitable 'live off the land' type of places are spoken for already, no nearby property owners are going to approve of such a 'zone'.
prawn 7y ago
Can you talk more about the state laws? Are they not discouraging homelessness or are they too weak on petty crime?
- Izkata 7y ago
  The second one, as far as I'm aware (not from California): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47
  - inferiorhuman 7y ago
    Prop 47 is a ridiculous red herring. It raised the threshold for felony [whatever] to $950. To my knowledge that threshold hadn't changed in my lifetime, which is to say that the intent of the original statutes was that there should be a significant barrier to a felony charge. Meanwhile a misdemeanor can be punished by up to 364 days in jail. However police are generally unwilling to enforce misdemeanor statutes. A couple weeks ago one of my cars was vandalized (hood was etched). The last time I talked to a body shop about getting a hood repainted I was told to expect to pay at least $600-$800. I'd expect by now the total cost will be over a grand. For all of the whining about Prop 47 (not from you specifically), do you really think the vandal was cognizant of the threshold for felony vandalism? Do you really think that they were trying to create just under $950 worth of damage? I sure don't. Hell, I don't even think that person deserves to spend in excess of a year in jail over this. Prop 47 only encourages crime because we've moved into "police won't enforce the laws on the books" territory.
    - cobookman 7y ago
      It's not just prop 47 or the cops. The new DA just refused to prosecute a murder. https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/SF-District-Attorney-declines-to-file-murder-14978176.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/SF-District-Attorn...
    - pandaman 7y ago
      Not enough information about your vandal to speculate on his or her motives but there are reports of gangs of shoplifters raiding shops and taking less than $950 worth of goods each e.g. https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/05/14/shoplifting-california-prop-47-reduced-penalties/ https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/05/14/shoplifting-cal...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Supermancho 7y ago
Those kinds of troubles are the same reason people leave other areas I know well - Most of Orange County/LA County, CA and King County (Seattle)
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  Are you sure they are leaving king county, because the traffic keeps getting worse here? I wish more would leave, we are full up.
  - scruple 7y ago
    People we know are leaving (I have been in SoCal -- Santa Barbara, LA, and Orange counties -- for the last 12 years) but are clearly being replaced, and then some, by am influx of migrants and immigrants.

triceratops 7y ago

> $600k avg home price. > homeless encampments on our bike trails These seem linked somehow...

option 7y ago
Are they really? An honest question - suppose the housing does a nosedive to 100K. I still find it hard to believe that those living on the streets in tents with no jobs will rush to buy houses. The other category of “invisible” homeless - those living in cars and at friends places/garages will of course benefit if the average price of the housing drops
- Touche 7y ago
  You understand rent would also go down too right?
- ivanbakel 7y ago
  That would be the most naive interpretation of the relationship - what if, for example, the invisible homeless also burden charities and other support systems in a way that leads to more visible homelessness? What if, given that high prices are a sign of lack of supply, visible homelessness is just a symptom of lack of construction in the county? "Suppose the house price drops" is a very non-specific hypothetical. Why would the house price drop, and what impact could that have on homelessness?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- michaelbuckbee 7y ago
  I think "linked" is probably the right term. It's certainly a spectrum of people with issues (substance abuse, mental health, opportunity, bad luck). A drop in housing prices doesn't immediately fix any of those things, but it unlocks some options. Looking at Zillow, rent of a 1 bedroom unit is around $2000/mo (put another way, that's 100% of the income of a person working at minimum wage), that's just an impossible situation. If housing prices come down, rents come down, the most functional 1/3 of the homeless population gets off the street, resources can be applied to the more difficult cases, etc.
- Fauntleroy 7y ago
  Obviously people with no real income will not be rushing out to buy houses... however, lowering home prices would help prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place. If you only have to manage to pay for a $100,000 home, it's going to be much easier to keep those payments up. For those already homeless, special assistance will be required to get them back into "moneyed" society. However, a lower entry point to homeownership would make this assistance less costly.
- jimhefferon 7y ago
  > Are they really? An honest question Not an economist. But many of us perceive that in the US today the middle class is contracting. A few people from that class may migrate to the upper class-- good for them-- but probably the overwhelming majority of folks migrate downwards. So if OP means that in a context where there is a lot of quite expensive real estate you would expect also to find a good number of people who are so marginalized that they are living in their cars or on the streets, then yes, they are linked.
- triceratops 7y ago
  If housing prices nosedive, so does rent. Not everyone in a tent encampment needs to be a buyer.
  - option 7y ago
    I’d say my point still applies, perhaps with a smaller degree. If rents drop 3x (an economic disaster pretty much) are tent encampment inhabitants rushing to rent, coming up with deposits and getting pre-approved?
    - 34679 7y ago
      You keep using that word "rushing" but there's no solution that I'm aware of that would cause hordes of homeless to rush towards housing. What we can do is judge whether a policy helps or hurts. Higher housing costs causes more homelessness. Period.
    - triceratops 7y ago
      > If rents drop 3x (an economic disaster pretty much) are tent encampment inhabitants rushing to rent, coming up with deposits and getting pre-approved? If we're dealing in hypotheticals, why do you seem to be asserting that they would not do so? If they can hold down some sort of job, and they can afford the lower rent why wouldn't they go for a real roof over their head? Or are you saying that campers simply don't want that? I have no idea what you're on about with these questions...

Ididntdothis 7y ago

I work remotely but just moved to Sonoma county because my partner got a job here. The house prices are really insane. Seems most people here are either rich retirees or people whose families have lived here for a long time and made a ton of money with real estate bought before prices exploded. I don’t see any jobs here that would even remotely justify the house prices. It’s a beautiful area but the economy is pretty weird.

borkt 7y ago
I'm born and raised Sonoma County (as is my wife) and we are about the only people we grew up with who still live here. We saved/worked through college bought a house at a decent time (2014), and our mortgage payment for 3BR/2BA is less than many friends pay for a room. If my wife wasn't a winemaker we would most likely not be living here either. I cannot begin to understand how or why people would move here, and many people have come from out of the area to work at the City I work for only to leave after a year or two of living in a home 1/4 the size of where they come from and saving absolutely no money despite their pay increase. We've had 3 people hired for the same position all decline after a month or so of looking for housing, saying they cannot find a place where they could afford based on the salary (and the salaries are high).
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  It’s hard to beat CA weather, scenery, and access to outdoors. And be a drive from a major city like SF. Hence lots of rich people are willing to pay a lot for housing. Plus, CA has some decent socially liberal laws that set it apart.
  - borkt 7y ago
    If one can afford to live here I get it - sorry writing during short breaks at work. I don't understand how someone who is young and in an entry level service industry job could make the decision to live in Sonoma County, however with my wife supervising 10-40 seasonal interns a year (shes worked in different sized wineries) I have become friends with a lot of them. I wish them the best but more often than not I see them give up after a year or two and move home. This has led to a lot of well loved restaurants slowly decreasing in quality and closing, or offering limited menus (I eat out only a few times a year so I am not decrying the loss of restauarants, but rather pointing out a visible expression of the rising cost of living).

claudeganon 7y ago

> We have fires caused by illegal cooking fires at these encampments. Be careful about tossing around this kind of rhetoric. I heard the same story about a fire in my old neighborhood in LA. It turned out that the son of the head of Chamber of Commerce started it trying to firebomb an encampment. https://ktla.com/2019/09/04/suspects-in-eagle-rock-brush-fire-were-targeting-homeless-encampment-officials-say/ https://ktla.com/2019/09/04/suspects-in-eagle-rock-brush-fir...

borkt 7y ago
Please research the facts before posting this. The fires have been caused by people using Propane tanks with attachments to heat their flammable tents.
- claudeganon 7y ago
  The Kincade Fire was started by PG&E, but somehow whenever wildfires get mentioned, people immediately point to the homeless... I only made this comment because it seems to be feeding into exterminationist sentiments among the wealthy and homeowners. As I pointed out, this led to an attack on an encampment in my old neighborhood.
  - sologoub 7y ago
    Your example is deplorable and should not happen. The other points are not baseless: Skirball fire in LA is currently attributed to a cooking fire as the source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skirball_Fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skirball_Fire My view is that this is not the homeless fault either - people have to eat and shelter. What we need is a right to shelter or similar approach to actually address the root problem. Medical care and development (lack of it) are also contributing issues.
  - ttwwmm 7y ago
    OP didn't say that the wildfires were caused by the homeless. There have been three small fires at an encampment between Santa Rosa and Sebastopol in the last few months: https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/10578855-181/fire-crew-responds-to-small https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/10578855-181/fire-crew-re...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

MeltySmelty 7y ago

even the leftists are waking up, good stuff!

smsm42 7y ago

> Petty crime is increasing, and state laws are only enabling this - people are sick of it. I wonder if people considered voting the politicians who made these laws out. Judging from CA voting patterns, probably not. And then when it gets really bad, they move to another state and likely vote for the same policies that caused them to move in the first place.

cft 7y ago
They not only don't vote them out, but they double down on their voting patterns.
bronco21016 7y ago
I first heard of this phenomenon the other day from a coworker that lives south of Atlanta, near the major movie/tv production area. People, from what are typically blue areas, are moving in and radically changing the political landscape according to him. He wasn’t necessarily against liberal ideas but his complaint was that they seem to vote for taxes just for the hell of it because every tax proposed is still significantly less than where they came from. Either way, interesting times.
- jorblumesea 7y ago
  But that's not what the data shows. People from blue states are moving to blue cities in red states. Left leaning people are moving to similarly left leaning areas. Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Atlanta, when was the last time these were Republican bastions? Look at the areas experiencing huge population growth. Texas might be red but the populations centers haven't been for years.
  - bronco21016 7y ago
    I think in the particular case of my co-worker the blue is spilling into the traditionally red rural areas. The population centers inevitably must expand to handle the migration.
    - 7y ago

jelliclesfarm 7y ago

Sonoma county needs to clean up. Rampant drug abuse, crime(prop 47) and homeless encampments everywhere. I can’t even begin to explain the hassle I had to deal with my farm there. My farm business is literally trashed due to Sonoma county’s lack of law and order.

34679 7y ago

Former Sonoma County resident from 2009-2017 here. Three break-ins in my last year and a half caused my exodus. A new skate park had been built across the street that included bathrooms and a bus stop. A homeless camp immediately sprang up in the woods behind it, and I started getting robbed. That combined with the fact that the garden I had was 100% legal locally until the state legalized recreational cannabis and the county went for the cash grab. What Sonoma County did to their small cannabis farmers is another huge reason people are heading elsewhere. It left me in the position of leaving or having an illegal garden that was being robbed. I can tell you that I didn't move to Northern California to grow cannabis illegally and I didn't move to the woods to get robbed, so the choice to leave was tough but unambiguous.

jvanderbot 7y ago
Edit: I misunderstood.

narrator 7y ago

Forcing homeless services into an area and the subsequent homeless people entering your neighborhood is the politically correct 21st century version of blockbusting[1]. I suspect this is probably why Amazon, not exactly a friend of poor people, is putting homeless shelters in their offices, so they can lower the surrounding real estate prices and more easily expand[2]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting [2]https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-headquarters-homeless-shelter-seattle-opening-2019-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-headquarters-homeless...

jimmaswell 7y ago
Drifting the topic but I've wondered why they don't section off some good wilderness land to let homeless people make a kind of wild west type town for themselves. If I was homeless I'd certainly rather live off the land in that setting with a nice cabin even without electricity, catch my own meat, and generally be able to be self-sustaining than sleep on concrete and panhandle.
- zootam 7y ago
  There are different kinds of homeless people. Some of them might do well in such a setting. But more than a few of them would be disruptive and ruin the land and ruin it for everyone else. There are plenty of articles and videos about what ends up happening to these encampments- they turn into dumps with piles of used needles and lots of human waste. The last thing you'd want is something catching fire and spreading. Generally, most habitable 'live off the land' type of places are spoken for already, no nearby property owners are going to approve of such a 'zone'.

prawn 7y ago

Can you talk more about the state laws? Are they not discouraging homelessness or are they too weak on petty crime?

Izkata 7y ago
The second one, as far as I'm aware (not from California): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47
- inferiorhuman 7y ago
  Prop 47 is a ridiculous red herring. It raised the threshold for felony [whatever] to $950. To my knowledge that threshold hadn't changed in my lifetime, which is to say that the intent of the original statutes was that there should be a significant barrier to a felony charge. Meanwhile a misdemeanor can be punished by up to 364 days in jail. However police are generally unwilling to enforce misdemeanor statutes. A couple weeks ago one of my cars was vandalized (hood was etched). The last time I talked to a body shop about getting a hood repainted I was told to expect to pay at least $600-$800. I'd expect by now the total cost will be over a grand. For all of the whining about Prop 47 (not from you specifically), do you really think the vandal was cognizant of the threshold for felony vandalism? Do you really think that they were trying to create just under $950 worth of damage? I sure don't. Hell, I don't even think that person deserves to spend in excess of a year in jail over this. Prop 47 only encourages crime because we've moved into "police won't enforce the laws on the books" territory.
  - cobookman 7y ago
    It's not just prop 47 or the cops. The new DA just refused to prosecute a murder. https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/SF-District-Attorney-declines-to-file-murder-14978176.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/SF-District-Attorn...
  - pandaman 7y ago
    Not enough information about your vandal to speculate on his or her motives but there are reports of gangs of shoplifters raiding shops and taking less than $950 worth of goods each e.g. https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/05/14/shoplifting-california-prop-47-reduced-penalties/ https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/05/14/shoplifting-cal...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Supermancho 7y ago

Those kinds of troubles are the same reason people leave other areas I know well - Most of Orange County/LA County, CA and King County (Seattle)

seanmcdirmid 7y ago
Are you sure they are leaving king county, because the traffic keeps getting worse here? I wish more would leave, we are full up.
- scruple 7y ago
  People we know are leaving (I have been in SoCal -- Santa Barbara, LA, and Orange counties -- for the last 12 years) but are clearly being replaced, and then some, by am influx of migrants and immigrants.