Some things are just in plain sight. All you need to do is make a trip down to San Francisco downtown and the rest of the areas in SF. I don’t need to look at a

Some things are just in plain sight. All you need to do is make a trip down to San Francisco downtown and the rest of the areas in SF. I don’t need to look at any data, for that matter but looking at it only reaffirms the observation. I think the biggest mistake policy makers make in improving a worsening situation is to double down on their policy stances instead of stepping back and observing the consequences impartially and accepting failure of their actions. Only then one can expect to improve, otherwise any set of successive choices you make, will suffocate you in a local optima. That said, I think SF gets disproportional attention from the media while the rest of the west coast is eroding: LA, Seattle and Portland [1]. I think this is a west-coast problem of illberalism. [1] The Urban Land Institute, a think-tank, runs annual surveys ranking the desirability of cities to property developers. In 2017 Portland ranked third. Now it has dropped to 66th out of 80: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/06/12/portland-was-once-a-byword-for-tattooed-vegan-microbrewers https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/06/12/portland-...