4 ms·

As someone who was born in San Francisco (third gen) and has bounced around between the city and other areas of the state/country most of my life, I can assure

As someone who was born in San Francisco (third gen) and has bounced around between the city and other areas of the state/country most of my life, I can assure you that swapping one set of politicians for another is going to have very little effect on the deep-seated problems facing the city and the Bay Area in general. Which issues are the most important are debatable, but these have to be considered: (1) Jobs. There used to be a ton of electronics and garment manufacturing jobs in the region. Most such jobs required no more than a high school education, possible some vocational training, but the R & D and white-collar sections also provided employement for the college-educated. That's mostly all gone to China, Mexico, Indonesia, etc. Right out of high school I actually did a couple years doing electronics assembly line manufacturing in various locations, including in an exciting laser-welding shop, making ridiculously good money relative to my peers (I could afford my own apartment at 18) - and there were people who'd been there decades. Gets boring fast, so I went to college, as I didn't want to be there forever. When you look at the huge homeless population today, I think it was less than 10% back then of what it is now, and my guess is that the availability of those jobs played a big role in that. (2) Housing. The reality is, either you are in or near the 1% by wealth or you can't buy a home, and rents are ridiculously high, and there are confounding factors like AirBNB taking homes off the market and foreign investors using real estate as a tax haven / money laundering scheme, etc. Developers don't want to build high-density affordable housing as profit margins are lower. Increased population puts strains on public transportation and traffic. The whole region could turn into something like Mexico City (wealthy center protected by police, surrounded by miles of slums and shantytowns). Importantly, people who serve key roles - teachers, service workers, etc. - generally have to commute into the city, was they can't afford local rents. This wealth/poverty class divide is not very stable or pleasant to be around. I think what a certain sector of wealthy SF wants (basically the people behind the recall effort) is for the police to mainly serve the role of kicking the homeless out of the pricey neighborhoods and concentrating them in areas where they never go, which will heavily impact these poorer neighborhoods, exacerbating the growing class conflict. Oh, and one job sector that is growing? Armed private security. I don't think the outcome of the recall will affect any of this significantly, however. The only real fixes I see would be a massive jobs program to bring back manufacturing to the region and a push towards Tokyo-style tiny apartment construction across the region.

SmokeyHamster 4y ago
>The whole region could turn into something like Mexico City (wealthy center protected by police, surrounded by miles of slums and shantytowns). Importantly, people who serve key roles - teachers, service workers, etc. Mexico City? That's almost every major US city already. Have you been to DC recently? That's it to a T. The government sector is nice, with a little buffer of upper class homes and businesses surrounded by miles of high-crime slums.
- acdanger 4y ago
  What? Which areas are “miles of high-crime slums”? SE DC and parts of suburban Maryland. But the vast majority of the city and suburbs are safe and far from being slums. Look at Arlington, Alexandria, Bethesda etc.
technothrasher 4y ago
> When you look at the huge homeless population today, I think it was less than 10% back then of what it is now I'm not sure when "back then" was, but homeless in SF has only increased by around 2% from 10 years ago, and has actually dropped by 15% compared to two years ago. (From https://hsh.sfgov.org/get-involved/2022-pit-count/ https://hsh.sfgov.org/get-involved/2022-pit-count/ using the non-sheltered counts, as you were referencing the population you could 'look at') Looking at earlier info, the NY Times in 1998 quoted the Coalition on Homelessness saying there were 16,000 homeless on the streets of SF then. That would mean a huge decrease today compared to then, but I suspect the two numbers may have been counted differently. (https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/13/us/homelessness-tests-san-francisco-s-ideals.html https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/13/us/homelessness-tests-san...). Anyway, it doesn't seem like the data supports your claim that there has been a massive increase in the homeless population lately, unless you go back to at least before the 1980s (https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/overview/ https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/overview/)
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  The homeless population is a regional phenomenon, SF isn't an isolated island: http://www.bayareaeconomy.org/report/bay-area-homelessness-2/ http://www.bayareaeconomy.org/report/bay-area-homelessness-2... > "The Bay Area’s homeless population today is larger, less sheltered, and growing faster than ever before. Between 2017 and 2020, the Bay Area’s homeless population grew by 6,878 individuals to a total of 35,118—accounting for more than a quarter of the growth in the total U.S. homeless population." Some of the Covid emergency programs sort of worked by putting people in hotels, but those hotels are pretty sketchy places at best. This might account for the apparently flat rate in SF but anyone walking around the poorer neighborhoods can see it with their own eyes: https://www.kqed.org/news/11914346/more-people-became-unhoused-across-the-bay-area-over-last-3-years-except-in-sf https://www.kqed.org/news/11914346/more-people-became-unhous... That's only part of the picture: the growing gap between wealthy and poor is a more significant long-term issue.

SmokeyHamster 4y ago

>The whole region could turn into something like Mexico City (wealthy center protected by police, surrounded by miles of slums and shantytowns). Importantly, people who serve key roles - teachers, service workers, etc. Mexico City? That's almost every major US city already. Have you been to DC recently? That's it to a T. The government sector is nice, with a little buffer of upper class homes and businesses surrounded by miles of high-crime slums.

acdanger 4y ago
What? Which areas are “miles of high-crime slums”? SE DC and parts of suburban Maryland. But the vast majority of the city and suburbs are safe and far from being slums. Look at Arlington, Alexandria, Bethesda etc.

technothrasher 4y ago

> When you look at the huge homeless population today, I think it was less than 10% back then of what it is now I'm not sure when "back then" was, but homeless in SF has only increased by around 2% from 10 years ago, and has actually dropped by 15% compared to two years ago. (From https://hsh.sfgov.org/get-involved/2022-pit-count/ https://hsh.sfgov.org/get-involved/2022-pit-count/ using the non-sheltered counts, as you were referencing the population you could 'look at') Looking at earlier info, the NY Times in 1998 quoted the Coalition on Homelessness saying there were 16,000 homeless on the streets of SF then. That would mean a huge decrease today compared to then, but I suspect the two numbers may have been counted differently. (https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/13/us/homelessness-tests-san-francisco-s-ideals.html https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/13/us/homelessness-tests-san...). Anyway, it doesn't seem like the data supports your claim that there has been a massive increase in the homeless population lately, unless you go back to at least before the 1980s (https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/overview/ https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/overview/)

photochemsyn 4y ago
The homeless population is a regional phenomenon, SF isn't an isolated island: http://www.bayareaeconomy.org/report/bay-area-homelessness-2/ http://www.bayareaeconomy.org/report/bay-area-homelessness-2... > "The Bay Area’s homeless population today is larger, less sheltered, and growing faster than ever before. Between 2017 and 2020, the Bay Area’s homeless population grew by 6,878 individuals to a total of 35,118—accounting for more than a quarter of the growth in the total U.S. homeless population." Some of the Covid emergency programs sort of worked by putting people in hotels, but those hotels are pretty sketchy places at best. This might account for the apparently flat rate in SF but anyone walking around the poorer neighborhoods can see it with their own eyes: https://www.kqed.org/news/11914346/more-people-became-unhoused-across-the-bay-area-over-last-3-years-except-in-sf https://www.kqed.org/news/11914346/more-people-became-unhous... That's only part of the picture: the growing gap between wealthy and poor is a more significant long-term issue.