6 ms·

San Francisco: The reckoning is here

27 points by vinnyglennon 4y ago

__lbracket__ 4y ago
In the minds of SF folks, covid policies came to represent resistance to Trump. Those asking for schools and businesses to be opened sounded like the MAGA crowd -- i.e. the Enemy. The policymakers, blind with agenda, doubled down on restrictive policies, with a faulty theory of "everything will come back". The result is a city that works for neither the rich nor poor. SF truly is a social experiment and more capable minds than me may some day cast these events into a coherent social theory.
- pmonks 4y ago
  How do you know what’s “in the minds of SF folks”? Do you live in SF, yourself, for example?
  - __lbracket__ 4y ago
    In a scientific sense, it is obviously impossible to know whats in someone's mind. Also, I don't live in SF proper, but more like south bay. However, listening to the rhetoric at the time, it was not hard to guess that COVID policy came to represent the political gap between the two sides. So it stands to reason that in hyper progressive SF, any opposition to absolute closure would be seen as 'siding with the enemy'. If this does not sound reasonable, I'm afraid I cannot convince you and wish you best.
    - pmonks 4y ago
      It does not sound reasonable, as the concerns (and actions in response to those concerns) in the city during 2020 were driven by the actual documented damage COVID was already causing elsewhere (especially NYC), not based on some hypothetical “dunk on The Donald” point scoring exercise. Many people seem to forget how in the dark we were about COVID at that time, and are now criticizing the actions public health organizations took with the benefit of hindsight.
pmonks 4y ago
San Francisco has always been a boom and bust place, as anyone who was here during the 2008 crash, the dotcom bubble, or probably even the gold rush would tell you. The author of this seagull* article needs to take a deep breath, wait a couple of years, observe, and then realize that they could have saved themselves the effort. *fly in, crap all over everything, fly out
- jmeister 4y ago
  Mature cities like NYC* find ways to incorporate new industries and grow with them. SF doesn't want to grow up apparently. That's fine, but the seagulls aren't to blame. SF could have used their tax revenue to build something awesome. [*] I guess the cities which successfully do this have a long history of being centres of trade and commerce. Those activities facilitate pro-tolerance and anti-zero-sum thinking.
  - iancmceachern 4y ago
    So has SF.
  - pmonks 4y ago
    You’re comparing apples (the Big Apple, it turns out) and oranges. SF is 7 miles by 7 miles of hilly, earthquake prone land, surrounded on 3 sides by water. There is literally no “new land” available to build on, and redeveloping existing lots to rezone, or increase density, or whatever is costly and slow (and that’s true in most US cities, not just SF). These are _essential_ complexities of land use in SF that are fairly unique to it, and hence comparisons to other cities are rarely useful.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      I agree that it's an apples-to-oranges comparison, but for the record: Manhattan is surrounded on 4 sides by water, and is much hillier than people think (only the southern part of the island is flat). The parts that flat are filled-in salt marsh. There's a reason the top 8[1] most dense municipalities are in the NYC area: there's limited developable land. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
alphakappa 4y ago
>San Francisco has replaced its DA and now re-funded police When was SF police de-funded? Budgets have only increased [1] each year, any rhetoric notwithstanding 1. https://abc7news.com/sfpd-budget-defund-the-police-department-funding/12321818/ https://abc7news.com/sfpd-budget-defund-the-police-departmen...
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Never. This is classic "repeat-the-lie-and-keep-walking"-style writing.
- SaintGhurka 4y ago
  >>When was SF police de-funded? This year and last year. 2019-2020: 692.3M 2020-2021: 667.9M 2021-2022: 657.4M Source: your link Edit: sorry about the formatting. For some reason HN is selectively throwing away line breaks.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  The same thing happened in Seattle. The council talked about defunding police but only parking enforcement was moved out. And because of the hiring crunch, we lost police officers and weren't able to replace them (but this was a problem nation wide). What I do blame the city and county for is not taking crime seriously enough. Even when police arrest someone who has broken the law, the DA refuses to prosecute, the jail refuses to book them in, and judges let them off repeatedly with light to non-existent sentences. People shop lift with impunity these days because the system simply doesn't care if they do. It isn't really the police's fault (though they are understaffed also).
silisili 4y ago
It's felt like a 'emperor has no clothes' situation at least for the past few years, maybe longer. The only difference being that people are pointing it out, and others just sit with their fingers in their ear. Maybe more of a 'Don't Look Up' situation then, I guess.
Animats 4y ago
Just like the first dot-com crash in 2002. And the recession in 2008.
reidjs 4y ago
I'm not so sure things are as dire as the article makes them out to be. As long as you avoid soma, lower nob hill, civic center, fidi, and the tenderloin it's been a great place to live during/after the pandemic. Rent is actually cheaper than pre-pandemic, the city is still super walkable and bikeable, there are more than enough bars, restaurants, and live events every weekend to keep me busy and then some. Shameless pitch for people who may be new to the area and can only see the negative side of the SF bay area, me and another local started a conversational podcast loosely about awesome bay area events & activities: https://bawcast.com/ https://bawcast.com/
- hindsightbias 4y ago
  The first rule of SF should be that you should not talk about this. Better to repeat the dystopian hellscape meme to dissuade the locusts. But good luck with the cast.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    > The first rule of SF should be that you should not talk about this. Better to repeat the dystopian hellscape meme to dissuade the locusts. This is also the first rule of Seattle: mention how much it rains, how the homeless have taken over, and maybe earthquakes and volcanoes. Anything to dissuade more people from moving here.
    - recursive 4y ago
      So the car window smashers are actually doing a public service.
      - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
        On street parking really sucks! Don't buy/maintain a car if you don't have a real parking spot for it. That would also keep the traffic down.
        4y ago
alphakappa 4y ago
>California has the same age-adjusted excess mortality as Florida, so the destruction was wrought for naught. Seems arbitrary to compare with Florida when the linked data shows California ranked 38, and nearly half the excess mortality of states at the top that seemingly didn’t take the same COVID-19 precautions. When the article begins with such a false premise, it’s hard to take the rest of it seriously
- tshaddox 4y ago
  If I’m reading that data correctly, it also looks like Florida’s age-adjusted COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 is 8% higher than California’s. Is that supposed to be interpreted as equivalent?
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
This seems to be a rag-bag of right-wing talking points e.g. * Covid lockdowns - bad * Harsh policing - good So the chances of it being based on anything other than the writers pre-concieved political biases is basically nil. In particular, SF seems to be getting blamed for partly Californian and Federal policies in a somewhat loose manner. Even if you disagree with them, and you think the people in charge of SF at various levels agree with them, it's silly to heap it all onto SF as some kind of hate-focus.
- dilap 4y ago
  During the pandemic, SF had in-person schooling at private schools, but not in public schools. This continued long after it was clear that (a) in person schooling was not a significant risk and (b) remote education was not adequate. (You're basically insane if you think sitting on videochat hours a day, with no in-person contact with other children, is in any way a healthy lifestyle for an elementary-school aged kid.) This was SF policy, not state policy! It was just a totally fucked, unafir situation: only those w/ enough cash to afford private education could get even the most minimal level of quality education for their kids. Besides failing at the basic public service of educating children, SF also struggles with things like providing safe, sanitary streets and public transit. All this while having a huge budget. Here's a memory that has stuck with me, from just before the pandemic started: A man lying on the sidwalk at the intersection of Colombus and Broadway, covered in his own shit, calling out, "help me, call an ambulance, help me". A constant stream of people, passing by, doing nothing. That's SF in a nutshell: people are in a sort of state of denial about the condition of their city. Sure, there are lots of great things, and you can ignore the badness and pretend it's not happening, but it's there. (Or at least it was when I was there, from 2011-2021.) I hope they figure it out and improve things! It's truly a geographically blessed area. And I've still got a bunch of family there.
  - pmonks 4y ago
    This is 100% false. Source: I know many families with kids in various private schools in SF, and not one of them had uninterrupted in-person learning throughout the pandemic. That said, SF public schools were slower to reopen to in-person learning than private schools, which seems to me to have mostly been due to pushback by the SFUSD teacher’s union (who, imvho, responded to this crisis poorly).
whimsicalism 4y ago
This article is full of misleading claims and outright falsehoods. Police were never defunded, Chicago does not have as many tech companies as San Francisco does, SFs age-adjusted mortality from COVID is way lower than Florida, etc. etc.
manuelabeledo 4y ago
> ... and a declining police force inevitably leads to more crime Citation needed.

27 points by vinnyglennon 4y ago

In the minds of SF folks, covid policies came to represent resistance to Trump. Those asking for schools and businesses to be opened sounded like the MAGA crowd -- i.e. the Enemy. The policymakers, blind with agenda, doubled down on restrictive policies, with a faulty theory of "everything will come back". The result is a city that works for neither the rich nor poor. SF truly is a social experiment and more capable minds than me may some day cast these events into a coherent social theory.

pmonks 4y ago
How do you know what’s “in the minds of SF folks”? Do you live in SF, yourself, for example?
- __lbracket__ 4y ago
  In a scientific sense, it is obviously impossible to know whats in someone's mind. Also, I don't live in SF proper, but more like south bay. However, listening to the rhetoric at the time, it was not hard to guess that COVID policy came to represent the political gap between the two sides. So it stands to reason that in hyper progressive SF, any opposition to absolute closure would be seen as 'siding with the enemy'. If this does not sound reasonable, I'm afraid I cannot convince you and wish you best.
  - pmonks 4y ago
    It does not sound reasonable, as the concerns (and actions in response to those concerns) in the city during 2020 were driven by the actual documented damage COVID was already causing elsewhere (especially NYC), not based on some hypothetical “dunk on The Donald” point scoring exercise. Many people seem to forget how in the dark we were about COVID at that time, and are now criticizing the actions public health organizations took with the benefit of hindsight.

pmonks 4y ago

San Francisco has always been a boom and bust place, as anyone who was here during the 2008 crash, the dotcom bubble, or probably even the gold rush would tell you. The author of this seagull* article needs to take a deep breath, wait a couple of years, observe, and then realize that they could have saved themselves the effort. *fly in, crap all over everything, fly out

jmeister 4y ago
Mature cities like NYC* find ways to incorporate new industries and grow with them. SF doesn't want to grow up apparently. That's fine, but the seagulls aren't to blame. SF could have used their tax revenue to build something awesome. [*] I guess the cities which successfully do this have a long history of being centres of trade and commerce. Those activities facilitate pro-tolerance and anti-zero-sum thinking.
- iancmceachern 4y ago
  So has SF.
- pmonks 4y ago
  You’re comparing apples (the Big Apple, it turns out) and oranges. SF is 7 miles by 7 miles of hilly, earthquake prone land, surrounded on 3 sides by water. There is literally no “new land” available to build on, and redeveloping existing lots to rezone, or increase density, or whatever is costly and slow (and that’s true in most US cities, not just SF). These are _essential_ complexities of land use in SF that are fairly unique to it, and hence comparisons to other cities are rarely useful.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    I agree that it's an apples-to-oranges comparison, but for the record: Manhattan is surrounded on 4 sides by water, and is much hillier than people think (only the southern part of the island is flat). The parts that flat are filled-in salt marsh. There's a reason the top 8[1] most dense municipalities are in the NYC area: there's limited developable land. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

alphakappa 4y ago

>San Francisco has replaced its DA and now re-funded police When was SF police de-funded? Budgets have only increased [1] each year, any rhetoric notwithstanding 1. https://abc7news.com/sfpd-budget-defund-the-police-department-funding/12321818/ https://abc7news.com/sfpd-budget-defund-the-police-departmen...

woodruffw 4y ago
Never. This is classic "repeat-the-lie-and-keep-walking"-style writing.
SaintGhurka 4y ago
>>When was SF police de-funded? This year and last year. 2019-2020: 692.3M 2020-2021: 667.9M 2021-2022: 657.4M Source: your link Edit: sorry about the formatting. For some reason HN is selectively throwing away line breaks.
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
The same thing happened in Seattle. The council talked about defunding police but only parking enforcement was moved out. And because of the hiring crunch, we lost police officers and weren't able to replace them (but this was a problem nation wide). What I do blame the city and county for is not taking crime seriously enough. Even when police arrest someone who has broken the law, the DA refuses to prosecute, the jail refuses to book them in, and judges let them off repeatedly with light to non-existent sentences. People shop lift with impunity these days because the system simply doesn't care if they do. It isn't really the police's fault (though they are understaffed also).

silisili 4y ago

It's felt like a 'emperor has no clothes' situation at least for the past few years, maybe longer. The only difference being that people are pointing it out, and others just sit with their fingers in their ear. Maybe more of a 'Don't Look Up' situation then, I guess.

Animats 4y ago

Just like the first dot-com crash in 2002. And the recession in 2008.

reidjs 4y ago

I'm not so sure things are as dire as the article makes them out to be. As long as you avoid soma, lower nob hill, civic center, fidi, and the tenderloin it's been a great place to live during/after the pandemic. Rent is actually cheaper than pre-pandemic, the city is still super walkable and bikeable, there are more than enough bars, restaurants, and live events every weekend to keep me busy and then some. Shameless pitch for people who may be new to the area and can only see the negative side of the SF bay area, me and another local started a conversational podcast loosely about awesome bay area events & activities: https://bawcast.com/ https://bawcast.com/

hindsightbias 4y ago
The first rule of SF should be that you should not talk about this. Better to repeat the dystopian hellscape meme to dissuade the locusts. But good luck with the cast.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  > The first rule of SF should be that you should not talk about this. Better to repeat the dystopian hellscape meme to dissuade the locusts. This is also the first rule of Seattle: mention how much it rains, how the homeless have taken over, and maybe earthquakes and volcanoes. Anything to dissuade more people from moving here.
  - recursive 4y ago
    So the car window smashers are actually doing a public service.
    - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
      On street parking really sucks! Don't buy/maintain a car if you don't have a real parking spot for it. That would also keep the traffic down.
      - 4y ago

alphakappa 4y ago

>California has the same age-adjusted excess mortality as Florida, so the destruction was wrought for naught. Seems arbitrary to compare with Florida when the linked data shows California ranked 38, and nearly half the excess mortality of states at the top that seemingly didn’t take the same COVID-19 precautions. When the article begins with such a false premise, it’s hard to take the rest of it seriously

tshaddox 4y ago
If I’m reading that data correctly, it also looks like Florida’s age-adjusted COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 is 8% higher than California’s. Is that supposed to be interpreted as equivalent?

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

This seems to be a rag-bag of right-wing talking points e.g. * Covid lockdowns - bad * Harsh policing - good So the chances of it being based on anything other than the writers pre-concieved political biases is basically nil. In particular, SF seems to be getting blamed for partly Californian and Federal policies in a somewhat loose manner. Even if you disagree with them, and you think the people in charge of SF at various levels agree with them, it's silly to heap it all onto SF as some kind of hate-focus.

dilap 4y ago
During the pandemic, SF had in-person schooling at private schools, but not in public schools. This continued long after it was clear that (a) in person schooling was not a significant risk and (b) remote education was not adequate. (You're basically insane if you think sitting on videochat hours a day, with no in-person contact with other children, is in any way a healthy lifestyle for an elementary-school aged kid.) This was SF policy, not state policy! It was just a totally fucked, unafir situation: only those w/ enough cash to afford private education could get even the most minimal level of quality education for their kids. Besides failing at the basic public service of educating children, SF also struggles with things like providing safe, sanitary streets and public transit. All this while having a huge budget. Here's a memory that has stuck with me, from just before the pandemic started: A man lying on the sidwalk at the intersection of Colombus and Broadway, covered in his own shit, calling out, "help me, call an ambulance, help me". A constant stream of people, passing by, doing nothing. That's SF in a nutshell: people are in a sort of state of denial about the condition of their city. Sure, there are lots of great things, and you can ignore the badness and pretend it's not happening, but it's there. (Or at least it was when I was there, from 2011-2021.) I hope they figure it out and improve things! It's truly a geographically blessed area. And I've still got a bunch of family there.
- pmonks 4y ago
  This is 100% false. Source: I know many families with kids in various private schools in SF, and not one of them had uninterrupted in-person learning throughout the pandemic. That said, SF public schools were slower to reopen to in-person learning than private schools, which seems to me to have mostly been due to pushback by the SFUSD teacher’s union (who, imvho, responded to this crisis poorly).

whimsicalism 4y ago

This article is full of misleading claims and outright falsehoods. Police were never defunded, Chicago does not have as many tech companies as San Francisco does, SFs age-adjusted mortality from COVID is way lower than Florida, etc. etc.

manuelabeledo 4y ago

> ... and a declining police force inevitably leads to more crime Citation needed.