5 ms·

San Francisco Falls into the Abyss

70 points by jseliger 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
carbocation 4y ago
> But because the income distribution is such that the median income is greater than its simple arithmetic average, the median income of taxpayers who left San Francisco would probably have been around $250,000. What? That would be extremely unusual, if true. (The long tail on the upper end is unbounded, while on the lower end income is bounded at 0. So for income, usually mean >>> median.) Did they get mean and median reversed? = = = = = Edit I drew a random sample of incomes for 1,000 people (between $0 and $1 million) and used Pytorch to update these incomes to achieve mean $196,000 and median $250,000. (I also heavily penalized income < $0.) The shape of the distribution of incomes to achieve such a feat, as one would predict, is absurd. X axis is income in $, Y axis is the number of people with that income out of 1,000. (First image.) If instead the economist got his understanding of mean and median reversed, you get the second image, which is zero-inflated but otherwise uniform in income. https://imgur.com/6OiIF3V https://imgur.com/6OiIF3V
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  This article is written by a "Professor of Economics" too. Indeed in SF average household income is $167k while median is $120k.
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    He's talking specifically about the people who left, not the people who are still there.
    - carbocation 4y ago
      The fact that the lower end of income is bounded—while the upper end is not—is true for both groups.
      - kingkawn 4y ago
        This is like the old saying, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.”
    - zeroonetwothree 4y ago
      No, he is speculating about the people that left based on the general distribution: > But because the income distribution is such that the median income is greater than its simple arithmetic average, the median income of taxpayers who left San Francisco would probably have been around $250,000.
      - jrumbut 4y ago
        I'm sympathetic to the argument that there might be something unusual about the income distribution of the people who left San Francisco for various ski resort towns but pulling a very specific number like $250k out of the air is weird. The silliest part is that it doesn't change the argument. $196k is a good income, $250k is better but not qualitatively different by any means.
        jmeister 4y ago
        It is not pulled out of thin air. It's Stanford/Hoover, if they have access to the mean they have access to the median, probably more fine grained data too.
        jrumbut 4y ago
        You would think that, but the article text says otherwise: > the median income of taxpayers who left San Francisco would probably have been around $250,000. I am as puzzled as you, why not just calculate the median or email the people with the data and ask for it? Otherwise it feels like reaching for anything to embellish a partisan talking point.
- jmeister 4y ago
  No it's just about skew. https://openstax.org/books/introductory-business-statistics/pages/2-6-skewness-and-the-mean-median-and-mode https://openstax.org/books/introductory-business-statistics/...
  - carbocation 4y ago
    Skew is fundamental to my point.
BMc2020 4y ago
No major American city has failed at the same level as Detroit, whose population dropped from 1.85 million people in 1950 to about 630,000 today. Move over Detroit, here comes San Francisco, which lost 6.3 percent of its population between 2019 and 2021, a rate of decline larger than any two year-period in Detroit’s history and unprecedented among any major US city.
- peter422 4y ago
  New York City lost 3.5% in the same time period, which is way, way more people in the absolute sense. So if SF is an abyss, then NYC must be apocalyptic right now. Also these figures are census estimates which are not accurate down to this level of precision anyways.
  - AuthorizedCust 4y ago
    Huh? So if a town of 1000 loses 100% of its population, no biggie because NYC?
    - katbyte 4y ago
      For that town it sure is. But for the state/country it resides in? Not really.
    - peter422 4y ago
      That wouldn't be unprecedented either. But it's hard to say with a straight face that SF losing 50k people is unprecedented among major US cities when by the same measurement in the same time period NYC lost 300k.
    - culi 4y ago
      Many small towns routinely lose more than 6.8% of their population within a year. It's not really news...
- jslql 4y ago
  White flight at its worst.
m0llusk 4y ago
San Francisco empowered some of the most wealthy people not only in the US currently but in all human history. When working from home became not only possible but necessary many left. Most of those who left ended up nearby in other less dense parts of the roughly eight million strong metropolitan area of which San Francisco is merely a central part. The failure comparison context that saturates this piece is based on analysis that is mistaken about the composition and goals of urban areas. This is because this piece is not about analysis, but political slant. The Hoover Institution has a very strong agenda and beliefs that drive its actions. This is perhaps most clear in the final sentence that explains that all these problems can be changed by voting differently. This conclusion is not clear and not supported by the piece. Much of what is going on in and around San Francisco is driven by the population and commerce there over which the government has limited control. It is difficult to make progress with complex social programs when one's agenda is preset in long static beliefs and prevents taking the situation seriously.
- friedman23 4y ago
  > San Francisco empowered some of the most wealthy people not only in the US currently but in all human history Bullshit, they could've done it anywhere else, it just happened to be there. The idea that "San Francisco" empowered anything is just complete delusion, it was the people that did it.
- kjghkjghkjgh 4y ago
  "Much of what is going on in and around San Francisco is driven by the population and commerce there over which the government has limited control." Why don't cities like Miami and Houston have a homeless problem like San Francisco's?
  - parker_mountain 4y ago
    Between weather (Miami and Houston both regularly suffer weather conditions that can kill from exposure), geography (SF is uniquely constrained, it's almost like an island), and reputation (SF has historically been considered both a cultural and queer refuge, and queer people make up a large amount of the unsheltered), you have a series of unique factors that make SF an ideal destination for homeless people, or people on the brink of homelessness. Now, add Regan's removal of mental health services (something we're still dealing with today), skyrocketing rent (removing the bottom rung of renting), and a sudden population pressure, and you have a uniquely awful set of circumstances. And no, this does not absolve SF and Bay Area leadership. They have repeatedly thrown money at the problem without any accountability whatsoever, but if the unique factors that affect SF were to hit Miami or Houston, they'd probably find themselves with the same problem overnight.
msrenee 4y ago
Quite the opinion piece largely devoid of citations. A two-year trend where people who had to move to the city are moving out is totally indicative of a fall into the abyss exactly like what happened when the auto industry pulled out of Detroit. You couldn't pay me enough to move to California, but this article is nothing but the exaggerated ramblings of someone who thinks that progressive policies will be the downfall of civilization.
surfmike 4y ago
Over the last 12 months, San Francisco has seen the second-biggest worker population gain of any area in the United States, according to LinkedIn. https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/2023/1/18/23542444/san-francisco-bay-area-population-moving-linkedin https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/2023/1/18/23542444/s...
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  Hmm... who do we trust, the liberal Vox or the conservative Hoover? It's great to live in an age when anyone can find evidence to support their existing politics.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Objective reality doesn’t care about political spin. So trust neither, but look for context. Bias tends to show up in what’s left out of the conversation rather than outright lies. In this case it’s clear the conservative narrative is objectively false, but that’s not always the case.
  - jmeister 4y ago
    The two claims don't contradict each other.
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    I believe the age you refer to is the age of human beings.
- ac29 4y ago
  Take that with a huge grain of salt since LinkedIn claims to have significantly more than 100% of the US workforce using their site (191 million US LinkedIn members versus an official US workforce size of 165 million).
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Not only is their data junked up by abandoned accounts, duplicate accounts, and fake accounts, but their real user base skews heavily towards salaried office workers. I would be surprised if 50% of Americans used LinkedIn.
ericmcer 4y ago
How does this article fail to mention the pandemic. That is crazy that they talk about 2019-2021 but never once address it.
- mattnewton 4y ago
  Because the poster has an agenda and wants to blame San Francisco politics for everything. Were that San Francisco’s problems as easy as voters “voting differently” - the truth is that some of the problems San Francisco faces like homelessness and pandemic work pattern shifts are way above the pay grade of a metro mayor to combat, but they make convenient scapegoats.
  - strawhatguy 4y ago
    It’s certainly the policies SF pursues that lead to crime/homelessness increases. While the state of CA tacks on a few more that’s harder for a mayor and council to overcome, still no excuse not to correct what they can. The various vetoes different groups get on what someone can build on their own land is a good example a thing to get rid of. Assuming there’s any developers left at this point not friends with the gov there.
    - culi 4y ago
      > There was a 3.5% decrease in the total homeless population from 2019 – 2022. https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population > Compared with other major U.S. cities, S.F. boasts lower-than-average rates of violent crime https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/fixing-san-francisco-problems/crime https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/fixing-san-francis...
      - strawhatguy 4y ago
        I think property prices actually dropped as more people left SF during the pandemic timeframe, so it doesn’t appear to contradict the point: cheaper housing leads to less homelessness, and sf gov is mostly still in the way from that happening.
29athrowaway 4y ago
[flagged]
- katbyte 4y ago
  Pretty sure that’s anywhere on the west coast due to the mild weather. Homelessness and drug use is also high and endemic in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver Canada.
- dinobones 4y ago
  What is with all the homeless people so against shelters? In every interview of a homeless person, every time someone asks them about taking them to shelter for help, they recoil in fear and say "No, they steal/are violent/evil." etc... I have no doubt that homeless people are treated poorly by society. Maybe they are also treated poorly by shelters. But I can't believe how common the general dislike/avoidance of shelters seems to be.
  - 29athrowaway 4y ago
    Because you cannot be high or drunk at the shelter.
  - ok123456 4y ago
    It comes with all the social dynamics of being "institutionalized." All things being equal, they'd rather go on their own than be in a prison. Being in a low-trust environment is stressful in itself, and you run a good chance of having whatever possessions you carry around with you getting stolen.
  - braingenious 4y ago
    >What is with all the homeless people so against shelters? … > In every interview of a homeless person, every time someone asks them about taking them to shelter for help, they recoil in fear and say "No, they steal/are violent/evil." etc... … > Maybe they are also treated poorly by shelters. I would venture to say that if every person interviewed said the same thing every time, “What’s the problem??” becomes much less of a head scratcher. The only way you could arrive at “Maybe they are treated poorly” logically would be if you think that there is a good chance that every person interviewed was lying every single time. If that’s your view on things, you’ll literally be mystified forever.
newaccount2021 4y ago
[dead]
channel_t 4y ago
This whole rant is so cringe it reads almost like satire. From the sound of things, the people leaving for other expensive areas were just wealthy semi-tourists who weren't contributing anything meaningfully positive to the city to begin with. The sorts of people the author expects SF-ers to look up to as parental figures or something. Good riddance. The only thing that is likely to cause SF to experience a Detroit-level exodus is climate crisis. Where will the people migrate to? Probably Detroit!
- kjghkjghkjgh 4y ago
  This is wrong. SF's tax revenue plummets when the wealthy move.
- friedman23 4y ago
  > weren't contributing anything meaningfully positive to the city to begin with Only money
labrador 4y ago
I have watched a lot of talks from the Hoover institute because I like some of the people they have on, but after awhile I noticed a certain lack of intelligence, not because they are not smart or educated, but because their ideology gets in the way Victor David Hanson is a good example. Detroit is "motor city". It didn't fail. Everybody bought cars and moved to the suburbs. I don't know how you can blame that on the city government. That's what I mean - they want to support their dislike if liberals by saying dumb things. Do they think we won't notice? Or is it the wealthy people who leave their money to the institute won't notice?
gardnr 4y ago
I left when they made it illegal to be naked in public. https://www.kqed.org/news/11613510/the-history-of-nudity-in-san-francisco-uncovered https://www.kqed.org/news/11613510/the-history-of-nudity-in-...
- culi 4y ago
  > Today, you need a permit to get fully naked in San Francisco. Or, if you’re not into paperwork, you can always go to a nude-approved park, like the north end of Baker Beach, where the National Park Service has said it’s legal to be naked. Is this not how it works in most other major cities? I'd imagine most cities have protection of kids against flashing...
fnordpiglet 4y ago
The comparison is absurd. No one would live in Detroit because it’s bleak and sprawling. San Francisco is beautiful and cosmopolitan. The trajectory of Detroit is irreversible and structural, while for San Francisco it’ll be an enduring global destination for as long as it stands. Two year blips during a pandemic aren’t sufficient to mark a trend, and SF city politics have been broken for generations. I lived in SOMA in the 1990’s, and 5th and mission was an open air drug festival too. The tender groin was foul, and civic center was a wasteland of feces, condoms, needles, and occasionally people who died overnight and hadn’t been cleaned up yet. The streets were covered in human waste even in residential areas. When I’ve come back to SF, it is generally a lot cleaner than it was, and has gentrified. I’ve not been back post pandemic, and I can imagine it’s reverted. But it was not possible to be worse than it was when I lived there. Yet, people loved it there and I miss it. If it weren’t for the vacuous tech culture chasing VC and exits I might be back some day.
- huitzitziltzin 4y ago
  While I don’t endorse most of this piece, it’s worth pointing out that Detroit has not always been bleak. Within living memory it was a very prosperous city
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- adamjcook 4y ago
  > No one would live in Detroit because it’s bleak and sprawling. San Francisco is beautiful and cosmopolitan. The trajectory of Detroit is irreversible and structural As someone who just moved to Detroit (in October of 2022), I could not disagree more. This city is clearly on the upswing and it is immensely beautiful. Do not sleep on Detroit. If anything, it is absurd for this "article" to compare whatever is happening in San Francisco to a completely unrelated population decline event in Detroit that spanned over 70 years. In other words, I am not sure why Detroit would be brought into this "analysis" at all. That is what is absurd.
  - 4y ago
uejfiweun 4y ago
Regardless of the political slant of the article, I really wish the city didn't have to be such a shithole. It's like twice the price of the south bay, way farther away from most tech companies, filled with angry crazy homeless people and criminals, not really that walkable, inundated with needles and trash and feces... I'm jealous of people who moved to the bay area already with relationships because I hate hate hate the fact that my best chances to find someone are to move to SF.
jameson 4y ago
I used to commute to SF for a year and it was shocking to me how the home to one of the wealthiest companies and residents are overwhelmed with homelessness and crimes. The scene of downtown was something out of a dystopian movie where you see wealthy people walking by a drug addict with needles on the ground and yet everyone appears to conform that this is the norm I'm definitely oversimplifying the problem here but intuitively shouldn't a city with high income have more money to spend on infrastructure? Where are the taxpayers money spent on?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- culi 4y ago
  The rate of houselessness has actually been decreasing. But I expect the rate of forced relocation by neighboring towns is also increasing I've lived in 3 suburbs so far and all 3 of them bus their houseless folks to the nearest city. The cops often take all their stuff in the process too so they usually lose everything and are especially vulnerable once they arrive
mistrial9 4y ago
most people do not know that a very significant portion of the residential population in SF is ethnic Chinese. Workers and excecutives alike travel to San Francisco each day from nearby residential areas that are not at all like the commercial streets of San Francisco. Many people there, like New Yorkers, had developed an aversion to interacting with the skid row and excess-party crowds that line the popular areas, long ago. That aversion was part of the formula on how it went so badly, in the modern chapter.
kepler1 4y ago
The credibility of the assertions in the article aside, most of the problems that SF is experiencing are of its own creation, so I cannot commiserate too hard with its plight. And I recently moved away, so I care less. Every city, whether you admit it or not as part of a deliberate strategy to succeed, is building itself a reserve of advantages and points against future adversity. SF has natural bonus points for geography, weather, etc. And intangible bonus points for talent pools, etc. SF chose to squander points over the years by letting conservative liberals prevent it from modernizing its policies and infrastructure, letting tax money be spent on ridiculous homeless-favoring policies, underinvesting in long-term improvements while diverting money to enrich union Muni drivers and city workers. Favoring people who are here already, over those who want to be here but couldn't afford it, who gladly pick up and leave from their rental properties with no attachments. All leaving it with a fragile tax base and city services so entrenched with lazy interests that it collapsed at the pandemic's pressure. If you want a lesson in how a city with so many advantages can sink its own ship, study SF.
zwilliamson 4y ago
In Detroit, the memory of abandonment is kept alive with the constant visual reminder of abandoned manufacturing infrastructure and homes from 70+ years ago. You can't escape it. I used to drive in from Lansing with my friends to see concerts back in late 90s. Miles and miles of abandoned factories, warehouses, and neighborhoods right next to the highway. Take the wrong exit and you felt like you entered a post apocalyptic world. We would brave the concert, then drive back to a factory town that somehow didn't receive the same treatment.
fwungy 4y ago
I only saw five turds last time I walked on Market Street. It's not like it's everywhere. No proof that they weren't from animals either.
Brian_K_White 4y ago
I agree with whoever flagged this.
etothepii 4y ago
Am I being gaslit by this article? The article claims the median income is higher than the arithmetic mean. Since income is typically exponential or even pareto this is almost inconceivable. It then claims (in parenthesis) that Florida has a state income tax.

70 points by jseliger 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

> But because the income distribution is such that the median income is greater than its simple arithmetic average, the median income of taxpayers who left San Francisco would probably have been around $250,000. What? That would be extremely unusual, if true. (The long tail on the upper end is unbounded, while on the lower end income is bounded at 0. So for income, usually mean >>> median.) Did they get mean and median reversed? = = = = = Edit I drew a random sample of incomes for 1,000 people (between $0 and $1 million) and used Pytorch to update these incomes to achieve mean $196,000 and median $250,000. (I also heavily penalized income < $0.) The shape of the distribution of incomes to achieve such a feat, as one would predict, is absurd. X axis is income in $, Y axis is the number of people with that income out of 1,000. (First image.) If instead the economist got his understanding of mean and median reversed, you get the second image, which is zero-inflated but otherwise uniform in income. https://imgur.com/6OiIF3V https://imgur.com/6OiIF3V

zeroonetwothree 4y ago
This article is written by a "Professor of Economics" too. Indeed in SF average household income is $167k while median is $120k.
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  He's talking specifically about the people who left, not the people who are still there.
  - carbocation 4y ago
    The fact that the lower end of income is bounded—while the upper end is not—is true for both groups.
    - kingkawn 4y ago
      This is like the old saying, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.”
  - zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    No, he is speculating about the people that left based on the general distribution: > But because the income distribution is such that the median income is greater than its simple arithmetic average, the median income of taxpayers who left San Francisco would probably have been around $250,000.
    - jrumbut 4y ago
      I'm sympathetic to the argument that there might be something unusual about the income distribution of the people who left San Francisco for various ski resort towns but pulling a very specific number like $250k out of the air is weird. The silliest part is that it doesn't change the argument. $196k is a good income, $250k is better but not qualitatively different by any means.
      - jmeister 4y ago
        It is not pulled out of thin air. It's Stanford/Hoover, if they have access to the mean they have access to the median, probably more fine grained data too.
        jrumbut 4y ago
        You would think that, but the article text says otherwise: > the median income of taxpayers who left San Francisco would probably have been around $250,000. I am as puzzled as you, why not just calculate the median or email the people with the data and ask for it? Otherwise it feels like reaching for anything to embellish a partisan talking point.
jmeister 4y ago
No it's just about skew. https://openstax.org/books/introductory-business-statistics/pages/2-6-skewness-and-the-mean-median-and-mode https://openstax.org/books/introductory-business-statistics/...
- carbocation 4y ago
  Skew is fundamental to my point.

BMc2020 4y ago

No major American city has failed at the same level as Detroit, whose population dropped from 1.85 million people in 1950 to about 630,000 today. Move over Detroit, here comes San Francisco, which lost 6.3 percent of its population between 2019 and 2021, a rate of decline larger than any two year-period in Detroit’s history and unprecedented among any major US city.

peter422 4y ago
New York City lost 3.5% in the same time period, which is way, way more people in the absolute sense. So if SF is an abyss, then NYC must be apocalyptic right now. Also these figures are census estimates which are not accurate down to this level of precision anyways.
- AuthorizedCust 4y ago
  Huh? So if a town of 1000 loses 100% of its population, no biggie because NYC?
  - katbyte 4y ago
    For that town it sure is. But for the state/country it resides in? Not really.
  - peter422 4y ago
    That wouldn't be unprecedented either. But it's hard to say with a straight face that SF losing 50k people is unprecedented among major US cities when by the same measurement in the same time period NYC lost 300k.
  - culi 4y ago
    Many small towns routinely lose more than 6.8% of their population within a year. It's not really news...
jslql 4y ago
White flight at its worst.

m0llusk 4y ago

San Francisco empowered some of the most wealthy people not only in the US currently but in all human history. When working from home became not only possible but necessary many left. Most of those who left ended up nearby in other less dense parts of the roughly eight million strong metropolitan area of which San Francisco is merely a central part. The failure comparison context that saturates this piece is based on analysis that is mistaken about the composition and goals of urban areas. This is because this piece is not about analysis, but political slant. The Hoover Institution has a very strong agenda and beliefs that drive its actions. This is perhaps most clear in the final sentence that explains that all these problems can be changed by voting differently. This conclusion is not clear and not supported by the piece. Much of what is going on in and around San Francisco is driven by the population and commerce there over which the government has limited control. It is difficult to make progress with complex social programs when one's agenda is preset in long static beliefs and prevents taking the situation seriously.

friedman23 4y ago
> San Francisco empowered some of the most wealthy people not only in the US currently but in all human history Bullshit, they could've done it anywhere else, it just happened to be there. The idea that "San Francisco" empowered anything is just complete delusion, it was the people that did it.
kjghkjghkjgh 4y ago
"Much of what is going on in and around San Francisco is driven by the population and commerce there over which the government has limited control." Why don't cities like Miami and Houston have a homeless problem like San Francisco's?
- parker_mountain 4y ago
  Between weather (Miami and Houston both regularly suffer weather conditions that can kill from exposure), geography (SF is uniquely constrained, it's almost like an island), and reputation (SF has historically been considered both a cultural and queer refuge, and queer people make up a large amount of the unsheltered), you have a series of unique factors that make SF an ideal destination for homeless people, or people on the brink of homelessness. Now, add Regan's removal of mental health services (something we're still dealing with today), skyrocketing rent (removing the bottom rung of renting), and a sudden population pressure, and you have a uniquely awful set of circumstances. And no, this does not absolve SF and Bay Area leadership. They have repeatedly thrown money at the problem without any accountability whatsoever, but if the unique factors that affect SF were to hit Miami or Houston, they'd probably find themselves with the same problem overnight.

msrenee 4y ago

Quite the opinion piece largely devoid of citations. A two-year trend where people who had to move to the city are moving out is totally indicative of a fall into the abyss exactly like what happened when the auto industry pulled out of Detroit. You couldn't pay me enough to move to California, but this article is nothing but the exaggerated ramblings of someone who thinks that progressive policies will be the downfall of civilization.

surfmike 4y ago

Over the last 12 months, San Francisco has seen the second-biggest worker population gain of any area in the United States, according to LinkedIn. https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/2023/1/18/23542444/san-francisco-bay-area-population-moving-linkedin https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/2023/1/18/23542444/s...

zeroonetwothree 4y ago
Hmm... who do we trust, the liberal Vox or the conservative Hoover? It's great to live in an age when anyone can find evidence to support their existing politics.
- Retric 4y ago
  Objective reality doesn’t care about political spin. So trust neither, but look for context. Bias tends to show up in what’s left out of the conversation rather than outright lies. In this case it’s clear the conservative narrative is objectively false, but that’s not always the case.
- jmeister 4y ago
  The two claims don't contradict each other.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  I believe the age you refer to is the age of human beings.
ac29 4y ago
Take that with a huge grain of salt since LinkedIn claims to have significantly more than 100% of the US workforce using their site (191 million US LinkedIn members versus an official US workforce size of 165 million).
- kube-system 4y ago
  Not only is their data junked up by abandoned accounts, duplicate accounts, and fake accounts, but their real user base skews heavily towards salaried office workers. I would be surprised if 50% of Americans used LinkedIn.

ericmcer 4y ago

How does this article fail to mention the pandemic. That is crazy that they talk about 2019-2021 but never once address it.

mattnewton 4y ago
Because the poster has an agenda and wants to blame San Francisco politics for everything. Were that San Francisco’s problems as easy as voters “voting differently” - the truth is that some of the problems San Francisco faces like homelessness and pandemic work pattern shifts are way above the pay grade of a metro mayor to combat, but they make convenient scapegoats.
- strawhatguy 4y ago
  It’s certainly the policies SF pursues that lead to crime/homelessness increases. While the state of CA tacks on a few more that’s harder for a mayor and council to overcome, still no excuse not to correct what they can. The various vetoes different groups get on what someone can build on their own land is a good example a thing to get rid of. Assuming there’s any developers left at this point not friends with the gov there.
  - culi 4y ago
    > There was a 3.5% decrease in the total homeless population from 2019 – 2022. https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population > Compared with other major U.S. cities, S.F. boasts lower-than-average rates of violent crime https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/fixing-san-francisco-problems/crime https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/fixing-san-francis...
    - strawhatguy 4y ago
      I think property prices actually dropped as more people left SF during the pandemic timeframe, so it doesn’t appear to contradict the point: cheaper housing leads to less homelessness, and sf gov is mostly still in the way from that happening.

29athrowaway 4y ago

[flagged]

katbyte 4y ago
Pretty sure that’s anywhere on the west coast due to the mild weather. Homelessness and drug use is also high and endemic in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver Canada.
dinobones 4y ago
What is with all the homeless people so against shelters? In every interview of a homeless person, every time someone asks them about taking them to shelter for help, they recoil in fear and say "No, they steal/are violent/evil." etc... I have no doubt that homeless people are treated poorly by society. Maybe they are also treated poorly by shelters. But I can't believe how common the general dislike/avoidance of shelters seems to be.
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Because you cannot be high or drunk at the shelter.
- ok123456 4y ago
  It comes with all the social dynamics of being "institutionalized." All things being equal, they'd rather go on their own than be in a prison. Being in a low-trust environment is stressful in itself, and you run a good chance of having whatever possessions you carry around with you getting stolen.
- braingenious 4y ago
  >What is with all the homeless people so against shelters? … > In every interview of a homeless person, every time someone asks them about taking them to shelter for help, they recoil in fear and say "No, they steal/are violent/evil." etc... … > Maybe they are also treated poorly by shelters. I would venture to say that if every person interviewed said the same thing every time, “What’s the problem??” becomes much less of a head scratcher. The only way you could arrive at “Maybe they are treated poorly” logically would be if you think that there is a good chance that every person interviewed was lying every single time. If that’s your view on things, you’ll literally be mystified forever.

newaccount2021 4y ago

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channel_t 4y ago

This whole rant is so cringe it reads almost like satire. From the sound of things, the people leaving for other expensive areas were just wealthy semi-tourists who weren't contributing anything meaningfully positive to the city to begin with. The sorts of people the author expects SF-ers to look up to as parental figures or something. Good riddance. The only thing that is likely to cause SF to experience a Detroit-level exodus is climate crisis. Where will the people migrate to? Probably Detroit!

kjghkjghkjgh 4y ago
This is wrong. SF's tax revenue plummets when the wealthy move.
friedman23 4y ago
> weren't contributing anything meaningfully positive to the city to begin with Only money

labrador 4y ago

I have watched a lot of talks from the Hoover institute because I like some of the people they have on, but after awhile I noticed a certain lack of intelligence, not because they are not smart or educated, but because their ideology gets in the way Victor David Hanson is a good example. Detroit is "motor city". It didn't fail. Everybody bought cars and moved to the suburbs. I don't know how you can blame that on the city government. That's what I mean - they want to support their dislike if liberals by saying dumb things. Do they think we won't notice? Or is it the wealthy people who leave their money to the institute won't notice?

gardnr 4y ago

I left when they made it illegal to be naked in public. https://www.kqed.org/news/11613510/the-history-of-nudity-in-san-francisco-uncovered https://www.kqed.org/news/11613510/the-history-of-nudity-in-...

culi 4y ago
> Today, you need a permit to get fully naked in San Francisco. Or, if you’re not into paperwork, you can always go to a nude-approved park, like the north end of Baker Beach, where the National Park Service has said it’s legal to be naked. Is this not how it works in most other major cities? I'd imagine most cities have protection of kids against flashing...

fnordpiglet 4y ago

The comparison is absurd. No one would live in Detroit because it’s bleak and sprawling. San Francisco is beautiful and cosmopolitan. The trajectory of Detroit is irreversible and structural, while for San Francisco it’ll be an enduring global destination for as long as it stands. Two year blips during a pandemic aren’t sufficient to mark a trend, and SF city politics have been broken for generations. I lived in SOMA in the 1990’s, and 5th and mission was an open air drug festival too. The tender groin was foul, and civic center was a wasteland of feces, condoms, needles, and occasionally people who died overnight and hadn’t been cleaned up yet. The streets were covered in human waste even in residential areas. When I’ve come back to SF, it is generally a lot cleaner than it was, and has gentrified. I’ve not been back post pandemic, and I can imagine it’s reverted. But it was not possible to be worse than it was when I lived there. Yet, people loved it there and I miss it. If it weren’t for the vacuous tech culture chasing VC and exits I might be back some day.

huitzitziltzin 4y ago
While I don’t endorse most of this piece, it’s worth pointing out that Detroit has not always been bleak. Within living memory it was a very prosperous city
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adamjcook 4y ago
> No one would live in Detroit because it’s bleak and sprawling. San Francisco is beautiful and cosmopolitan. The trajectory of Detroit is irreversible and structural As someone who just moved to Detroit (in October of 2022), I could not disagree more. This city is clearly on the upswing and it is immensely beautiful. Do not sleep on Detroit. If anything, it is absurd for this "article" to compare whatever is happening in San Francisco to a completely unrelated population decline event in Detroit that spanned over 70 years. In other words, I am not sure why Detroit would be brought into this "analysis" at all. That is what is absurd.
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uejfiweun 4y ago

Regardless of the political slant of the article, I really wish the city didn't have to be such a shithole. It's like twice the price of the south bay, way farther away from most tech companies, filled with angry crazy homeless people and criminals, not really that walkable, inundated with needles and trash and feces... I'm jealous of people who moved to the bay area already with relationships because I hate hate hate the fact that my best chances to find someone are to move to SF.

jameson 4y ago

I used to commute to SF for a year and it was shocking to me how the home to one of the wealthiest companies and residents are overwhelmed with homelessness and crimes. The scene of downtown was something out of a dystopian movie where you see wealthy people walking by a drug addict with needles on the ground and yet everyone appears to conform that this is the norm I'm definitely oversimplifying the problem here but intuitively shouldn't a city with high income have more money to spend on infrastructure? Where are the taxpayers money spent on?

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culi 4y ago
The rate of houselessness has actually been decreasing. But I expect the rate of forced relocation by neighboring towns is also increasing I've lived in 3 suburbs so far and all 3 of them bus their houseless folks to the nearest city. The cops often take all their stuff in the process too so they usually lose everything and are especially vulnerable once they arrive

mistrial9 4y ago

most people do not know that a very significant portion of the residential population in SF is ethnic Chinese. Workers and excecutives alike travel to San Francisco each day from nearby residential areas that are not at all like the commercial streets of San Francisco. Many people there, like New Yorkers, had developed an aversion to interacting with the skid row and excess-party crowds that line the popular areas, long ago. That aversion was part of the formula on how it went so badly, in the modern chapter.

kepler1 4y ago

The credibility of the assertions in the article aside, most of the problems that SF is experiencing are of its own creation, so I cannot commiserate too hard with its plight. And I recently moved away, so I care less. Every city, whether you admit it or not as part of a deliberate strategy to succeed, is building itself a reserve of advantages and points against future adversity. SF has natural bonus points for geography, weather, etc. And intangible bonus points for talent pools, etc. SF chose to squander points over the years by letting conservative liberals prevent it from modernizing its policies and infrastructure, letting tax money be spent on ridiculous homeless-favoring policies, underinvesting in long-term improvements while diverting money to enrich union Muni drivers and city workers. Favoring people who are here already, over those who want to be here but couldn't afford it, who gladly pick up and leave from their rental properties with no attachments. All leaving it with a fragile tax base and city services so entrenched with lazy interests that it collapsed at the pandemic's pressure. If you want a lesson in how a city with so many advantages can sink its own ship, study SF.

zwilliamson 4y ago

In Detroit, the memory of abandonment is kept alive with the constant visual reminder of abandoned manufacturing infrastructure and homes from 70+ years ago. You can't escape it. I used to drive in from Lansing with my friends to see concerts back in late 90s. Miles and miles of abandoned factories, warehouses, and neighborhoods right next to the highway. Take the wrong exit and you felt like you entered a post apocalyptic world. We would brave the concert, then drive back to a factory town that somehow didn't receive the same treatment.

fwungy 4y ago

I only saw five turds last time I walked on Market Street. It's not like it's everywhere. No proof that they weren't from animals either.

Brian_K_White 4y ago

I agree with whoever flagged this.

etothepii 4y ago

Am I being gaslit by this article? The article claims the median income is higher than the arithmetic mean. Since income is typically exponential or even pareto this is almost inconceivable. It then claims (in parenthesis) that Florida has a state income tax.