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San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?
- nickdothutton 4y agoI skimmed until I found the part where the author was seriously suggesting dumping money on the problem, then I closed the article. The problem is not money.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> skimmed until I found the part where the author was seriously suggesting dumping money on the problem, then I closed the article “…if you were the state of California, and you were staring down a projected $22 billion budget deficit, would you invest your scarce resources in San Francisco, which has repeatedly proven itself unfit for such investments by building a vast, inefficient bureaucracy at the expense of taxpayers and vulnerable residents? No.”
- floren 4y agoHey, congratulations SF. You spent over a decade whining about tech-bros and Google buses. Guess those problems are solved now!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jeffbee 4y agoI think the fact that Prop J cruised to victory and Prop I went down in flames shows that the influence of the old guard is waning. There is a proliferation of groups trying to flex tech money in SF politics: Grow SF, Abundant SF, Together SF. And they are aligned with state politicians who get the goods like Weiner, Newsom, and Haney. Supervisor Peskin is termed out, again, in 2024 and Preston and his band of fake-ass socialists are going to get a serious challenger
- rahimnathwani 4y agoI'd put Haney in the same bucket as Preston. https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1410107988505890817 https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1410107988505890817
- lkjwelkjlk3t 4y ago[flagged]
- lkjwelkjlk3t 4y ago[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> Downvote all you want You called for violence against a public official. Also: “Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading” [1]. > Did Weiner not help pass a bill to legalize raping underage boys? Did they? Provide a source. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- decremental 4y agoYeah he wanted to make it legal for underage gay boys and older gay men to have sex. That guy pushes all kinds of weird sex stuff related to kids.
- dangrover 4y agoYes, Haney was originally very NIMBY in his politics but has become more moderate.
- dangrover 4y agoTech money should be flexed in politics more. We’re paying taxes too, right?
- thot_experiment 4y agoafter the huggingface event last night a group of us wasn't let into a bar/club because "y'all are nerds, we don't want your patronage" I don't think it's solved enough yet for their taste, what a beautifully schizoid city, never change, we should just throw money at the problem forever as a monument to hubris XD
- AndrewKemendo 4y agoI'm super interested in this story. Can you elaborate more on the context please?
- thot_experiment 4y agoI will simply leave you with this image by way of explanation: https://thiic.cc/heavy/huggingface_bar.jpg https://thiic.cc/heavy/huggingface_bar.jpg
- Der_Einzige 4y agoThe resentment happening from society towards us is spiraling out of control, and I say this as someone who was also at that meetup event yesterday. Pretty sad but we should expect it given how fast AI is going to hurt a lot of these people. The world is finding that they want to always treat us nerds how they treated us in our formative years...
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> we should expect it given how fast AI is going to hurt a lot of these people It has nothing to do with tangible harm and a lot with the attitude of techno public figures, as well as, in San Francisco, the civic detachment of its tech workers.
- Der_Einzige 4y agoWhy should we expect "civic attachment" when nerds are literally hardcore bullied from the beginning in our media, in our schools, and now, they're starting getting bullied for being cerebral nerds by the bars of the one city that's supposed to be theirs. I don't blame them tbh. Frankly, society should be very happy uniquely for the "nerds at the HF event" since those nerds are working very hard on open source and democratic AI, which is basically the only protection that the non nerds of SF have against the coming AI job apocalypse.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- baron816 4y agoIt all comes down to housing. If you make it affordable to build housing, you make housing affordable. If you make housing affordable, then you make services affordable.
- jleyank 4y agoI wonder whether homeowners talking about more affordable housing realize that includes their own house likely declining in value….
- eropple 4y agoDunno about in SF, but I certainly realize it. And I don't care. I bought the place to live in. I don't plan to sell it for decades. I will have gotten my money's worth out of it no matter what. Which is why I absolutely advocate locally for more housing.
- kevingadd 4y agoHome value does not (generally) matter to you day to day if you plan to actually live there. Hell, if the value of your home goes down that could lower your property taxes! Of course in the US, homes are first and foremost an investment, so losing resale value is one of the worst things that could happen to a homeowner, or something.
- jleyank 4y agoOnly issues I can think of would be going underwater on a mortgage which might cause financial problems or having the price or liquidity drop when you need to sell short term.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago> Home value does not (generally) matter to you day to day if you plan to actually live there. Until you retire or for other reasons find yourself living on a fixed (and possibly diminished) income, while property taxes based on home value continue to rise.
- orzig 4y agoI don’t live there, but as a general rule, people overestimate the probability of “collapse“. Things can be declining for a long time without the dramatic acceleration that merits that term.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoI've found that anything written to compete for clicks tries to over-exaggerate in a thousand major and minor ways to grab attention.
- ppeetteerr 4y agoAgreed. Just look at Twitter. It's running with a skeleton crew but that's only because a system of that size does not collapse in a day. It takes years for the cracks to show and grow.
- CydeWeys 4y agoI think the specific situation with Twitter is that it takes a lot more people to create and update a system of this size than it does to merely maintain it. They simply no longer have the capacity to make a large new product at this point, but even a skeleton staff is enough to keep the existing product running.
- ppeetteerr 4y agoThat's why the cracks are small at first. Patches, new API connections to customers, and ambition will still cause some change, albeit small as you point out. Entropy in a living system always increases.
- revelio 4y agoTwitter was created originally by a much smaller team than even the one that Musk still has today.
- CydeWeys 4y ago
- EnglishmanITGuy 4y agoNo mention of law and order.
- JumpCrisscross 4y agoNew York of the 1970s [1] is a better analogy than 9/11. San Francisco is going broke. Not because of terrorism, but due to its own devices. It will need to be bailed out. When that happens, the state will take over and face the realities its voters choose to ignore. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-saved-itself-from-bankruptcy https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-...
- KennyBlanken 4y agoSan Francisco is largely owned and controlled by about a half dozen extremely wealthy families, who don't just control SF...they're also "kingmakers" for the governor's office, and have been using their influence for personal gain for decades: https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-gavin-newsom-san-francisco-money/ https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-gavin-newsom-san-... Not a dime of public money should go to bailing out the Guggenhimes, Buells, Swigs, Marcuses, Fishers, Gettys, and Pritzkers. As Biden said: oh boo hoo, capitalism working as intended.
- imwithstoopid 4y ago[flagged]
- cptskippy 4y agoSo you are of the opinion that we should continue the long tradition of bailouts to the wealthy?
- version_five 4y agoSVB was like three weeks ago, no reason to go back that far
- lkjwelkjlk3t 4y ago[flagged]
- ghaff 4y ago
- ravenstine 4y agoLet it burn. The only way out is to let competition thrive and thereby create pressure to revert the cost of living insanity.
- carapace 4y agoSomeone went and collected data going back to 1948. > Today's outrageous prices are exactly in line with the 6.6% trend that began 60 years ago. https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employment-construction-and-cost-of-san.html https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employme...
- ghaff 4y agoI passed on a tech job in the Bay Area in the 90s in part because of cost of living. This was also a time when tech salaries in general were much lower than today. It would have been generally a quality of life downgrade to have moved west.
- Ekaros 4y agoI think one reasonable solution is literally this. Would allow rebuilding whole thing from fresh, with much higher density and maybe in general as high rise buildings.
- Game_Ender 4y agohttps://archive.is/QYoji https://archive.is/QYoji
- bdcravens 4y agoEvery city has its glory days and eventual decline. It happened to Detroit; it's happening to SF, and eventually it'll happen to other cities (I see it happening to Houston if the US truly uncouples itself from oil)
- marcellus23 4y agoCities can come back after the decline, too. Look at NYC.
- bdcravens 4y agoTrue, given the local industry. NYC has finance, marketing, fashion, etc. What would San Francisco's be? As an outsider, it feels to me like the days magical tech synergy has left, and that work in our industry is unlikely to recentralize.
- ghaff 4y agoWas SF ever really a tech city? I mean it can't avoid Silicon Valley's penumbra, tech events and conferences, and a few large presences like Salesforce. But SF isn't really a tech city like Manhattan is a finance city. (Indeed, SF is probably at least as much of a West Coast financial and law center as it is tech.
- zamnos 4y agoOutside of tech, there's UCSF, a prominent medical institution, a large part of which can only be done in person and not remotely, as well as Genentech and similar, which is in south sf and not sf proper, but where do their employees want to live? some want suburbia but some also want city living
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoHow is that glory-days-then-decline theory working out for the cities of the old world?
- twelve40 4y ago
- epicureanideal 4y ago[flagged]
- ricksunny 4y ago'verge of collapse' & 'brink of collapse' are some of the most frequently-slung clickbait phrases in the editor's grab-bag. Already collapsed? Not going to collapse? Neither newsworthy. 'about to collapse'? That's your stress response being triggered, to be satisfied by clicking on the headline to ascertain how to either head off the stress source or be infotained by it.
- d23 4y agoAny thoughts on the content of the article itself?
- kurthr 4y agoIt might as well have been written 20 years ago.
- WillPostForFood 4y agoThe vacancy rate is pretty similar to 20 years ago after the dot com bust. But there is a layer of crime and lawlessness this time that makes it a lot worse, and harder to recover from.
- ricksunny 4y agoI'll tell you what - tell me what metric is in question, and what percent decrease of it over what period of time would constitute 'collapse', following which I will read the article and provide my response. Bonus to incentivize: I'll even be providing the weird mix of native-San-Franciscan-cum-tech-person take, being born & raised in the Sunset. Therefore I promise to infuse it with a sense of entitlement & disaffection, as if it was possible to have any scope on in-migration/emigration policy across city limits.
- UIUC_06 4y agoMaybe a new Giuliani will come along. Nah, they'd reject him. They voted themselves into this.
- dilyevsky 4y agoGood luck attracting tourists with crime rates as they are. We don't need no water…
- firstlink 4y agoPoint and laugh. And maybe learn, but let's not get too crazy.
- diogenescynic 4y agoLet it. The city is governed by incompetent leaders and the voters need to stop re-electing the same awful supervisors. Until that happens, I see no reason to bail them out.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dehrmann 4y agoI'm not convinced. There's a reason people came back faster to almost every other major city. This makes me think a lot of people were just there for the money, and once they could get the same money without the hassle of the city, they did just that. The problem is adding more housing downtown doesn't really help the problem beyond making a shorter commute (to WFH jobs?). Especially for the people who moved out, SF's pandemic policies weren't attractive, and it's even worse in a dense neighborhood. There's still the homeless problem. There's still a lot of property crime. This week, there was a post about how hard it is for 8th graders to take Algebra. Like the article said, I don't really want to give more money to a city that's been so mismanaged.
- ghaff 4y agoThere are certainly reasons other than jobs why some people choose to live in a major city. But eliminate the job/commute reason and the calculus changes for a lot of people given that "live near work" is at least one of the main reasons they would choose urban living.
- dehrmann 4y ago> There are certainly reasons other than jobs why some people choose to live in a major city I agree, but without jobs, as a major city, SF looks pretty unattractive. It was better a decade ago, but since then, all its problems got worse.
- ghaff 4y agoI've spent a lot of time traveling to SF and the broader Bay Area over the years. What I tell people is that a lot of the pros are still there but the CON list especially for living in the city proper has definitely gotten longer and redder.
- swayvil 4y agoIt's such a beautiful piece of property too. If not for all the people. Maybe this is "success through failure" approaching. Maybe it will be quite nice in 100 years.
- tv_walkman 4y ago[flagged]
- lkjwelkjlk3t 4y ago[flagged]
- Waterluvian 4y ago> …it was assumed, would never again want to work in office towers over fears of terrorism. This feels like a ridiculous assumption. Maybe in the emotional moment, but sensible minds wouldn’t for long think that that’s it for the concept of working downtown.
- McScrooge 4y ago"This is the city where it can take 87 permits, 1,000 days of meetings and $500,000 in fees to build residential housing projects. This is the city — the only one in the state — that allows housing permits to be appealed even after projects are entitled. This is the city where it costs an estimated $100,000 to build one tiny home for the homeless — up to 10 times more than in other Bay Area cities — and almost $1.2 million to build a single unit of affordable housing. This is the city that at one point celebrated plans to build a single public toilet for $1.7 million." "1,000 days of meetings" sounds like the ultimate office horror movie.
- JumpCrisscross 4y agoThe author follows up with measures the mayor is taking to fight this.
- pg_1234 4y agoWhich is worthless unless the measures go though, there are no "points for trying at this scale" Right now San Francisco is not "too big to fail", but rather "too bloated to save".
- sidewndr46 4y agoIt's the city's own policy. How could the mayor 'fight' it?
- scottydog51834 4y agoStarting 1-2 months ago, many people, myself included, have started saying "SF is back" after observing the excitement surrounding, attendance at, and quantity of Generative AI events. It's too early to know how permanent this effect will be, but an article discussing SF collapse should at least mention the possibility that decline has ended and attempt to explain why event attendance won't be the first step towards recovery.
- DLA 4y agoSF and NY are getting exactly what they deserve by electing idiots.
- danesparza 4y agoPlease. Tell me this is an April Fool's joke (even if done in poor taste).
- Animats 4y ago"downtown" This sounds like the "downtown" real estate interests whining. By "downtown" they mean the area around Embarcadero Center. The working center of SF has been moving south into SOMA and Dogpatch for two decades. There have been desperate efforts to stop this, including the "transit center" and an unnecessary push for tunnels to terminate Caltrain in classic "downtown". Those parts of SF seem to be doing OK. It's the tall office building sector that's in trouble.
- WillPostForFood 4y agoIf you read the downtown plans from SF planning or the mayor's office that the article refers to, it is not just the financial district or union square. Their definition includes areas from Chinatown to Mission Bay, and from Embacadero to Castro along Market. So all of SOMA, but not Dogpatch. Those parts of SF seem to be doing OK. SOMA is about 32% vacant. The goal is "Clean, safe and inviting", so I'd say not doing OK right now.
- dehrmann 4y agoIn the near term, it's more about tax revenue than real estate interests.
- twelve40 4y agoSOMA is deserted. I stopped going because it's not much different from my suburban desert anymore, so why go there. Empty offices, shuttered restaurants, very few people.
- carapace 4y agoGood. As someone who grew up here, it'll be nice to get back to our original role in American life: open-air asylum for the rest of the country. Literally that's an old joke here: "If you're too crazy for the rest of the country you move to California, and if you're too crazy for California you move to San Francisco." And then under our breathe we add, "And if you're too crazy for SF you move to Berkeley." This Dot-Com Boom period (roughly 2001 to now) kinda fucked up the city. I can't wait to clear out the folks who were only here for money and hype, and start getting the weirdos and hippies back in.
- zamnos 4y agoI don't know about "verge of collapse", but the city needs to take a long hard look at itself and ask "why do people live in cities", and one reason, other than work, which, no two ways about it, is moving out of the city in various fashions for various reasons (I'm looking at you, prop-C and stripe); one reason people want to live in a city is for the nightlife, where it's a city's density and not the suburbs that's necessary to support it in any meaningful fashion. Why does San Jose not have the same vibrant nightlife? Why does San Francisco make this giant sucking sound for all culture in the bay area? (That's no longer as true as it once was; so much has been pushed into Easy Bay simply due to housing prices in the city.) It's a large collection of suburbia and not actually a city. This past week, San Francisco took steps to utterly destroy the nightlife scene, by sending subpoenas to all the after-hours venues to cease and desist. Like the Prohibition, this only serves to drive the scene (further) underground, causing it to be more dangerous because the parties aren't going to stop happening, they're going to happen further out from the heart of the city, into being less regulated, and further away from the hospitals which will result in deaths from that whole fentanyl thing. Without the party scene (which rivals major cities of the world under the metric "can I party from Thursday til Tuesday"), both above and below ground, there's little reason for young adults who enjoy that sort of thing to live in this tiny city now that work remote is viable in many industries. The industry forced to be in-person is healthcare, and UCSF is a major medical institution in the US and the world, with a major infectious disease center that played an important role in the recent pandemic, so the city has that going for it, but it's only the frontlines of that industry that need to be in the city. Much of that industry is administrators and patient navigators and all that kind of stuff, which happens on the phone, but with VOIP and the Internet, can go fully remote. Genentech (and co), the other major part of that industry, are in South San Francisco, which is technically a different city, despite its name, and far away enough from San Francisco proper that you need a car to get there (or work at Genentech and take their buses).
- agentofoblivion 4y agoOne question that’s always top of mind when I hear about the insanity of SF: why on Earth are people with radical, proven ineffective policies voted in time and time again? Whenever I hear from tech people, they think it’s crazy. So if tech has overrun SF, why haven’t the politics become more moderate? At least one of my assumptions must be wrong.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoWhat is there in SF politics that you consider "radical"? I mean, I can't disagree that the evidence supports the idea that recent policies there have been ineffective in addressing many of that city's most pressing issues. But "radical" ?
- agentofoblivion 4y agoAre you being serious? SF is as much, or more, known for radical left wing politics than it is tech. They basically give homeless people free money, make it legally hard to clear camps, and don’t enforce laws of open, hard drug use and petty theft, leading to the obvious consequences. Basically they make it easy to be a drug addict on the street, and hard to be a police officer, and then wonder why crime and homelessness flourish.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoI am being serious. You're describing a highly proscribed area of city governance. Radical left politics generally involves much larger issues, chiefly relating to economic and power relationships between different groups with a society. At least. What's going on in SF has essentially nothing to do with that at all.
- agentofoblivion 4y agoThey are one and the same. Chesa Boudine was largely responsible, and ran on the platform, of essentially not enforcing laws on drugs and theft. His parents spent decades in prison for murder as a result of their radical leftists activism with the Weather Underground. SF is basically the poster child for putting radical leftists in charge.
- lazyeye 4y agoMaybe vote differently?
- chmod600 4y agoTo do what NYC did and bring more residents into downtown (rather than just offices), SF needs to be an appealing place to live. NYC tries to make itself an appealing place to live. SF does not. I'm not sure quite what SF is optimizing for, but "pleasant" is not it. Even if crime is "just" theft and broken windows, it's still an unpleasant day (or week) when it happens. Enough of that and people just don't want to live there.
- jinushaun 4y agoHaving lived in both cities, NYC seems to strive everyday to continue to make it a livable city for families and people of all income levels. SF just seems to be coasting into disaster. Nothing seems to change or improve. Things just seem to get worse. My taxes in NYC seem to actually do something. My CA/SF taxes felt like throwing money into a fire pit.
- te_chris 4y agoJust spent a few days there and man, talk about living off past beauty. It sure is one of the most beautiful urban environments in the world: the geography, the variety of the architecture, but fuck me, so expensive and just weirdly hostile rules. And I live in London so no stranger to shit costing a lot. Was there with my wife and child and tried to go to a cool wine bar at like 5pm, told we weren’t allowed in due to licensing laws as the baby was a minor. Nowhere in Europe would even raise an eyebrow at 5pm in a half full bar, it’s not like I was trying to take him to Berghain. Saw barely any parents with kids out, but I guess that makes sense when you look at the rents. It could be so much more, I hope there can be some sort of will to change.
- pandaman 4y ago>Was there with my wife and child and tried to go to a cool wine bar at like 5pm It's everywhere in California: minors (under 21 y.o.) are not allowed into bars except on legitimate business (e.g. making a delivery) at any time.
- anotheruser13 4y agoThe US is stupid about things like this. When I was a kid, my family used to go to bars and the VFW club in rural Minnesota, so we could meet up with our relatives. These were equivalent to community social centers. No harm was done to our little minds.
- pandaman 4y agoIt's not a US law, it's a California law.
- 0xbadc0de5 4y agoCalifornia government: if you think the problems we create are bad, wait until you see our solutions.
- agilob 4y agoAfter reading the title I thought it will be about earthquakes.