17 ms·

Spiraling in San Francisco’s Doom Loop

55 points by edgefield 3y ago

crop_rotation 3y ago
I would be very interested to hear some long term SF native's opinions on how are things currently in SF. Talking to people I either get that it has become dystopia or it is pursuing policies which will lead to nirvana.
- jfisher4024 3y ago
  I’ve lived in San Francisco for 20+ years. Downtown is in bad shape, but the rest of the city is quite lovely. I think techies don’t explore the “villages” (Richmond, Hayes Valley, etc) and only see the more corporate, less flattering side of the city (SoMa). This will lead to an uneven view of the city. And a deservedly negative one. The rumors of San Francisco death are exaggerated. They are also self-fulfilling because they discourage people from investing in the community. My advice to techies: move West. Take a pottery class and eat a dumpling. Make friends with artists. It’s a richly cultural city once you get out of the bubble.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - jmoak3 3y ago
    I lived in the Mission for 1.5 years and a random dude carrying some sort of radio antenna plucked all of the parts off of my roommate's street parked car that he could yank off. Another day a drug deal went wrong and two guys exchanged bullets for a few minutes in broad daylight right below our window a block from Dolores. We moved to Noe Valley and then a random dude broke into our house by smashing glass and opening the door. SoMa was definitely the epicenter of "woah" but the "woah" was by no means isolated to that area. This was all pre-covid - I didn't stick around to see if it would get worse. I've got hundreds more stories of people getting into fights on my morning train (the J), or just doing strange things to everyone around them while everybody keeps their heads down praying it will end soon so they can just get to work. SF is undeniably fun and pretty, and honestly an amazing place - I even saw Tim Schafer on my morning train once but didn't want to bother him. However, between the intensity of daily life and the intensity of cost of living I can't recommend it to anyone who isn't a young millionaire, or literally 2 years from that outcome. My favorite parts were the west side like you recommend though.
    - jmoak3 3y ago
      Correction: >We moved to Noe Valley and then a random dude broke into our house by smashing glass and opening the door. This happened 2 months into COVID, and then I moved away soon after
  - pfannkuchen 3y ago
    My impression was that Hayes Valley was like 100% young tech people (except for the people trying to sell you weird newspapers). Is it not?
  - refurb 3y ago
    The rest of the city is not as bad as downtown, but it has gotten worse. Car breakins, violent street encounters, general lawlessness has definitely increased in the outlying areas. It’s not horrible mind you, just more prevalent than say 5 years ago.
- m0llusk 3y ago
  People underestimate how rough SF has been in the past. Urban horrors inspired Dirty Harry some time ago and it was all getting seriously tired even back then. There are also long term changes playing out. The Baby Boom flooded SF with weird energy. Today young people are less numerous and not as freaked out. The Crack Boom was in some ways similar to the Fentanyl, opioid, and meth craziness but back then the users tended to flame out violently instead of stumbling around like zombies. No es bueno. As the HIV epidemic has played out at this point much of a generation of gay people have been killed off or disabled. In the past the need to mingle to meet others drove an intense urban subculture. Nowadays Internet dating serves similar needs but works differently and rarely if ever fills public spaces.
  - refurb 3y ago
    Yup, prior to the tech boom, SF was not in good shape. Not dying like Detroit, but not really growing either. 25 years ago you didn’t go to Dolores Park because it was a dump. Now Valley was working class, Glen Park was awful. Now those places are havens for the young and rich. There is no reason why those times can’t return.
    - xref 3y ago
      I had to look up “Now Valley” because I wondered if it’s where arrested development got “Sudden Valley,” but alas I assume it was a typo of an area named Noe Valley
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  From my experience living in a different city, the legitimate complaints about it from people who actually live there tend to be specific, like "the 34 has been skipping routes this month and the park by the Firehouse Subs is still closed for construction." Whereas the complaints that come from outsiders are vague culture war talking points that transparently originate from fear/outrage media. Vague and generic driveby comments about how it's wholly unsafe and going to hell. The cities I've lived in or visited frequently, the locals who aren't looking for trouble feel safe and don't find it difficult or burdensome to avoid unsafe areas/behaviors.
  - jonhohle 3y ago
    I drove into SF on a vacation and within two hours had my car broken into in a heavily populated area. I spent the rest of the time that I should have been enriching the city with my tourism dollars on the other side of the bay bridge trying to find glass repair and cleaning glass out of the car while my family sat in a hotel room. We sent a police report into the void knowing from several other anecdotes that nothing will be done. We have no interest in going back, and wouldn’t recommend it to others. How is that healthy for a city?
    - whinenot 3y ago
      For what it's worth, the same thing happened to me 18 years ago. Pull-out car radios (remember those?!) were practically mandatory for a time. SF has always been a den of smash and grab thieves.
- darth_avocado 3y ago
  It’s bad. More and more people I know, including me, have been victims of crime. A year ago, it was mostly property crime. But more recently (last 6 months) things have escalated. People have been robbed at gunpoint in their own homes in supposedly safe neighborhoods of the city. More people are considering moving away after that.
- rasengan0 3y ago
  Not dystopia, just becoming a corrupted ghetto. [1] There is probably still systemic resilience that prevents utter collapse but the level of civic tolerance is paper thin. The rationalization of the current status cannot overcome reality; people and businesses simply leave [2] It is really is very simple, just visit the city to see what has become of it. Walk around and have a "lived experience" is really the best education. Visit our wonderful Main Library but before they open, come greet the morning with our welcoming citizens on 7th Street and Market. You may have to stoop a bit as some folks on oversees synthetics have a bad hangover. [3] Money is not going to solve it AND where in the hell is it going to anyway? [4] Blaming does not solve anything, but regret, shame and utter disgust is my first step out of denial of this sh*t show. And to those who have their head in the sand viewing our beautiful utopia out in sunny Noe Valley or Outer Sunset, just you wait until the delusion is shattered... [1] The minority group being referred to here are natives or residents who actually live and care about the city and see what it has become over years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghetto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghetto [2] Businesses: https://youtu.be/kvsGqG1pMN8 https://youtu.be/kvsGqG1pMN8 People: https://www.axios.com/2023/04/07/population-change-pandemic https://www.axios.com/2023/04/07/population-change-pandemic [3] Where in the world can you get good cheap chemistry? https://youtu.be/z6iW1poC-0c https://youtu.be/z6iW1poC-0c [4] $100K per serviced client = ($848.4 million - admin costs) /~8k = https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population https://sf.gov/data/our-city-our-home-fund-6-month-report-fiscal-year-2022-2023 https://sf.gov/data/our-city-our-home-fund-6-month-report-fi...
draw_down 3y ago
[dead]
kingzulu 3y ago
What kind of publication uses Jake Shields as a source for anything?
monero-xmr 3y ago
I live in a major city in America (not SF), and like every major city in America, it is run by progressive democrats. I like that neighborhood rules have kept things a certain style, but we have a pro-development local group that runs zoning and stuff gets built (however we still need more housing). The public schools are absolutely dogshit even though they are funded through the roof, with a few test-schools that the activists are actively trying to ruin. The cops don’t do enough, but they do solve murders and prevent violent crime. We have pretty decent public transit (although it’s also a corrupt mess, in many ways). In summation, I’m a city guy and I like living in cities, and despite my political differences, I made my peace with the situation and greatly enjoy the restaurants, museums, events, and so on that city life provides. That said, I cannot possibly understand how people can think SF is desirable. Your tax dollars that aren’t stolen by this-or-that office or agency or politically connected consultant are being incinerated as quickly as possible. How many bonds and tax increases have been issued specifically to alleviate poverty and drugs and homelessness and what is the ROI of this spending? It seems like no one gives a shit and the worse things get the more the distortion of what “normal” city life is gets turned up. What a crazy situation you SFers got yourself into.
- crooked-v 3y ago
  > progressive The real question is, how many of them are actually progressive, and how many are just people using the right buzzwords? SF sure looks like a lot of the latter, given the chokehold that NIMBYism has over any and all new construction that might actually help with the city's cost-of-living issues.
  - jonhohle 3y ago
    So despite the majority of major metro areas having sharp increases in violent and property crime and homelessness while being run by people who claim to be progressive, those aren’t real progressives? It’s not that progressive policies don’t work and make cities worse for most people?
    - peter422 3y ago
bostonsre 3y ago
Has anyone heard of a viable escape route for sf? Every piece of news just seems to say sf is dieing but I haven't really read about any potential solutions. Shouldn't we be one of the most capable areas to solve a problem like this? Or did the culture or economic impact that silicon valley has produced cause this? On a side note, how is Austin? Any death spirals over there?
- bombcar 3y ago
  To be bluntly honest it probably has to die and be reborn; die so hard there is nothing left for the homeless so then move elsewhere. It’s a story that has played out time and time again on small scales in many places, and it’s not particularly unique to SF.
  - bostonsre 3y ago
    Where are some examples of other places where that has worked? How long would you think it would take to get to the low point and what would that low point look like in sf? And what makes a city that has reached that low point a place where the homeless wouldn't want to live? I guess I'm not even sure what drove the homeless to sf in the first place.. was it mild weather and lax law enforcement?
- akiselev 3y ago
  Build high speed rail between Mojave and Starfleet Academy in the Presidio.
- HPMOR 3y ago
  Austin is becoming bad. They're trying to make it like Houston. It used to be super walkable but now they're expanding the streets into the central area and ripping out the sidewalk. It makes me sad :( I think I'm done with American cities. They're all made for cars with maybe the exception of NYC.
  - ravitation 3y ago
    As someone who grew up in Austin, it was never walkable at any meaningful scale.
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
I do not know how San Francisco might solve its many other problems, but homelessness is just a game theory problem gone bad. To solve it, one does not need empathy, or pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps paternalism. We don't need a return to 1980s style mental-illness-warehousing, or for people to be less greedy. No municipality can fix this problem, regardless of the local politics, because to be the first city to solve it would mean that they'd find out they have so many more homeless people in the coming weeks and months. The homeless aren't stupid, and they aren't chained to the ground where ever it is they have to be right now. If they heard of a magical place where homelessness was solved, they'd hitchhike there, or panhandle for a bus ticket, or if no other options just hoof it the whole way. Suddenly, this city finds out that they allocated the funding for 100% of their homelessness needs... but now they have twice as many. Five times as many. Is there even an upper limit? And cities and townships everywhere else are getting bright ideas like that they can be rid of their homeless too, if they're willing to splurge on a bus ticket for them. If you were mayor of this city, the city where you could get the bill passed to fix homelessness, would you do it? It must be in the back of your mind that any attempt to fix it will result in this embarrassing calamity. Whether you are Democrat or Republican (or anything else). Maybe it'd be better to just not bother. And so you don't. If you're on the left, you pretend to be really empathetic, if on the right you just give a really stern speech about how everyone needs to take care of themselves. Then you let it go. This remains true, no matter what the details are for your fix for homelessness. There might even be many possible fixes, but none of them can be tried (and if some unclever local politician does try, they'll just end up making it look like it failed when it does backfire). The solution is quite simple, cheap, boring, and unobjectionable to anyone who might hear it. But being those things, it also elicits a reaction of "how could it be so, people have been trying to solve this for years!". If anyone can find me a city manager or city council or mayor who'd listen for 15 minutes, they could be a hero that goes down in the history books.
- function_seven 3y ago
  > The solution is quite simple, cheap, boring, and unobjectionable to anyone who might hear it. What is it? Genuinely curious, because I’ve done the same thought experiment as you about how little control individual cities have.

55 points by edgefield 3y ago

I would be very interested to hear some long term SF native's opinions on how are things currently in SF. Talking to people I either get that it has become dystopia or it is pursuing policies which will lead to nirvana.

jfisher4024 3y ago
I’ve lived in San Francisco for 20+ years. Downtown is in bad shape, but the rest of the city is quite lovely. I think techies don’t explore the “villages” (Richmond, Hayes Valley, etc) and only see the more corporate, less flattering side of the city (SoMa). This will lead to an uneven view of the city. And a deservedly negative one. The rumors of San Francisco death are exaggerated. They are also self-fulfilling because they discourage people from investing in the community. My advice to techies: move West. Take a pottery class and eat a dumpling. Make friends with artists. It’s a richly cultural city once you get out of the bubble.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jmoak3 3y ago
  I lived in the Mission for 1.5 years and a random dude carrying some sort of radio antenna plucked all of the parts off of my roommate's street parked car that he could yank off. Another day a drug deal went wrong and two guys exchanged bullets for a few minutes in broad daylight right below our window a block from Dolores. We moved to Noe Valley and then a random dude broke into our house by smashing glass and opening the door. SoMa was definitely the epicenter of "woah" but the "woah" was by no means isolated to that area. This was all pre-covid - I didn't stick around to see if it would get worse. I've got hundreds more stories of people getting into fights on my morning train (the J), or just doing strange things to everyone around them while everybody keeps their heads down praying it will end soon so they can just get to work. SF is undeniably fun and pretty, and honestly an amazing place - I even saw Tim Schafer on my morning train once but didn't want to bother him. However, between the intensity of daily life and the intensity of cost of living I can't recommend it to anyone who isn't a young millionaire, or literally 2 years from that outcome. My favorite parts were the west side like you recommend though.
  - jmoak3 3y ago
    Correction: >We moved to Noe Valley and then a random dude broke into our house by smashing glass and opening the door. This happened 2 months into COVID, and then I moved away soon after
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  My impression was that Hayes Valley was like 100% young tech people (except for the people trying to sell you weird newspapers). Is it not?
- refurb 3y ago
  The rest of the city is not as bad as downtown, but it has gotten worse. Car breakins, violent street encounters, general lawlessness has definitely increased in the outlying areas. It’s not horrible mind you, just more prevalent than say 5 years ago.
m0llusk 3y ago
People underestimate how rough SF has been in the past. Urban horrors inspired Dirty Harry some time ago and it was all getting seriously tired even back then. There are also long term changes playing out. The Baby Boom flooded SF with weird energy. Today young people are less numerous and not as freaked out. The Crack Boom was in some ways similar to the Fentanyl, opioid, and meth craziness but back then the users tended to flame out violently instead of stumbling around like zombies. No es bueno. As the HIV epidemic has played out at this point much of a generation of gay people have been killed off or disabled. In the past the need to mingle to meet others drove an intense urban subculture. Nowadays Internet dating serves similar needs but works differently and rarely if ever fills public spaces.
- refurb 3y ago
  Yup, prior to the tech boom, SF was not in good shape. Not dying like Detroit, but not really growing either. 25 years ago you didn’t go to Dolores Park because it was a dump. Now Valley was working class, Glen Park was awful. Now those places are havens for the young and rich. There is no reason why those times can’t return.
  - xref 3y ago
    I had to look up “Now Valley” because I wondered if it’s where arrested development got “Sudden Valley,” but alas I assume it was a typo of an area named Noe Valley
add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
From my experience living in a different city, the legitimate complaints about it from people who actually live there tend to be specific, like "the 34 has been skipping routes this month and the park by the Firehouse Subs is still closed for construction." Whereas the complaints that come from outsiders are vague culture war talking points that transparently originate from fear/outrage media. Vague and generic driveby comments about how it's wholly unsafe and going to hell. The cities I've lived in or visited frequently, the locals who aren't looking for trouble feel safe and don't find it difficult or burdensome to avoid unsafe areas/behaviors.
- jonhohle 3y ago
  I drove into SF on a vacation and within two hours had my car broken into in a heavily populated area. I spent the rest of the time that I should have been enriching the city with my tourism dollars on the other side of the bay bridge trying to find glass repair and cleaning glass out of the car while my family sat in a hotel room. We sent a police report into the void knowing from several other anecdotes that nothing will be done. We have no interest in going back, and wouldn’t recommend it to others. How is that healthy for a city?
  - whinenot 3y ago
    For what it's worth, the same thing happened to me 18 years ago. Pull-out car radios (remember those?!) were practically mandatory for a time. SF has always been a den of smash and grab thieves.
darth_avocado 3y ago
It’s bad. More and more people I know, including me, have been victims of crime. A year ago, it was mostly property crime. But more recently (last 6 months) things have escalated. People have been robbed at gunpoint in their own homes in supposedly safe neighborhoods of the city. More people are considering moving away after that.
rasengan0 3y ago
Not dystopia, just becoming a corrupted ghetto. [1] There is probably still systemic resilience that prevents utter collapse but the level of civic tolerance is paper thin. The rationalization of the current status cannot overcome reality; people and businesses simply leave [2] It is really is very simple, just visit the city to see what has become of it. Walk around and have a "lived experience" is really the best education. Visit our wonderful Main Library but before they open, come greet the morning with our welcoming citizens on 7th Street and Market. You may have to stoop a bit as some folks on oversees synthetics have a bad hangover. [3] Money is not going to solve it AND where in the hell is it going to anyway? [4] Blaming does not solve anything, but regret, shame and utter disgust is my first step out of denial of this sh*t show. And to those who have their head in the sand viewing our beautiful utopia out in sunny Noe Valley or Outer Sunset, just you wait until the delusion is shattered... [1] The minority group being referred to here are natives or residents who actually live and care about the city and see what it has become over years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghetto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghetto [2] Businesses: https://youtu.be/kvsGqG1pMN8 https://youtu.be/kvsGqG1pMN8 People: https://www.axios.com/2023/04/07/population-change-pandemic https://www.axios.com/2023/04/07/population-change-pandemic [3] Where in the world can you get good cheap chemistry? https://youtu.be/z6iW1poC-0c https://youtu.be/z6iW1poC-0c [4] $100K per serviced client = ($848.4 million - admin costs) /~8k = https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population https://sf.gov/data/our-city-our-home-fund-6-month-report-fiscal-year-2022-2023 https://sf.gov/data/our-city-our-home-fund-6-month-report-fi...

draw_down 3y ago

[dead]

kingzulu 3y ago

What kind of publication uses Jake Shields as a source for anything?

monero-xmr 3y ago

I live in a major city in America (not SF), and like every major city in America, it is run by progressive democrats. I like that neighborhood rules have kept things a certain style, but we have a pro-development local group that runs zoning and stuff gets built (however we still need more housing). The public schools are absolutely dogshit even though they are funded through the roof, with a few test-schools that the activists are actively trying to ruin. The cops don’t do enough, but they do solve murders and prevent violent crime. We have pretty decent public transit (although it’s also a corrupt mess, in many ways). In summation, I’m a city guy and I like living in cities, and despite my political differences, I made my peace with the situation and greatly enjoy the restaurants, museums, events, and so on that city life provides. That said, I cannot possibly understand how people can think SF is desirable. Your tax dollars that aren’t stolen by this-or-that office or agency or politically connected consultant are being incinerated as quickly as possible. How many bonds and tax increases have been issued specifically to alleviate poverty and drugs and homelessness and what is the ROI of this spending? It seems like no one gives a shit and the worse things get the more the distortion of what “normal” city life is gets turned up. What a crazy situation you SFers got yourself into.

crooked-v 3y ago
> progressive The real question is, how many of them are actually progressive, and how many are just people using the right buzzwords? SF sure looks like a lot of the latter, given the chokehold that NIMBYism has over any and all new construction that might actually help with the city's cost-of-living issues.
- jonhohle 3y ago
  So despite the majority of major metro areas having sharp increases in violent and property crime and homelessness while being run by people who claim to be progressive, those aren’t real progressives? It’s not that progressive policies don’t work and make cities worse for most people?
  - peter422 3y ago

bostonsre 3y ago

Has anyone heard of a viable escape route for sf? Every piece of news just seems to say sf is dieing but I haven't really read about any potential solutions. Shouldn't we be one of the most capable areas to solve a problem like this? Or did the culture or economic impact that silicon valley has produced cause this? On a side note, how is Austin? Any death spirals over there?

bombcar 3y ago
To be bluntly honest it probably has to die and be reborn; die so hard there is nothing left for the homeless so then move elsewhere. It’s a story that has played out time and time again on small scales in many places, and it’s not particularly unique to SF.
- bostonsre 3y ago
  Where are some examples of other places where that has worked? How long would you think it would take to get to the low point and what would that low point look like in sf? And what makes a city that has reached that low point a place where the homeless wouldn't want to live? I guess I'm not even sure what drove the homeless to sf in the first place.. was it mild weather and lax law enforcement?
akiselev 3y ago
Build high speed rail between Mojave and Starfleet Academy in the Presidio.
HPMOR 3y ago
Austin is becoming bad. They're trying to make it like Houston. It used to be super walkable but now they're expanding the streets into the central area and ripping out the sidewalk. It makes me sad :( I think I'm done with American cities. They're all made for cars with maybe the exception of NYC.
- ravitation 3y ago
  As someone who grew up in Austin, it was never walkable at any meaningful scale.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

I do not know how San Francisco might solve its many other problems, but homelessness is just a game theory problem gone bad. To solve it, one does not need empathy, or pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps paternalism. We don't need a return to 1980s style mental-illness-warehousing, or for people to be less greedy. No municipality can fix this problem, regardless of the local politics, because to be the first city to solve it would mean that they'd find out they have so many more homeless people in the coming weeks and months. The homeless aren't stupid, and they aren't chained to the ground where ever it is they have to be right now. If they heard of a magical place where homelessness was solved, they'd hitchhike there, or panhandle for a bus ticket, or if no other options just hoof it the whole way. Suddenly, this city finds out that they allocated the funding for 100% of their homelessness needs... but now they have twice as many. Five times as many. Is there even an upper limit? And cities and townships everywhere else are getting bright ideas like that they can be rid of their homeless too, if they're willing to splurge on a bus ticket for them. If you were mayor of this city, the city where you could get the bill passed to fix homelessness, would you do it? It must be in the back of your mind that any attempt to fix it will result in this embarrassing calamity. Whether you are Democrat or Republican (or anything else). Maybe it'd be better to just not bother. And so you don't. If you're on the left, you pretend to be really empathetic, if on the right you just give a really stern speech about how everyone needs to take care of themselves. Then you let it go. This remains true, no matter what the details are for your fix for homelessness. There might even be many possible fixes, but none of them can be tried (and if some unclever local politician does try, they'll just end up making it look like it failed when it does backfire). The solution is quite simple, cheap, boring, and unobjectionable to anyone who might hear it. But being those things, it also elicits a reaction of "how could it be so, people have been trying to solve this for years!". If anyone can find me a city manager or city council or mayor who'd listen for 15 minutes, they could be a hero that goes down in the history books.

function_seven 3y ago
> The solution is quite simple, cheap, boring, and unobjectionable to anyone who might hear it. What is it? Genuinely curious, because I’ve done the same thought experiment as you about how little control individual cities have.