5 ms·

Who is going to strictly enforce all the laws? The excess police officers that can't be hired because they can't afford to live in the city and don't want to co

Who is going to strictly enforce all the laws? The excess police officers that can't be hired because they can't afford to live in the city and don't want to commute into a city they don't care about to make less money than other nearby communities will pay them? Fewer than 25% of SF cops live in SF. It all comes back to housing. If you have a desirable place, people want to live there, and at some point if you don't keep up with growth then your city starts to lose the really important people that kept it running (nurses, teachers, police officers, etc). It's not like SF almost kept up with growth... They didn't try and fell so far behind in a deliberate attempt to keep a status quo, which completely led to the current disaster.

pfannkuchen 3y ago
Sorry if my point wasn’t clear. I am saying that conceptually some of the other problems people are discussing aren’t strictly caused by a housing shortage. The path we took from a prior “okay” state to the current “not okay” state may have been rooted in a lack of housing, but not all paths back to an “okay” state necessarily require that we solve the housing problem. Asserting that e.g. people pooping in the street is caused strictly by expensive housing would require some mental gymnastics IMO, there are simpler explanations and simpler ways out, without blocking on solving the expensive housing problem. If for example we ended up with a nice peaceful city but the police budget was really really high (so they could live locally), that would be a much less hairy problem than we have today I think. Nice peaceful city tends to generate more tax revenue also.
- travisjungroth 3y ago
  Seems unfair to call a suggestion to fix the main cause of many problems “mental gymnastics”. Raising police salaries and lowering housing costs are both about making things more affordable, just from different ends.
  - pfannkuchen 3y ago
    That isn’t what I was calling mental gymnastics. > Asserting that e.g. people pooping in the street is caused strictly by expensive housing would require some mental gymnastics Key word being strictly, i.e. expensive housing is the cause of street pooping, and there is ultimately no other way to prevent street pooping other than to reduce housing costs broadly. Raising police salaries is obviously a much easier problem to solve, right? It is something that is already under government control and it can be modeled using a simple spreadsheet. Housing cost on the other hand is not really possible to model accurately, the system is too complex and has too many inputs.
    - peter422 3y ago
      The starting salary for an SF police officer is over 100k. At some point money isn't the only issue. Also like any other job, the best way to get good police officers is to have lots of competition. If you are desperate for staffing, you aren't getting the best.
      - pfannkuchen 3y ago
        100k while living in SF is peanuts. Paying, say, 500k per officer and increasing the number of police would be tremendously easier and cheaper than fixing the systemic housing problem. If we still can’t find good candidates at 500k I would be very surprised. Also need to follow through on prosecution of course. And, again, not saying this is necessarily what should be done, just commenting on whether it is physically possible to make SF nice if we decided to ignore progressivism completely.
        peter422 3y ago
        So currently 9% of the city budget is spent on police and you are suggesting we increase that to 40%? That is a better solution than building more housing? A community is a social construct, you have to keep a lot of things in balance for it to work properly. The most important part is giving people a roof over their heads. Overpaying for police (or teachers, or nurses, etc) isn't going to save the day. It's the same reason you can't buy your way out of the homelessness problem!

pfannkuchen 3y ago

Sorry if my point wasn’t clear. I am saying that conceptually some of the other problems people are discussing aren’t strictly caused by a housing shortage. The path we took from a prior “okay” state to the current “not okay” state may have been rooted in a lack of housing, but not all paths back to an “okay” state necessarily require that we solve the housing problem. Asserting that e.g. people pooping in the street is caused strictly by expensive housing would require some mental gymnastics IMO, there are simpler explanations and simpler ways out, without blocking on solving the expensive housing problem. If for example we ended up with a nice peaceful city but the police budget was really really high (so they could live locally), that would be a much less hairy problem than we have today I think. Nice peaceful city tends to generate more tax revenue also.

travisjungroth 3y ago
Seems unfair to call a suggestion to fix the main cause of many problems “mental gymnastics”. Raising police salaries and lowering housing costs are both about making things more affordable, just from different ends.
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  That isn’t what I was calling mental gymnastics. > Asserting that e.g. people pooping in the street is caused strictly by expensive housing would require some mental gymnastics Key word being strictly, i.e. expensive housing is the cause of street pooping, and there is ultimately no other way to prevent street pooping other than to reduce housing costs broadly. Raising police salaries is obviously a much easier problem to solve, right? It is something that is already under government control and it can be modeled using a simple spreadsheet. Housing cost on the other hand is not really possible to model accurately, the system is too complex and has too many inputs.
  - peter422 3y ago
    The starting salary for an SF police officer is over 100k. At some point money isn't the only issue. Also like any other job, the best way to get good police officers is to have lots of competition. If you are desperate for staffing, you aren't getting the best.
    - pfannkuchen 3y ago
      100k while living in SF is peanuts. Paying, say, 500k per officer and increasing the number of police would be tremendously easier and cheaper than fixing the systemic housing problem. If we still can’t find good candidates at 500k I would be very surprised. Also need to follow through on prosecution of course. And, again, not saying this is necessarily what should be done, just commenting on whether it is physically possible to make SF nice if we decided to ignore progressivism completely.
      - peter422 3y ago
        So currently 9% of the city budget is spent on police and you are suggesting we increase that to 40%? That is a better solution than building more housing? A community is a social construct, you have to keep a lot of things in balance for it to work properly. The most important part is giving people a roof over their heads. Overpaying for police (or teachers, or nurses, etc) isn't going to save the day. It's the same reason you can't buy your way out of the homelessness problem!