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What if San Francisco never pulls out of its ‘doom loop’?
- AlbertCory 3y agohttps://archive.ph/IEhOE https://archive.ph/IEhOE
- push-to-prod 3y agoThank you, paywalls are the worst.
- proc0 3y ago> But San Francisco’s problems go far beyond drugs. The Bay Area is home to four of the 10 most valuable companies in the world — Apple, Alphabet, Nvidia and Meta — titanic producers of wealth, but a staggering one per cent of the city’s population is homeless, compared to less than 0.2 per cent across the US. Nice try, but this isn't as big as a problem outside of SF and Oakland. Other cities have a semblance of order and while there are still people outside they are not out of control and they seem to be in a relatively normal state of mind. The main question for me is will anybody be held accountable for this at all.
- user_named 3y agoThe article is talking about San Francisco and you say, "except for San Francisco"...?
- proc0 3y agoThat specific line seems to conflating Silicon Valley with SF. They're close, but it's not the same, especially on this issue.
- LarsAlereon 3y agoThe size of the visible homeless population in a city is mostly determined by the cost of housing and how cold it gets in the winter. SF is basically a worst case scenario of being insanely expensive but also warm enough that they don't feel an obligation to build shelters so people aren't freezing to death. People are homeless because it's too expensive to live, not because we're not punishing them harshly enough for being poor.
- nicenewtemp84 3y agoHow much would housing have to fall, for a homeless person to get themselves a 1br? 75%? Are there really people on the streets because they had a spare $1000 a month, but couldn't find anything, so they said screw it I'll shoot up heroine from a tent instead?
- throw9away6 3y agoThe cost to rebuild would have to be insanely cheap to house people that destroy everything. Like derilect rv cheap 5-10k
- nicenewtemp84 3y agoA home Depot shed isn't crazy. Just need a communal bathroom area and honestly that's about what most houses were like for most people just a century ago.
- throw9away6 3y agoI think it’s fine but having sufficient separation from other sheds is hard because a lot of people are smoking and cooking meth/lith so fires are happening a lot.
- AlbertCory 3y agoWe have a natural experiment going on just 50 miles to the south, in San Jose. New mayor Matt Mahan won by promising "pragmatic" solutions to homelessness, including building very cheap housing for them, and putting them to work cleaning up the city
- inglor_cz 3y agoCompared to homelessness, a park of refurbished naval cargo containers with common bathrooms/kitchens would be livable, plus steel containers are really hard to destroy.
- LarsAlereon 3y ago
- nicenewtemp84 3y agoCan anyone explain to me why a nice rich suburb will not even allow a panhandler to stand in a center divide at an intersection, but SF basically allows open air drug use? Is it just a matter of scale? You can stop 1 panhandler, but if you had 100 people to stop you couldnt? If that's the case, once problems reach critical mass, is there any going back?
- TurkishPoptart 3y ago> “Five years ago, it wasn’t like this,” he says about the people openly using drugs around us on Market Street, just outside the Urban Alchemy headquarters, where he sells souvenir photographs of local liquor stores. “Five years ago, a black guy with a pipe got arrested; now the police walk past a white guy with a needle in his arm,” he says. So, as of the past 5-10 years there are these really progressive district attorneys who really do not like to prosecute people. I'm not going to say who generally funds their campaigns, because I'm tired of being downvoted, but you can find out pretty easily.
- Avshalom 3y ago5-10? that's a weird fucking range, gascon was 12-4 years ago (and a cop) and boudin was 3-1 years ago.
- blagie 3y agoThe US is hyper-polarized. There are crazies on both sides. The bigger the city, the more political processes select for crazies. In a village of 100 people (1) more people are involved, since individual influence is felt (2) there are fewer crazies, since you can only go 2-3 std. div. out. In a bigger city, (1) fewer people follow politics, since there's no direct influence on their lives; civics is dominated by crazies. (2) The absolute number of crazies is higher. If you have 100,000 people, just by statistics, the craziest crazies will be crazier. Having a small number of very bad crazies can ruin civics, since they often operate outside of civic processes. If just one person is willing to tarnish your reputation, smash your windows, or send a death threat, that can have a chilling effect. The worst cities in the US are near-100% blue or near-100% red, since there's no moderating factor. Transient cities also tend to be worse (where a lot of the population don't expect to keep living there in five years), since no one cares about civics. SF is the sort of place people most people move out from when they decide to start a family. SF is close to a million people, VERY blue, and that leads to extremist politics. Note: I'm extrapolating from what I see with cities where I live, as well as accounts from SF. I don't have first-hand experience there. But I think there are a lot of reasons why SF politics might get particularly broken.
- thegaulofthem 3y agoSan Francisco will simply become the new Detroit. It will still exist, some headquarters will still exist but the city proper will be the butt of a bad joke for a long time. Folks will live in nice suburbs and be forced to commute while the city core rots. Considering Detroit once held the record for patents filed, this isn’t all too far fetched. Maybe there is some type of awful natural law to be found even?
- bigmattystyles 3y agoDetroit weather is rough though - SF's climate, proximity to A LOT and its natural beauty could be its saving grace.
- Kon-Peki 3y agoDetroit has a bright future ahead of it. All the evidence suggests that it hit bottom a while ago and is rebounding. People really should visit and see first hand (in the summer, if the weather is that important to you).
- dllthomas 3y agoI couldn't disagree more - if the weather is important to you, visit any time but the summer. Preferably the fall or spring, but winter is okay if you're prepared for it (it just goes on way too long). (I have little experience of Detroit proper, but I assume the weather is sufficiently similar to Lansing and A2)
- Kon-Peki 3y agoFair enough :)
- AlbertCory 3y agoI spent January to October there one year. It sucks most of the time. Sorry. When you say, "if the weather is that important to you" you're speaking of something you know not of.
- arpyzo 3y agoSan Francisco's problems are the predictable result of inequality that's completely out of control. All US cities suffer the same problems as SF, and the only difference between them is a matter of degree. The wealthy and powerful that created this problem would like to solve it while simultaneously continuing to exasperate it. It doesn’t take a genius to see that this will never work. At best, a temporary, politically palatable status quo can be achieved which is basically what US cities which are considered functional have. San Francisco may recover or it might become the next Detroit. To some extent it doesn’t matter because without fundamental systemic changes it’s only a matter of time before the next city suffers the same fate.
- lockhouse 3y agoRampant NIMBYism and being absurdly soft on crime aren’t helping either.
- refulgentis 3y agoI still haven't seen or heard anything that would lead me to believe there's anyone choosing to be soft on crime, I know there's tons of back and forth on this but it just rings as people idly speculating to me. Only useful info I've found is people on both sides of the divide decrying police won't take reports for car breakins/thefts[^1^], and response times are high [^1^] the latest set piece I saw with this was fascinating, two people victim of same crime, drawing two opposite conclusions from lack of interest in taking a report, both only from injecting ideology
- lockhouse 3y agohttps://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime#:~:text=With%20a%20crime%20rate%20of%2064%20per%20one,or%20property%20crime%20here%20is%20one%20in%2016 https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime#:~:.... Take a look, those are some terrible crime stats.
- daveguy 3y ago
- klyrs 3y ago"What if," "never," "doom." This is catastrophizing. Flag it as an anxiety thought and move on. Ask "what can we do today" instead.
- lockhouse 3y agoIt’s not my city, but I’d start by voting out the incumbents next election and taking self defense classes.
- zuiper 3y agoIt's due a massive earthquake any day now. That's the real doom barely anyone talks about in connection to the area.
- whinenot 3y agoMeh. The Loma Prieta in '89 got rid of most of the crappy infrastructure. Sure, landfill zones like the Marina are going to liquefy again, and the Millennium Tower may topple (hitting a mostly empty Salesforce Tower) but 34 years of retrofitting has made SF a much safer city than back in the 80's.
- gamblor956 3y agoNew York City not only pulled out of the death spiral but came out of it 100x stronger than before. Most people don't remember when Times Square used to be a warren of brothels and drug dens, even though most of the people on HN were alive when the changeover happened. L.A. pulled out of a decades-long spiral within the past 15 years (Skid Row notwithstanding), as developers took advantage of high demand and low/0% interest. Staples Center and Bottega Louie deserve a lot of the credit for that. Cleveland did...eventually. It took decades of home-grown investment and federal tax dollars. Washington D.C. did. Mostly. As with Cleveland, it took years, largely because Congress controls a lot of its budget and purse strings and it was convenient to use the Capitol as a punching bag. Detroit is still in the process of pulling out of its decades-long spiral. It's no longer at rock bottom, but it's still got a long way to go. It's hard to say whether SF is starting a doom spiral or just returning to its naturally seedy state (SF was a port city before it was a tech hub, with all of the seedy establishments that being a port city entails). Only time will tell.
- Clubber 3y agoLooking at some Louis Rossmann videos, NYC is headed back to the dumpster. I hope they get out of it, I visited a few times 20 years ago and it was a nice place. The food was excellent.
- some-guy 3y agoWhile I agree NYC has problems, I'm going to guess Louis Rossmann wasn't alive in the 1970s and probably didn't remember the 80s very well either in NYC. It's nowhere near the dumpster it used to be.
- freejazz 3y ago> Louis Rossmann videos, NYC is headed back to the dumpster It's not and he's wrong and I'm sure there's plenty of other media you could consume that would be less ridiculous
- rasz 3y agoSome people dont realize 1979 Warriors was a documentary :)
- hdlothia 3y agoPpl can afford to live there again?
- rocket_surgeron 3y agoIf San Francisco is in a doom loop right now, what was it in back in the 60s-00s? An ultra-hyper-mega-doomloop-of-death? Hell in the 90s the violent crime rate routinely topped 1,800 per 100k. Today it is 1/3rd that. I remember San Francisco in the 90s. Today's San Francisco is Disneyland compared to then. My theory is that we are all suffering from collective cultural amnesia and have forgotten that the world existed prior to 2019 and thus have forgotten that while things go up and down year-to-year they have been getting better on the whole for decades.
- andromeduck 3y agoYou could tmsay the same about any number of social issues. Racism and sexism are all near all time lows, as are gun deaths - that didn't stop popular movements from springing up.
- throwaway2037 3y agoThis article wins a gold medal for click-baiting. Readers can skip the text, but the art is beautiful and deserves some attention.