7 ms·

What Happened to San Francisco, Really?

67 points by elsewhen 3y ago

pinewurst 3y ago
https://archive.ph/ayOW9 https://archive.ph/ayOW9
clpmsf 3y ago
As a resident of SF, this was probably the best article about SF that I've read in years - it really captures a broad set of perspectives and paints an accurate picture of the landscape.
- lamroger 3y ago
  really enjoyed this too
- inferiorhuman 3y ago
  Meh. The article presents a rather disingenuous view of "both sides". Gumps? Gumps went out of business in 2018 (Chapter 11). What Chachas is mourning is not a centuries old company, it's the less than a decade old plaything of an investment banker who bemoans the effect of remote work on his San Francisco business… from New York. TogetherSF? They've put forth some rather dubious political positions and bankrolled the comically tone deaf "Fentalife" ads. Who cares about the opinions put forth by a group only interested in pulling cheap publicity stunts? Otherwise it's a puff piece filtered through the perspective of tech. How droll.
- oicu812 3y ago
  As a non-resident who has enjoyed going to tech conferences in SF in the past, taking along my family so they could explore the city while I was at the conference, this article did nothing to change my opinion of SF. There is no way in hell I would go to SF for a conference or take my family there.
  - space_fountain 3y ago
    What gave you the negative view? Was it personal experience or media?
    - denysvitali 3y ago
      Not OP, but I've seen SF in the news before coming here last week and it really looked bad. It's sadly exactly as shown in the news - car break-ins and zombies around TL. It's just sad and not safe. I don't know how the rest of the US looks like right now in terms of crime rate and drugs abuse - but as an european I have never seen anything this bad.
moneycantbuy 3y ago
While I can appreciate the optimism of this article, it really only focuses on the perspectives of the rich and powerful and their pet projects to save the city, hardly reflecting the sentiment of the last sentence (“The only solution that’s a real solution is a solution in which everyone is involved”). Try interviewing people like me who can only afford to live with housemates even though I’m 40 years old and supposedly make a lot of money because I work in tech. I moved out last month after a beloved clerk at a market in the outer richmond was savagely beaten to death by a shoplifter.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  What has stopped you from seeking something remote?
  - moneycantbuy 3y ago
    i did and am remote now. prior to that i lived in sf for 7 years. a lot to love about the city, but not enough to keep me there anymore. lack of decent affordable housing seems to be the root of the city’s problems and i don’t see that changing in my lifetime. As a young man, moving to SF was stimulating and launched my career. But now as a middle-aged man it became too depressing stepping over junkies passed out in front of my expensive yet crappy apartment just to discover my car had been broken into again. all for the pleasure of commuting to a mostly empty office to have video meetings with international colleagues. not to say that these problems are unique to sf, it seems opioids have devastated many cities in america as has unaffordable housing. a broad solution could be to reduce wealth inequality or heavily tax those who insist they need to own more than 3 homes, but that’s basically asking the powerful to relinquish their power, which rarely happens.
    - zzzzzzzza 3y ago
      my suspicion would be that more equitable wealth distribution would make housing even more expensive in some scenarious even taxing third homes could ultimately reduce the supply of housing a land value tax on the other hand...
truth777 3y ago
They voted for this. There's no hidden secret. It's right there in the open.
omscs99 3y ago
I really don’t get why all of the fanfare and hand wavey attempts at outreach are necessary here. You have a well defined problem: high rates of property crime and drug use. How to solve it? Maybe try what they did in El Salvador, since that’ll actually accomplish something The impression that I get from this article is that the city has too many bullshitters in it to actually solve concrete problems: the same problem of a company with way too much management
- amanaplanacanal 3y ago
  What did they do in El Salvador?
  - omscs99 3y ago
    https://apnews.com/article/el-salvador-nayib-bukele-gangs-601b2aaad7d6297bfc6035da3f5399e7 https://apnews.com/article/el-salvador-nayib-bukele-gangs-60... How does this relate? There they actually enforced the laws and threw violators in prison. A similar strategy could be employed with drug dealers, property crime, etc in SF
    - jowea 3y ago
      From what I understand El Salvador went beyond "enforcing the laws" as we'd understand in a peacetime liberal democracy and instead jumped straight to borderline martial law and arbitrary arrests.
    - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
      So I read the article. I have no doubt that some people would love to suspend constitutional rights and use the military to start rounding up anybody they don’t like, but that doesn’t feel like the kind of thing we do in the US.
  - Rebelgecko 3y ago
    Suspended due process and rounded up suspected gang members/men with tattoos until they tripled their incarceration rate
lvl102 3y ago
It makes me really sad that SF turned into current state. It’s the only city I’d considered to be perfect and that’s also why I know it will bounce back better than ever.
- creer 3y ago
  Some aspects are so nice it's quite likely it can stay disfunctional forever and still not shrink significantly.
creer 3y ago
Good article - which captures the chaos that is San Francisco today. But probably completely confuses anyone who doesn't live there. Let me add some more illustrations of chaos: - Around Market and 9th to 11th, a mostly residential and expensive main and small streets, the noise is not that of the homeless in the street (of which there are many). It's mostly the INSANE level of noise of firefighters and ambulances. Second is the noise of the oh-so-touristic tramways. By contrast in the Mission the problem is the noise of the homeless shouting at each other and playing music in the street - early, all day, late. Firefighters and ambulances are rather quiet and much less frequent. - "safest it has ever been". WTF? It has been years since people bothered to report "non-violent crime" such as smashing car windows for kicks and giggles. (There is an online system where you can get a number if you really need one for your insurance, without inconveniencing too many people.) And my friends and I have stopped even reporting most violent crime. Because what's the point? My score is now at 4 physical assaults and uncounted (because who has even the time) verbal ones. A friend has a better score but also uncounted: "every time I leave the apartment". - Meanwhile, some neighborhoods are perfectly civilized: Usually no homeless and no poop on the sidewalks (dog or human), peaceful, construction work is discreet. No police in sight (same as mostly anywhere). If these people mostly live in these neighborhoods, they don't have anything to complain about. - "millions!!! [...] for extra police overtime". Not for hiring, mind you. Just for paying cops to stands around doing nothing more profitably. Which is a double edged thing anyway: It's dangerous when SF cops DO something. For all the "progressiveness" of the city, many minorities don't feel safe when the cops are around. Some events actively ask the participants to NOT call the cops if something happens - because it would only aggravate the situation for the people who do belong there. - It can be hard to get the official service to pick up trash for you. But on the other hand you can just leave stuff on the sidewalk and most will disappear fast. That's convenient. /s - "too much ideology. Not enough action." There is a lot of that. Not just from the government. - Transit. Great, right? There is a decent density of public transit in San Francisco. That should be good, right? Yes and no: It's slow. It's very often not on time - sometimes missing entirely. It sometimes isn't safe. It often doesn't feel safe. It's often disgusting. And even the giant busses sometimes have a hard time navigating the potholes. - "The city has an annual budget of fifteen billion dollars". Really? I didn't know that. Funny. The web says $6.4B in 2010, $14.6B in 2023-2024. Amazing. So much money for so little result. - Street cleaning. SF uses "street cleaning" as a pretext for parking tickets largely. On some streets, the street sweeper zooms through at warp speed, in the middle of the street, after the ticket brigade came through, and then you can park again. Elsewhere, the sweeper assiduously scrubs this way and that again - beautiful. So anyway, chaos. And good luck San Francisco! What can fix it? Beats me. Not one thing certainly. Less red tape of course, less corruption of course (of every kind including not doing one's job or using one's job as a platform for ones' obsessions), less infighting no doubt wouldn't hurt, more voting probably (but this is California, running on a platform "for housing" means absolutely nothing in practice.) Oh: The weather is great. Hard to beat really depending on your preferences.
paxys 3y ago
Can me when San Francisco has "collapsed" so I can maybe buy a reasonably priced home. As it stands despite all the horror you see on the news no one really wants to leave.
- dongobread 3y ago
  San Francisco is in fact the fastest declining US city by population[1] and has seen one of the biggest drops in housing prices in the country[2] [1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/05/large-cities-no-longer-biggest-population-losers.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/05/large-cities-... [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SFXRSA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SFXRSA
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - alisson_dover 3y ago
    Did you even look at the content of the pages you posted? From [1]: "The 15 fastest-declining cities from 2021 to 2022 and 2020 to 2021 were different, with major cities like Boston, Washington, D.C. and, most notably, San Francisco falling off the list." San Francisco was #1 in 2020-2021 (i.e. the tech industry employee exodus at the beginning of the pandemic), and isn't even on the list for 2021-2022. For [2]: while SF prices did decline, they are now at the level of Nov 2021 and are steadily recovering. (Not dissimilar to cities like Las Vegas or Austin.)
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    A house goes from $2 million to $1.9 million, that's a $100k drop! But only a 5% drop in relatively value. According to [2], housing prices have dropped to where they were 1.5 years ago.
mikeymz 3y ago
Surprised nobody mentions the smell. A heady mix of piss and weed
- orangepurple 3y ago
  Not just piss. Piss is OK (I have several kids and the smell is nothing anymore). It's heavily fermented piss and feces and the odiferous chemicals that stick to your clothes that really sucks.
tfehring 3y ago
> [Matt] Dorsey, a former police-department spokesperson, had the idea of adding fentanyl dealing to a list of crimes for which undocumented immigrants lose their sanctuary-city protections. "My hope was to incentivize a change to the drug market—if we went back to the good old days of heroin and Oxys, we’ll save hundreds of lives every year," he said. "It didn’t go over well with my colleagues." I wonder what share of San Franciscans would actually oppose the deportation of undocumented immigrants who'd been convicted of dealing fentanyl. Are residents being poorly represented by their elected and appointed officials, or are they living in the product of their own preferences?
THENATHE 3y ago
It's been said a million times, but I'll say it again for the ones in the back: Housing prices and tech wages. City got great because everyone wanted to live there. Because everyone lived there, it made a lot of large business start up. These tech giants and other ritsy businesses pay a ton. People move there because of this, which drives houses up. You hit a bubble where the wages drive the demand which drives the housing price, cyclically. This is what we all know. The part we don't know or at least isn't talked about is the offshoots of these issues. Hypothetically, I go to SF and live in a camper because I want to get better job opportunities without buying a house. This exposes me more directly to other seekers, homelessness, and 'street people' (drug dealers, criminals, addicts, gangbangers) because I am living in the 'undesirable' places, forced into these locations due to my transient living situation. I have all this money from working, living in a bad area, likely depressed from living in a camper, lacking creature comforts, and suffering burnout, so I turn to these street people and now I am part of the problem. The unique situation of transient individuals with tons of cash means that it assists in creating a bigger problem faster.
georgeplusplus 3y ago
The city was in decay and decline for a decade. This didn’t just happen overnight. The warning signs was pointed out and the people who flocked there wrote off the warnings signs as “it’s just part of the quirkiness of San Francisco”, as they happily took their inflated tech paychecks. I had the chance to take a job there but when I did the math even at 200k I was making less than my peers in the Pennsylvania office who were paying 150k. Now that it’s reached a tipping point in decay there’s some pretty crazy finger pointing going on. Well who do you blame in a uniparty city where everyone votes for one party, certainly not the people who voted these people in that enacted these policies. The author points the finger at the super rich democrats of the city, the one they presumably decided to work for and offered them large inflated paychecks that helped create this income disparity. The whole thing reeks of hypocrisy.
- pauldenton 3y ago
  Speaking of decay and hypocrisy. Do you think the Californians that move to Texas will vote for policies and politicians that made California into what it is, and Texas into California 2.0? Or will they integrate and vote for Texas values?
RagnarD 3y ago
Hmm, maybe those who could afford the extreme expense of living there got tired of contending with uncontrolled violent crime and a really (literally) shitty environment? It's not as though people with money have their pick of the entire rest of the planet, the vast majority of which doesn't have those problems. How selfish of somebody to want to live peacefully, not step in shit, and not be endlessly taxed as a penalty for being productive. The only ones seriously asking "What happened" are the ones whose policies made these problems and want to pretend that they aren't problems, or want to evade responsibility for them.
biotechie123 3y ago
+1 to the housing issue - this has led to a lost generation of the kind of young to mid-career professionals that would otherwise serve as the roots of the community. I moved there in 2014 for work out of grad school, had no money to buy when I showed up and despite doing well, costs rose faster than my income. I was open to putting down roots there, but just do the basic math with the assumption of a small family and an eventual retirement, and you come to the conclusion it's not going to work for you in that environment. The good friends I made there mostly came to the same conclusion, and by 2019 almost all of them were gone, the pandemic just finished them off, including me who left in 2020. It's not rocket science, if you literally make it impossible to invest and grow in the community you will have a transient population who leaves the minute it doesn't make sense to be there. I have also lived in New York City, and due to investments in transit and an environment that allows for development along this transit you have options to invest and grow in the city. Start out as a young professional 10 stops away from the city in Brooklyn, Queens or even the Bronx. When you're a bit more financially secure move to a neighborhood 5 stops away, keeping your community and family ties along the way. There are two quotes in the article, which are completely off: “To blame poor and displaced people for decline when you had a whole influx of people who came to mine the city’s wealth during the tech boom, drove the rents way up, got their money, and then, during covid, popped out? No,” We didn't get our money, we gave it to the landlords and property owners. What we did get was our experience, that we can now monetize elsewhere and have a chance to meet basic personal and financial goals, and we aren't coming back. The rents went up because the region created many new jobs, but completely resisted creating new housing. So then the question is: Who bites on cheap San Francisco housing? Is it students? Is it immigrants? Is it artists? Is it techies?” Housing is nowhere near being cheap, it's basic math. Median SF house cost is currently $1.2M or ~$8500 a month in mortgage, tax, insurance, which is down from prior years. Median bay area income is ~$120K, about $84k after taxes and so ~$7k a month take home. Students aren't buying these houses, artists and new immigrants aren't buying these houses, the mid-career professionals that were just displaced are your only possibility. San Francisco property owners leveraged their returns in boom years by restricting new supply, but increased the risks of exactly this scenario. I can only hope another shock doesn't hit right now, like the inevitable "big one". It's going to take time and doing things differently to build a more sustainable community and replace this lost generation. Start with building dense housing on the BART lines, again it's not rocket science.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

67 points by elsewhen 3y ago

https://archive.ph/ayOW9 https://archive.ph/ayOW9

As a resident of SF, this was probably the best article about SF that I've read in years - it really captures a broad set of perspectives and paints an accurate picture of the landscape.

lamroger 3y ago
really enjoyed this too
inferiorhuman 3y ago
Meh. The article presents a rather disingenuous view of "both sides". Gumps? Gumps went out of business in 2018 (Chapter 11). What Chachas is mourning is not a centuries old company, it's the less than a decade old plaything of an investment banker who bemoans the effect of remote work on his San Francisco business… from New York. TogetherSF? They've put forth some rather dubious political positions and bankrolled the comically tone deaf "Fentalife" ads. Who cares about the opinions put forth by a group only interested in pulling cheap publicity stunts? Otherwise it's a puff piece filtered through the perspective of tech. How droll.
oicu812 3y ago
As a non-resident who has enjoyed going to tech conferences in SF in the past, taking along my family so they could explore the city while I was at the conference, this article did nothing to change my opinion of SF. There is no way in hell I would go to SF for a conference or take my family there.
- space_fountain 3y ago
  What gave you the negative view? Was it personal experience or media?
  - denysvitali 3y ago
    Not OP, but I've seen SF in the news before coming here last week and it really looked bad. It's sadly exactly as shown in the news - car break-ins and zombies around TL. It's just sad and not safe. I don't know how the rest of the US looks like right now in terms of crime rate and drugs abuse - but as an european I have never seen anything this bad.

moneycantbuy 3y ago

While I can appreciate the optimism of this article, it really only focuses on the perspectives of the rich and powerful and their pet projects to save the city, hardly reflecting the sentiment of the last sentence (“The only solution that’s a real solution is a solution in which everyone is involved”). Try interviewing people like me who can only afford to live with housemates even though I’m 40 years old and supposedly make a lot of money because I work in tech. I moved out last month after a beloved clerk at a market in the outer richmond was savagely beaten to death by a shoplifter.

Workaccount2 3y ago
What has stopped you from seeking something remote?
- moneycantbuy 3y ago
  i did and am remote now. prior to that i lived in sf for 7 years. a lot to love about the city, but not enough to keep me there anymore. lack of decent affordable housing seems to be the root of the city’s problems and i don’t see that changing in my lifetime. As a young man, moving to SF was stimulating and launched my career. But now as a middle-aged man it became too depressing stepping over junkies passed out in front of my expensive yet crappy apartment just to discover my car had been broken into again. all for the pleasure of commuting to a mostly empty office to have video meetings with international colleagues. not to say that these problems are unique to sf, it seems opioids have devastated many cities in america as has unaffordable housing. a broad solution could be to reduce wealth inequality or heavily tax those who insist they need to own more than 3 homes, but that’s basically asking the powerful to relinquish their power, which rarely happens.
  - zzzzzzzza 3y ago
    my suspicion would be that more equitable wealth distribution would make housing even more expensive in some scenarious even taxing third homes could ultimately reduce the supply of housing a land value tax on the other hand...

truth777 3y ago

They voted for this. There's no hidden secret. It's right there in the open.

omscs99 3y ago

I really don’t get why all of the fanfare and hand wavey attempts at outreach are necessary here. You have a well defined problem: high rates of property crime and drug use. How to solve it? Maybe try what they did in El Salvador, since that’ll actually accomplish something The impression that I get from this article is that the city has too many bullshitters in it to actually solve concrete problems: the same problem of a company with way too much management

amanaplanacanal 3y ago
What did they do in El Salvador?
- omscs99 3y ago
  https://apnews.com/article/el-salvador-nayib-bukele-gangs-601b2aaad7d6297bfc6035da3f5399e7 https://apnews.com/article/el-salvador-nayib-bukele-gangs-60... How does this relate? There they actually enforced the laws and threw violators in prison. A similar strategy could be employed with drug dealers, property crime, etc in SF
  - jowea 3y ago
    From what I understand El Salvador went beyond "enforcing the laws" as we'd understand in a peacetime liberal democracy and instead jumped straight to borderline martial law and arbitrary arrests.
  - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
    So I read the article. I have no doubt that some people would love to suspend constitutional rights and use the military to start rounding up anybody they don’t like, but that doesn’t feel like the kind of thing we do in the US.
- Rebelgecko 3y ago
  Suspended due process and rounded up suspected gang members/men with tattoos until they tripled their incarceration rate

lvl102 3y ago

It makes me really sad that SF turned into current state. It’s the only city I’d considered to be perfect and that’s also why I know it will bounce back better than ever.

creer 3y ago
Some aspects are so nice it's quite likely it can stay disfunctional forever and still not shrink significantly.

creer 3y ago

Good article - which captures the chaos that is San Francisco today. But probably completely confuses anyone who doesn't live there. Let me add some more illustrations of chaos: - Around Market and 9th to 11th, a mostly residential and expensive main and small streets, the noise is not that of the homeless in the street (of which there are many). It's mostly the INSANE level of noise of firefighters and ambulances. Second is the noise of the oh-so-touristic tramways. By contrast in the Mission the problem is the noise of the homeless shouting at each other and playing music in the street - early, all day, late. Firefighters and ambulances are rather quiet and much less frequent. - "safest it has ever been". WTF? It has been years since people bothered to report "non-violent crime" such as smashing car windows for kicks and giggles. (There is an online system where you can get a number if you really need one for your insurance, without inconveniencing too many people.) And my friends and I have stopped even reporting most violent crime. Because what's the point? My score is now at 4 physical assaults and uncounted (because who has even the time) verbal ones. A friend has a better score but also uncounted: "every time I leave the apartment". - Meanwhile, some neighborhoods are perfectly civilized: Usually no homeless and no poop on the sidewalks (dog or human), peaceful, construction work is discreet. No police in sight (same as mostly anywhere). If these people mostly live in these neighborhoods, they don't have anything to complain about. - "millions!!! [...] for extra police overtime". Not for hiring, mind you. Just for paying cops to stands around doing nothing more profitably. Which is a double edged thing anyway: It's dangerous when SF cops DO something. For all the "progressiveness" of the city, many minorities don't feel safe when the cops are around. Some events actively ask the participants to NOT call the cops if something happens - because it would only aggravate the situation for the people who do belong there. - It can be hard to get the official service to pick up trash for you. But on the other hand you can just leave stuff on the sidewalk and most will disappear fast. That's convenient. /s - "too much ideology. Not enough action." There is a lot of that. Not just from the government. - Transit. Great, right? There is a decent density of public transit in San Francisco. That should be good, right? Yes and no: It's slow. It's very often not on time - sometimes missing entirely. It sometimes isn't safe. It often doesn't feel safe. It's often disgusting. And even the giant busses sometimes have a hard time navigating the potholes. - "The city has an annual budget of fifteen billion dollars". Really? I didn't know that. Funny. The web says $6.4B in 2010, $14.6B in 2023-2024. Amazing. So much money for so little result. - Street cleaning. SF uses "street cleaning" as a pretext for parking tickets largely. On some streets, the street sweeper zooms through at warp speed, in the middle of the street, after the ticket brigade came through, and then you can park again. Elsewhere, the sweeper assiduously scrubs this way and that again - beautiful. So anyway, chaos. And good luck San Francisco! What can fix it? Beats me. Not one thing certainly. Less red tape of course, less corruption of course (of every kind including not doing one's job or using one's job as a platform for ones' obsessions), less infighting no doubt wouldn't hurt, more voting probably (but this is California, running on a platform "for housing" means absolutely nothing in practice.) Oh: The weather is great. Hard to beat really depending on your preferences.

paxys 3y ago

Can me when San Francisco has "collapsed" so I can maybe buy a reasonably priced home. As it stands despite all the horror you see on the news no one really wants to leave.

dongobread 3y ago
San Francisco is in fact the fastest declining US city by population[1] and has seen one of the biggest drops in housing prices in the country[2] [1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/05/large-cities-no-longer-biggest-population-losers.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/05/large-cities-... [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SFXRSA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SFXRSA
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- alisson_dover 3y ago
  Did you even look at the content of the pages you posted? From [1]: "The 15 fastest-declining cities from 2021 to 2022 and 2020 to 2021 were different, with major cities like Boston, Washington, D.C. and, most notably, San Francisco falling off the list." San Francisco was #1 in 2020-2021 (i.e. the tech industry employee exodus at the beginning of the pandemic), and isn't even on the list for 2021-2022. For [2]: while SF prices did decline, they are now at the level of Nov 2021 and are steadily recovering. (Not dissimilar to cities like Las Vegas or Austin.)
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  A house goes from $2 million to $1.9 million, that's a $100k drop! But only a 5% drop in relatively value. According to [2], housing prices have dropped to where they were 1.5 years ago.

mikeymz 3y ago

Surprised nobody mentions the smell. A heady mix of piss and weed

orangepurple 3y ago
Not just piss. Piss is OK (I have several kids and the smell is nothing anymore). It's heavily fermented piss and feces and the odiferous chemicals that stick to your clothes that really sucks.

tfehring 3y ago

> [Matt] Dorsey, a former police-department spokesperson, had the idea of adding fentanyl dealing to a list of crimes for which undocumented immigrants lose their sanctuary-city protections. "My hope was to incentivize a change to the drug market—if we went back to the good old days of heroin and Oxys, we’ll save hundreds of lives every year," he said. "It didn’t go over well with my colleagues." I wonder what share of San Franciscans would actually oppose the deportation of undocumented immigrants who'd been convicted of dealing fentanyl. Are residents being poorly represented by their elected and appointed officials, or are they living in the product of their own preferences?

THENATHE 3y ago

It's been said a million times, but I'll say it again for the ones in the back: Housing prices and tech wages. City got great because everyone wanted to live there. Because everyone lived there, it made a lot of large business start up. These tech giants and other ritsy businesses pay a ton. People move there because of this, which drives houses up. You hit a bubble where the wages drive the demand which drives the housing price, cyclically. This is what we all know. The part we don't know or at least isn't talked about is the offshoots of these issues. Hypothetically, I go to SF and live in a camper because I want to get better job opportunities without buying a house. This exposes me more directly to other seekers, homelessness, and 'street people' (drug dealers, criminals, addicts, gangbangers) because I am living in the 'undesirable' places, forced into these locations due to my transient living situation. I have all this money from working, living in a bad area, likely depressed from living in a camper, lacking creature comforts, and suffering burnout, so I turn to these street people and now I am part of the problem. The unique situation of transient individuals with tons of cash means that it assists in creating a bigger problem faster.

georgeplusplus 3y ago

The city was in decay and decline for a decade. This didn’t just happen overnight. The warning signs was pointed out and the people who flocked there wrote off the warnings signs as “it’s just part of the quirkiness of San Francisco”, as they happily took their inflated tech paychecks. I had the chance to take a job there but when I did the math even at 200k I was making less than my peers in the Pennsylvania office who were paying 150k. Now that it’s reached a tipping point in decay there’s some pretty crazy finger pointing going on. Well who do you blame in a uniparty city where everyone votes for one party, certainly not the people who voted these people in that enacted these policies. The author points the finger at the super rich democrats of the city, the one they presumably decided to work for and offered them large inflated paychecks that helped create this income disparity. The whole thing reeks of hypocrisy.

pauldenton 3y ago
Speaking of decay and hypocrisy. Do you think the Californians that move to Texas will vote for policies and politicians that made California into what it is, and Texas into California 2.0? Or will they integrate and vote for Texas values?

RagnarD 3y ago

Hmm, maybe those who could afford the extreme expense of living there got tired of contending with uncontrolled violent crime and a really (literally) shitty environment? It's not as though people with money have their pick of the entire rest of the planet, the vast majority of which doesn't have those problems. How selfish of somebody to want to live peacefully, not step in shit, and not be endlessly taxed as a penalty for being productive. The only ones seriously asking "What happened" are the ones whose policies made these problems and want to pretend that they aren't problems, or want to evade responsibility for them.

biotechie123 3y ago

+1 to the housing issue - this has led to a lost generation of the kind of young to mid-career professionals that would otherwise serve as the roots of the community. I moved there in 2014 for work out of grad school, had no money to buy when I showed up and despite doing well, costs rose faster than my income. I was open to putting down roots there, but just do the basic math with the assumption of a small family and an eventual retirement, and you come to the conclusion it's not going to work for you in that environment. The good friends I made there mostly came to the same conclusion, and by 2019 almost all of them were gone, the pandemic just finished them off, including me who left in 2020. It's not rocket science, if you literally make it impossible to invest and grow in the community you will have a transient population who leaves the minute it doesn't make sense to be there. I have also lived in New York City, and due to investments in transit and an environment that allows for development along this transit you have options to invest and grow in the city. Start out as a young professional 10 stops away from the city in Brooklyn, Queens or even the Bronx. When you're a bit more financially secure move to a neighborhood 5 stops away, keeping your community and family ties along the way. There are two quotes in the article, which are completely off: “To blame poor and displaced people for decline when you had a whole influx of people who came to mine the city’s wealth during the tech boom, drove the rents way up, got their money, and then, during covid, popped out? No,” We didn't get our money, we gave it to the landlords and property owners. What we did get was our experience, that we can now monetize elsewhere and have a chance to meet basic personal and financial goals, and we aren't coming back. The rents went up because the region created many new jobs, but completely resisted creating new housing. So then the question is: Who bites on cheap San Francisco housing? Is it students? Is it immigrants? Is it artists? Is it techies?” Housing is nowhere near being cheap, it's basic math. Median SF house cost is currently $1.2M or ~$8500 a month in mortgage, tax, insurance, which is down from prior years. Median bay area income is ~$120K, about $84k after taxes and so ~$7k a month take home. Students aren't buying these houses, artists and new immigrants aren't buying these houses, the mid-career professionals that were just displaced are your only possibility. San Francisco property owners leveraged their returns in boom years by restricting new supply, but increased the risks of exactly this scenario. I can only hope another shock doesn't hit right now, like the inevitable "big one". It's going to take time and doing things differently to build a more sustainable community and replace this lost generation. Start with building dense housing on the BART lines, again it's not rocket science.

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