
San Francisco Is Burning - awiesenhofer
http://www.gq.com/story/san-francisco-is-burning
======
gwbas1c
I lived in San Francisco for a year. The first week in, I realized what a
mistake it was.

The problem is that city laws unreasonably favor the tenants, putting an
unreasonable amount of pressure on landlords. It was so bad that my landlord
couldn't afford to fix problems in her building; nor could she evict a problem
tenant who threatened us all.

When we (the tenants) tried to work with the city to stop the aggressive
tenant's behavior, the judge just threw it out. (This tenant was mentally ill
and needed to live in a home with proper supervision.) Ultimately, all of us
left, except the family who lived there for 20 years and paid almost nothing
for rent. *

I don't have a lot of love for landlords; but San Francisco treats tenant
protection as a win-lose negotiation. It puts landlords in a clear loosing
situation of the negotiation, and then drags down anyone who wants a safe "no
frills" apartment at a good price.

* San Francisco's rent control is unreasonable. If you live in a rent-controlled building for more than a few years, you can effectively live there for free. The landlord then can't keep up the building, because the rent for the open apartments needs to stay low to compete with luxury apartments without rent control. That's partly why San Francisco tenant protection puts landlords on the loosing side and drags down everyone else.

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J-dawg
> _This man, let’s call him Frank, was in trouble for some financial
> infraction. Frank cut a deal with the authorities. They’d go easy on him if
> he’d wear a wire and lure Gideon into plotting to burn down his building._

Is it common practice to take someone who is in trouble for an unrelated
crime, and use it to coerce them into being what amounts to an unpaid
undercover police officer?

I mean, I understand the idea of arresting someone from a criminal gang and
then getting them to wear a wire to catch the big boss. But the way this is
written it sounds like the two men didn't know each other.

Am I missing something here? Because that sounds incredibly unethical and I'm
surprised if it's legal.

~~~
jfaat
Here is a particularly disturbing example:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Rachel_Hoffman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Rachel_Hoffman)

~~~
popctrl
"The officers involved in the operation were suspended with pay" So they made
a pothead buy coke and guns and get murdered, and got punished with a paid
vacation...

------
FeepingCreature
> Gideon sighs. “Violation of civil rights. Habitability. It’s all bullshit.
> They’d shit on the floor and take a picture of it. I had a guy who glued
> bologna sandwiches to his wall and sued me because his room had roaches.”

> “I’d close my eyes, and my mind wouldn’t stop all night long. I don’t mean
> not sleeping. I mean _not sleeping_. You go to bed and you’re up all night.
> And then, the next day, you go to work…”

> I think Gideon’s answer to that last question reveals some narcissism

> I appreciate Gideon’s candor, but our conversation demonstrates just how
> contemptuous San Francisco entrepreneurs can feel about the residents who
> aren’t rich or hipsters or tech workers.

This bit stood out to me because it's like... you're asking for empathy in the
same breath as showing very little yourself. It shouldn't be this hard for
this reporter to see how a guy can be without much empathy for people he
dislikes. After all, he's doing it right there.

~~~
rayiner
The reporter is being extremely disingenuous. There is a huge difference
between "residents who aren't rich or hipsters or tech workers" and the kind
of residents that end up at places like Gideon's. My wife's uncle is a
landlord. One of his tenants let her dog shit and piss all over the floor all
the time. To the point where he had to cut out the lower part of the drywall
because of all the dog piss that had soaked into the wall from the floor. My
wife could still smell it even after it was renovated.

------
rayiner
The article really buries the lede:

> The numbers cited by Campos and others—45 fires in two years—also weren’t
> necessarily as suspicious as they seemed. _It turns out that 25 fires a year
> is about average for the Mission._

~~~
azernik
It's more than buries the lede. It starts with a cold open, which is plays up
and up... and it turns out it was a borderline entrapment scheme, where a
criminal on a plea deal offered to burn the place down while wearing a wire.

So, a big fat pile of nothing, plus a narration of the (very real) inter-
ethnic and inter-class tensions in the Mission intended to make the story
sound more plausible.

Also, can I just add how irresponsible David Campos's role has been in all
this?

> “I’m not saying there is arson,” he said. “The fire department tells me
> there isn’t. They haven’t found evidence of arson.”

> “Have you come across any clues?” I asked.

> “Nothing’s come up,” he said.

> “Are there rumors?”

> “There are comments,” he said. “Like with that fire that happened at the
> car-repair place.”

> He meant the Rolling Stock tire-shop fire of November 8, 2015. It destroyed
> the shop and two adjacent apartment buildings, displacing 21 people. Fire
> investigators ruled this one an accident as well, most likely started by an
> electrical fault or, again, discarded smoking materials.

> “The owner [James Albera] was sort of, ‘Hey! Now I guess we can go and build
> condos,’ ” Campos continued. “It was an odd comment that fed into the
> speculation.”

> Later, I found Albera’s verbatim comments to the media: “It’s terrible. It’s
> been in the family since 1960.” And then, when asked what he planned to do
> next: “I’d like to go residential, with stores on the bottom.”

> I e-mailed Albera several times to ask him about what Campos told me.
> Personally, I didn’t find his response to the fire suspicious. Even so, he
> didn’t reply.

~~~
Shalomboy
For what it's worth, the reporter is the a fairly popular author; he wrote
"The Psychopath Test" and "So You've Been Publicly Shamed." He writes the
you've shown to serve an argument he's making in his books. I wouldn't be
surprised if this article is actually a chapter or a passage from an upcoming
book of his. He isn't following proper journalistic writing standards, but he
also isn't trying to be a journalist. GQ probably wanted to drive readership
to their site and their July 2017 issue, so they asked if Ronson had anything
in the works and paid him for the rights to publish an excerpt from his
manuscript.

~~~
azernik
My thought was actually that the editor had reordered intermediate material in
order to make things look worse than the author did :-D

------
wheaties
Let's see...

Can't increase supply because NYMBY? Check. Can't increase rent because rent
control? Check. Removing tenants next to impossible? Ok, this is true
anywhere.

Gee, I wonder why the incentives are all screwed up?

~~~
emodendroket
So what's the argument here? We shouldn't take any measures to try and keep
rents within reach for city residents, because arson is a natural, unavoidable
consequence?

~~~
wheaties
No, it's that when you abandon healthy markets and try to impose artificial
constraints that fly in the face of basic economics you wind up with horribly
perverse incentive structures. Can someone find that article about the
landlord who took a 2-family house, knocked down the 2nd unit and then was
able to increase rent on the remaining unit 4x?

------
ubertaco
As a software developer from the southeast, my two visits to San Francisco
taught me one thing: you couldn't pay me enough to live there.

It's overcrowded, it's overly-expensive, and it's jam-packed with two kinds of
people: naive overpaid tech-startup people who are convinced _their_ selfie
app will be the one that saves the world, and the most aggressive homeless
people I've ever met -- that is, the world that needs more than a selfie app
to save them, but who are effectively "pigeons" (to borrow this landlord's
crass terminology) in the eyes of the self-styled superheroes on their way to
an overpriced bistro or a meeting about how to reinvent the bus system but
with a prohibitively-high price tag.

The city reeks of marijuana smoke, and spending more than 20 minutes at
Fisherman's Wharf left me lightheaded. You may scream loudly about your right
to smoke this medicinal herb, but what of my right not to be compelled to feel
its effects just because I dared to walk down a public avenue?

It's nigh-impossible to get around any way other than just walking for miles
-- including to overpriced grocery stores and back -- or paying for another
app startup's glorified taxi service, gallantly offering highly-priced
"solutions" to a problem they helped create. This may be an unfair criticism,
though; my own hometown has notoriously-bad public transit. It's a hard
problem to solve, just made harder by the sheer crowded density of San
Francisco.

There are no trees, except in tiny parks. At least one of those few parks is
comprised of artificial turf (the plasticky kind), and would take about 1 full
minute to leisurely stroll from end to end. If you combined all the parks, you
might get something roughly the size of New York's Central Park. Maybe. The
city has decided that the natural ecosystem which it boasts so loudly about
protecting has no place within its boundaries. And so, you have nothing but
cement, asphalt, and concrete as far as the eye can see.

As much as people talk about the "Bible belt" and how it's so hard to be left-
leaning or atheist there (because you're considered "odd"), it's much harder
to be right-leaning or Christian in San Francisco, where the assumption is
that people of that ilk are knuckle-dragging trogdolytes to be scorned or
ignored until the commonly-shared blue-tinted dream vision of history renders
such people somehow obsolete. It's an attitude of "we respect all people,
just...not you."

There's lots of talk to be found on street signs and in meeting rooms about
celebrating cultural diversity and indigenous peoples, but in practice the
people who are celebrated are rich CEOs or incoming tech workers riding in on
H1Bs to displace the "indigenous" people of the area, crowding them out and
motivating the kind of hostility mentioned in this article.

My business travel to San Francisco felt like I was walking into a foreign
country; one that was on the decline, one that had some deep-rooted enmity for
my own homeland (the "rest of the country"), like you might find between India
and Pakistan.

~~~
andymcfee
After visiting San Francisco a couple of weeks ago for the first time in
years, I couldn't agree more with everything you just said - especially
regarding the homeless and the persistent smell of marijuana.

To add to that point further, the drug problem in San Francisco seems to be
absolutely enormous. I can't even tell you the number of times I saw someone
literally shooting up right on the sidewalk in broad daylight. It was very
disconcerting to say the least. I get the need for access to clean syringes,
but it seems to go beyond disease prevention and almost into the realm of
enabling. I say all this as an expert of nothing, just my observations after
48 hours in the center of town.

~~~
fineIllregister
> I get the need for access to clean syringes, but it seems to go beyond
> disease prevention and almost into the realm of enabling.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean here. Most harm reduction programs of
this type are needle exchanges, they're not just giving them away. It seems
obvious that it won't enable the person to use if they obtain a clean syringe,
because otherwise they'd just use the dirty one they already have. Exchange
programs also incentivize people not to leave old syringes lying around.

------
timwaagh
such brutal criminality. landlording has always been shady business,
especially when the rent is low, however this is pure insanity. SRO is not
very different from the rooms i rent out. it is perfectly possible to do this
well and make a lot more than the price you bought it for. you mainly need to
keep a cool head. let's hope sf landlords get their sanity back.

