Contrariwise, I see San Francisco as a city that is struggling with some of the worst demographic issues in the nation, mostly stemming from having an absolutely absurd amount of wealth inequality for various structural and temporal reasons, and doing an admirable job of it. The "homegrown tech industry" was intentionally fostered in response to the valley turning the city into its bedroom community, so the idea that the city is somehow corrupting your vision of what SF could be is disingenuous. I suspect the SF in your recollection is the SF you yourself had a hand in changing into what it is today.
30 year San Francisco resident. The issues San Francisco faces today are not from wealth inequality. That’s horse shit. It is in fact dysfunctional government. Also, you are mistaken about the genesis of San Francisco based tech versus the Valley. And you are wrong about the history of workers living in San Francisco and commuting to the Valley.
In many cases the homeless have a better net impact on the world than tech people.
Consider carbon footprint, accelerating “progress” toward ecological collapse, building tech used by authoritarian governments, etc.
People of all classes come to SF for similar reasons, the resources.
Instead of being afraid of solving the homeless problem for fear of attracting more homeless, SF Ought to focus its creativity on solving the problem in a way that works for everyone.
The best solution is, give the homeless free housing.
Since SF industry is extracting / creating wealth (depending on your political slant) from all over the world, then it should be ok with people from all over the world coming in to have basic needs met.
Create shipping container / tiny home villages; provide robotic grown organic foods; deploy scalable mental health and community building tech; etc.
Deploy that tech to other surrounding cities which would alleviate some of the pressure for folks to move to SF if they are homeless.
Repeat the process across the USA.
Repeat the process around the world and alleviate the resource gradient.
You want to take a dent out of the universe? Solve homelessness and resource scarcity.
I agree with the reply above mine by Captainredbeard, that bringing back the CCC would help to stymie the crumbling of a large portion of America's failing infrastructure.
Or, bring back the Civilian Conservation Corps and exchange labor for government income / support. It will provide meaningful work and structure for the lost and is productive to boot. There are many great works from the 1930s (dams, etc.) which still provide immense value to recreational users and farmers today.
Most of the homeless aren't inbound. They're being priced out of the market that they've lived in their whole life. You're just illustrating the lack of awareness tech people have in the city.
How has such a shitty local government not gotten voted out? I understand the NIMBYism driving it and perverse incentives for housing owners but the approval rate has to be crazy low
A "shitty local government" that delivers the biggest economic miracle in the world while at the same time advancing progressive values. Surely we must vote it out.
People aren't downvoting you because they hate homeless people. They're downvoting because the city already devotes a ton of money to homelessness, and has proven itself extraordinarily inept or corrupt at solving that problem.
There are many possible solutions to what is a horrible and obvious problem. Throwing billions more down the SF government money maw is not one of them.
Much of SF's homeless population is not local to SF. Part of the problem with spending money on the homeless is that it draws more homeless seeking those services. And in many cases, other states and cities have "solved" their homeless problem by shipping their homeless to CA. (Texas, especially, is notorious for this.)
Not saying that SF is well-run or not, merely that the homeless problem isn't simply due to the city's response.
The city uses an expanded definition of homelessness that includes people who are "doubled-up" in the homes of family or friends [1]. The survey referenced in the source you've linked counts people dealing with LGBTQ-related issues that, while terrible, aren't what most people think of when they picture homelessness in SF.
The "man shooting heroin on the street" sorts of homeless folks are, in my limited experience volunteering, generally not from SF but some other part of CA.
There really are cities that pay for bus tickets to ship homeless out, generally under the banner of a name like "homeward bound." The reality, though, is that SF is a net exporter under those programs: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
I mean... that's how the cookie crumbles unfortunately. California is the most survivable climate for the homeless and for some reason people applaud local governments busing the homeless to California - as long as those two factors remain in place it's up to California to fix it.
With that understanding there should be more national funding going toward the homeless issue - and if there's one local economy that could actually afford to fix the problem it's SF.
Land is pretty cheap in Texas. It’s often unrestricted. SF could buy up a ton of land and start building an eco village with tiny homes; robotic organic food production; etc. and start providing services to the Texas homeless population as way to stop them from coming to SF.
SF spends $400 million a year on what it terms behavioral health (encompassing both mental healthcare and drug abuse treatment). How much more do you think ought to be spent?
The top-line figure of the SF budget is misleading because it includes the SFO airport. This arrangement is unusual in the United States. Chicago operates ORD and MDW out of a separate budget, like most US cities do [1].
Notice the large difference in the size of Chicago's enterprise budget [2] and San Francisco's enterprise budget [3]. SFO is considered part of the enterprise budget of the City and County of San Francisco, but it's a separate fund entirely for Chicago.
(As an aside, this setup means that the mayor of San Francisco doubles as the CEO of the SFO airport, which is also unusual.)
To add to this, I'm assuming "twice as large of an economy" must be hyperbole because I'm not finding any data that comes even close to that. Chicago's GDP, for example, is only ~1.3x bigger in total. In terms of GDP per capita SF is actually ~1.5x bigger (for metro areas, because that's the data I could find).
Definitely not arguing that SF doesn't have its share of management problems, but this feels like a pretty poor example.
Then you're not looking at the city proper and we're mixing measures here. The 1.5x I mentioned is at the metro level, while your 1/3 population is city proper. That said, I'm struggling to find any kind of useful data broken down at the city level in terms of economic output, so I certainly wouldn't die on this hill.
Right, I’m assuming the relative ratio is the same for the cities as for the metro areas. Both cities have a lot of their jobs and major companies in the suburbs, so that’s probably not an unreasonable assumption.
Chicago’s problem is that it’s in a state that until quite recently taxed like a red state (3% flat income tax!). But that’s on the revenue side—it has nothing to do with how much money is reasonable to spend on city services.
I’m not downvoting you but I’m skeptical that the problems with homelessness can be fixed by putting more money toward mental health care. Are there a lot of skilled mental health practitioners who aren’t working due to a lack of demand?
Mental healthcare is absolutely a salve for a lot of homeless folks. We used to have sanitariums and institutes - some of those were terribly abusive (seriously, they were horrific in some cases). Instead of fixing the abuse issues people found it easier to solve the problem by shutting down the evil institutions... then everyone who had been receiving treatment was forced onto the street and expected to take care of themselves.
Anecdotally, my wife (at the time a developmental psychologist) was commuting to SF from central valley every day because her pay wasn't enough to pay both rent and student loans.
In the end she left psych and went into tech. Problem solved!
