We found truck drivers loaded up with $262,898; city painters making $270,190; firefighters earning $316,306; and plumbing supervisors cleaning up $348,291 every year. One deputy sheriff earned $574,595 last year – including $315,896 in overtime.
Regarding the example of a cop who made more in overtime than his base salary: This has gotten very common in the past few decades. Police doing huge amounts of overtime with almost no approval needed (or even basic oversight that this is useful/actual work) is a problem in a lot of jurisdictions. The original idea is that you shouldn't need to get special approval for a public-safety emergency. But in practice, it's become a norm in many places, with police resisting any attempt to decrease routine use of overtime and limit it to emergencies.
Paying these people a high salary seems fine to me. Good on them for collective bargaining to not have to commute half their lives. Paying them an equally high pension just makes me feel sad. Here I am running the rat race to save enough to retire, but I'm not making much more than they are, and including retirement, making much less (the retiring fire chief will make more than $300k/year for the rest of her life?!?). Maybe I should have gone into public service.
That's the logic of collective bargaining. The best move is to get benefits that go to everyone equally instead of putting everyone in the position to potentially earn more. So increase the size of pensions and health care benefits. Also politically when the two sides are non-antagonistic the biggest reward possible is the one that's put in the form of an unalterable agreement to be paid by a future party.
If a tech worker has half their compensation in bonuses and equity, is that bonus and equity abuse?
It could just be a different compensation structure to get fair pay.
That being said, I don't want to claim to know what a "fair" compensation is here. $80k, $100k, $150k, doesn't matter. If $150k is too high, then fix the compensation structure. Don't blame it on "overtime abuse" or some other reason that blames the workers for getting as much as they can from their job.
> blames the workers for getting as much as they can from their job.
Is that what you think I'm doing? Is there any evidence that "the workers" are getting as much as they can? It seems that a small percentage of workers, mostly in positions of power over other workers, are gaming the system in a way that does not benefit the public they're supposed to serve.
I'm bitter enough about the abuse of salaried positions and "crunch time" and 50-60 hours/week as normal that when I see other jobs get paid overtime, I have a hard time summoning resentment.
This seems like goalpost movement. A moment ago you were celebrating high salaries and collective bargaining when presented with evidence that a small number of public employees (apparently, based on the graphic, largely "peace officers") are using a system which pays them far, far more than they agreed.
I think we're all mostly fine with the former, but the latter is a very different situation.
I'm not moving any goalposts. I see that they negotiated a total package that's high. It includes tons of overtime, which I don't resent like some in the thread seem to.
@Mods the actual title is "19,000 Highly Compensated City Employees Earned $150,000+ In Pay & Perks" and there is a later quote of "18,759 highly compensated employees from each bringing home pay packages worth $150,000 (or more) annually."
It seems to me that the current title editorialized the post to seem like its $150k+ in salary when in fact it seems to be factoring pension and other elements.
It didn't fit in the title length guidelines for HN and I had to shave off a few characters. Mind suggesting a better paraphrasing of the entire title?
Perhaps "San Francisco Troubles - 19,000 City Employees earned $150k in Pay & Perks"? Given that "Highly paid" is subjective and a source of contention even in this thread.
I wish the lower and middle classes would stop begrudging each other’s thousands and start focusing on the millions and billions being raked in by corporations and the rich.
That’s good. As well as all that, it may do well to care what corporations aren't paying the govt, because that’s also your pool of money not being fairly funded.
Yes, that just means so we should also fight corporations paying people too low that they show up on welfare.
That doesn't mean we should just ignore government employees and politicians banding together to fleece future taxpayers. More than one thing can be bad and can be fought against.
> Walmart's low-wage workers cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $6.2 billion in public assistance including food stamps, Medicaid and subsidized housing, according to a report published by Americans for Tax Fairness, a coalition of 400 national and state-level progressive groups.
> I don't care what corporations pay their people, that's not my money. I care what the gov't pays people, because that's my money.
You’ve just been given an example that demonstrates the two are linked, with corporations underpaying their staff, subsidised by the government.
Do you have the same opposition to govt subsidies on underpaid private workers as to do for what you presumably consider to be overpaid public workers?
Note that Walmart is posting billions in net (not gross) profits, while the employees are using food stamps.
Blaming Walmart while lamenting the shortcomings of the system can be done at the same time.
Usually blaming big corps is a bit more effective than trying to untangle US democracy/politics (first past the post, healthcare/education costs skyrocketing, employment and health insurance too strongly entwined, race, religion and ideology takes the center stage not poverty, because path dependence of the affected groups).
So who do you vote for if you want to ensure fair living wages for all? How do you align that particular interest with all the other interests you have?
What if you're an MAGA supporter, against tax cuts for the rich, in support of equal treatment of all ethnicities and religions, believe in additional rights and protections for police, pro life, pro gun-control, pro living wages and universal healthcare.
What is your democratic duty? Who do you vote for? Which candidate enables you to vote for everything that matters to you?
Every issue cannot simply be distilled down to which candidate you voted for. Especially if the issues you care about are unlikely to be handled properly by either candidate, if only because the executive branch doesn't wield unlimited power (thankfully), and the branches of government are no longer demonstrating any willingness to work together (unfortunately).
The issue remains systemic, and instead of targeting the individuals "for ignoring [their] democratic duties", the system itself would benefit from meaningful changes.
In the USA, wealthy companies have a big voice in politics too, and they don't want a higher minimum wage. Their voice comes not just in money paid to candidates, but they fund groups that play ads warning voters that higher minimum wage will cause higher unemployment and force companies into bankruptcy.
Negative Income Tax, or any linear system (as in a safety net that does not have discontinuities/jumps, so it doesn't make folks choose between having a shitty job or getting a shitty unemployment income).
At the same time though, lower and middle classes are competing for the same set of resources. Billionaires aren’t driving rent prices up or causing $15 lunches. Their money gives them an unequal share of influence over our democracy, but it isn’t like if we took it all and redistributed it more physical goods would appear.
As someone who moved into this city, after a year I see nothing good about San Francisco. It’s a shithole with every well off person in their little castles of crumbling houses that are worth $2.5M.
As a staunch democrat, I always wonder - why are cities in Red states such as Austin, Houston, Phoenix, Raleigh, Dallas have so much better infrastructure than Portland, Seattle, LA and San Francisco? Pot holes everywhere and homelessness out of control.
I don't think single party control is a good thing anywhere. I lean Democrat like most of us here, but I find myself avoiding deep blue cities.
A lot of Democrats are just as selfish, Republicans tend to be more open about it. Deep blue cities have the same corruption and social segregation as red ones do.
A lot of "hot" cities outside SV are Democratic mayors in Republican states. The mix keeps corruption low and forces compromises.
The homeless issue is a city scale prisoners dilemma. By offering better services you attract homeless. Homeless people aren't stupid and will move to places that suit their lifestyle better, just like we do. The only way to avoid it is better policies on a national level. Otherwise cities that treat homeless better just become a magnet for them.
>The homeless issue is a city scale prisoners dilemma. By offering better services you attract homeless. Homeless people aren't stupid and will move to places that suit their lifestyle better, just like we do. The only way to avoid it is better policies on a national level. Otherwise cities that treat homeless better just become a magnet for them.
Well, you're wrong about one thing. The homeless don't have to move. If SF attracts homeless people then it is entirely possible that people in the "grey zone" become homeless on their own. A lot of people just move in with their parents or friends if they lose their home. If the stigma of homelessness is smaller than the stigma of living with parents it's entirely possible that people go to shelters just to save themselves the embarrassment of failure in front of their friends and family. Especially if that "shelter" is just a free apartment room.
Housed for how long? It's common for people with mental and substance abuse issues to move in and out of housing transiently because they frequently lose their jobs.
The huge expense of housing is due to insane NIMBYism that somehow gets tied to progressive policies. Protect the children, the forest, the neighborhood. There's enough laws going around to protect everything that nothing can change at all. And it may or may not be intentional that this housing shortage increases property values.
My theory is that red states distaste for regulations discourages everyone from weaseling housing policies for their own interest.
Housing is definitely cheaper in cities within red states. And in my experience there's less homeless, which may be directly correlated.
> why are cities in Red states such as Austin, Houston, Phoenix, Raleigh, Dallas have so much better infrastructure than Portland, Seattle, LA and San Francisco? Pot holes everywhere and homelessness out of control.
One obvious answer is age. It's cheap to build greenfield infrastructure.[1] It's expensive to rebuild infrastructure in dense areas, and that's before factoring in NIMBY pushback. (BTW, that expense is why the wealthy often live in older housing stock in cities. Maintaining an older home is expensive and thus a way to signal wealth. Once enough wealthy people move in you can start to condemn properties that aren't maintained to the same standard. Old money understands this dynamic very well. New money people conflate wealth with newness, which is poor people thinking.)
Regarding homeless: in dense, high-cost of living areas the homeless will be concentrated and adjacent and thus highly visible. As someone who grew up relatively poor, on occasion briefly homeless and often housing insecure, I assure you there are a ton of such people in suburbia, but they're spread out and hidden--couch surfing, pushed to the rural edges, and either scattered around or concentrated in hidden areas (e.g. trailer parks). And of course housing is generally cheaper in less dense areas--the middle classes build new neighborhoods in greenfield areas, then vacate them in a decade or two, making them available for the working classes and the poor. Suburban neighborhoods don't get recycled back up the income ladder like they do in cities. Gentrification in suburbia is rare; rather a new neighborhood is destined to be abandoned and forgotten by the middle classes.
Of course, much could be said regarding Portland's, Seattle's, and San Francisco's licentiousness regarding drug use and other aspects beyond geography and pricing that draw and concentrate the homeless, but those are somewhat unique to those cities, not a general phenomenon.
Regarding potholes: Those older suburban neighborhoods above are just as pothole-filled (if not more so) as any city downtown, but you won't see it because you have no reason to go there! While cities are highly income segregated--often much more so than suburbia--proximities are closer and infrastructure expenditures more equitable so you're far more likely to see the seedy underbelly of your regional community.
Regarding potholes in SF specifically, the city is halfway through a 20 year, multi-billion dollar water & sewer refurbishment plan. The roads are torn up across the city because of this. The Van Ness/Mission and Geary BRT projects are compounding the problem on two of the busiest thoroughfares, and since COVID-19 the city seems to have taken the opportunity to rip open the streets all over the place simultaneously, presumably (hopefully!) to get some of the most inconvenient segments and intersections out of the way earlier.
[1] Not just cheap, but often free. Alot of suburban infrastructure--streets, water, power--is built by the real estate developer. The cost is hidden in the original purchase price. Afterward the cost can't be hidden. Faced with the prospect of having to pay out of pocket, directly or through higher taxes, the middle class will elect to simply move on to greener pastures.
> As a staunch democrat, I always wonder - why are cities in Red states such as Austin
Uhhhh, wut? I think everyone in Austin is dying to see this wonderful infrastructure you speak of, considering we're fairly well known for our inadequate-to-non-existant public transportation system.
The original sin in California is Prop 13. Nearly all of our budget and housing issues can be traced back to that god awful ballot proposition. With high housing costs comes increased homelessness, higher wages for public employees, larger pension liabilities, and on and on.
I think this illustrates a weakness of legislation via ballot propositions. It is too easy for the resulting statutes or articles to be contradictory or become out of sync with new realities/data and there is no legislative mechanism to adjust.
In reading up on the process, I realize that there is a mechanism to sort our explicit conflicts, but that doesn't mean everything that is passed works well together in practice.
Mainly because these comparisons are never apples to apples - SF is a City/County so the budget includes normal County expenses where many other city budgets don’t (eg the entire Sheriffs office and jail system). Also SF’s budget includes the Port of San Francisco and one of busiest airports in the country - both of which are net profitable to the city but whose expenses should be backed out if you’re doing a $$$ spent per capita calculation. I’m too lazy to do it myself but I’d love to see “cleaned up” numbers that take this stuff into account.
I don’t disagree that’s not an apples to apples comparison, but Philadelphia is an “ok” comparison since they cover county costs and an airport (but not ports). They are ~50% of SF’s per capita spending.
Regardless, I think the argument that SF just “needs more money” isn’t a particularly strong one.
I think a large part of California's issues come down to an inflationary spiral led by the absurd housing costs. I don't think it's unreasonable for city workers to want to be able to afford to live in the city that they work in. E.g. the average SF police officer should be able to afford to live in SF. What this has meant in practice though is that we keep giving city employees raises on raises on raises to keep up with housing costs which means everything else is crowded out and the long-term pension costs of these now inflated salaries is astronomical. If a 2-bedroom apartment were $1,500/month instead of $3,500/month, the 'fair' cost to a city worker would be much lower and by virtue our entire tax base could shrink.
As they say though, wages are sticky in the downward direction, so even if California were to flip a switch and do a 180 with their housing policies, these costs will be with us for a very long time. Property tax reform paired with lowered income taxes would be a good first step though.
The original sin was politicians spending the state into oblivion and then raising property taxes year over year. Prop 13 was in direct consequence to this and a way to protect taxpayers from politicians that keep raising taxes to solve their problems. It is great for homeowners and I love knowing that my property taxes won’t go sky high and force me out of my house when I retire.
High housing costs are directly because of the stock market and tech employees becoming inordinately wealthy. Prop 13 was around for decades and housing only became unaffordable in the last 10 years because of the rise of FANG.
If politicians are "spending the state into oblivion", surely the solution is to limit spending. Limiting revenue doesn't help balance the budget (although it does help landowners who are relatively wealthy and use property as a tax shelter).
There is zero evidence that homelessness is caused to any substantial degree by high housing costs. The kind of people who are chronically homeless at $3000/mo/1br are also chronically homeless at $1000/mo/1br. They usually have some kind of mental problem or drug addiction, not just “they can’t afford rent”. The people at the margins of being able to afford housing usually just move elsewhere, rather than end up on the streets.
Zero evidence? That charging more for housing increases the number of people that cant afford housing? It’s tautological...
The majority of San Francisco’s homeless are from San Francisco and were recently homed.. if not for cost, what’s causing people with stable housing to end up on the streets?
Well, for one costs are much higher, availability of labor and land are far more constrained. Also, while their states (Texas, Arizona, and North Carolina) might be slightly red, those cities, like all large American cities, lean blue.
The climate is fairly hospitable year round in the Bay Area. If I were homeless I doubt that I'd choose to live in Arizona or Texas in Summer or Winter. The concentration of disposable wealth and a generally liberal population in San Francisco probably makes panhandling easier, I would guess.
Much of this is caused by the high cost of housing. Everyone needs to be paid enough to live here or enough to be worth commuting long distances.
> availability of labor and land are extremely constrained
That's not really true. There's not a lot of empty land, but there's huge swaths of underutilized land. Only zoning law prevents it from becoming more useful. Instead we get crumbling single family homes a few miles from a growing number of skyscrapers.
Zoning could arguably mitigate the problem, but geography strongly constrains the Bay Area in a way that simply does not apply to major metropolitan areas with vastly lower property values. Ironically, it really is pretty much supply and demand.
It's wishful thinking that the rest of America's real estate market is much more affordable due to wise zoning choices.
A lot of the land that seems underutilized is contaminated (SuperFund sites, ex-military, industrial, etc) and requires significant remediation. Even so, Peninsula residents still spend $1M for townhouses and condos built on former SuperFund sites. That's the discount price...
That supply and demand would change greatly if the 20 miles outside of the city center wasn't restricted to 3 stories.. Artificially tilts supply to nothing. Local owners want to keep it cause their prop value would drop and not in my backyard. Really really simple. If the state would override the locals, and zone it better, sf wouldn't be the most unaffordable city.
3/4 of residential land in SF is zoned for single family. We're not to the point where we need to talk about geography or the superfund sites.
When we actually use our land wisely, then it will be easy to build more around train stations. The measure of distance that matters is not miles, but minutes.
> It's wishful thinking that the rest of America's real estate market is much more affordable due to wise zoning choices.
SF jobs are more concentrated in a down town area. Offices in cities that were built post car culture are more sprawled out. It's terrible for the environment, but it postpones the problems that SF is running into.
> Ironically, it really is pretty much supply and demand.
Well, cheers to agreeing on something. Sucks that this is a debated thing here.
Also, consider that this zoning problem surely existed long before home prices skyrocketed across the Bay Area and spread to other tech hubs such as Seattle. The fact that the top 5 tech companies alone in those two metropolitan areas (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook) have a combined market cap of $7.5T, is just one manifestation of the vast wealth generated by the tech industry which has warped property values.
It's a problem that comes with economic success and SF got there first. That doesn't mean other cities aren't on the same trajectory. And the fact that it's a 19th century city not designed for cars makes a big difference.
My fillings fall out when driving in Austin and Dallas. But after 50 years of construction (that is not an exaggeration), 635 isnt so bad. Mopac is a nice for a parking lot. IH-35... lol.
SF has been updating 100+ year old sewer system. The roads will suck until that is done.
It does really suck how we don’t criminalize homelessness and mental illness in CA like good Christian Red States do. I do wonder who filled up those 20000 SROs in the last ten years. Just where did all those homeless come from?
Moving out of CA made me realize that progressivism in America simply doesn’t work if your goals are vaguely along the lines of <high standard of living for the middle class>. The fact that SF caters so aggressively to the poor and the homeless, coupled with the massive population of chronically impoverished people in the US, all but guarantees that it’s going to be an unlivable shithole. And indeed, needles, druggies with open wounds, feces, homeless encampments, everywhere.
SF "protects" its single family neighborhoods by herding all the heroin, hookers, and new housing into a few containment zone neighborhoods.
The police department has completed 40 of the 272 reforms it promised to the Department of Justice in 2016.
There's a lot of progressive talk to dress up traditional conservative policies. Sadly, the best thing SF has done for progressivism is serve as a warning to other progressive cities that they need to put action behind their rhetoric.
> SF "protects" its single family neighborhoods by herding all the heroin, hookers, and new housing into a few containment zone neighborhoods.
I don't see as much of them lately, but several years ago there was a rather large contingent of SF police on dirt bikes wielding billy clubs whose job was to roust the homeless in nice neighborhoods and tourist areas and quite literally herd them downtown. Presumably their disappearance has something to do with homeless visibility--although not sure if its cause or effect (i.e. simply too many homeless to prevent spillover).
Also, to further the redevelopment of southeast SF, the city built alot of new public housing not only downtown but also near Fisherman's Wharf. I'm certain the increase in crime around Fisherman's Wharf is related. AFAIU, they chose Fisherman's Warf because 1) the port authority owned alot of land there and 2) rules regarding port authority-owned land made it relatively easier to push through low-income housing projects. Previously public housing in the NE of the city was predominately for seniors, who don't generally attract trouble.
I think maybe it's taught many of them to act less and more slowly rather than over regulate and burn money. What's the tax rate there and what are you getting again? Oh cool trolleys.
> On average, the city’s 44,526 employees received pay and perks costing taxpayers $131,335 apiece. Four out of ten – 18,749 city workers – received a compensation package exceeding $150,000 per year.
The style of summarizing this data is not good. Taking some arbitrary high-bar and then averaging it, is twisting the data to their purpose. There clearly are high salaries in there, but saying X truck-drivers earned an average of Y, when you exclude all of the low-paid ones is just misrepresentation of the data.
Most people don’t spend 100% of their income on CoL. If you make $150k in SF, you have more surplus than if you make $50k in Madison (unless you really suck at budgeting).
The starting salary for a Madison cop is $52k. SF is $89k. That's $3k more per month, before tax. The mortgage on a 3 bedroom house in Madison is $1400. In San Francisco, it's $7500. You'd be spending more on a mortgage payment than your take home pay.
The problem with this kind of comparison is that it attempts to compare like-for-like housing (and transportation) arrangements, when obviously people in San Francisco have different living arrangements than people in Madison. When I moved from St. Louis to NYC I didn't expect to live in exactly the same kind of arrangements and it would have been absurd to calculate my cost of living based on the assumption that I would. And, yet, that's what most COL calculators try to do, rendering them practically useless.
But why do they have different living arrangements? Because SF/NYC is more expensive, i.e. the cost of living is higher.
Perhaps you value other things like having access to cultural activities, etc, but if you want the same material standard of living, it's much more expensive in these cities.
One does not have the "same material standard of living" in identical houses independent of where the houses are located. That's why the costs are different in the first place. You're imagining that the real estate can be valued in the abstract, independent of its location. But it can't. If you have two identical houses, one in Manhattan and one in suburban Arizona, the one in Manhattan represents a vastly higher material standard of living.
So you don’t get to adjust based on CoL, because you don’t spend all your money and have more disposable income.
You don’t get to compare on housing, because you live in a city.
So meanwhile city dwellers have more disposable income, who continue to dispose of more income on rent, while their counterparts outside the city get to invest their money in their own property, which they can later sell for a fat return, while continuing to begrudge city dwellers for making a few more bucks in disposable income in the short term?
Living in a city has its upsides and downsides. One of the upsides is higher pay. One of the downsides is pissing away lots of that higher pay paying someone else’s mortgage instead of your own.
Yeah, the truth is that no matter what lifestyle you choose, you'll have to give up something in the process. "City dwellers" get more money but live in smaller housing. "Town dwellers" get less money but live in bigger housing.
However, one thing is certain. Once you have children you'll need bigger housing. A lot of hyper competitive cities aren't very welcoming to families.
That's one reason I advocate better accountability before shouting "raise taxes on rich." Want to see another example? Number of fires being reported is nearly 1/3rd of what was in 1970s. And yet the number of firefighters on payroll has only gone up [1]. Yes, firefighters do respond to medical emergencies but most of the times it's redundant.
"Some people — including Tabarrok and other libertarian economists — think that dispatching huge trucks loaded with firefighters to respond to every medical call made to 911 is not an ideal situation.
'Typically, they'll get there a minute or two before an ambulance does, and in some cases they start treatment,' Tabarrok says. 'In my view, it's mostly redundant. Other people will say that getting there earlier can save a life, but most of the time it has no bearing whatsoever.'"
We found truck drivers loaded up with $262,898; city painters making $270,190; firefighters earning $316,306; and plumbing supervisors cleaning up $348,291 every year. One deputy sheriff earned $574,595 last year – including $315,896 in overtime.