I live in a major city in America (not SF), and like every major city in America, it is run by progressive democrats. I like that neighborhood rules have kept things a certain style, but we have a pro-development local group that runs zoning and stuff gets built (however we still need more housing). The public schools are absolutely dogshit even though they are funded through the roof, with a few test-schools that the activists are actively trying to ruin. The cops don’t do enough, but they do solve murders and prevent violent crime. We have pretty decent public transit (although it’s also a corrupt mess, in many ways).
In summation, I’m a city guy and I like living in cities, and despite my political differences, I made my peace with the situation and greatly enjoy the restaurants, museums, events, and so on that city life provides.
That said, I cannot possibly understand how people can think SF is desirable. Your tax dollars that aren’t stolen by this-or-that office or agency or politically connected consultant are being incinerated as quickly as possible. How many bonds and tax increases have been issued specifically to alleviate poverty and drugs and homelessness and what is the ROI of this spending? It seems like no one gives a shit and the worse things get the more the distortion of what “normal” city life is gets turned up. What a crazy situation you SFers got yourself into.
> It seems like no one gives a shit and the worse things get the more the distortion of
I know the human shit aspect of SF gets called out a lot, but it seems perfectly representative. The city won’t arrest humans shitting in the streets and can’t figure out how to stop it humanely so they allow it. And the citizens defend the practice as if there’s nothing possible to fix it.
So as a result you have to either deal with human shit as part of your life, or leave. The city won’t fix it. They won’t choose to arrest and institutionalize active drug scenes.
I don’t in SF but I spent a few months there in total over the years and really liked it. But I can’t imagine a reasonable person staying.
But maybe we’ll have some cool robocop style movies for when the city finally breaks down into mad max style real chaos.
The real question is, how many of them are actually progressive, and how many are just people using the right buzzwords? SF sure looks like a lot of the latter, given the chokehold that NIMBYism has over any and all new construction that might actually help with the city's cost-of-living issues.
So despite the majority of major metro areas having sharp increases in violent and property crime and homelessness while being run by people who claim to be progressive, those aren’t real progressives? It’s not that progressive policies don’t work and make cities worse for most people?
SF's biggest problem is lack of housing, and SF's housing policies are among the most "conservative" (ie all about keeping the status quo) in the nation.
A lot of "progressive" policies that people are worried about have little actual impact, especially when the price of housing is completely ridiculous and creates so many problems on its own.
Without building any more housing, SF could be a nice place (for those who can afford it) by simply strictly enforcing existing laws. The desire to not strictly enforce existing laws generally comes from a progressive leaning I believe? Basically, it is <some flavor of mean> to enforce the laws, because those breaking the laws were put in a bad situation by society? Which I think is the gist of a lot of progressive ideals (not asserting that they are wrong here).
Who is going to strictly enforce all the laws? The excess police officers that can't be hired because they can't afford to live in the city and don't want to commute into a city they don't care about to make less money than other nearby communities will pay them? Fewer than 25% of SF cops live in SF.
It all comes back to housing. If you have a desirable place, people want to live there, and at some point if you don't keep up with growth then your city starts to lose the really important people that kept it running (nurses, teachers, police officers, etc).
It's not like SF almost kept up with growth... They didn't try and fell so far behind in a deliberate attempt to keep a status quo, which completely led to the current disaster.
Sorry if my point wasn’t clear. I am saying that conceptually some of the other problems people are discussing aren’t strictly caused by a housing shortage. The path we took from a prior “okay” state to the current “not okay” state may have been rooted in a lack of housing, but not all paths back to an “okay” state necessarily require that we solve the housing problem.
Asserting that e.g. people pooping in the street is caused strictly by expensive housing would require some mental gymnastics IMO, there are simpler explanations and simpler ways out, without blocking on solving the expensive housing problem. If for example we ended up with a nice peaceful city but the police budget was really really high (so they could live locally), that would be a much less hairy problem than we have today I think. Nice peaceful city tends to generate more tax revenue also.
Seems unfair to call a suggestion to fix the main cause of many problems “mental gymnastics”. Raising police salaries and lowering housing costs are both about making things more affordable, just from different ends.
> Asserting that e.g. people pooping in the street is caused strictly by expensive housing would require some mental gymnastics
Key word being strictly, i.e. expensive housing is the cause of street pooping, and there is ultimately no other way to prevent street pooping other than to reduce housing costs broadly.
Raising police salaries is obviously a much easier problem to solve, right? It is something that is already under government control and it can be modeled using a simple spreadsheet. Housing cost on the other hand is not really possible to model accurately, the system is too complex and has too many inputs.
The starting salary for an SF police officer is over 100k. At some point money isn't the only issue.
Also like any other job, the best way to get good police officers is to have lots of competition. If you are desperate for staffing, you aren't getting the best.
100k while living in SF is peanuts. Paying, say, 500k per officer and increasing the number of police would be tremendously easier and cheaper than fixing the systemic housing problem. If we still can’t find good candidates at 500k I would be very surprised. Also need to follow through on prosecution of course. And, again, not saying this is necessarily what should be done, just commenting on whether it is physically possible to make SF nice if we decided to ignore progressivism completely.
So currently 9% of the city budget is spent on police and you are suggesting we increase that to 40%?
That is a better solution than building more housing?
A community is a social construct, you have to keep a lot of things in balance for it to work properly. The most important part is giving people a roof over their heads. Overpaying for police (or teachers, or nurses, etc) isn't going to save the day. It's the same reason you can't buy your way out of the homelessness problem!
Police departments have a lot of costs other than salary. It appears that only 3% of the budget goes towards salaries. So, yes, I don’t think it’s completely unreasonable to massively increase that in order to curtail street pooping. I don’t think anyone has really tried to buy us out of the homelessness problem. The issue is pretty clearly a lack of will, not a lack of resources.
I see what you’re getting at, calling out a No True Scotsman. It’s worth remembering that some people aren’t actually Scotsmen.
SF is essentially a single party system. Everyone has to run Democrat, even the conservatives. It continues down to liberal hypocrisy in the citizenry, which mirrors the conservative hypocrisy. Every abortion is immoral except the one I need, everyone deserves affordable housing except in my neighborhood.
The end-to-end government in SF, which would include the state and federal, is not meaningfully progressive. It’s extremely progressive on visible, local issues. But it’s to such a point it’s absurd. This is how you end up with a very conservative tax system while petty property crime is de facto legal.
NIBYism always comes up when talking about the cost-of-living crisis. Did you know just 12 entities own a majority of Bay Area real estate [0]? Do you really think building more units is going to stop those entities from continuing their oligopoly on residential real estate in the area?
But yea, I'm sure it's those damn people who like their backyard causing this crisis!!! In my opinion, this anti-NIMBY push is likely supported by these megalithic property owners. They’ve run out of units to buy and can no longer grow their cash flow. The solution to this problem is to take property from existing property owners. Pretty much all legislation in this countries happens with support or approval from corporate interests. It would not surprise me at all to find out corporate interests were the driving force that is compelling the state to override local zoning ordinances.
Another thing to consider is, why is the proposed solution forcing local governments to give up their zoning rights? Why don’t we force real estate investors to give up some of their units so people have a place to live? How can some people own thousands of units before others have even one?
What do you think investors are doing with housing units? Do you think they just hoard empty apartments so they can twirl their mustaches and laugh at homeless people? Those units already have people living in them. Changing the ownership won’t increase the amount of housing. If you want cheaper housing, you need to build more, not play musical chairs with the same existing units that aren’t enough.
Third paragraph. But also, from your link “we’re confident this list of 12 includes some of the region’s major power players in residential real estate, housing tens of thousands of families in nearly 7,000 assessor-defined properties from San Jose to Santa Rosa”.
If you read their methodology, the 2.3M records includes government owned buildings, commercial, and developer-owned properties. But yes I agree “most” is a stretch in the original article.
More than a stretch - there’s almost 200k residential properties in SF alone. 7k across the whole Bay Area is tiny no matter how you slice it. Just curious, but does this change your original opinion at all?
No, because the broader point still stands that many properties are owned by investors. Also, 7k is the number of parcels, which can include apartment buildings containing hundreds of units counted as a single parcel.
People who claim to be progressive are so because to claim otherwise would invite significant social stigma. It's all lip service. Sure, if we were talking 15 yr olds, maybe those are true believers... but they don't tend to get elected to city councils and zoning boards.
> How many bonds and tax increases have been issued specifically to alleviate poverty and drugs and homelessness and what is the ROI of this spending?
The city of San Francisco spends $70,000 annually per homeless person! <https://abc7news.com/sf-homeless-plan-housing-all-san-franci...> The homeless there are homeless because severe mental and addiction issues cause them to reject help, not because resources aren't available.
In summation, I’m a city guy and I like living in cities, and despite my political differences, I made my peace with the situation and greatly enjoy the restaurants, museums, events, and so on that city life provides.
That said, I cannot possibly understand how people can think SF is desirable. Your tax dollars that aren’t stolen by this-or-that office or agency or politically connected consultant are being incinerated as quickly as possible. How many bonds and tax increases have been issued specifically to alleviate poverty and drugs and homelessness and what is the ROI of this spending? It seems like no one gives a shit and the worse things get the more the distortion of what “normal” city life is gets turned up. What a crazy situation you SFers got yourself into.