Anecdote: almost every family with kids that I know has the same story: Lived in SF, had kids and gtfo because the city is not great for kids. That can easily be contrasted to Manhattan that was cleaned up by "broken windows policy". In SF the petty crime was rampant. Cars broken into, vandalism, drug use, theft and vagrancy(too bad it's not illegal in SF).
There are no borders and nothing stopping people from moving their tax base down to the Peninsula (where the weather is better, schools are great and no one shits on your doorstep).
Gentrification has a part, but so does the work of city & community leader. East Palo Alto became a city in 1983, before that the county handled the area's affairs...and given the smaller size/population it was not a primary focus.
Yes, there was a specific gentrification plan that included the Ikea/Home Depot complex and separately the Four Seasons Complex, but they appeared due to quite a lot of prior work.
In the early 80s (82 or 84) they decided to incorporate on their own rather than join Menlo Park (they were just an unincorporated part of MP at the time, and still share a school district and, I believe, the fire district too). Calling the new town East Palo Alto (though Palo Alto itself is in a completely different county) was smart, despite earlier efforts to name the not yet incorporated place "Nairobi".
They had been county land so had had only had a sheriff; but before the Whisky Gulch (where four seasons complex now stands) was built they already had a municipal police department.
So yes you could say "gentrification" but it was a proactive policy by the city government.
IIRC the last active farm in the city limits was sold after 2000, lasting longer than Mountain View or (except for stock) Palo Alto.
The "murder capital" label was true only because the population wasn't high making the rate high. I personally never felt unsafe there though I only filled my car or got a coffee there.
East Palo Alto also received significant law enforcement assistance from the state and neighboring cities. I wonder if SF leaders would want the CHP patrolling their streets?
> That can easily be contrasted to Manhattan that was cleaned up by "broken windows policy".
I believe this is more a just-so story than a fact. While New York did use the broken windows policy, they also grew the police force by 35%[1]. Rather than a special effect of the broken windows policy, it could just be with more police they were able to solve/prevent more crimes.
One interesting thing about policing in the US, is that the US has fewer police than Europe and also more crime. People want to say interesting things about how politics or culture affect crime, but the simple story (where crime is high in the US because it is relatively easy to get away with it because there aren't many police) may be the best one.
NYC reduced their murder rate by an order of magnitude in just a few years. That is exceptional. There were several things that happened during these years, among them the expanded police force, much more aggressive stop and frisk to get people to stop take guns to the streets, and after the murder rate had started dropping they started with the broken window policy.
The other thing is that SF's political leadership is put into leadership positions by voters; one could just as easily say, "SF voters have squandered a fortune."
As California governor he is now rolling out that failed policy across the state, attracting indigents and itinerants from far and wide with substance abuse, mental health and/or economic hardship problems.
People who aren't thinking assume 'not in my back yard' is the problem with resisting including these hordes of people 'into their community'. The latest fiasco is a half billion dollars being spent on buying hotels to 'convert into housing' across California. This destroys bed tax revenue, places for tourists to stay while introducing a sizable contingent of people with serious issues into downtown areas.
Proven approaches are projects like loaves and fishes in Austin Texas but California is ignoring cost effective and practical solutions, instead behaving like the well meaning but naive parents of an addict, lavishing money and help on their very sick child until it runs out with no success.
https://mlf.org
California's autocratic political class are going to have a serious reckoning soon...
Although undoubtedly an excellent program, Loaves and fishes is projected to provides housing for 200 people at some point in the future. SF currently has somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 homeless people living on the streets right now.
From that SF Chronicle article:
"A decade and roughly $1.5 billion later, the city has succeeded in moving 19,500 homeless people off its streets, roughly equivalent to relocating the entire Castro district. But despite that major effort, the homeless population hasn’t budged, showing that as one homeless person is helped, another takes his place."
I mean, that's just incredible. They relocated nearly 20,000 people off the streets.
What else are they supposed to do? You can't accuse them of not trying. They moved 100x more people off the streets than that Loaves and Fishes housing project is projected to do at some point in the future.
It's a tremendously difficult problem to actually solve within the constraints of the constitution, and human decency.
You've missed the fundamental flaw in the logic - as you spend lavishly to 'house' (actually pay to put in a flophouse) one person another shows up, having heard through the grapevine the pickings are excellent in San Francisco. The 'nearly 20k people off the streets' was proven to be wildly inaccurate. Austin's Loaves and Fishes was just a small scale example, there are lots of practical ways to manage the rapidly increasing transient population and help with addiction and mental health issues that don't involve inner city camp sites and hotel rooms.
The general principle is that incentives work. Make one option better than another and people will flock to it. Current implementation is that you will get fed, housed, medical care, and even paid with no participation on your part. You are incentivized to continue what got you homeless, usually drug use or not attempting to work. The simple solution is require recovery to receive benefits - require drug tests, require attendance to lectures, require applying for jobs or that you get one. The point is to make good behavior better than the alternative. Another way to incentivize good behavior is to make programs benefit both parties. Can collecting was one such program, litter is collected and people without other options make at least some money. When you give people the money there is little benefit to a city in return. A lot of the complaints can be rectified by cleaning jobs in particular.
It's no good asking to have ideas presented to you for critique and evaluation. Go and talk to street people and get their perspective. Challenge out of touch politicians and root out corruption or it will get worse.
The irony is, the point of my comments in this thread were to move from Zhenya's bagging on both politicians and homeless people without offering any constructive solutions, to having a productive discussion about how to make things better.
It worked to some extent.
It generated a lot of ideas, and I learned a lot. I hope it helped others too.
I'm happy with my contribution involving keeping my own severely mentally-ill relatives off the streets. If our family hadn't gotten lucky with some county programs, a couple of people close to me would now be living on the street due to no fault of their own. They're sick, and it's a full-time job split between various family members to keep them above water.
Thanks for your input. I apologize if I come across as overly argumentative. I'm just bored and interested in the subject. If we were in person, I'd buy you a beer.
All over the western world we urgently need political leadership who are interested in investing in holistic prevention of expensive worst case scenarios. We don't have viable safety nets and support systems but we do have a burgeoning 'homeless industrial complex' that is intimately linked to the prison industrial complex. This is profoundly wrong IMO and I am very vocal about that.
This lack of a safety net coupled with labor and cost intensive care for the mentally ill and addicted is corrosive to society on so many levels and fundamental to everyone's quality of life. The only way to change this is to be extremely noisy and aggressive about what our 'leadership' is doing IMO.
I am partially motivated from a young bay area relative dying from opioid o/d this February after his family had burned through a huge sum on rehabs, chasing after him + the emotional burn out toll. We are headed in the wrong direction...
>You've missed the fundamental flaw in the logic - as you spend lavishly to 'house' (actually pay to put in a flophouse) one person another shows up, having heard through the grapevine the pickings are excellent in San Francisco.
Correct. Why is the homeless problem in San Francisco so much worse than in San Diego, despite the latter having nicer climate? Because the goodies are in San Francisco and people know it.
It's less visible because SD is way larger geographically than SF (231 square miles vs. 372 sq miles in the city proper), plus there's no bay to the East, it just goes into more urban area. But, yeah, there's a big skid-row tent-city southeast of the Padres stadium.
SF is a small city and it just squeeeeezes everyone together so it's in your face.
San Diego County (not city) also has more than three times the population of San Francisco, so all the more dilution of the homeless. But there's no way that you can tell me that the homeless problem is worse in San Diego than in San Francisco. My comment was to point out why this is so, despite the former's much nicer climate.
If you mean in-your-face, I'm thinking it's an urban density thing.
SF is small and incredibly dense. So, the homeless people that are there are packed into this tiny space along with everyone else and you literally have to step over them on the way to work.
If the population of SD was packed into the geographic area of SF with no available land to the North, East, and West, everyone would be stepping over homeless people on the way to work there too.
Same with LA. People come and jam themselves wherever they can fit. If there's fewer miles of sidewalk, density of homeless people goes up, it's more visible, and you get people living on your front doorstep.
On the list of urban density, SF is number 6 and SD doesn't even make the list.
Why does SF get to embrace all the tech talent it atttacts, but not need to deal with rising population of less desirable demographics? Is there something about California that makes it more worthy of the countries wealth than the communities with less resources?
> As California governor he is now rolling out that failed policy across the state
No he's not. He's on the record as saying that the approach he applied in SF failed. I'm fairly certain he's said it more straightforwardly, but from a quick Google search with a 2014 quote,
> "There’s a mythology that you can — quote unquote — end homelessness at any moment, but there are new people coming in, suffering through the cycles of their lives," he said. "It’s the manifestation of complete, abject failure as a society. We’ll never solve this at City Hall."
And here's what he said in a recent state of the state address:
> "Of course, the fundamental building block of California’s solution has to be more housing. A comprehensive response to our collective failure to build enough of it. When we don’t build housing for people at all income levels, we worsen the homeless crisis. It’s a vicious cycle and we own it. And the only sustainable way out of it is to massively increase housing production."
Also noteworthy in that speech is that he spends more time discussing health care and mental health issues than housing, per se.
Newsom's talking points on homelessness are often annoyingly vague (owing to his very ambitious career goals), but note what he doesn't say and what he doesn't support. Notably he doesn't support a legal right to housing, and is on the record saying so. His complete silence on Senator Wiener's bills was also deafening. Following his politics over the years it's fairly obvious he supports Weiner in principle but 1) knew it would never pass and 2) didn't want to burn his political capital on a loser. Also note the sums in his spending proposals for new, publicly subsidized construction; they're ridiculously paltry if the actual intent is to literally use public funds to build homes for all the homeless. Rather, it's obvious he's placating the far left without burning real cash--a strategy that many centrist SF politicians are actually quite adept at.
The sad fact is that plenty of California politicians know exactly what needs to be happen, including and especially Newsom. But California voters, both liberal and conservative, don't want to loosen housing regulations state-wide (including overriding local restrictions), and far too many on the left unthinkingly assume it's feasible to publicly fund or exact, dollar-for-dollar, enough construction to "fix" the homeless issue. Newsom definitely no longer believes, and he, like Brown and many others, are also perfectly aware how hopeless the situation is in terms of electoral support for meaningful reform and choose to stay clear of attacking the issue head-on.
Don't blame the politicians for failing to produce solutions according to the electorate's inconsistent and incoherent preferences. And especially don't blame a man who successfully[1] implemented a widely popular but destined to fail policy and then publicly went on the record as admitting to the fundamentally flawed premise. We need more politicians capable of doing that and fewer that simply point fingers.
[1] He promised to create beds for every homeless person at the time, and by the time the program wrapped up it succeeded in creating that number of beds. Of course, for every homeless person given a bed and taken off the street someone else replaced them on the street. And he admits it--lesson learned.
Newsom first launched project roomkey, housing thousands of street people in rented hotel rooms earlier this year. He then announced project homekey, spending vast sums on buying hotels and motels to convert into 'housing' this summer. The astonishingly autocratic one party California government have been buying city center hotels with no discussion or oversight to convert into 'homeless''homes'. Newsom is doubling down on his failed policies and despite being family is now in danger of burning out his political capital.
SF spent $1.5 billion building housing. Newsom's budget allocates $550 million overseveralyears for the entirestate to build new housing. (SF population is ~800k as compared to the state population of over 35 million.) The rest (~$750 million) is for general homeless services, including mental health care. Note that alot of the beds purchased with the funds have already gone to house people displaced by wildfires.
As I said, it's clear from the sums and structure of the funding that Newsom isn't actually trying to replicate the SF program. But it's easy for conservative pundits to make hay out of things (especially when the announcements themselves are tailored to placate the left) rather than support actual reform efforts. As I said, the politics in California is fscked up. But using Newsom as a scapegoat merely evinces partisan blinders.
I'm a registered Democrat and have massive issues with both lobbyist dominated parties FWIW. Politics in California is fscked up because there is no opposition and increasingly incompetent, autocratic rule. The homeless 'non profit' industry is huge and growing.
https://hcd.ca.gov/grants-funding/active-funding/homekey.sht...
Has details of the crazy Homekey spending on hotels. There is very little housing being built it is extremely expensive.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/homeless/article245547415....
America's, and particularly the west coast's, homeless problem is uniquely bad. It'd probably be worthwhile to just scrap whatever they've been trying these past few decades and adopting methods used by almost any other country out there.
And I know this is an incredibly unpopular statement in HN, but the lax attitude towards drugs is a big contributor to the problem. I don't think people should be in prison for smoking or swallowing whatever they want, but I don't think public intoxication should be permissible either. When I lived in a certain large west coast city, it wasn't uncommon to see someone sitting down on a street corner and pulling out a syringe. It wasn't uncommon to see someone who clearly just took a solid hit of meth and decided to start stripping off their clothes on the streetcar. It was just part of city life there.
The attitudes towards this behavior are known pretty far and wide. Some people actively move to west coast cities because they know they can just give up on everything and abuse drugs all day without a care in the world. Treating drug addiction as some unavoidable pitiable disease hasn't been helping. Sometimes people do need a kick in the butt to get up and get their life together, and I think some cities are afraid of perpetuating the equally harmful effects of the drug war and end up doing nothing at all. Some have legitimate mental illnesses and can be treated in other ways, but most of the people I encountered were people living a completely carefree life in a place with good weather.
America's, and particularly the west coast's, homeless problem is uniquely bad. It'd probably be worthwhile to just scrap whatever they've been trying these past few decades
Specifically in California, among them are:
* weather that's survivable without permanent shelter
* other states in the American West bussing their homeless to the state
* CA Governor (and later US President) Reagan's abdication of the role of the government in aiding the chronically ill (especially mentally ill) and/or homeless.
Around the same time, the Court ruled, in O’Connor v. Donaldson, that a Florida man named Kenneth Donaldson had been kept against his will in a state psychiatric hospital for nearly fifteen years. The ruling added momentum to a nationwide campaign to “deinstitutionalize” the mentally ill. Activists decried the existence of mental hospitals that were filled, as one account put it, with “naked humans herded like cattle.” During the next two decades, states across the country shut down such facilities, both to save money and to appease advocates pushing for reform. But instead of funding more humane modes of treatment—such as community mental-health centers that could help patients live independently—many states left the mentally ill to their own devices. Often, highly unstable people ended up on the streets, abusing drugs and committing crimes, which led them into the prison system.
It doesn't help that more than half of the homeless in California aren't from California. (See, e.g., a LA Times series of articles on homeless in LA, in which reporters found that more than half of the homeless were from Texas and the Midwest.)
But the bigger problem is the ACLU and especially homeless advocacy groups, who have decided that being drunk, high, and shitting on the sidewalk are constitutional rights. It is literally impossible to get a homeless person the treatment they need for their mental illness or drug dependency because these groups have blocked all efforts by the city and county to administer such programs.
The alternative you are proposing is arresting them, right? I'm not saying you're wrong, and I'm not attacking you or anything. I just want to play this out, because if there's a good solution, god knows I'd love to discuss it.
Is it constitutional to arrest mentally ill people for being mentally ill?
That's a complex question.
I don't think homeless advocacy groups have any interest in obstructing homeless people's access to municipally-administered mental health and substance-abuse programs? Sure, they don't want people harassed, but I see no evidence they're actively trying to prevent people from getting treatment.
Is it constitutional to arrest mentally ill people for being mentally ill?
It's possible to involuntarily commit someone to a mental hospital. That's not an arrest, it's a civil commitment of a medical nature without any criminal implications.
Sure, they don't want people harassed, but I see no evidence they're actively trying to prevent people from getting treatment.
Homeless advocacy groups recently blocked the construction of a homeless shelter in Lancaster because they didn't like the location. They've blocked multiple attempts by the city to force violently mentally ill homeless individuals from being treated, even though such individuals are a harm to themselves and to others...especially others. More than dozen homeless individuals have been murdered this year by other homeless persons who were prevented from receiving medical treatment by homeless advocacy groups.
The problem is that the idiot advocates base their views of "harassment" on academic ivory-tower views of personhood, and don't understand what it means to be mentally ill and homeless. It means to be shitting yourself every day, to be eating food off the streets, to spend your days and nights fighting off rats and cockroaches, and to avoiding drug dealers and persons more ill than yourself, to be lost in haze or to be seeing people and creatures that don't exist.
Nobody wants to be mentally ill, and once treated, the individual always prefers sanity. The problem with most mental illnesses that lead to homelessness, especially the schizophrenic family of disorders, is that the disorder itself makes the individual paranoid of treatment, and the homeless advocates focus all of their attention on that refusal instead of actually making the person better.
A homeless person that has their mental illness under control can transition to permanent housing and become a functioning member of society again. But in order to do that, you need to let them be treated, even if they don't want the treatment.
First of all, I definitely appreciate the perspective of a Public Defender with experience in this area. I spent a year working as an EMT picking up my fair share of patients on 5150 holds from PD off the street and bringing them to the ER or to the nearest mental health emergency receiving facility. I do agree, this kind of stuff is not pretty up-close. I've been the scared kid in the back of the box with the guy credibly threatening to murder me.
If we had a system where people could be placed on a medical hold, and taken somewhere to receive humane treatment with a safe environment to get better, my god, I wouldn't have any problem with that at all. But, I have spent my fair share of time bringing patients into county mental health facilities, and oh man they can be kind of terrifying places. The system, as it exists now, is not even remotely capable of what you describe.
It would be great to see a system for humane, limited-term institutionalization with long-term follow-up like you're talking about. If there's a coherent policy platform somewhere that outlines what this would look like and how we get from A to B, I would love to see it.
I agree that there are no adequate county medical health facilities.
On the other hand, the state mental hospitals are very good at what they do. I had multiple clients treated at Patton (one of the state mental hospitals for criminal offenders) and they are all still maintaining self-medication years after treatment.
Asking for personal reasons here. What does it take for a person to, for want of a better word, graduate from the county level facilities to the state level facilities?
Right, yeah, I understand it's not a patient driven decision. I'm asking because my brother in law is diagnosed mentally ill, frequently homeless, frequently placed on 5150 holds, frequently arrested for crimes, including at least once or twice being popped, at least initially, for class 4 felonies. He's got arrest warrants in Arizona and Nevada from skipping bail. He is, seemingly, permanently stuck in the county level system between SD, Orange, and LA counties, and it _does not work_.
> Almost all of the state mental hospitals are for criminal patients.
Is this a specific legal thing, like criminally insane?
> AFAIK only one is open to non-offender patients and they only take referrals.
I wasn't aware there was the possibility of referrals. We'll look into this the next time it comes around...
I'm so sorry for what your family is going through.
My severely autistic adult nephew finally got placed in a county-affiliated group home, but getting him there and keeping him in the program is a full-time job split between various family members. He's been on a few 5150s, and anywhere he winds up half the time they have him drugged out of his mind.
Our country's infrastructure for handling these problems is borderline criminal.
I sincerely hope that you guys are able to get your brother in law some help.
Thank you for the kind words. I appreciate it. It's very challenging and I agree with you completely that the way we handle things in this country is simply horrific.
I, unlike the GP, actually do propose that, in preference to the current approach.
The way I see it, it should work like both the rights and responsibilities currently work for children. Children are not tried for crimes as adults (most of the time), because we understand their lack of capability, but that also means they cannot drive, drink, vote, sign certain contracts without an adult, etc., and small children can be coerced by their parents to an even large degree.
Either you are an adult and can participate in society, but then you have to take responsibility for your actions, including going to jail, mental illness or not.
Or, mental illness excuses you from responsibility due to limited capability, but then your rights can also be restricted accordingly.
The choice for someone committing a crime and claiming mental illness should be jail, or involuntary treatment.
Treasure Island in the middle of the bay was military because of its militarily strategic location. That strategic location gives it both breathtaking views and easy access to SF business. When the military left and said the city could have it, the city gov't declared that one of the uses of this incredible windfall was to build low-income/homeless housing projects on the island. They claimed that "justice" meant that the poor had as much right to beautiful views as the rich. I suggested that if their goal was to house the needy, they could house far more of them by developing the spectacular real estate for the rich and using the tax revenue to fund housing and services for a much larger number of poor elsewhere than by insisting that a few of them be housed with million-dollar views. They reacted with the predictable Godwin's Law economic and personal analysis, so I wished them luck with their homeless utopia. I have no idea what eventually happened to housing projects on the island (I left them to it), but it came as no big surprise that as tech wealth exploded in the city, it somehow didn't translate to better housing for the poor.
I love this anecdote. It's actually really interesting. You've obviously been thinking about this issue for a long time. I want to gather your opinion though:
A) Where do we put these folks?
B) Can you constitutionally 'put' someone somewhere they may not want to be put?
C) How do you help mentally ill people without resorting to dystopian means?
Sorry for not getting back until now. Homelessness is a result with several very different causes. That means that any single answer to "the problem" will be wrong most of the time. The answer must be a combination of programs that each deal with a different category. Some people are desperate to get off the street and have safe housing but can't obtain it for various reasons. Others want to stay on the street for various reasons. Some of them might be willing to move under certain conditions, and you might move different sub-groups of them with different combinations of carrot and stick. Some are mentally ill, some are ruled by chemical addictions, some are hardcore predators wanting to stay near their prey (mostly other homeless), some are scammers (pretending to be homeless, because they prefer begging to being at the mercy of an employer), etc., etc.
So, a good (not showpiece) solution could have no one place to "put" them. Any solution optimized for the needs of the homeless rather than for their advocates will necessarily be an ever-adapting patchwork based on lots of experiments that are allowed to fail, one that can't ever fully solve the problem but gradually gets better at it, like genuine, evidence-based medicine addressing the needs of sick people.
I don't believe you can constitutionally put someone anywhere they don't want to go unless they threaten others, but you can tell them that they "can't stay here" and let them decide where else to put themselves. Like all of the patches, that will only work for some. Others are unable to put themselves someplace safe, so options have to be created--again different options for different categories. "You can't stay here but you can go here" will be an important patch in the patchwork.
But it still leaves many categories uncovered. Those who are predators can constitutionally be taken off the streets and locked up and need to be. Their most likely prey are other homeless, who need to be kept safe even if you haven't found a housing solution for them. And the mentally ill? There are categories of mental impairments, too. Some aren't too bad off and might be "bribed" in various ways to take their meds.
And I have to repeat, some things will help these people, some things will help those people, and there will always remain unsolved categories. I can no more provide the solution to homelessness than the solution to all illness, but an adapting, experimental, evidence-based approach to solving it in pieces--focused on measured reduction in homelessness rather than on benefits to the service providers--is the most likely to succeed, as is the case with medicine.
What if they don't want treatment? What if they flat out reject it? What if they refuse help? What if part of their mental illness is a form of extreme paranoia that prevents them from accepting help, especially when it comes from those in positions of supposed authority? This is one of my family members. There is no amount of help that anyone can give this person other than cash donations that they will accept because _they do not want to "get better"_.
That's sort of the crux of the problem, right? That's where people seem to split.
How do you balance individual, constitutional rights with the need to help people who are ill.
We either force people to undergo treatment, or leave them alone to live in a cardboard box, scream at mailboxes, and self medicate with heroin and amphetamines.
I have heard, and am swayed, by arguments on both sides. I tend to lean in the direction of getting people help (maybe against their will), but at the moment we have zero infrastructure to accomplish that in a remotely humane way. We have some short-term systems in place, but they don't extend beyond the duration of a 51-50 hold.
Enough voters are not confronted with the issue of homelessness and mental illness on a regular enough basis for it to have become a national talking point, but damned if it shouldn't be.
In Europe we put mentally ill people in institutions, so they get the care they need. What else would you do? Throw them on the streets? We're not a 3rd world country.
Well, the difference in perspective is that the mentally ill in this country have rights that forbid them from being forcibly locked up (under most conditions). I don't know who has the better approach. All that I know that our (US) approach isn't working for most of the population that is homeless and mentally ill.
Exactly, the main problem these people are having is not a mystery - it's that they don't have housing. There are often addiction or mental health issues, but anyone who has experienced these problems in the past understands that being homeless at the same time is catastrophic. Giving people housing while they get on their feet is the simplest, cheapest, most humane, and most effective policy. It's been proven to work in Finland and other places to great effect: https://amp.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle...
I think it says a lot about the HN crowd that people are downvoting you for saying this. Everyone wants either to police/arrest homeless people (even more than they already are, apparently) or to make their lives even harder so they'll go somewhere else. Neither of those "solutions" addresses the root of the problem - that these people have nowhere to go - and homelessness will continue until they are provided with housing. People love to wring their hands about how homelessness is such a hard problem but they don't want to even consider the obvious solution that would both fix the root problem and treat people with dignity.
Pointing out that Hacker News tends to be white (and more importantly wealthy or have strong aspirations of wealth), or that the demographics present here affect the discussions on this site, doesn't tend to go over well. :P Here at the orange site, we like to think we're all rational machines of pure logic, and all of our opinions on how humanity should live are simply the obvious and objective truth. Bonus points if it matches the status quo.
Homelessness is simple to fix. Build homes, let people live in them. But the framework we've created, our beliefs about capitalism, fairness, and that survival should be "earned," prevent a lot of people from even considering the obvious options.
When some people look at homeless people, sometimes they think "This is gross, I wish I did not have to look at homeless person," and they stop their analysis there. The empathy of "wow damn, imagine being that guy and how much it would suck" doesn't really happen, for whatever reason. Maybe it's just a self-assurance "that could never happen to me, because I make good choices. Conversely, that guy must have made bad choices, and that is why he deserves to be swept away from my sight. His crime of looking weird on public transit is yet more evidence of his unworthiness." Y'know, the Just World fallacy, and all that.
The "empathy gap" talked about in Big Tech is a bit of a misnomer, I think. I don't think that the kinds of people running FAANG are any less empathetic than the oil tycoons were, or Ma Bell, or the leaders of any other profitable industries.
But we didn't expect Big Oil to help out the little guy, to give a damn if their procurement pipelines were ethical. We all know the guys running BP Gas only rebranded "green" in a cynical attempt to clean up their image after the Deepwater Horizon spill.
Big Tech, though, is different in what it promises. It promises not to sell you cheaper oil, but a better life. Voice assistants are the Star Trek future, Facebook is a way to stay in touch with Grandma, OKCupid is a site to help people find their soulmates. Robots will free us from toil and drudgery, Uber empowers drivers, Nextdoor brings communities together, and a hundred other obvious lies get told to us.
The "empathy gap," when it comes to tech, is the gap between what they promise, and what they deliver. Twitter doesn't ban Nazis and encourages "engagement". Facebook spreads political misinformation. AirBNB and Uber are just barely-regulated clones of hotels & taxis. Github sells services to ICE. Amazon works their employees to the bone. Google promotes slot-machine apps on the Android store because they get a cut of their users' gambling addictions. Youtube directs people to white nationalist videos.
And, when a company is clearly unethical, but it's making you rich, how could that select for employees with high empathy? How could the workplace culture not tend toward siding with the rich over the poor, when everyone there is making 6 figures and dreaming of the day they'll cash out on 8 figures?
SF's tech boom not only attracts people who aren't empathetic, it selects for it and encourages it. As rents rise ever higher and gentrification continues to squeeze out those on the margins, how could the result not be a growing anti-poor-people sentiment? When all your coworkers are wealthy, when all your neighbors are wealthy, that guy who hasn't bathed in a week (because he has no way to) stands out like a sore, gross thumb. They don't see anything of themselves in him, or of anyone they know.
People who are poor, or who have been poor, consistently rate higher on empathy. A pool of rich people (or people who strongly value wealth) congregating in an area and driving everyone else out, is going to reduce the empathy in that space. Whether that space is San Francisco or Hacker News, the culture changes, and people stop caring so much about those who aren't as fortunate.
This is not because of crime, this is because upper-middle-class families in the US, especially in the bay area, play the "chase the school district" game in hopes that their kids will get a "better education" (which means being with other upper-middle class folks), despite it being a terrible idea both for society and for their kids.
It's interesting how everything revolves around money in the US.
I take it from your name that you are French. Here the quality of the school has more to do with the education of the patients and the general "proper raising" approach.
Take Versailles for instance. The best school there attracts peuple from vastly different backgrounds and wealth. This is not a discriminant but rather how parents educate their children.
Private schools have a payement system that takes into account the revenue of parents.
Sure,you can buy your way to education but you will never hit the best (or even good) schools.
Then you have the worse neighborhoods, the problem there is a lack of interest or time of the parents rather than money on schools (they get more than the affluent neighborhood ones, take the north of Paris as an example and look at their infrastructures vs the ones in, say, Versailles).
>Then you have the worse neighborhoods, the problem there is a lack of interest or time of the parents rather than money on schools (they get more than the affluent neighborhood ones, take the north of Paris as an example and look at their infrastructures vs the ones in, say, Versailles).
The same in the US. New York City spends more per student than anywhere else in the US (https://www.silive.com/news/2019/06/how-much-does-new-york-c...). Baltimore, an incredibly poor and run-down city, spends the third most. #4-6 and #8 are all wealthy suburbs of Washington DC, but their schools are all far better than those of Baltimore or NYC (on average), despite Baltimore spending slightly more per student and NYC spending 60-70% more.
As you say, parents taking interest in their children's education is far more important than money spent.
> As you say, parents taking interest in their children's education is far more important than money spent.
I have first hand visibility on this (though obviously on limited data) when looking at the classes my children go to.
I live in a cozy neighborhood but the classes are mixed. Primary school is mixed because of social mixture and one can see that the children who are good are the ones pushed for that. Teachers clearly pass the message of "it is your work that is going to help you" (they do not even talk about money because it is mostly irrelevant in France with out education system, at least in terms of paying for school (the other costs like housing etc. is another story)).
Then you move to high school, we have several of them in my city. One is in the very top of best schools in France and the students population is not that different: you have people from all wealth and the common denominator is that they work (hard). It is not possible to buy your way into that school.
What I see is that the children care and their parents care. They either give an example (because they are well educated) or push the children to get off the social caste.
Unfortunately there is also a mass factor: a few people significantly off in a class will not be a problem. When nobody in your neighborhood cares about education (despite having access to it) then it is much more difficult for the ones who want to work.
Finally, there is often a perception in socially lower neighborhoods that the best schools are "not for them". It is not a matter of money, but of perception. I followed two high school students (a boy and a girl) for a few years - they were brilliant and I pushed them to try. They did and succeeded in ivy league schools (grandes écoles in French). They told me that they would have not even tried, again because of perception. Now they are "giving back" to their community by passing the right message.
You might enjoy this podcast[1] from the producers of Serial and the NYTimes. It deals with schools in NYC but the general idea can be applied to SF/Oakland and many other cities in the US. It's only 5 episodes and that's it.
Nope, upper-middle class families buy a 1.5 to 3 million dollar house "to be in the right school district" in the Bay Area. Ask your colleagues with kids :-)
Yup! Had a kid. Where to live? Menlo, PA, Los Gatos, Cupertino, Los Altos. Moved to Los Gatos. Schools were the single driving factor in picking the area in which to look for housing. Without having a kid, downtown San Jose, Redwood City, East PA, etc would have been on the list. SF was never on the list for what it is worth. I like cites. Tokyo, NYC, London, etc. SF is not a really city as the side walk roll up at 10pm and in the past few years it looks more and more like a public toilet. If you step in shit on the sidewalk in SF, it likely not from a dog.
There are a few more cities with amazing schools on the Peninsula but this is effectively the calculus. Some people still send their kids to private schools from those cities but the home value is buoyed by access to the public schools.
Proving my point here thank you :). It's not really great for kids either, given the crazy level of anxiety I see in my peers who attended those schools because of all the pressure from their childhood.
The good school / good neighborhood thing is a self-reinforcing cycle. Wealthy families move to neighborhoods with better schools, increasing local tax revenue, which gets invested into better and better schools, which attracts even more wealthy families. On the other hand, middle class flight leaves poor families in shitty districts, reducing tax revenue, which means worse and worse schools, which means more middle class flight. The incentives guarantee this will happen.
We need to separate school funding/quality from neighborhood affluence but that's a tall order politically.
I think school quality is more a factor of the the families economic status than than of how much funding a school gets.
I bet if you took took the Cupertino school district families, and transplanted them into a much worse school district, and kept the same teachers, same staff, same buildings, same funding level of school, you would see the school district improve, even without the funding.
The issue is the families in poverty don't have the time and energy to care about school. Wealthy families, care about school. So even if the school is crappy, they will make sure their kids learn what they need to. In impoverished school districts, teachers can't concentrate on teaching, because they have to act as both teachers and social workers and advocates for their students.
So even if you increased the funding of schools, if you did not address the poverty in the surrounding community, it will mostly be a waste of money and political capital.
In California, tax revenue is already redistributed by the state to mostly equalize funding across school districts. Most of that funding comes from state income taxes, not local taxes.
If we let the money follow the student (aka vouchers) then good schools would sprout up and attract more students and more dollars in a self perpetuating cycle regardless of location. It is immoral that the only students who have the choice of which school they go to are those with rich parents that can select the private school they prefer. For the poor, it’s a derelict monopoly school full of lifers.
I see your argument as avocating for a flavor of wealth redistribution. Is be interested in hearing more, but would prefer to explore the idea in a less polarizing, more academic way. Any sources?
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. Could you please stop creating accounts to do that with? We'd appreciate it, because we're trying for something different here.
The reason it's not good for kids is that the houses with enough space are either crazy expensive or far from work. Trust me if I could afford it I would love to live in SF.
Here I was thinking consulting at banks was the easiest money that could possibly be made. Turns out I should have been working for the local government in San Francisco.
This is a really insightful point. I spent the last few weeks pondering on why California's governance is evolving into more ineptitude, slowness, and wastefulness, and whether there is something wrong with the democratic party values that make things worse in the long term.
The reality is probably closer to what you are claiming. And the lack of competition and accountability creates rot in the system.
idk, looking at local politics, there’s plenty of internecine fighting to keep things interesting for a while. But I do think America, from top to bottom and in its infinite wisdom, regularly designs governments to be in a constant state of deadlock. So you can “win” an election, but be blocked from doing anything of consequence. Either through minority powers to block and stymie efforts; or by making power hyperlocal so that any collective action problem is whiffed.
Local elections in SF are actually quite competitive, thanks to both jungle primaries and ranked choice voting.
Of course, if you e.g. are a single issue voter that cares only that women who has consensual sex not have the option to terminate unintended pregnancies you won't have a candidate to support in the general.
Competition between Democrats in the Generals each carrying water for the party does not make for competitive elections. Even the moderates in SF are to the left of the State and Country.
Our elections are not competitive. If we were talking about two left parties competing in our “non-partisan” General elections, you would have a point, but it is Democrats top to bottom, who are only slightly distinguishable from each other in the context of San Francisco politics. In the context of California politics, they’re expected to all carry the same amount of fealty to the Unions, the State Party and its platform as any other California Democrat and in the context of Democrats nationwide, the San Francisco Democrats may as well be the bloody Borg.
The Mayoral special election between London Breed, Mark Leno and Jane Kim could be called “competitive”, but no matter who won (London won), the trajectory and policies of the City would have remained effectively the same with the only difference being who could advance their career that year.
Or to put it another way, it is a very competitive environment as long as you are a Democrat, but it is not an ideologically or politically competitive environment and the policies of the City government are stagnant (Fix homelessness! Save Muni! Stop car break-ins! Build more housing but only the right kind, maybe! etc.). This is unlikely to change under single party rule.
There's significant daylight between the prog and moderate coalitions in SF -- at least if you care about anything on their platforms. Again, if your focus is policing people's sex lives and consensual relationships, it'll all look the same to you.
Moderates and Progressives war over small differences because they are in competition with each other, even if the type of competition is in its nature internal to the power struggles within the Democratic Party. If you can’t distinguish yourself from the pack in some small ways, it’s going to be harder for you to win elections. Taking that back to the Special Mayoral election, London Breed managed to do just that, over Mark Leno and Jane Kim who had this kind of mutual endorsement deal going on exploiting the nature of the ranked choice voting.
But it is a power struggle internal to the Democratic Party. Sure you have different people with different ideas about where to go, what to do, but overall the trajectory is largely the same, and to be frank, it isn’t a direction I like. I still don’t know if I was naïve in hitching my wagon to the Democratic Party when I came of age, if I was never really in agreement with it, or of it just left me, and I’ve been trying to figure that out. What I do know is that there’s no place for me in it anymore, but whether I was naïve before, then and now, they’re still the only game in town and the combination of Ranked-Choice Voting and Open Primaries is further cementing them both here and in localities around here. I have my ballot in front of me, and for every race below President, it is virtually indistinguishable from a Democratic primary ballot because that is in effect what our General elections around here have become, a question of whose career do you want to advance or maintain under the auspices of this particular party banner?
> Again, if your focus is policing people's sex lives and consensual relationships, it'll all look the same to you.
Since nobody has mentioned anything of the like in this comment chain, I’m forced to conclude you’re making certain assumptions about me and insinuating something unsavory there. Maybe my conclusion is wrong, you tell me. Unfortunately for you, that’s never been something I gave a crap about. I’m not some bloody transplant weirded out by the Castro, I grew up in the Castro, and for the moment it is still my home.
I wish more people would understand this. Those (both American leftists, and Europeans who listen to them) who say that "Democrats in the US would be right wing in Europe/Canada" have to (for example) then agree that all major political parties in Canada and every European country outside the UK and Ireland are right of US Democrats, because there is no significant opposition to voter ID laws anywhere. Macron's Les Republicains got elected because voters liked his vow to get tough on unions and union pensions, and privatize more infrastructure, neither of which appears in Biden's campaign platform.
Speaking of which, several European countries have privatized post offices; not just telecom companies that were parts of PTTs, but entire postal services. It is the rare European country that hasn't sold off at least part of their postal services. The EU explicitly requires postal monopolies to end in member states; whether government-owned or not, EU postal services do not have the USPS's monopoly on first-class mail. Yet no major party in the US seriously talks about privatizing the USPS.[1] Does this mean that American politics is "far to the left" of that of Germany and the UK, both of which have completely sold off their postal services to private investors?
[1] 1 And no, it's not because of the Constitution. Article I Section 8 only gives Congress the authority "To establish Post Offices", as opposed to requiring a government-run one. Certainly nothing in the Constitution mandates the USPS's first-class mail monopoly.
EU market liberalization makes sense because there are already at least 20+ would be competitors for almost everything.
I have no idea how well this turned out in practice, especially considering that market harmonization/standardization is a basically a must have to have efficiency at scale.
The big difference seems to be healthcare and education. Where there's a primary state funded/owned/operated/mandated provider/option. Which sort of helps with keeping a ceiling on prices.
But at the same time youth unemployment was (and probably still is) very high, despite easy access to higher education. US unemployment rates reached its low point before covid19 probably because so much is tied to employment and there are so few restrictions on hiring and firing folks compared to some "average/median" EU jurisdiction.
Then of course there are very real far right parties with power too, so yeah, it's a lot less true that US Dems are so right of Europe politics. While at the same time a very authoritarian group runs the current US federal show, with a very real chance of that continuing, which unfortunately doesn't help with the polarization of politics.
Well, that's just not remotely true. There are six supervisor seats up for election this year, as there are every even year. Ronen is running unopposed, which is a bit odd. The other five seats have at least 3 candidates each. I don't pay too much attention to Supervisor elections outside my district (which isn't up this cycle), but from glancing at websites and endorsements it looks like there's at least a few non-delusional competitors. And I recall D6 in particular was extremely competitive last time around, since it was a vacant seat after Jane Kim got term-limited out.
EDIT: The Board of Supervisors also has a two-term limit, so even if you think incumbents are automatic winners (which they usually are - not usually unopposed, but, like most incumbents, I don't think they usually have to sweat it too much), there's going to be a competitive open-seat race at least once a decade.
Honestly this attitude is exactly why sf is a dump. It's not about abortion. The chance of getting a conservative leader is impossible in sf. Luckily california may turn red this year due to the hispanic vote
Have lots of hispanic family in rural california... I grew up in conservative california and when I visited this year... It's like I've never seen it. I don't believe the polls. Californians should actually go out and talk with the people who live in their state
California is not likely to vote for Trump, but he's going to do much better than the 31.6% he won in 2016. Nationally, he's going to do much better than the 28% of Hispanics he won in 2016.
Honestly this attitude is exactly why sf is a dump. It's not about abortion. The chance of getting a conservative leader is impossible in sf. Luckily california may turn red this year due to the hispanic vote.
San Francisco is not meaningfully a one-party city. There are sub-party factions (the "progressives" and "moderates") who vote as blocs on the most significant issues and tend to get similar groups of endorsements. The Republicans have been run out of town (for good reason), so now the Democrats, which are a big-tent party, can - and do - safely fight amongst themselves. And it's not just primaries, either; ranked-choice voting means that general elections for city positions are usually contested between two (or more) Democrats even in November.
Democrats != one unified party. Republicans are a minority united under the same terrible platform. Democrats are everyone else. From progressive to centrist or even right wing (what would conservative in other countries).
You also have "democrats" that act with conservative values that are vocal and prevent any changes. Check Nextdoor if you want to get a wiff of how crazy people are here.
When the Republicans insist on nominating unelectable kooks, a one-party state is indeed what you end up with.
That's what we see happening here in Washington, in any case. There's no one I can vote for who isn't a Democrat, so I guess I'm a Democrat by default, whether I wanted to be one or not. Super frustrating.
Did you read the article? It laments a lack of investment in:
* Affordable housing
* Public transit
* Green energy
Can you show me any of these items in the current Republican party platform, or even point to any local Republican-run government which has invested significantly in any of these?
Affordable housing is an easy one-- look at a map of US housing costs, and make a decision about which areas are affordable [1]. Then look at a map of political party distribution. There is a strong correlation between affordable communities and Republican ones
It's also trivial to find examples of republican led cities/counties investing in public transit and green energy. Here's a twofer [2]
A tad related: This was in the LA area, but there was a video I saw a while back where a guy had crowdfunded a project to build shelters for homless people that were basically tiny houses with locks, a solar power providing a small amount of power, etc. and the city went ballistic about it. Admittedly there were some genuine problems with how it was executed, i.e. blocking sidewalks and they even offered to move them but were rejected. There was a clip of some city official claiming that this man building shelters for homeless people did nothing to help them, yet his own plan to "end homelessness" somehow would. This video was rather old, probably early 2010s. I wonder how that politicians plan to end homelessness is doing.
Since I live in LA I can answer your last question: whatever the plan was it is not working. The homelessness situation here is continuing to accelerate out of control.
This dovetails nicely with the “tiny home” movement. Regardless of how you feel about affluent people taking up tiny homes, there is something deeply off putting about municipalities in the midst of a housing crisis putting up minimum housing size laws that require tiny homes to be built via loophole on top of a trailer.
So you only care about what a website says, and not the living proof that your current leadership has not only -not- done those things, but apparently lied about its intentions?
I think you are misinterpreting the post you are replying to. Any single-party system devolves into graft and cronyism as the politicians aren't held accountable for their actions. After all, what are you going to do, waste your vote on the other side?
The inevitable reversal of fortune will be a very interesting drama. Will it be like Chicago, where any attempt to shrink government is stymied and taxes are ratcheted upwards every year just to tread water on bloated pensions? Or will it collapse into bankruptcy like Detroit?
The amount of inefficiency and waste of resources in SF is unfathomable. Eventually the chickens come home to roost.
Chicago and Detroit also look pretty different economically. Detroit was overbuilt and depended too heavily on car manufacturing, which left it vulnerable to collapse. Chicago meanwhile is still a pretty decent sized transit hub, and it has the financial markets used to stabilize the price of a bunch of important commodities like grains and pork, which provided a diverse enough economy to stumble forwards despite nakedly corrupt and incompetent leadership.
The question is, how much wealth will leave SF? If some startups leave, it’ll probably look more like Chicago. Clearly bankrupt, but still functioning to some degree. If most startups and their employees leave, it’ll be the Detroit route for SF.
"If most startups and their employees leave, it’ll be the Detroit route for SF."
News flash: SF only relatively recently became a startup hub with the web 2.0 and smartphone/apps eras and the advent of free shuttle buses to the likes of Google/FB.
If the startups and their employees leave, it'll be slightly more like the diverse and more affordable SF that it previously was.
If you honestly think it's the Detroit route for SF should most startups and their employees vacate, you are horribly misinformed.
There's a practically unlimited number of people hoping SF prices fall enough for them to move back and/or buy property there. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the startup scene. If most the tech people moved out of SF I'd be far more interested in living there myself. The startup/tech monoculture has ruined the city in many ways.
You really have to explain this to me because I'm leaving SF now even though I could save 50% off my current market rate rent if I move to a new place.
What am I missing that I haven't seen in the last 6 years? I've walked/biked the city hundreds of times up and down from GGB to Stonestown and Dogpatch. Visited every nook and cranny of the city, tried living in different neighborhoods and I have always been sorely disappointed by the rampant crime and homelessness. I made life-long friends, attended tens of meetups from hiking, to biking and tech. Tasted food from all over the world, sailed on the bay, saw all the touristy and local spots. Day-tripped all over the bay and hours in every direction. Got an amazing workplace experience that is unlikely to be rivaled anywhere else in the world.
Yet, I can't ignore it forever, I end up driving through downtown to get to Sausalito or eating at a nice restaurant while this person decides I am a demon and begins screaming at me while menacingly coming towards me.
I had my bike stolen from my garage, my car window broken and been threatened by a random person on the street.
You really think most people haven't had enough of this? I tried my best to love SF despite all of it's serious problems but after all these years it got to me and I have to leave, no matter how cheap it would be to stay.
When discussions of housing vacancies pop up at work lots of the individuals who reside in the city report that there's open units at their apartment complexes etc.
I'm really curious what the 2020 census rolls up for us in this area of California migration, etc.
I think the 2020 census will be obsolete because it was done this year... I already completed it so I'm going to show up as a SF resident even though I'm leaving before the end of the year.
No doubt it'll be out of date, but I wouldn't call it obsolete, it'll still be useful. We had a footworker guy from the Census who went around double checking all the vacant units to ensure they didn't shirk their census obligations. They would post these shipping label looking things at the doors and door steps of the units asking them to complete their census forms by whatever deadline was listed.
The guy knocked on our door asking about these neighbors to which we pointed out their moved, died, etc. For the ones who moved he got down to asking about roughly when they moved because residency counts up to some month, like April or something I forget. It was definitely earlier in the year by a few months from when he went double checking on all the residents. Depending on our memory for when the guy moved out he was going to count him as a resident even though he may not even have been in the state anymore nor filled out a census form apparently. We directed the fella to the Managers office to get more precise dates than the rough stuff we had in mind. I remember the guy seeming to be troubled and flustered that there were a boatload of vacancies he had to comb through and didn't want to invest too much time hunting down facts about various residents. We wished him well and he went on his way.
I see, so you're banking on the fact that the living conditions in SF will improve and it will be come desirable again.
That is something we can agree on, I too look forward to such a period but I imagine it'll be 5-10 years from now and only after the local government begins doing radically different things to tackle all these problems. At that time, I too will want to return to SF since again, I love the city, the people and the environment, just not the current living conditions.
The romantic East Coast City on the West Coast. Yep. People will always come to San Francisco for the same reason they go to North Park, San Diego or Silver Lake, Los Angeles.
If you’re trying to go for a trite left vs. right comment, I’d like to point out that a lot of the cities that people in CA are moving to are also managed by Democrats.
The nature of current US geographic politics means that most cities will be run by a very specific party, both the well run and the poorly run ones. This is one of those situations that escapes easy and convenient narratives, especially ones that happen to support a partisan side.
> Municipal employment has eaten up a large share. Salaries and benefits account for almost 45 percent of the budget, averaging $175,004 per employee, in a city where median household income is $96,265.
This is not fair. Comparing salaries + benefits to income is an apples to oranges comparison.
They're kind of in the orbit of one another. One quantifies the near total cost of funding an individual public employee from that municipality vs the entire household income of a family living in said municipality who presumably contributes towards funding that one individual. That household certainly doesn't pay for that municipal individual's total compensation from their benefits dollars but rather from their income.
The article was filled with apples and oranges comparisons. I'm sure that there are legitimate points to be made, but it's hard to take seriously when then piece is so slanted.
To make matters worse, wealth is pretty easily moveable within legal borders. It’s extremely trivial for those in SF to move anywhere else in CA without having to even change their tax status (Edit: for withholding. Crossing state lines is more of a paperwork hassle for some companies), depriving SF of rents and taxes. And that’s not even counting the people willing to leave California for the various PADS (Portland, Austin, Seattle, Denver) cities.
This coming decade is going to be bad for SF. Shame they didn’t spend all that money making the city more desirable for reasons other than FAANG jobs.
> It’s extremely trivial for those in SF to move anywhere else in CA without having to even change their tax status (Edit: for withholding. Crossing state lines is more of a paperwork hassle for some companies), depriving SF of rents and taxes.
This is why governments should primarily derive their tax revenue from the one thing people can’t move around: the land. Unfortunately, CA eliminates this obvious avenue of taxation through prop 13.
> This coming decade is going to be bad for SF. Shame they didn’t spend all that money making the city more desirable for reasons other than FAANG jobs.
Everyone who doesn't want to be there should move. There is 25 Phoenix in the United States and only one San Francisco ;-)
As much as a handful of rich people like to piss and moan about it, Seattle’s more progressive politics will probably be its saving grace because it has allowed it to still be somewhat affordable for people other than its tech workers.
The median household income recently surpassed 100k[0], and an average studio will run you $1800 per month (let's not even discuss owning anything). Sure if you're willing to put up with an hour commute (pre covid) or live with roommates you can find something more affordable but I would not describe Seattle as being at all affordable to most of the working class. Even as a tech worker, I had to compromise on a lot of housing criteria, compared to when I lived in the south, just to afford to live here.
It’s quite easy for the wealthy to move their domicile and assets between states and even countries. The tricks lawyers, accountants, and estate planners can do run circles around tax authorities. They can’t close the loopholes as fast as new tricks are created.
The “if we only just seized money from the rich to solve all our problems” theorists are wrong on two major counts. First they expect to be able to seize the money, which as I described above is very unlikely. The second is that once they seize it once, they will be unable to seize it again as the wealthy don’t have any more assets or wise up.
The proper way out of the fiscal mess is to reform government and, if needed, increase taxes broadly and sustainably. I am not a Bernie Sanders supporter but he was the only one who straight-up said he would raise taxes on everyone, unlike every other candidate that was promising utopia by taking the money from billionaires. But everyone wants easy answers nowadays, no one wants to sacrifice, if it’s not something for nothing immediately then it’s a non-starter.
While I largely agree, I’d raise some limits about the basic principle that people will move their domicile to avoid taxes. People do move to avoid taxes all the time, but it’s nowhere near as simple as saying that people will quickly move to wherever taxes are the lowest; people will tolerate some level of higher tax if they feel that it’s worth it for whatever reason.
At the low income end, that’s been CA for decades. CA is a higher tax state than other places, but they could get away with it because people wanted to live in CA, and were willing to pay for it. It helps that the really desirable areas of CA are a long way away from other states, making leaving the state kind of a pain in the butt. It’ll be interesting to see how Covid changes that around.
Even at the higher level, we don’t see a ton of millionaires and billionaires renouncing their citizenship and moving to wherever the taxes are the lowest. Some do, but a lot stay in the US because living in the US is a really nice place to be if you’re rich. They might move to the lower tax states, but that’s as far as they’re willing to go.
The issue for SF specifically is a bit like the issue for NYC; it’s relatively small and really close to a bunch of places within commuting distance that have lower tax rates. Compared to leaving even CA, leaving SF specifically is really easy.
And FWIW, I think that the tax thing is a bit overblown; I think housing costs are the real problem. I’m leaving CA (Los Angeles) next month for another state, and while I’ll save a bit on taxes, it’s nothing compared to what I’ll save on housing costs. Four months of owning a home will save me enough over my 2bd LA apartment to obliterate any difference in income taxes for the year.
I’m speaking more about actually wealthy people. Having a few million dollars and a W2 doesn’t move the needle. If you are a business owner with paper assets of tens or hundreds of millions (and this level of wealth is 1000x more common than billionaires) you have many other options. For example, transferring assets to an offshore trust. You would think this would be illegal or something but it’s extremely common. You can also invest in a variety of things that use various carve outs in our Byzantine tax system to drastically lower what you pay. The list goes on and on and on - and the rich don’t even do it! Their hired guns do, they just sign the papers.
This is why the true way to raise taxes sustainably is on the common people. But everyone wants what taxes provide but even mentioning the hint of raising taxes is suicide, which is why Biden claims he will only do it on incomes above $400k. This won’t raise anything like what the country needs to pay off its debts.
I used to be a big fan of Bernie Sanders' ~2015 platform of "raise taxes and do sensible things" until I realized there's only one Bernie Sanders and he's pretty old. First and outside of the scope of this discussion, in search of a base he has aligned with the woke, but the main reason I stopped being a fan is exactly observing money being spent in CA and WA by people that are not quite as bright or honest as Bernie Sanders. I no longer want to pay more taxes, because I am philosophically opposed to giving money to complete morons. Frankly, I'd sooner pay taxes to Bill Gates or Warren Buffett - they are more likely to do something sensible with the money.
I believe that behind the veneer of the official progressivism there's deep monetary corruption in San Francisco government. Here is my data (all within last 24 months):
Out of curiosity, I wanted to see how unusual this is. According to https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/ezaucr/asp/ucr_display.asp about 150000 people were arrested for fraud and embezzlement in 2014 out of 328m Americans, or .0004% of the population, with 31830 employees that should be 12 a year if there's a even distribution of fraudsters in the country. Granted it's 2 am here and I'm really tired, so this might not make much sense.
A better stat would be the % of arrests of other cities' officials. The majority of population does not have access to the FBI scale embezzlement, even if they wanted to do it.
True, I cant find any stats like that though. Searching https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/public-corruption/news for San Francisco 2020 does seem to yeild substantially more results than any other city I tried, though.
This is good data but hard to imagine financial corruption being the only reason the city is a toilet. Take for example the fact that open drug use and public defecation isn’t even a crime here.
For all the article’s whining about the Transbay Transit Center, the city only provided financing for about ten percent of the phase one costs. (Phase two not yet started.) The other 90% of the cost was financed through other means, mostly land sales by the state, special tax increases, and toll increases. [1]
The expected lifespan of this building at least a hundred years. Frankly $200m from the city is not bad at all.
If the article compared the state’s contribution to its budget that would make the point relevant. Instead the article is about the city and I claim it is raising irrelevant points of evidence.
The sources of the funding don't matter, the spending does. If you spent too much money on a thrashed up apartment, it wouldn't matter whether you did that from your salary, selling your previous house or taking a loan.
I've lived in 5 cities, across 3 states. I've lived in SF for 10 years and this is by far the worst, least responsive government I've experienced. From my experience in interacting with San Francisco politicians they all want one thing: Nancy Pelosi's job.
I don't think they care about anything else.
What I see is grown adults spitballing the worst, often national policy platforms/ideas to attract voters and constituency groups for a future campaign. I really do not get the impression they care about the community because the outcomes are so bad.
The inability of modern states to operationally keep up is deeply distressing. I have no political orientation with respect to the 'size' of government so much, but at very least, it needs to be effective for whatever it is doing.
The massive backlogs in the justice and immigration system, the lack of innovation in so many areas, ultra powerful unions, lack of material investment in anything other that known quantities like 'roads and highways' the seeming inability to have coherent identity solution for elections.
Yesterday, large swaths of Canadian government stats site 'Stats Canada' - a federal agency was just down and completely broken. It's 'COVID', hey, we're not going to fix that. Can you imagine of Amazon.com just 'went down' for a few days?
SF and California in particular lose all credibility when trying to 'lead' the country in any capacity really - Gavin Newsom's words about 'California is the future of America' are toxically arrogant in this regard.
Dysfunction is just another form of corruption.
This is an existential problem for some modern nations.
The problem is incentive. No one in the government has any incentive to do anything. In fact not rocking the boat is far safer than doing something new, which is risky.
While I do wish the government would shrink heavily, another idea I have is to pay department heads a percentage of every dollar saved each year. As it stands, agencies want to increase their budget and headcount every year as that leads to prestige. If 10 cents of every dollar saved went straight to the head of the department, you would magically see millions and millions cut each year as they install better software, streamline, etc.
Rather than efficiency, I suspect you would simply see everything dissolved. Mayor closes up shop on the spot, walks away with $1.5B, and the city no longer has a government.
" another idea I have is to pay department heads a percentage of every dollar saved each year."
We can't reasonably measure how much money is 'saved' because there would have to be some rational benchmark agains which there would be 'savings'.
What you would be inducing is merely 'less spending'.
The 'spending' is not the problem, it's the efficiency.
We want governments to spend wherein the can be a high ROI on that spend, but not where there is less obviously.
As the article hints, if SF had an amazing new subway system for it's squandered billions, that would probably be a net win.
In other words what we want is 'surplus' to be generated from government spending, the 'more surplus for the dollar', the better.
Because most government services are free, we don't have any direct way of measuring said surpluses (we don't in the private sector either, but assuming any degree of market efficiency than price can be a proxy for surplus).
So either we have to 'guess' at the value of services created (easier for subways than for say, having 'judges'), or create some kind of direct measurement.
Or perhaps levels of spending and baseline measures of output could be measured, and then held to account against other cities in the region/country and have cities more comparably 'benchmark' against one another.
And finally, just transparency: if people see how much money is going where and it's popularized, published, widely disseminated, it can have a populist effect.
Public policy is tremendously complex, and difficult to do well.
Before boiling down large, complex government programs to simple dysfunction and corruption, I recommend a read-through of Deborah Stone's book Policy Paradox. It gives you some idea of what real policymakers are up against in the real world. The city managers are optimizing for the preferences of a million people in a city with geographic restrictions and tremendous external factors at play.
"Policy Paradox offers a needed alternative (or complement) to economics-based or rational choice books that treat policy making and policy analysis as distinct from one another—the former as a messy political process, the latter as a clinical, "rational" exercise."
Thanks for the reference, however, with only having read the description, I'm a little bit cynical already in that they highlight issues of 'values, politics and policy' - when I don't think that's the problem.
The problem to me is one of operational effectiveness.
'Making stuff work' is a grind - it requires focus, dedication, leadership, a bit of vision, commitment.
Even if SF were to have made the 'wrong choices' ie it should have built light rail instead of subway ... the benefits would be tremendous.
It's not at the level of 'policy' that US/Canada have 5 year backlogs in their immigration systems - it's a lack of operating intelligence and the ability to adapt to new scenarios.
It doesn't matter what policy is if nothing ever gets done.
Operational effectiveness is highly tied to values, politics, and policy.
From federal down to local, every bureaucracy has to deal with changes and interventions from outside in the form of budget, direction, etc.
Bureaucracies are only as effective as the political environment in which they operate, and they are directed at the behest of voters and politicians which tend to change every few years or-so.
My point in sharing the reference isn't to say 'oh, I know something you don't know.' It's that I read it, and went, 'oh, I know nothing, this stuff is waaay more complicated than I thought it was, and no wonder nothing gets done.'
Yes of course, I get the point of the reference, it looks super interesting, I wish I could read quickly enough for it to actually make it on my list.
I appreciate your point about political change but that's not something I view as being 'outside of government'. The political leadership and the bureaucracy are 'government' - if they are failing even primarily due to arbitrary change in direction ... then we can at least narrow the scope of where we point our fingers, but it doesn't mean that 'building a subway should be impossible' in 2020.
The US engaged and defeated the Nazis, and the Japanese, and built the first Nuclear Weapon, along with designing several new weapons and building them at large ... in the term of a single presidential cycle.
Without being overly cynical, I do believe that incentives matter, and if the bureaucracy doesn't have to produce much of real value then it just won't.
We had one, single goal then. Defeat the enemy. We pulled out the stops to confront that particular existential threat. Everything else got put on hold. Everything. People had fuel ration cards, and every single piece of scrap metal was turned into guns and bullets. People planted victory gardens, and bought war bonds. They sent their sons to die across an ocean, and their daughters built war machines in huge factories.
But it was a simpler time in terms of policy. We've done so much since then. Hell, when we were fighting WWII, a black person couldn't even use the same drinking fountain as white folks. Monterey Bay was dead from overfishing, the air over Los Angeles was so thick with pollution from incinerators and factories you could barely breathe. Bunker Hill in LA was a slum of flophouses. We didn't even have freeways yet. The modern San Francisco Skyline as we know it didn't exist. Hawaii wasn't a state yet, and neither was Alaska.
We're in a different world. Washington has crossed the Delaware and there ain't no going back.
Take a random poll of everyone you see walking down Market Street and ask them what our one single goal is and you'll get as many answers, as people you stop and ask.
From global warming, to COVID, to public transit, to homelessness, to income inequality, to bicycle lanes, to rent costs, to getting the Republicans out of congress, to getting the Democrats out of congress, to immigration, to domestic spying, to GMOs, to healthcare, to dolphin-safe fishing nets, to high-speed rail, to police reform, to the guy pooping on someone's doorstep, to adding an extra lane on the 5, to wildfires, to legalizing mushrooms, to teaching REGEX to elementary school kids, to spaying an neutering stray cats, to Amy Coney Barrett.
Nobody cared about dolphin-safe nets in 1940. Nobody. Nobody cared about homelessness in San Francisco in 1940. Nobody cared about domestic spying, or bike lanes, or rent costs, or wildfires, or drug policy, or whatever. Things are more complicated now because there's more stuff going on. The systems in place are far more complicated.
We're pulled in so many directions these days. An institutional bureaucracy is like a big ship in the harbor, and elected politicians/constituent opinions are like the tugboats pulling it out towards the open ocean. But instead of one tugboat, there are like 3,000 tugboats that are all going in different directions, and different tugboats are disappearing and showing up all the time.
Look at how we've dealt with the existential threat of COVID as a nation. Divided, arguing, a thousand different opinions on what to do, zero coordination, zero guidance. It's all a mess.
I wish we could all sit down and come up with a plan for moving forward to build subways, I really, really wish we could because I'm absolutely sick of our public transit infrastructure. It's nowhere near what it should be. But I look around and I get it.
I wish I had a vision for how we could fix it and move forward, but I don't. I can barely wrap my head around the actual complexity of one issue, let along the bajillion I'm confronted with when I look around at all that needs fixing. Flip open the California voter guide this election. You can't with a straight face tell me you have any idea what the deal is with half that stuff in any meaningful level of detail.
I mean, we've had dysfunction and corruption for a long time as well.
I feel like we're going in circles, which I take as a personal failure, as I was hoping we would both reach some sort of a point of agreement in the middle.
Good talking to you though. Appreciate you taking the time to talk over the issue, and if we were in person I'd buy you a beer.
I think people's belief about 'government not needing true accountability' is one of civic mindset, and a kind of naivte to how inefficient things can truly get. The word 'incentives' triggers the socialist crowd with 'capitalist speak'.
I for one value good governance, and I don't think it's all about incentives, but that's definitely part of the issue and we don't have any popular measurable accountability for the bureaucracy.
I don't get how articles like these get reposted so often - this article is from 2019, for god's sake. If you're interested in the state of the city budget, Covid-19 combined with the passage of a year means that you really need to double-check everything in this article, so at best, it's a waste of time. At worst, you're being pushed toward a very biased, incomplete view of things - I'm not saying every article published by a "think tank" is factually wrong, but ignoring such articles is a handy lifehack.
Lived and worked in San Francisco for over 25 years. The last decade I lived in the East Bay, we wanted to buy property and felt the most financially responsible place was there.
We left in 2018.
Having lived there for so long I thought I had seen everything. There was always an atmosphere of drugs in the air, homeless people, crazies on the street... but San Francisco was the city I had grown to love and you took the good with the bad.
I'm not exactly sure when it started but you kind of iterate here and there and somehow we got to the point that is just wasn't safe any longer. I had to walk that line at Civic Center BART at 6:30am and there was nothing but bad things happening on either side of you. Needles all over the street. EVERYWHERE. People on the street bend over for half hour at a time high on heroine or fentanyl or whatever. Anyway, you've all seen it... it became too much for even a pretty forgivable long term resident to put up with and we ended up in Austin. Well, outside Austin in the suburbs (our equivalent of the East Bay I guess). FWIW Austin is starting to head in the same direction so we chose to stay outside of Travis County, but that's just me having felt burnt once and not caring to have it happen again. Anyways, digressing...
Most people live in San Francisco because there is a lot of fun stuff to do (not the case right now) and there are tons of job in tech (these are all starting to leave, or go remote first anyway). So there's no real reason to live in San Francisco any longer. Not right now anyway.
So given the dynamic of more crime (due to lack of prosecution), more homeless because the City allows tents everywhere, less workforce from companies going remote, less income from sales tax, less income from commercial real estate, and a rental market that's crashing... Well, it's not looking great, now is it.
There's another crisis that will hit after this, and that's the real estate market. All of these variables will play into that, and if they don't turn it around real soon it's going to be apocalyptic. The good news, that's not happening yet.
https://www.bayareamarketreports.com/trend/san-francisco-hom...
I'm not saying I'm an expert or anything, but you look around and you have to wonder how long that will be the case.
Best of luck, San Francisco. You're going to need it.
I recently ran some online quotes from Uhaul for a moving truck from SF to Austin and it rang in at like roughly $4000. Going the opposite direction, $1000.
It seems all too frequent that this is the outcome of many things in the US. Like universities and healthcare. More and more money becomes less and less effective. When there's so much demand and so little supply, it seems the suppliers of things (e.g. effective governing) care lesser the more it's demanded.
I do agree that the political leadership has squandered a fortune, but if there is a root cause, it ultimately comes down to the voters. It is the voters who repeatedly vote for the same leaders who implement the same policies emphasizing the same values with the same outcomes over and over. And when confronted with those problems, the response from voters is to shame dissenting voices for a lack of empathy instead of recognizing the reality around them and applying common sense.
I could go on, but if I had to pick a few basic things that are broken and need attention:
- Unequal enforcement of the law. Residents who follow the rules and care about their city are subject to the law. If they break the law, for instance by littering or not paying for parking or not being properly permitted for something, they'll be subject to fines or other penalties. But drug addicted homeless vagrants can break every last law with impunity, and face no consequence for it.
- Incredible bloat in governance, with massive public agencies that are really just job creation schemes for those who are looking to lazily coast through a 'career'. We see the same issue at the state level in California.
- Woke politics that focuses on pandering to a few loud activists over serving tax paying residents. The city's leaders are willing to devote time, energy, and resources to social justice causes disproportionately, at the expense of other real problems the city faces. This is because of politicians' own personal political biases but also because the voters incentivize them this way by voting based on alignment to a far left progressive agenda instead of goals and results.
- Lack of accountability. SF spends hundreds of millions a year on the 'homelessness crisis' and has nothing to show for it. Those breaking the law are released back on the streets and the lack of law enforcement only incentivizes more drug addicted nomads to pour in. No ones seems to talk about tracking the effectiveness of spending with metrics and goals.
- A lack of diversity. Yes SF has people of many racial backgrounds. But they're welcome only if their true culture and religion is the SF progressive political culture. Diversity is very literally skin-deep in SF, and there is almost no diversity of thought. This reflects in the city's politics - SF (also CA) is a one-party state and of course, it displays all the classic problems of a one-party state. The city has become so hostile to any differing views that there's no one left who's willing to actually take a stand.
The saddest part of all this is that as California and San Francisco bleed residents to other locations, those voters seem to be bringing their same values/politics to those new locations, causing those places to also deteriorate, instead of retrospecting and realizing that they are recreating the very problems they are fleeing from. To me, this is a form of deep arrogance - the inability to learn from the culture of the place they move to, and the blind faith in their own cultural superiority. Unfortunately many formerly beautiful and well-managed cities like Portland, Austin, Denver, and Seattle are starting to show the same problems SF faces - they just seem to be lagging SF by a few years as their local politics gets taken over by SF/CA transplants.
> The city employs 31,830 people, one for every 28 residents and six employees for every city block.
You see, you and I know such a large public workforce is a problem and a burden on private citizens, but the San Francisco government views a large public workforce as an important goal.
The reason San Francisco is in bad shape is because the bureaucrats who run it actually think it’s in good shape.
before the pandemic, the city doubled in size every day to 1.6m folks, during working hours which would reduce the ratio by 1/2
The city also includes the airport, which alone employs a mix of 30k public and non public workers.
Finally, SF is unique in that is both a city and a county, so all of the sherifs/jail workers/county transit workers are employed by the city itself, which inflates numbers relative to other cities.
I do not know what the true number of residents per public worker is, but my point is that the numbers are a lot more complicated than what you present here.
It is in California. Of the 58 counties, San Francisco is the only consolidated City and County and has all the requisite overhead of both under California law.
There are no borders and nothing stopping people from moving their tax base down to the Peninsula (where the weather is better, schools are great and no one shits on your doorstep).
Good luck sf, you'll need it.