> But San Francisco’s problems go far beyond drugs. The Bay Area is home to four of the 10 most valuable companies in the world — Apple, Alphabet, Nvidia and Meta — titanic producers of wealth, but a staggering one per cent of the city’s population is homeless, compared to less than 0.2 per cent across the US.
Nice try, but this isn't as big as a problem outside of SF and Oakland. Other cities have a semblance of order and while there are still people outside they are not out of control and they seem to be in a relatively normal state of mind. The main question for me is will anybody be held accountable for this at all.
The size of the visible homeless population in a city is mostly determined by the cost of housing and how cold it gets in the winter. SF is basically a worst case scenario of being insanely expensive but also warm enough that they don't feel an obligation to build shelters so people aren't freezing to death. People are homeless because it's too expensive to live, not because we're not punishing them harshly enough for being poor.
How much would housing have to fall, for a homeless person to get themselves a 1br? 75%? Are there really people on the streets because they had a spare $1000 a month, but couldn't find anything, so they said screw it I'll shoot up heroine from a tent instead?
A home Depot shed isn't crazy. Just need a communal bathroom area and honestly that's about what most houses were like for most people just a century ago.
I think it’s fine but having sufficient separation from other sheds is hard because a lot of people are smoking and cooking meth/lith so fires are happening a lot.
We have a natural experiment going on just 50 miles to the south, in San Jose. New mayor Matt Mahan won by promising "pragmatic" solutions to homelessness, including building very cheap housing for them, and putting them to work cleaning up the city
Compared to homelessness, a park of refurbished naval cargo containers with common bathrooms/kitchens would be livable, plus steel containers are really hard to destroy.
Look at it this way, there are definitely people homeless because it's not possible to afford somewhere to live on the wages they can earn. It's also really hard to keep a job when you're living out of your car. People in a situation like that often give up, or experience depression that they try to self-medicate using addictive substances.
Who decides to be homeless instead of getting a room in Tracy CA and driving?
Or just renting a room in Tracy CA for $500 and working any menial job in town?
There are two distinct sets of homeless people: the ones passing through a homeless phase (many car-inhabitants in this group; shower at the gym; they work); and those with substance and/or (usually ‘and’) mental health issues (the ones you see everywhere in SF).
The first group gets through it, finds a job or a $20 greyhound fare to somewhere they have family, or where they can afford a home on what they can earn. The second group is stuck.
Treating these as though they are a homogenous group is super pointless. For one thing, the systems in place do support the first category and make it possible for them to escape homelessness. The second group — I’ll just say this: it’s not uncommon for Hollywood celebrities, who have access to infinite money and the most people who care intensely about them to help them get into rehab, to have massive substance and MH problems, and to OD or die by suicide. If they can’t even be helped, what amount of money and skilled intervention will cure every meth addict on the SF streets plus the new ones who arrive every day? (Without violating their civil rights by forcing them to get treatment)
Can anyone explain to me why a nice rich suburb will not even allow a panhandler to stand in a center divide at an intersection, but SF basically allows open air drug use?
Is it just a matter of scale? You can stop 1 panhandler, but if you had 100 people to stop you couldnt?
If that's the case, once problems reach critical mass, is there any going back?
> “Five years ago, it wasn’t like this,” he says about the people openly using drugs around us on Market Street, just outside the Urban Alchemy headquarters, where he sells souvenir photographs of local liquor stores. “Five years ago, a black guy with a pipe got arrested; now the police walk past a white guy with a needle in his arm,” he says.
So, as of the past 5-10 years there are these really progressive district attorneys who really do not like to prosecute people. I'm not going to say who generally funds their campaigns, because I'm tired of being downvoted, but you can find out pretty easily.
The US is hyper-polarized. There are crazies on both sides.
The bigger the city, the more political processes select for crazies. In a village of 100 people (1) more people are involved, since individual influence is felt (2) there are fewer crazies, since you can only go 2-3 std. div. out.
In a bigger city, (1) fewer people follow politics, since there's no direct influence on their lives; civics is dominated by crazies. (2) The absolute number of crazies is higher. If you have 100,000 people, just by statistics, the craziest crazies will be crazier.
Having a small number of very bad crazies can ruin civics, since they often operate outside of civic processes. If just one person is willing to tarnish your reputation, smash your windows, or send a death threat, that can have a chilling effect.
The worst cities in the US are near-100% blue or near-100% red, since there's no moderating factor.
Transient cities also tend to be worse (where a lot of the population don't expect to keep living there in five years), since no one cares about civics. SF is the sort of place people most people move out from when they decide to start a family.
SF is close to a million people, VERY blue, and that leads to extremist politics.
Note: I'm extrapolating from what I see with cities where I live, as well as accounts from SF. I don't have first-hand experience there. But I think there are a lot of reasons why SF politics might get particularly broken.
San Francisco will simply become the new Detroit. It will still exist, some headquarters will still exist but the city proper will be the butt of a bad joke for a long time. Folks will live in nice suburbs and be forced to commute while the city core rots.
Considering Detroit once held the record for patents filed, this isn’t all too far fetched. Maybe there is some type of awful natural law to be found even?
Detroit has a bright future ahead of it. All the evidence suggests that it hit bottom a while ago and is rebounding. People really should visit and see first hand (in the summer, if the weather is that important to you).
I couldn't disagree more - if the weather is important to you, visit any time but the summer. Preferably the fall or spring, but winter is okay if you're prepared for it (it just goes on way too long).
(I have little experience of Detroit proper, but I assume the weather is sufficiently similar to Lansing and A2)
> Maybe there is some type of awful natural law to be found even?
Maybe. You've got two examples so far. Can you go even further back? Which cities were industrial hubs prior to Silicon Valley and Detroit, and what became of them?
Mill towns from the industrial revolution come to mind. Factories and boarding houses created such thriving industry that towns literally spawned around them, but within decades they transformed into abandoned buildings in towns devoid of any economic opportunity.
San Francisco and Los Angeles could be the worst-run cities in the US (and spoiler, they’re not— as someone who has lived / still lives in both these cities and in red cities and in suburbs or towns), and they will still be desirable to live in.
People forget what drew (and to a lesser extent, still draws, despite the valid complaints) people to California is the weather and climate, the nature, the mountains, the desert, and the ocean. It’s objectively one of the most gorgeous and geographically diverse states (and I don’t say that lightly, as a Texan myself).
There will be a devastating earthquake here sooner than later, but after what I imagine will be a particularly devastating 3-5 year initial adjustment period where certain segments of the media will be jumping at the bit to say “California is dead” (remember NYC and Covid?), I have no doubt people will be flocking back in greater numbers than left, likely looking to buy at a significant discount before prices inevitably shoot up again.
Because, despite it all— People want to live here.
Look at Santa Barbara, for example— it has almost no corporate presence yet some of the most expensive real estate in the state and nation. Yet it’s not a summer destination like the Hamptons, but a year-round thriving city. That’s not an accident, but because Santa Barbara is situated on one of the most beautiful coastal inlets on one of the world’s most desirable coasts, georgraphically and weather-wise.
It's true. If you've only ever lived on flat terrain in crappy weather, you can't know what it's like to get used to nice weather with mountains on the horizon.
Nowadays, whenever I see on TV streets lined with dirty slush piles and gray skies above, I think with a shudder, "Thank God I don't live in that anymore."
I still remember when I moved from Cleveland, Ohio to San Jose, California. I moved in the winter. I had an grapefruit tree in my front yard at my first boarding house. It dropped decent grapefruits. My second boarding house had an orange tree in the backyard. They were delicious; more than we could eat in a season. And the first winter, weeks and weeks went by with no clouds in the sky. I remember calling my relatives, standing outside in my backyard, telling them about the weather. Crystal clear blue skies. That winter re-wired my brain. The weather is so sh-tty in Cleveland... Good weather changed my life.
San Francisco's problems are the predictable result of inequality that's completely out of control. All US cities suffer the same problems as SF, and the only difference between them is a matter of degree.
The wealthy and powerful that created this problem would like to solve it while simultaneously continuing to exasperate it. It doesn’t take a genius to see that this will never work. At best, a temporary, politically palatable status quo can be achieved which is basically what US cities which are considered functional have.
San Francisco may recover or it might become the next Detroit. To some extent it doesn’t matter because without fundamental systemic changes it’s only a matter of time before the next city suffers the same fate.
I still haven't seen or heard anything that would lead me to believe there's anyone choosing to be soft on crime, I know there's tons of back and forth on this but it just rings as people idly speculating to me. Only useful info I've found is people on both sides of the divide decrying police won't take reports for car breakins/thefts[^1^], and response times are high
[^1^] the latest set piece I saw with this was fascinating, two people victim of same crime, drawing two opposite conclusions from lack of interest in taking a report, both only from injecting ideology
I looked there and I looked at my city. My city has worse statistics than SF, but it doesn't have as many liberals so it doesn't work as well in a scare narrative. I wouldn't consider my city anywhere close to a dystopian hellscape as some depict SF, and they certainly aren't soft on crime here.
Go read about the echo park protests from a few years ago.
Not only are a very vocal progressive lot of people in socal being soft on crime, they're protecting the unhoused rights to commit crime. Ostensibly this is human rights in action, but I believe it's helping the well off feel better about nimbyism by telling others how dare they kick homeless out of their neighborhoods (because dear God they may come here)
I can't think of an acronym I dislike more than NIMBYism. By its own nature, it posits the alternative as being outright for anything is a better option.
Meh. The Loma Prieta in '89 got rid of most of the crappy infrastructure. Sure, landfill zones like the Marina are going to liquefy again, and the Millennium Tower may topple (hitting a mostly empty Salesforce Tower) but 34 years of retrofitting has made SF a much safer city than back in the 80's.
New York City not only pulled out of the death spiral but came out of it 100x stronger than before. Most people don't remember when Times Square used to be a warren of brothels and drug dens, even though most of the people on HN were alive when the changeover happened.
L.A. pulled out of a decades-long spiral within the past 15 years (Skid Row notwithstanding), as developers took advantage of high demand and low/0% interest. Staples Center and Bottega Louie deserve a lot of the credit for that.
Cleveland did...eventually. It took decades of home-grown investment and federal tax dollars.
Washington D.C. did. Mostly. As with Cleveland, it took years, largely because Congress controls a lot of its budget and purse strings and it was convenient to use the Capitol as a punching bag.
Detroit is still in the process of pulling out of its decades-long spiral. It's no longer at rock bottom, but it's still got a long way to go.
It's hard to say whether SF is starting a doom spiral or just returning to its naturally seedy state. Only time will tell.
Looking at some Louis Rossmann videos, NYC is headed back to the dumpster. I hope they get out of it, I visited a few times 20 years ago and it was a nice place. The food was excellent.
While I agree NYC has problems, I'm going to guess Louis Rossmann wasn't alive in the 1970s and probably didn't remember the 80s very well either in NYC. It's nowhere near the dumpster it used to be.
If San Francisco is in a doom loop right now, what was it in back in the 60s-00s?
An ultra-hyper-mega-doomloop-of-death?
Hell in the 90s the violent crime rate routinely topped 1,800 per 100k. Today it is 1/3rd that.
I remember San Francisco in the 90s. Today's San Francisco is Disneyland compared to then.
My theory is that we are all suffering from collective cultural amnesia and have forgotten that the world existed prior to 2019 and thus have forgotten that while things go up and down year-to-year they have been getting better on the whole for decades.
You could tmsay the same about any number of social issues. Racism and sexism are all near all time lows, as are gun deaths - that didn't stop popular movements from springing up.
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