> The city notoriously gave tax breaks to large tech companies
The city notoriously set up large and complex taxes on tech companies in SF and then randomly and unpredictably granted breaks to the ones that had the best lobbying.
> accompanied by some weak rhetoric about supporting local communities
And billions of dollars sent into homeless slush funds for activists and nonprofits with no accountability for how the money was spent.
> skimmed until I found the part where the author was seriously suggesting dumping money on the problem, then I closed the article
“…if you were the state of California, and you were staring down a projected $22 billion budget deficit, would you invest your scarce resources in San Francisco, which has repeatedly proven itself unfit for such investments by building a vast, inefficient bureaucracy at the expense of taxpayers and vulnerable residents?
> I read most of the article, in which the author implies that defunding the police increases crime, and blames the people in charge of Oakland with this crime.
Yet I recalled hearing that police budgets in Oakland were steady to up this year, despite the protests. What did I miss?
You missed the part about people linking together statistics, that are not necessarily related in any meaningful way, into a BS narrative or story. This is commonplace on various Substacks that people write. Also, I especially tend to find this from people with formal economics backgrounds and training.
> Blaming this on lax social policy around arrests misses the point I think.
No.
I'm old enough to remember visiting SF in the late 90s. The city was overall clean and safe. Only a few vagrants. The parks were parks and not shantytowns.
Fast forward to today. None of this is true.
That blame lies squarely on city leadership and the policies they push regardless of outcome.
>they left cause SF was going too right wing for them.
No one has ever said this. No normal rational adult could possibly think SF was right wing.... this is some Overton window type of bias or something. I can't even think of anywhere the country more left wing than SF. NYC is certainly not more left wing than SF... People would be crying and protesting putting the National Guard in BART. NYC welcomed it.
>The people I know didn't leave because of some kind of "failed state" vibe though
Everyone I know moved out because SF got shitty. More crime, more open drug use like this https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTLka6qqp/ and less cops, less personal safety, less riders on BART so you don't even feel safety amongst the crowd. I tried moving to Burlingame for a year, but that was boring and outrageously expensive so I just moved out of the Bay Area altogether.
SF is 'trying' and isn't succeeding. Stop spending my unaccounted for tax dollars on this if it isn't going to solve the issue and is just going to make SF a mafia wife enabling the homeless.
Translation: Everyone else's anecdotes don't match mine so they've never 'actually' lived there and whoever disagrees with my anecdote is 'just right wing'.
I mean, you would have to refute the sources in some of the comments about the increasing crime in San Francisco then. [0] [1] [2] [3] If you think they are 'wrong' that is.
> First, the city is incredibly wealthy and has a massive budget ...
This is true at a surface level, but looking deeper at City services and obligations the situation is more complex than simply declaring numbers large. San Francisco also has a much larger population of immigrants from all over including other states.
> Second, and even worse, the people in charge including the mayor, the police leadership, and a majority of the Board of Supervisors (the legislative body for SF), really just don’t seem to care one bit about what’s happening. Sure, they will occasionally rant in public and promise to fix things ...
Don't seem to care apart from occasionally promising to fix things. This is classic San Francisco attitude. Difficult longstanding problems are clearly incompetence, disinterest, a conspiracy of corruption, or perhaps all of these. Records and meetings are typically fully public, but actually attending any of that is too much for a member of the public to bear. Maybe so, but then you also are skipping out on your responsibilities and potential to contribute to some kind of positive solution.
> In San Francisco the have-it-alls are now as busy purging the middle class as they are the remaining working class communities of color.
Uh huh.
I'm no fan of San Francisco and was quite happy to leave a number of years ago, but it seems to me the problem is one of housing supply, rather than some kind of vast conspiracy to rid the city of working class non-white people.
Who votes this kind of bullshit up, anyway?
Edit: there are real problems with poverty that are serious and very worthy of our attention, but this whole bizarre attempt to blame everything on people who happen to be making some money in that area just seems like so much horse shit to me.
> which is full of extraordinarily wealthy people paying enormous rents to live under a dysfunctional government with a budgetary shortfall of $6.3B.
The state has a large surplus and the City and County of San Francisco has a projected deficit of an order of magnitude less than that amount, and the US budget deficit is on the rough scale of two orders of magnitude larger. What dysfunctional government are you referring to?
> I really like Singapore, but it’s almost a single party police state.
SF is a single party city defunding the police. While they parallel Singapore in the single party system they are close to the opposite in nearly all other aspects and it shows. Both places are awash in money but one of them only seems to get worse the more money pours in. If I had to choose between the political system of San Francisco and that of Singapore I would choose the latter.
It is a good thing I do not have to choose though since I don't like either of those systems, it is just that watching the slow-motion train wreck of San Francisco (among others) being run into the ground by self-proclaimed saviours of humanity is so disheartening, especially seen in the light of the claims made by those who push these policies. They must know that they are destroying the place, they can not be so blindsided by ideology. This only leaves the possibility that they are so hell-bent on staying in power that they will do anything it takes, no matter the consequences. How they can rhyme this with their self-proclaimed virtuous goals is beyond me.
Consider why you think that it has, and whether you are also getting your information from an in-group that is primarily motivated by ideology and not reality. (Just a different one from the one you criticise)
Citation needed.
Seriously. NO ONE has been defunded anywhere in the country.
https://www.sfweekly.com/news/is-san-francisco-re-funding-th...
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