- Homeless issues. Mentally ill people pissing and defecating on the sidewalks in every significant public space.
- Vehicle vandalism is extremely common and unchecked by police.
- Extremely high income taxes with no perceivable difference in government-provided services.
- Property tax law that advantages long-term owners over young people trying to buy at today's inflated prices.
COVID added some new ones:
- Extremely high pre-COVID rents meant many adults were living in roommate situations that seem a lot less acceptable when your health is tied to the willingness of everyone in your unit to behave responsibly.
- Bars and restaurants that made the city attractive for many are now closed
- Public transit in crisis and may no longer meet your needs
I believe the problem is more nuanced. I spoke with a retired police officer, and he said, "we can only give them a citation, and they [the vandals] know that, that they're gonna be out the same day."
In other words, the law is the problem, not the police.
BINGO! Isn't there a really, really old saying about not crapping where you sleep?
The police prioritize protecting the property rights of large landowners, first and always. Don’t buy their excuses.
Even in Austin, Texas is a backwards, overtly racist, pro-big business anti-small business state that hates “freedom” unless it has to do with guns or corporate protections.
By the way, we have so many homeless because other republican heavy cities ship them here. Google ‘Haruka Weiser’ for a pretty normal example of a cop from a small town picking up a mentally unstable transient and dropping them off in downtown Austin a couple of blocks near the university.
I am glad to see that Austin has become more progressive in some ways, but being completely ineffectual in how we care for members of our community while enabling the worse consequences of untreated mental illness and homelessness isn't something to be happy about. The key factor here is "untreated". There are some cities in the US that are actually working in a positive direction to help the homeless communities in their area to improve their lives, rather than just giving them a free pass out of doors.
Homelessness is a major problem all across America, and it's also a very complex problem. There are no easy fixes, but there are some obvious things which make the conditions and problem worse. It'd be great if there were easy fixes, but the reality is that it's very difficult to help people unless they want to be helped, and there's very real human rights considerations to forcing people into mental health or addiction treatments. Our country tried that at one point too, and it also didn't end well.
In fact the mental health insttutions system of the 70's and earlier was very successful from what I've read about. It was the victim of a mass campaign of what we today would call "fake news" from activists. The result is the crisis you have today, where people that NEED help, even if they are incapable of understanding and consenting to it, can't get it and are left to fend for themselves on the streets.
Once we do have the report, even if they do get caught, nothing happens. Many months of reports and multiple trips to the courthouse and we can MAYBE get a stay away order. Usually before that point, the store management has shuffled around enough that the person handling the legal legwork has moved on.
And to add to the roommate problem, I think a lot of people in sf led lives predicated on not spending that much time in their tiny housing. All of a sudden with everyone all home all the time... oof. You really need a separate office for each person so you're not spending 95% of your life in your bedroom. That's pretty unaffordable for most of the city.
My company bit the bullet and allowed permanent remote. Fifteen percent of our employees have already left sf. I suspect this will accelerate as leases expire.
Also, the stunning incompetence of sf government has led to property prices that are just stunning. A coworker bought a nice condo -- obviously elsewhere -- for less money than he was paying to have two roommates in sf. Getting out from under the ridiculous cost of living here leads to such a stark change in quality of life elsewhere.
By contrast, Seattle has been building to keep up with demand and has been able to manage prices much more effectively. We could have had a Tokyo of the West. Instead, we're left with an emptying shell of a self-agrandizing suburb.
(Full disclosure: I also own property in SF, but am in faor of all sorts of new housing, even that which will lower my home's value.)
Edit: Thanks for supporting housing even against your financial interests. I’m on the same boat (across the bay). In my case I just want to live somewhere walkable without breaking the bank.
Do you live in Seattle? Because that's not what anyone who lives here who is not making a tech salary thinks.
https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-seattle-rent-tren...
https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-san-francisco-ren...
Maybe I was too much on the dropping side but the article says prices had been booming like you said for a decade and 10k units were filled and then prices stabilized.
I'm not sure I'd call it incompetence though, they are very motivated to keep existing landowners happy. Higher prices and fewer neighbors to deal with is an easy way to do that.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/It-st...
"Ronen fought to prevent the construction of a 75-unit building on the site of a laundromat. She argued that an environmental review of the building did not consider the impact of a shadow on a nearby schoolyard, even though an environmental review conducted by officials at the San Francisco Planning Department showed that the new construction, including its shadow, would not have an adverse impact on children at the schoolyard.]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Ronen
Starting at 7:41 in this video an interview with the same supervisor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw8MACDZ3RI&t=547s
The tax breaks that she is referring to were roughly $10mm/year. https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report-state/twitter...
The city's budget increased by nearly $6bn during the time the tax breaks were active (largely fueled by the growth from tech boom).
Why would anyone vote for the incumbents in SF’s next elections is beyond me.
The current mayor London Breed has been doing good work, her handling of the covid-19 crisis in particular has been excellent. The problem is that most supervisors hate her and block her every step of the way.
I lived in Hayes Valley, across Warby Parker, last year and our electricity went out 3-4 times for the whole night. We paid our bills on time.
Who are the vandals? Why are they vandalizing? Are they related to the homeless problem?
Income/Property Taxes: Vote
Unless you're practically retired, this is not a real issue given the COVID mortality profile. The sort of people who have flatmates tend to be younger, so the idea that COVID means nobody can or should have flatmates anymore isn't backed by any sort of medical reality.
But there does seem to be an issue here with the type of people who live in SF not seeming to perceive the risks around COVID correctly. Why is Google keeping their offices closed until 2021? All you have to do is look at the stats or the history of epidemics to realise that this doesn't make sense, especially for a workforce as famously young as Google's.
But establishing an impregnable firewall is impossible, and long as the boundary between groups is porous, a higher infection rate among the young and healthy will increase the infection rate among the vulnerable, and hence the death rate.
It certainly is if you are one of those odd individuals whose concern for your health involves more than just near-term mortality.
Because of the mild weather and culture, SF is somewhat of a destination for the homeless which is less of an issue, but it wasn’t clear that the city was doing nearly enough to address the filth and human tragedy plaguing the streets.
It is also so expensive that bars and restaurants (before covid) had a hard time hiring because working at an SF restaurant meant either living in squalor packed in somewhere or living extremely far away and commuting. Thus everything opened late and closed early. The food scene was overrated, most of the artists left for the east bay or LA, and the charming things about the city seemed like they were only still there because of fantasy or stubborn inertia.
Other cities have room and willingness to build or the courage to restrict business growth if not willing to expand residential growth. People and businesses are much more willing to leave other cities, and that supply/demand elasticity makes problems fix themselves, but other cities don’t have the romanticism/reality disconnect in nearly the same way.
They haven't. But other cities have handled some quality of life issues differently, or better, or in some cases worse.
It's all cyclical. New York was a great place to be in the 60's, largely due to quality of life. New York in the 70's was a hellhole, largely due to quality of life. These things ebb and flow in every city. It's just SFO's turn to be on the fuzzy end of the lollipop. It'll come back.
I was active in SF housing politics when I lived there for 8 years, and my conclusion is that SF and most other US cities incompetent local governments (SF’s especially) are stuck in a mindset where they still repeatedly declare that they’re “great!” despite their blatantly subpar infrastructure and the rampant, systematic trampling of their own citizens human rights. Perhaps it is great for the elderly voters who never leave their homes in the burbs and see the “undesirables”.
They make excuses about how US culture makes tried and true solutions in other cities impossible to implement (So... are they saying US culture is just inferior?), and that things will get better just around the corner (when it costs 10x more and takes 10x longer to make any updates to the built infrastructure in US cities than anywhere else, and SF itself has built virtually nothing in the last 40 years).
Maybe it will, but I decided for myself that I’m not willing to wait around for it, and chose one of the countless cities in the world that in fact does do better.
Hong Kong was (probably still is for now) a world class city for the rich and the free and now is on path to become a hell-hole for both.
Cities swing through a pendulum of up and down. SF might be going to ruins but it'll be back. It might have to reach rock-bottom first before re-inventing itself though.
That said, the city does not have visible homeless or crime problems of most large US cities, partly because you can legally get a coffin for $300/month.
Why not? Are there support systems to give people shelter and reduce the need for crimes of desperation?
> Tokyo could be the rare example of a once expensive city that successfully managed the difficult political process of removing planning restrictions in order to achieve affordable housing.
They didn't achieve affordable housing as a result of a clean slate. In fact housing in Tokyo was insanely expensive during the 80s. It wasn't until zoning restrictions were changed in the 90s that prices came back down. It's about the laws, not about having to contend with old buildings.
I don't know what your profession or situation is, but if you can line up a job you can pretty easily get a work visa (it's much less binding than US work visas). Japanese corporations are known to have pretty brutal work culture so that's something you ought to be aware of when searching, if you seriously pursue it. Hope it's interesting food for thought :)
I have no doubt there are racists here, especially in the rural areas. But I also have no doubt that the same holds true for places like California and Washington. You may be keeping yourself from experiencing areas of the country that you may love and would love you back.
What about the fact that, nation-wide, many Americans don't have access to good jobs? Especially people without college degrees, but not even limited to that. This is an economy-wide problem. The federal government could probably do something to better address that than a city government.
How about that we generally fail at mental health care, or health care in general? The former is clearly applicable to many homeless folks who are visibly suffering. The latter is a huge cost for many people, drives many personal bankruptcies, etc.
But I also place a lot of blame on state policies too - CA Prop 13 is a cancer on the whole state, incentivizing land owners to fight tooth and nail to prevent progress. I'm glad that Scott Wiener got elected, though, as he's been making solid progress at the state level to rectify these issues.
The roots of these problems are not broadly federal in my opinion and, while they certainly can help, there's a lot of work to do at the city and state level that are achievable with a small number of dedicated people - if only they cared.
Neither would I just blame the sorry state of US cities on inadequate mental health care - while healthcare broadly certainly should be better, I'm in Japan where mental health awareness is relatively speaking in the stone age compared to SF, and that hasn't resulted in the level of human tragedy you experience viscerally by existing for 5 minutes in any of the US's major metropolises. Part of the reason for that is I can get my own apartment without roommates 15 minutes from the center of Tokyo for $600/mo, largely because the local government here actually does things to make it livable (and it's not just here, it's practically everywhere besides US cities).
Allowing construction will alleviate pressure on the system as a whole, but, perhaps due to a failure of my imagination, I'm not seeing ways in which it won't cost something. I think it's worth it, mind you, I'm just not seeing how to make it $0.
In 2020 SF, even the upper middle class struggle to pay for housing. If you, as a first step, allow the housing stock to double, twice as many people can afford to live in the city, and life in SF becomes much more accessible.
Sure, there will always be people out of luck needing some assistance. But it should dwindle down to a smaller core when there are places to live.
Personally, I don't believe in government run housing. It's better to help people with rent money etc. But of course, none of this will ever happen in SF, so my opinions don't matter.
Did your plane ride involve time travel to the 1970's?
With unemployment rising and poor benefits, civil unrest, and shitty containment policies; I’m thinking about riding the rest of this out back in Canada so we don’t get robbed/assaulted.
Better come home quick. Canada is getting more than a little afraid of how badly the US is handling the covid thing. Politeness only goes so far.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53742684
"While the border closure has had significant economic and personal repercussions for the millions of people that live along it or have loved ones on the other side, the vast majority of Canadians want it to stay shut."
Remember when trump spoke of closing off new york state? Canada has actually done something similar.
https://www.gov.nl.ca/covid-19/individuals-and-households/tr...
>>When entering Newfoundland and Labrador, visitors will be required to produce two pieces of government issued identification to verify that they are a permanent resident in one of the Atlantic Provinces. One piece of identification must include a home address.
Not as much as it was. De Blasio has been an unmitigated disaster, and NYC is rapidly approaching 90s-level (if not 70s-level) squalor. Only time will tell if the voters will throw him out and elect someone who can effectively manage the city government, or double down on failure.
That's true in other cities too. But if you can't take advantage of the facilities a city has to offer, why pay $4,000/month rent to live there during the pandemic when you could pay less than half of that somewhere else?
What are these quality of life issues, and how have other cities avoided them?