To great effect, mind you. SF County has the lowest rate of new cases per 100k of any major city in the country by a pretty significant margin [0].
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-c...
If you really care about public safety, you should pay attention to homelessness, drug addiction, and the problems in the streets! It's killing people 4x as fast as Covid, and yet nobody cares! This is exactly the problem that GP was talking about, and you come back with a smug "well our Covid rates are really low" comment.
You're ignoring the point by looking only at Covid. Look at the rest of the data. A city is more than its covid rate.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Tw...
> Older Black men living alone in residential hotels are dying at rates far higher than their portion of the city population. And yet most of us will see these statistics, think they’re a shame, and quickly move on.
> Even as [we] devote tremendous time and attention to quashing COVID-19, another public health epidemic that has killed far fewer San Franciscans. As of Saturday, that tally was 123.
> We’re a city that freaks out about a jogger running past without a mask, but doesn’t blink at someone injecting themselves in the neck on a Tenderloin sidewalk.
The article suggests the number was already growing at an alarming rate even before covid. While this is tragic, I'm not sure we can attribute these deaths solely to covid lockdowns.
It also behooves us to consider the practicality of public health measures. It's extremely easy for a californian mayor to tell people to stay home/wear masks and get a relatively high level of compliance. Getting people to stop using drugs is a much taller order.
And do WHAT, for them? What concrete thing are you supposed to DO?
No matter what YOU think is a solution, most of the homeless will refuse consent. Now what?
You can't just force a person into mental health or drug treatment without their consent unless they commit a crime or are an immediate danger to themselves.
Needle exchanges help. Methadone clinics help. And for the people who don't comply?
Most of the "homeless solutions" are effectively "move them somewhere else--preferably jail". That's really what people who want SF to "get control" of the homeless problem actually want.
Edit: Okay all you genius downvoters, let's hear your "solutions" for the SF homeless problem. I'm waiting with bated breath for your glorious insights ...
I have a theory that homelessness is an industry that employs tons of people who are unable to find work elsewhere. The homeless are the product.
Non profit org, public sector employees, donations, city employees, univ PhD researchers, grants etc...for every dollar, more than 60%(I will have to look up the exact number)..will go towards managing the homeless rather than aiding the homeless find a roof over their heads.
This might seem like a cynical way to view this but there is no reason why SF is spending in excess of 500 million dollars in ONE YEAR and still have homeless on the street.
There is literally zero incentive to solve homelessness. Now imagine the problem is resolved..how many people will be out of work? These are not drug addicts or mentally ill..they are educated and normal functioning people who need jobs..they need to be employed. Without a job, they will be unemployed and likely unhoused due to economic necessity.
Of course, people can migrate out of bay area. That would be the rational thing to do. Millions of immigrants do this every single day. But Americans won’t travel coast to coast in the worlds most boring homogeneous country where any freeway or Walmart or mcD in CA is no diff than in NH if economic survival and upward mobility is the imperative.
That’s my 2c anyways.
Since the US isn't an island, anytime SF loosens up, CV will immediately spike anyway, so no real advantage gained.
You end up creating a backlash.
If the vaccines live up to their advance billing some small number of lives will be saved, but it is very unclear whether, in the long run, more lives will be lost to the costs of a severe lockdown than saved by it.
I have yet to see data that shows any evidence of this theory. If you are aware of any existing data that points to this conclusion, I'd love to see it.
Worldwide poverty and deferred healthcare for vaccines and cancer screenings will have a decade the rack up an order of magnitude more deaths than will ever be directly attributed to COVID.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/health/coronavirus-childh...
"CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommend every child continues to receive routine vaccinations during the COVID-19 outbreak." [0]
Personally, I'm hoping vaccinations against COVID are what ends the pandemic.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents/visit/vaccination-durin....
Edit: Okay so maybe I skipped to the punchline. Just trying to say politics influences data or lack of data.
Yeah. But this idea breaks down as soon as one needs to leave the house for basic necessities. In that case, you would be much better off in a community which takes the issue seriously.
> more lives will be lost to the costs of a severe lockdown than saved by it
Not many lives should be lost by lockdowns, if at all. Perhaps if this issue wasn't so politicized, governments could intervene (and some have, in Europe) to help those in need.
The US is running at an average 1500 deaths a day now.
We lost about 132 deaths per day from suicide in 2019. Even if that doubles, that leave a lot of room for additional deaths due to deferred medical care. The numbers just don't add up.
April, May, and June had around 10% excess YLL. July and August had 17.5% excess YLL.
https://healthcostinstitute.org/hcci-research/the-impact-of-...
The data I've seen on suicides is cautiously optimistic in many places.
"Nevertheless, a reasonably consistent picture is beginning to emerge from high income countries. Reports suggest either no rise in suicide rates (Massachusetts, USA11; Victoria, Australia13; England14) or a fall (Japan,9 Norway15) in the early months of the pandemic. The picture is much less clear in low income countries, where the safety nets available in better resourced settings may be lacking. News reports of police data from Nepal suggest a rise in suicides,12 whereas an analysis of data from Peru suggests the opposite.10"
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4352
There is good data saying that people have delayed medical care (including me), but I can't find anything about detailed results.
On the other hand, if you are trying to distinguish COVID from the effects of trying to control it, I would like to point out that none of the "lockdown" restrictions have restricted access to medical care. That is either a personal choice or a consequence of overwhelmed facilities.
https://youtu.be/bzh6HwN0gbw?t=398
Better yet, watch the whole thing. And check the public numbers.
Stop spreading misinformation.
See for yourself at https://thecovidcomplex.com/state/california/san%20francisco...
Full disclosure, I built this website. Data is sourced from the New York Times. It’s the same dataset they use to power the interactive map that was linked. And I just discovered I have an error sharing links to counties with spaces. Go figure lol
Edit: 4 minutes since posting and a downvote. At least explain yourself.
I disagree with the statement that the number is meaningless. Media outlets are free to singularly report the number of positive cases. I see it all over mainstream media (CNN being the worst offender), Twitter, etc.
What's the issue with simply reversing that metric to show many people are COVID negative?
Final note, I'm happy to make updates based on additional data but public datasets are slim pickings. And I'm not in to tapping individual state/county datasets.
NYT publishes daily case counts and death counts across the United States by county.
edit: COVID negative is unequivocally the incorrect term to use. That was a mental mistake on my part. The specific term I use is “did not get a positive COVID test”.
One shows the minimum scale of the problem - if it's big, that's a problem, even if it's no bigger than the value reported. E.g. if 10% tested positive, that'd be unambiguously worrying / news-worthy.
The other shows the maximum awareness of a problem. If it's big, you have no idea if awareness is low (many neutrals) or if incidence is low (many negatives). Everyone in SF could have COVID, and that 99.798% number could still be factually correct. Or it could be that only those .202% got it. There's no way to know from that number alone.
Second, the number of positive cases is an affirmative result from people that have taken, and failed, covid tests. Your metric takes people who have never taken a test and lumps them into "COVID negative," which is pretty self-evidently extremely misleading.
True, but the statistic is still useful with respect to comparisons to other locations in the country under the same reporting constraints.
> What's the issue with simply reversing that metric to show many people are COVID negative?
I need to do better.
I contend that if you are not taking a test it’s because you didn’t need a test.
It’s also misleading to report only case positivity. Some areas of the country allow only people who have active symptoms to get a test thereby skewing the results.
I understand this is your site and you built it, and it's hard to let that go. But, I would implore you to rethink it until you get the data needed to add real insights to the conversations, not misleading stats based on what you have now.
Another reason you might not take a test is that you don't know you need it.
Asymptotic transmission is real (per the CDC) so I’ll accept that as fact. Ultimately if you view yourself as a high risk then it should be a personal responsibility to protect yourself. I believe my family and I to be low risk - citizens should be free to decide their tolerance for risk and act accordingly. Other families across the country and world have similar feelings about health.
I’m frustrated watching small business owners get crushed, bad their employees lose their livelihood.
There is significant damage being done with shutdowns and lockdowns that is with great chance worse than this disease itself.
But I think your point is strong enough to be presented without exaggeration or misleading.
We can't make claims about how much of the population at large is healthy because we don't actually know who is healthy and who is covid-positive/infectious/asymptomatic (and this is precisely why there are indiscriminate mask mandates in SF and elsewhere)
"Simply reversing" that metric gets a number that mostly shows how many people have not been tested within 14 days and thus noone has any idea on their COVID status. It's negligent to imply that this means that they are or would be negative.
Furthermore, even the original data point seems not literally true - this is based on net new cases, which would exclude people who became a net new case 15 or more days ago but actually have received a positive test recently because they are, for example, in the hospital right now and have gotten a repeated test that shows that they are still positive.
I would argue that making factually true statements for which the obvious implication actually is not true is inappropriate - and if it's not by mistake (as it seems out of your other comments) then it's intentionally misleading and should be downvoted.
On your site, El Paso is still at around 98% negative tests, which makes it appear like everything is under control when in reality the hospitals were mostly overrun and had to send patients outside of the county.
There are three groups. Positive, negative, and untested. The untested group is the biggest, and you can't call them COVID negative, because there's really no reason. They're not (yet) either positive or negative.
No where on thecovidcomplex.com do I use the term "COVID negative".
I applaud people who want to confirm what I have provided. All data is available on the page and I’ve provided links to all sources.
The number of bad "SF's gonna die!" takes on HN/twitter is so absurd I now read them with a "So bad it's good" type mindset. The number of times WSJ opinions alone have declared California dead is probably 20+.
The thing that will stop the oft remarked upon "death spiral" is, ahem, the fucking CA housing market. Where there are fluctuations in expensive asset prices, people see opportunity. If housing prices in SF drop by 5%, it's not like all the wealthy individuals who can buy just sit on the sidelines. Younger people with lesser means see opportunities to get rent control at a decent price etc. I'm looking forward to retractions of all these level zero takes when rent prices spike in July.
This is of course nothing new, for instance NY has gone through many ups and downs of its own and all along many in the media claimed "NY is dying!"
Where I first heard the idea that CA will collapse because "everyone is moving to NV to avoid CA taxes" was the WSJ...thirty years ago. I see that CA is still there, and far more populated than it was 30 years ago. A stopped clock might be right twice a day, but I'll be dead before the WSJ (or anyone) finally strikes gold with their "everyone is leaving CA" prediction.
It's like predicting that a ship is going to hit an iceberg if and only if the pilot doesn't/can't/won't change course in time.
Attacking these predictions with "haha weren't they stupid" is about as helpful as attacking various failed climate predictions which have been forestalled by environmental policy changes and technological advances, among other course corrections.
In reality it takes much longer than 30 years to topple empires as large as California (or the Bay Area) and it will often appear externally healthy right before the crash. Afterward we all know the drill where politicians will claim that "no one could have seen it coming", it was just an unlucky confluence of events and there was really nothing they could have done to prevent it.
[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/159953/will-wall-street-jour...
I suspect that the days of SaaS and pure web or mobile app developers are numbered. That field is increasingly getting commoditized.
This comment is a great example of the SV bubble mindset. The Midwest, Northeast and gulf coast have far better existing infrastructure and workforces if your goal is to create products that have a physical existence in excess of what it takes to represent ones and zeros.
I'll be the first to tell you that I'll vote for any despot who promises to screw the people of Boston but even I have to admit that if your goal is to do some BioMed thing the existing industry there is far better poised to take advantage of it than SV is. The Gulf coast is where you go if you want to do things with chemicals. The eastern midwest is where you go for heavy industry type manufacturing. Specialty composites, aerospace, electronics manufacturing capability is sprinkled throughout the area east of the Mississippi (though sprinkled less densely in the more agricultural parts of the south and midwest).
It's just laughable that you think that SV, a place that's spent decades driving out anything that doesn't have tech-size margins, has the existing workforce and infrastructure to compete against the places that already have these industries.
Silicon Valley is really good at 3 things:
1.) Eating our old.
2.) Replacing humans with computers.
3.) Thinking we know better than everyone else.
Makes us kind of insufferable, but that's precisely the mindset you need when your goal is to replace large segments of the economy with machines and take all the spoils for yourself (and your co-conspirators). If you're going to play nice and respect established wisdom, you'll never even bother embarking on such a project. SV's greatest strength is the large number of people who can be convinced to apply their technical knowledge to a project that sounds crazy and doesn't exist yet.
Weather. Creativity blooms when you don’t have little nitpicks stealing your time. Winter snow takes a huge toll on productivity. Not to mention the time suck of travel time, salted roads, leaking roofs, heating costs.
And I can tell you exactly how it works..because I farm, this is my religion. 8 months of three glorious seasons without a single drop of rain AND no drought. It’s a miracle. In the farming universe, this is heaven. This is why CA is the golden state.
While many do complain about the cost of living in California, it is high only because we subsidize a very fat chunk of people who can’t afford to live in the golden state. Our population is 40 million. (For comparison Canada is 20..NZ is 5, Sweden is 10, India is 1300 China is 1400)
A very small percentage of California takes care of almost most of the service sector and public sector and pensions and public school system through property taxes. It is the high cost of living here that ploughs money back into the economy to create capital and more businesses and more building and new roads.
A city prospers when it has economic churn. We did it for the region and to a less impressive extent, for the whole state. When everything is still and stable, there will be no economic prosperity. This is the basis for why capitalism works to rise millions out of poverty. Even in quasi non capitalistic economies.it is the difference between Russia and China.
Winter freezes all churn. We all know how much sunlight has an effect on humans and productivity. With both physical and mental activities. This is nothing to sneeze at..
Back to California, when the supported 99% has been encouraged to be spiteful and ungrateful to the golden goose of tech SV that was the 1%, the downside of this is going to be painful to watch. All the public school socialism taught by unionized teachers to weaponise entire generations is going to backfire.
The majority of the creme de la creme of SV were mostly educated OUTSIDE of California public education system. What does that tell us? I wish someone would do a study of that at UC. California SV benefitted from reverse brain drain. What does it say about our public school system? When kids are talking about privilege and colonization, that’s fine. I guess that’s an education too. But that is not going to pay the unfunded pension liabilities of their teachers’ Union.
California has been conspired against and murdered. This demise will be longer lasting than most.
Covid will end and the majority of employers will want you back in the office at least some or most of the time.
The only reason employers are okay with full remote right now is because of legal liability.
Sure, there are full remote culture employers but they are in the minority.
If bandwidth was the only issue then you’d have seen Silicon Valley spread to smaller/cheaper American cities a long time ago. In reality the network effects of industry hubs are significant and they exist throughout the world.
Saying that Silicon Valley tech is gonna pack their bags and dip out of town is kind of like saying the Ohio State Agricultural Science program is going to move its campus to New York City to attract more students.
Pinterest paid big money to break its lease to move out of SF, Stripe is moving out, Charles Schwab and McKesson, and Bechtel also moved their HQ out of SF and CA in general.
These moves were all done pre-covid but as a bay area resident the past year has been horrible like none other, fires raging all summer and toxic smoke, pg&e shutting off the power all the time, crime is really, really bad. I had stuff stolen from my house, a first of living an entire lifetime in the bay area.
Back to the bad takes: from what I've read the takes are all from people who moved out of the Bay. Some people come here, start their careers, then have the luxury of leaving and working from wherever. That's great, but there will always be a batch of new grads looking for work and honestly the concentration there is so high they could lose 20% of the companies by market cap and this would still be the place to start out, along with a few other large metros. Just because you leave doesn't mean the city stops.
Actually violent crime is at an all-time low. See this article about homicides for example: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/With-41-killings-i...
It looks like you were thinking of property crime, but I wonder what the statistics say about that, too.
The same could be said of Detroit. Until the 1960s, it was unquestionably the fastest booming major metro in the US. But at one point or another, the "price discount of a lifetime" just becomes an attempt to catch a falling knife.
Edit: clarification/wording
But the quality of life in the city is in death spiral. A lot more crime and a lot more homeless and infrastructure is in disarray
SF is in a resource curse situation right now. The coming winter will kill the parasitic insects in government off. Few elected governments have the incentives to set up a 'sovereign wealth fund' equivalent because the ones who use it will be seen as heroes and the ones who fund it as villains. So just as the winter helps temperate climate countries survive insect hordes, shocks like this help societies survive their bureaucrats.
A good argument could be made that it makes sense to leave people's money to them, but for gold rush states the right thing to do is to extract some rent from transient visitors into a longer term program so that it can weather shocks. If they have the incentives to protect the wealth fund.
No CA or SF program can do that, however, since there is a hedonic sink in the shape of CalPERS. Any money you save, CalPERS will eat. And CalPERS will grow whether you feed it or not. And now that CalPERS is big enough, you don't get to choose whether to feed it. CalPERS will feed.
https://www.city-journal.org/san-franciscos-municipal-budget
And the city's budget has grown by about 50% in ten years.
The 11 minute drive from our house into town (capital of Washington state) is ironically shorter than a drive to the nearest Safeway in Mountain View at certain times of the day.
My wife and I daily appreciate the fortune of having the luxury of working full time remote. Most people don't have that.
We very much enjoyed our time in the SF Bay Area. It's a beautiful place full of excellent people. "things" just got too out of balance over the past decade plus.
Our electricity is almost all hydro, and so very green. Our only vehicle is a Tesla which we charge at home.
Our home is relatively close to the Puget sound but we're nearly 100 feet above it, which will make us proof against 21st century sea level rise, hurricanes (currently impossible here) and tsunamis. At the same time, the very large amount of water near us strongly moderates our temperature fluctuations, similar to but stronger than the same effect on the peninsula in the SF Bay Area.
There's no state income taxes. Property tax is slightly higher than in the SF Bay Area. Sales tax is about the same.
Finally, this is my current view: https://www.realms.org/pics/woods-outside.jpg
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Nisqually_earthquake [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_Washing...
That could cause a large to very large tsunami.
The place we selected is proof against any Tsunami, and massively over-built to handle large earthquakes.
https://www.climate.washington.edu/stormking/mainindex.html
On the other hand, we're planning on the 70 year time horizon, which is basically reasonable MAX_AGE for our teenage son, so looking many decades back was appropriate for us as well.
Further, as more and more energy ends up captured in the atmosphere, we expect rare atmospheric events to become a lot less rare.
> it's fairly isolated from inclement weather phenomenon.
Indeed, we're loving it, especially given that we generally like cool, wet weather as a baseline.
Above, I specifically called out something you can't generally build for, which is flooding. Flooding comes either from water running down hill or from below, due to rising bodies of water. Our house is at the top of a very shallow rise/'hill', so we don't have to worry about the former. That we're more than 100 feet above any relevant body of water protects us from the latter.
The other items are generally about high winds, and this house is pretty much proof against that. It was massively over-built.
The only thing it could not withstand is a direct hit from a powerful tornado.
This is such a huge thing when it comes to quality of life. The traffic in the bay area is completely absurd. There is no rush hour. There's a small window around 10:00am-11:30am where you can just get in the car and run somewhere real quick without sitting in it. Otherwise it turns a quick trip to the grocery store into an hour long affair. I can remember working in Oakland, and living in Pleasant Hill, and if there was an accident at the tunnel, you're literally just sitting at the office until 8-9pm because the entire route is a parking lot. It's the number one thing I am thankful for since moving away.
Bicycling around takes time, but I considered it worth while since it doubled as good, low impact cardio.
We also stayed primarily in Mountain View because of the schools.
But yeah, from 2009-2020, traffic went from somewhat manageable to batshit crazy.
I'll keep working remote from flyover country, thanks (lots of beautiful places here too if you don't mind the snow!)
The perception of this, at least, is so widespread that you'll see quite a lot on community social media spaces, telling the "immigrants" that they're welcome, but please stop voting for the kinds of policies that you're trying to escape.
Most of Texas has been dealing with CA transplants since last housing crisis, or before, so 12+ years now. Austin area in particular is where the liberals usually land. And they tend to be very liberal even by traditional Austin standards and especially by Texas standards in general. Some of the recent things in Austin, particularly around tolerance of homeless, are not popular with Texans. We are generous people but not to the level of letting homeless sleep in our suburban yards. We're told we're not compassionate. But we feel these people are mostly, homeless by choice. If you take the time to watch them, it's a lifestyle for a high percentage and yes there are some who did not chose it due to drugs, PTSD, etc, and we'd support getting those people help, housing, food, etc. But not putting up tents and port-a-potties for them at the underpass. [1]
I just came back from Austin. I haven't lived there since 2007/8. Homeless there has always been a problem. As it is in almost any liberal US city. The last few years, it's gotten so much worse and letting it bleed into the suburbs makes no sense IMO. The local leaders are enabling thus inviting more homeless, etc. as happens in almost any liberal US city.
[1] As an example of something no Texan understands. My aunt told me, a lady on her Nextdoor ostracized the neighborhood for giving the homeless things they didn't need. Like food when they had food. Or food they did not like. So, she met with and created an Amazon Wish List for each person living under/near a nearby bridge freeway intersection. When my aunt clicked on it out of curiosity, it was mostly gift cards, phone minutes, electronics, etc. In my mind, things that are easily converted to cash.
Also the idea that Californians moving are responsible for pushing Austin in a more liberal direction I find untrue and a bit at odds with reality both from data presented on metro-to-metro movements [1, 2] and also with my own anecdotal experience here. I find many of the people I know who moved here from California think they’re getting away from what they consider an overtly liberal area by doing so, and in part move specifically because they believe Austin (by being in Texas) will be more conservative. From my experience having lived in Austin and in Texas (over twice as long as I’ve lived in California, which I first moved to from Austin), it is and has been more progressive than even most of the Bay Area has seemed to me (excluding Santa Cruz and Berkeley which I find comparable).
As far as what might be making it more liberal, it was a large part of the 60s and 70s counter-culture movement (Whole Foods and Wheatsville, Janis Joplin and the 13th Floor Elevators, Mother’s Cafe, etc.) the founders and artists of which were not from California, and in the case of Whole Foods and Janis actually were Austin exports to California. And also being widely more known for being a college town with large music festivals and a huge DIY scene. Austin feels more like San Jose to me these days, but it’s politics, especially when discussed with those I’ve known who were born and raised here, feel more akin to what I see and hear being discussed in places like Portland and Berkeley than what I saw and heard from those I knew in Palo Alto and Mountain View.
This is not due to Californians moving in, as even to this day the majority of Austinites are either born and raised or migrated from other parts of Texas. Even the initiative against keeping public homelessness from being criminalized was widely supported in council and by the mayor (of which I’m not aware of a single party being from California, Greg Casar who is pushing for a lot of the more progressive policies is actually from Houston and Adler went to UT and is from Washington DC).
Basically just trying to say, I disagree with the “liberal by Austin standards” idea, I think if anything you’re just seeing the city as it always was but with more political clout due to recent changes in how city council works and with a very energized mayor. The transplants from California if anything, in my anecdotal experience at least, are fairly conservative by Austin standards. But our experiences are our own.
[1] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2018/demo/geographic-mobi... [2] https://austonia.com/austin-growth
That sounds more like the South Bay. Try East.
Your argument seems to basically be, once the high-salaried tech workers leave, the city will get worse. But as far as I can tell, the presence of the high-salaried tech workers has been making the city worse over the last decade, and if you think it's anywhere near "a dump," I think a lot of people will be glad to get back the SF of years past (such as the SF of a couple of years before I arrived, before the second startup boom, before modern venture capital existed, before Uber and Airbnb, during the recession and the dot-com bust - the SF about which people like me said, I'd like to move there).
What was neat about SF circa 2005-2012 is that folks in general were happy, excited, and proud to be here. Current day tech workers complain a lot, while contributing little (presence, acceptance, consciousness) to help solve anything: viz the comments on this post. Now they dance upon its grave as they decamp to Montana or Ohio, etc. So in a sense part of the problem is just the mood of the place.
If you ever read Jane Jacobs "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" she describes exactly the cycle we are experiencing: a cheap place is colonized by artists and eccentrics, it becomes cool, this attracts mainstream folks, this makes the place hyped & expensive, the people who made it cool move away, it then becomes lame, eventually it decays, is abandoned, and becomes cheap again.
Be zen, this is all part of the normal life of the world. In the fullness of time, SF will have many more boom and bust cycles.
Given SF has been extremely heavy handed with the lockdowns, and a huge number of people leaving, alot of them well paid. Restaurants and businesses are closing(and moving out of the area) at a rapid pace. Expect a historic drop in revenue for the city, this means less services, less funding for education, more filth, more homeless, more drugs everywhere.
The residents who have the means will get fed up with the downward spiral, leading to a negative feedback in life quality and revenue. Politicians in SF always money hungry will then try to hit the 'billionaires' where it hurts, 'their wallets', and try to raise taxes leading to more people leaving. Not everyone who is leaving is because of the cost of living, its also people who are fed up.
The quality of life thing is huge, half of my Wife's good friends left the bay area the past year or two, a bunch of my co-workers in tech left and alot of it was people are sick of how poorly the place is run and is turning into a dump. I left in the summer and will never return, I grew up in the area so its been bittersweet, but I don't regret moving one bit.