There’s so much hard evidence in this video - you can see real people and hear from them. Then on the tech side there’s - nothing - just some hollow rhetoric. Industries come and go - gold, shipbuilding, tourism. It’s SF’s attempts to keep tech out that pushed house prices so high that the locals had to leave - that’s on them. Every city lost workers in the pandemic and every city except for SF has seen many return - nobody wants to return to somewhere where the streets are in such a dire state and housing consumes their salary.

As a bay area native, i believe he did a good job. I’ve spent my life volunteering in the community, and i think my most radical take is that i don’t hate street criminals because i mean the life is miserable. Its easy and understandable to fear being robbed (been there), but really, those kids get murdered quick. Nobody i grew up with that wanted to live crazy made it past 21.

I’ve always felt that the increase in crime was a direct result of the fucking rent. Its been empty for a minute now, it reminds me of disneyland in the sense that people all go in to shop and work but leave back home at night, leaving a ghost town. So it’s community got weak, lost the electorate to protect itself.

I do get frustrated by outsiders making fun of us. Its a complex problem that you can’t solve with a gun like some other commenters are suggesting. Try saving a life for once and then get back to me on how to make my city less miserable. I also get frustrated by the outsider voyeurism that comes with suffering.

I like how another commenter put it. Its as if we took a really painful fall off a cliff, alone. The only way out is to slowly crawl back up.

>I do get frustrated by outsiders making fun of us

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38426649

You're not alone though. Many many American cities are similarly awful, it's just that SF being the symbol it is gets the punching bag treatment more than most.

It's just that America bet everything on capitalism, yet americans are starting to realize that it is making their lives miserable in many, many different ways.

I like that Andrew brought up the idea of containment. I've lived in the major cities he described and it's the same pattern. It's invisible to the well off neighborhoods. The poor neighborhoods have to live with it. The fact that it's always been there - just hidden.

Re: tech - it def disrupted the fabric of the city. As quickly as it came (gentrification, raising rents) and as quickly as it left (residents losing adjacent jobs), it's been bad for the people who had to live through it without high paying tech jobs.

I liked that Andrew touched on the opioid epidemic and how it's spiraled. Heavy policing historically disenfranchised poor minorities so that's not the way to go. Progressive policies were tried and the people pushed back.

I wish there was a single solution. It feels like we fell off a cliff and the only way up is to crawl back up.

The role of tech is no different than any other industry. The problems were created by politicians making bad decisions. Easier to blame tech than fix things.

I can’t claim to understand how things got to be the way they are, but grossly oversimplifying the issue like this is the surest way to be wrong about it.

> The role of tech is no different than any other industry.

I agree with this. Doesn’t mean industry shares no blame.

It makes no sense for the tech industry to take the blame unless you want tech to take up government responsibilities. The tech industry wants more housing and frequently loses battles with local government. Do we want a tech industry which is capable of outweighing governments?

The blame ultimately does rest on the local government.

The solution to a lot of problems here are more high density housing. The way you get that is taxes and eminent domain to tear down and rebuild. But that will weaken current SF residents political power, so they fight against it. Pushing labor out of the city removes their power to affect change.

The only point I'd bring up about the tech industry is the SF residents putting up these barriers are often old time tech folks that "made it".

I think Seattle has some of the same issues, but at least seams to be handling things a lot better.

> The way you get that is taxes and eminent domain to tear down and rebuild.

Can we try not making it illegal to build densely on the property you own first? The government doesn’t need to do anything; no tax breaks or incentives. It just needs to stop taking the opinion that any amount of profit taken by a real estate developer is necessarily immoral.

Responsibility (and blame) goes to the people that have the power to change the outcome.

The municipality controls housing and homeless policy. The state controls the mental healthcare system. The feds allowed the opium epidemic.

If we want to focus on solutions, talking about the tech industry is a distraction.

Why do you 'love' him? According to multiple people, perhaps including himself, he is a sex predator.[1] Regardless of whether you think a figure like that should be at the forefront of the public eye (I don't), it's strange to express 'love' for a person of such low character.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/01/20/1149748975/a-full-guide-to-th...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD8g_ZfcrEo&t=80s&ab_channel...

What the hell is a “sex predator”? Do you mean just a normal human? We are literally programmed to get sex.

I don’t really blame tech, so much as I blame real estate speculators. The problem isn’t all the money and industry entering the city, it’s people trying to parasitically rent-seek off that productive economic activity. If San Francisco was able to build at the level of say a Tokyo or had social housing like Vienna, it’s a pretty much a non-issue. The problem comes when wealthy, land-owning elites conspire with corrupt politicians to prevent housing and other infrastructure from rising to meet the demand of the city’s growth. That being said, the overlap between wealthy tech investors and wealthy landowners blocking construction is not exactly zero.

Institutions in the us have never really worked for the people. It's always been an oligarchy of one type or another. Sf is just the latest chapter in this story.

Places like Vienna are more functional because they have governments that are working for the people rather than corporate interests. They have centuries of real social development, rather than what the us has which is only economic development.

I think most people in america don't really understand the concept of society. They see the state as a mechanism to keep just enough peace to enable money to be made, and to fight wars. They don't see it as a tool to craft a society that benefits the main thrust of it's people. Despite all the lofty ideals and language in our founding documents it's never been that type of endeavor.

Before the pandemic, there was bad stuff (in particular poop all over all the sidewalks) but there was relatively more good stuff because white collar workers commuted in on the weekdays and (at least) bought lunch. Post-pandemic, it’s all gone, so crime etc now has outsized leverage.

Uber eats and Doordash have had a particularly negative impact, not just that stolen car in the video. Restaurants are strangled and Uber both raises all prices and cuts into margins when the order load doesn’t scale. Even the original Little Star on divisadero is now closing due to Uber gouging. Combine with the fact that the drivers are out-of-town unsafe drivers and block roads everywhere, makes the suburbs look more appealing.

>Before the pandemic, there was bad stuff (in particular poop all over all the sidewalks) but there was relatively more good stuff because white collar workers commuted in on the weekdays and (at least) bought lunch. Post-pandemic, it’s all gone, so crime etc now has outsized leverage.

And yet there are people in denial about just how dead downtown SF is. This /r/sanfrancisco post is unintentionally hilarious. <https://np.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/11z2cz5/americ...> I think they think that "People leaving SF" = "Trump wins", or something.

I think part of the right's fixation with SF is that it was the first major city to shelter in place in early 2020 and 'cross the rubicon' into the world we live in today.

It's also a "sanctuary city" and a literal icon of the LGBTQ movement. It's basically all the things the right think are ruining America.

> Really not sure what to make of this

There’s no reason you shouldn’t take it at face value. There’s no reason to believe these are “normal city problems”.

From a May 2023 article on the decline of San Francisco <http://web.archive.org/web/20230510153958/https://www.curbed...>:

>A note to my fellow San Franciscians: I’m sorry. I know. There’s always some story in the East Coast press about how our city is dying. San Franciscians hate—HATE—these pieces. You’re a stooge and a traitor for writing one. When I set out reporting, I wanted to write a debunking-the-doom piece myself. Yet to live in San Francisco right now, to watch its streets, is to realize that no one will catch you if you fall. In the first three months of 2023, 200 San Franciscans OD’d, up 41 percent from last year. “It’s like a wasteland,” the guard said when I asked how San Francisco looked to him. “It’s like the only way to describe it. It’s like a video game — like made-up shit. Have you ever played Fallout?”

>I shook my head.

>“There’s this thing in the game called feral ghouls, and they’re like rotted. They’re like zombies.” There’s only so much pain a person can take before you disintegrate, grow paranoid, or turn numb. “I go home and play with my wife, and we’re like, ‘Ah, hahahaha, this is SF.’”

I found it notable that no one in the Reddit discussion <https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/13dvrjs/san_franci...> mentioned the Fallout comparison despite the fact that, well, this is Reddit. I think it hit too hard.