As a staunch democrat, I always wonder - why are cities in Red states such as Austin, Houston, Phoenix, Raleigh, Dallas have so much better infrastructure than Portland, Seattle, LA and San Francisco? Pot holes everywhere and homelessness out of control.
A lot of Democrats are just as selfish, Republicans tend to be more open about it. Deep blue cities have the same corruption and social segregation as red ones do.
A lot of "hot" cities outside SV are Democratic mayors in Republican states. The mix keeps corruption low and forces compromises.
The homeless issue is a city scale prisoners dilemma. By offering better services you attract homeless. Homeless people aren't stupid and will move to places that suit their lifestyle better, just like we do. The only way to avoid it is better policies on a national level. Otherwise cities that treat homeless better just become a magnet for them.
"[The] survey showed that 71% of San Francisco’s street people had formerly been housed in the city."
There's a recent example of numerous homeless coming to the city because the mayor promised housing during corona https://abc7news.com/homeless-in-san-francisco-coronavirus-s...
Not like anyone warned there was a problem: https://thebolditalic.com/life-inside-sf-s-vanishing-single-...
My theory is that red states distaste for regulations discourages everyone from weaseling housing policies for their own interest.
Housing is definitely cheaper in cities within red states. And in my experience there's less homeless, which may be directly correlated.
Well, you're wrong about one thing. The homeless don't have to move. If SF attracts homeless people then it is entirely possible that people in the "grey zone" become homeless on their own. A lot of people just move in with their parents or friends if they lose their home. If the stigma of homelessness is smaller than the stigma of living with parents it's entirely possible that people go to shelters just to save themselves the embarrassment of failure in front of their friends and family. Especially if that "shelter" is just a free apartment room.
One obvious answer is age. It's cheap to build greenfield infrastructure.[1] It's expensive to rebuild infrastructure in dense areas, and that's before factoring in NIMBY pushback. (BTW, that expense is why the wealthy often live in older housing stock in cities. Maintaining an older home is expensive and thus a way to signal wealth. Once enough wealthy people move in you can start to condemn properties that aren't maintained to the same standard. Old money understands this dynamic very well. New money people conflate wealth with newness, which is poor people thinking.)
Regarding homeless: in dense, high-cost of living areas the homeless will be concentrated and adjacent and thus highly visible. As someone who grew up relatively poor, on occasion briefly homeless and often housing insecure, I assure you there are a ton of such people in suburbia, but they're spread out and hidden--couch surfing, pushed to the rural edges, and either scattered around or concentrated in hidden areas (e.g. trailer parks). And of course housing is generally cheaper in less dense areas--the middle classes build new neighborhoods in greenfield areas, then vacate them in a decade or two, making them available for the working classes and the poor. Suburban neighborhoods don't get recycled back up the income ladder like they do in cities. Gentrification in suburbia is rare; rather a new neighborhood is destined to be abandoned and forgotten by the middle classes.
Of course, much could be said regarding Portland's, Seattle's, and San Francisco's licentiousness regarding drug use and other aspects beyond geography and pricing that draw and concentrate the homeless, but those are somewhat unique to those cities, not a general phenomenon.
Regarding potholes: Those older suburban neighborhoods above are just as pothole-filled (if not more so) as any city downtown, but you won't see it because you have no reason to go there! While cities are highly income segregated--often much more so than suburbia--proximities are closer and infrastructure expenditures more equitable so you're far more likely to see the seedy underbelly of your regional community.
Regarding potholes in SF specifically, the city is halfway through a 20 year, multi-billion dollar water & sewer refurbishment plan. The roads are torn up across the city because of this. The Van Ness/Mission and Geary BRT projects are compounding the problem on two of the busiest thoroughfares, and since COVID-19 the city seems to have taken the opportunity to rip open the streets all over the place simultaneously, presumably (hopefully!) to get some of the most inconvenient segments and intersections out of the way earlier.
[1] Not just cheap, but often free. Alot of suburban infrastructure--streets, water, power--is built by the real estate developer. The cost is hidden in the original purchase price. Afterward the cost can't be hidden. Faced with the prospect of having to pay out of pocket, directly or through higher taxes, the middle class will elect to simply move on to greener pastures.
Uhhhh, wut? I think everyone in Austin is dying to see this wonderful infrastructure you speak of, considering we're fairly well known for our inadequate-to-non-existant public transportation system.
The majority of San Francisco’s homeless are from San Francisco and were recently homed.. if not for cost, what’s causing people with stable housing to end up on the streets?
High housing costs mean housing vouchers cover fewer people with its budget.
> They usually have some kind of mental problem or drug addiction, not just “they can’t afford rent”.
I suspect you're making assumptions based on the more visible homeless people you see, but if there's any data to back that up I'd love to see it.
calmatters.org does some of the best reporting on housing and homelessness topics. For example https://calmatters.org/explainers/californias-homelessness-c...
"Do you have any of the following health conditions?"
Drug or alcohol abuse - 37%
Any psychiatric or emotional condition - 35%
Those are the top two health conditions identified. There is obviously overlap since the total of all of the answers is >100%.
[1]https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDRep...
Some people become homeless because they are mentally ill and can't maintain a tenancy.
Some people develop a mental illness after becoming homeless because it's living on the street is pretty stressful.
In reading up on the process, I realize that there is a mechanism to sort our explicit conflicts, but that doesn't mean everything that is passed works well together in practice.
High housing costs are directly because of the stock market and tech employees becoming inordinately wealthy. Prop 13 was around for decades and housing only became unaffordable in the last 10 years because of the rise of FANG.
What budget issues? SF budget is tops across almost all US cities in per capita spending.
Regardless, I think the argument that SF just “needs more money” isn’t a particularly strong one.
As they say though, wages are sticky in the downward direction, so even if California were to flip a switch and do a 180 with their housing policies, these costs will be with us for a very long time. Property tax reform paired with lowered income taxes would be a good first step though.
The climate is fairly hospitable year round in the Bay Area. If I were homeless I doubt that I'd choose to live in Arizona or Texas in Summer or Winter. The concentration of disposable wealth and a generally liberal population in San Francisco probably makes panhandling easier, I would guess.
Much of this is caused by the high cost of housing. Everyone needs to be paid enough to live here or enough to be worth commuting long distances.
> availability of labor and land are extremely constrained
That's not really true. There's not a lot of empty land, but there's huge swaths of underutilized land. Only zoning law prevents it from becoming more useful. Instead we get crumbling single family homes a few miles from a growing number of skyscrapers.
It's wishful thinking that the rest of America's real estate market is much more affordable due to wise zoning choices.
A lot of the land that seems underutilized is contaminated (SuperFund sites, ex-military, industrial, etc) and requires significant remediation. Even so, Peninsula residents still spend $1M for townhouses and condos built on former SuperFund sites. That's the discount price...
When we actually use our land wisely, then it will be easy to build more around train stations. The measure of distance that matters is not miles, but minutes.
> It's wishful thinking that the rest of America's real estate market is much more affordable due to wise zoning choices.
SF jobs are more concentrated in a down town area. Offices in cities that were built post car culture are more sprawled out. It's terrible for the environment, but it postpones the problems that SF is running into.
> Ironically, it really is pretty much supply and demand.
Well, cheers to agreeing on something. Sucks that this is a debated thing here.
But this is hardly a property unique to the Bay Area. Most American metropolitan areas share this lopsided bias towards single family zoning.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/18/upshot/cities...
Also, consider that this zoning problem surely existed long before home prices skyrocketed across the Bay Area and spread to other tech hubs such as Seattle. The fact that the top 5 tech companies alone in those two metropolitan areas (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook) have a combined market cap of $7.5T, is just one manifestation of the vast wealth generated by the tech industry which has warped property values.
Their gardens must offer a unique taste of computing history.
SF has been updating 100+ year old sewer system. The roads will suck until that is done.
It does really suck how we don’t criminalize homelessness and mental illness in CA like good Christian Red States do. I do wonder who filled up those 20000 SROs in the last ten years. Just where did all those homeless come from?
The police department has completed 40 of the 272 reforms it promised to the Department of Justice in 2016.
There's a lot of progressive talk to dress up traditional conservative policies. Sadly, the best thing SF has done for progressivism is serve as a warning to other progressive cities that they need to put action behind their rhetoric.
I don't see as much of them lately, but several years ago there was a rather large contingent of SF police on dirt bikes wielding billy clubs whose job was to roust the homeless in nice neighborhoods and tourist areas and quite literally herd them downtown. Presumably their disappearance has something to do with homeless visibility--although not sure if its cause or effect (i.e. simply too many homeless to prevent spillover).
Also, to further the redevelopment of southeast SF, the city built alot of new public housing not only downtown but also near Fisherman's Wharf. I'm certain the increase in crime around Fisherman's Wharf is related. AFAIU, they chose Fisherman's Warf because 1) the port authority owned alot of land there and 2) rules regarding port authority-owned land made it relatively easier to push through low-income housing projects. Previously public housing in the NE of the city was predominately for seniors, who don't generally attract trouble.
Chaos ensued.