Why San Francisco’s city government is so dysfunctional

The Irvine Company is very similar in Southern California. It seems like they own everything when you want office real estate.

So, it's corruption, right?

Well, except that if you talk to any contractors (like your internet provider installer) you find that they love The Irvine Company because there is someone who has a little bit of competence for them to talk to when they need to. As opposed to every other real estate company that seems to be staffed by brain-damaged monkeys.

So, you can posit corruption. Or, you can posit that real estate management is one of those markets that tends toward monopoly because you can amortize the costs more effectively the more properties you own.

In areas that are on the periphery, their coverage feels shallow and unsatisfying. I would imagine that the writers, who are some of the best in business, are doing their research but trying to make the content accessible. I can’t fault them for that. However, in this day and age, I would expect them to offer more depth.

On any tech topic Stratechery dives in deep, analysing the incentives, actions and outcomes of each player. Every quarterly report from the big tech companies is analysed. The author also has the courage to make predictions, many of which turn out to be true. It’s worth the money in my book.

The Economist also covers tech topics but at a high level, and for an audience that isn’t tech inclined. Take for example, this gem of an article - Why Companies Struggle With Recalcitrant IT (https://www.economist.com/business/2020/07/18/why-companies-...). For a layman it’s a great intro on software is always delayed and over budget. For those of us who work in IT, it’s all obvious stuff.

A person familiar with IT might say “go deeper, talk about other issues”. In fact, I did just that. I contacted the author and pointed out a couple of difficulties in software that increase complexity, like dependency management. The author was aware of this already but chose not to add this for the sake of keeping the article a manageable length [1].

That’s what the Economist does - covers a wide range of topics, while not assuming the reader is knowledgeable about any of it. Even though finance focussed newspaper, they painstakingly explain every term before they use it. But these two constraints - covering breadth and not assuming knowledge mean there is a limit to how deep they can go on any topic.

If you find a newspaper that analyses every topic in the world to your desired level of detail, please let us know. Also, if the newspaper isn’t staffed by aspiring fiction writers gratifying themselves by writing impossibly large “long reads”, that would be even better.

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[1] - their response to my letter :

Dear nindalf,

Thank you for your letter. You're right, of course - I've always thought it's a bit like an ancient city like Istanbul, with modern buildings sitting on top of layers of old architecture that's only half-mapped and whose builders are long forgotten. Unfortunately there wasn't space to get too evocative in the piece itself.

I've forwarded your letter for publication, though, because it's an important point.

Best,

Tim Cross

Technology Editor

The Economist

I mean they spend paragraphs bashing the 'leftie' DA before admitting the problem is actually the police being rubbish.

I knew they were biased, but the article seems especially bad.

Personally, I'm very glad that this isn't a mainstream way of understanding problems. Rich people are kind of fungible, in that they usually don't want to pay taxes, but other than that usually have about the same range of politics as everybody else. Focusing on individual malfeasance tends to protect dysfunctional systems.

There are probably at least two dozen families, each of which has a few powerful members. Getting them all to agree on anything besides their own self-interest of maintaining their own wealth and power is quite hard.

But the city government has delivered very well on that one shared interest of theirs. They own a lot of property and property values are way up over the past few decades.

Maybe many of them just aren't pro American. In almost every other country the media/politics carefully try to project some national pride and sense of unity; it's actually the opposite here in the US isn't it?

Government jobs are extremely lucrative, many pay six figures and opportunities to supplement with graft are plentiful. It’s a powerful club to be in and you’re potentially set for life. My spouse is a lifelong resident and remembers rushing to city hall with other hopefuls every time the city opened up applications.

The FBI is still working it’s way through the public works department with noted criminals like Mohammed Nuru and RoDBIgo Santos. I don’t really know what the Getty’s get out of playing kingmaker, but it’s pretty obvious what Willie Brown et all get out of neglecting the city and funneling money as they see fit.

Because they can't influence supervisor elections or school board elections as well as they can elections for mayor. The reason why San Francisco mayors are always re-elected is because they're very middle of the road in terms of politics and risk tolerance. Activist policies are usually the product of the Board of Supervisors, the school board, the district attorney, or public initiative, all of which are completely independent of the mayor's office. Sometimes the mayor's office will try to head off policies by offering watered-downed versions as an alternative. This doesn't always work, but it does contribute to the sense that they share some of the more radical policy preferences.

If you don't believe that the mayor's office has been significantly more conservative than the other political centers of San Francisco, just look at the police department. However dysfunctional you think the police department, it's not because the mayor's office has ever appointed a far left, defund-the-police police chief that seemingly every liberal has been demanding for decades. Police chiefs are appointed by the mayor the same way the monied elite choose a mayor--someone who is middle of the road, will keep their head down, and keep things moving along as best they can amidst the fracas. And as you would expect, their performance always falls short because their job isn't to succeed, but to avoid failure.

In general the mayor's office is expected by the old money elite (and increasingly some of the new money elite, like Benioff) to be the caretaker of a city with often times very extreme and contradictory policy demands. They're expected to avoid controversy, blunt the extremists, negotiate (quietly!) among various interests (e.g. unions), and pick up the pieces when things fail.

> The wealthy people who control NYC politics seem less tolerant of such issues.

Maybe. But I tend to think that a more important factor is that NYC still has a larger working class. The upper middle class, which increasingly dominates San Francisco politically, is disconnected from the city. Their politics come from social media and national narratives. They're more focused on avoiding feeling guilty about drug addicts and the homeless than on actual results. That's why the policies keep getting pushed further and further left (far beyond what was ever demanded 10 years earlier) despite the lack of results.

The thing about the rich elite, especially old money, is that in many ways they're far more grounded than the middle classes, especially modern middle classes. If you own buildings or businesses, local politics matters immensely to you. No matter how conservative or liberal you are, what matters above all else is consistency and avoiding surprises. Consistency and security is critical because you're immobile. The same is true for the working classes. No matter how pissed you are at economic inequality, the last thing you need is the ground constantly shifting underneath your feet. Similar to old money, consistency and security is critical because you're immobile.

San Francisco has too few of the latter kinds of people. At the end of an election cycle, its votes that matter, not dollars. The result is that moderates, which are still quite powerful, are always playing defense rather than offense.

Property taxes have been frozen which basically just throws more money into their throats.

You have Pacific Heights, Presidio/Richmond (especially where Feinsteins, Pelosis, Cockers, Dorseys, etc. live) as well as Marin and Hillsborough, et al.

They can let it happen because they can create their own little bubble world and never interact with "the deplorables".

I grew up in the Bay Area and went to "good schools" with these peoples' children so I've seen them up-close-and-personal. They are not nice people.

New Yorkers in my experience are far more practical and "based" compared to Western large blue cities.

My impression is the prevailing opinion within the families should not be attempting to hold office directly and that Angela's bid was not widely supported even by many of her relatives, let alone the wider group we're discussing.

But people still believe that Republicans will take away your freedoms and Democrats will solve everything (I don't believe either will solve much).

https://www.salon.com/1999/11/03/sf/

I don't think there's that much ideology to it. The place is corrupt and dysfunctional because it's conditioned itself to be corrupt and dysfunctional. Brownback's Kansas government had similar problems; same in Ohio.

Property crime is sky high... if you happen to get caught breaking into a car the penalty is a warning. That is the policy. You have to break into many cars and be caught (which is hard to do) many times for any action.

Boudin has indefensibly ignored violent criminals, too. Like a woman being assaulted while trying to open the door to here condo, fully on video and there was no prosecution. Even a few cases of murder from repeat offenders who were let go repeatedly after violent assault.

If you live in SF, try the Citizen phone app for alerts near you. There is some crazy stuff happening all around the city. Lately, cars keep inexplicably flipping over on city streets.

The craziest update I've seen was an alert about man dressed like a clown wielding a sword-cane.

"Before covid-19 San Francisco was the car-break-in capital of America; but with fewer tourists, criminals have shifted their attention. Home burglaries are up. Shootings have more than doubled in the past year. Viral videos show daytime heists, with perpetrators sauntering out of stores without consequence. Lax enforcement of drug laws can become fatal when even small amounts can kill."

An amazing statistics is that if the the US released every prisoner except the murderors and rapsists, we’d still have a higher incarceration rate than the EU.

A city full of bike thieves, shoplifters, and public defecators isn’t going to have a high incarceration. Even if the police are vigorous about arrests, those people just don’t spend very long in jail.

What to do about it? I don't really know; software development is my gig so this is far outside my expertise. But from what I observe, prison as it currently is implemented doesn't work, and doing nothing isn't working either.

Given the right environment and help, I'd hope that some (many? most?) can transform themselves and become healthy or at least functional in society. Some options that seem to help: a 12-step program, CBT and other therapy, drugs, low-dose hallucinogens (LSD, mushrooms, etc.).

It is strange that people have absolutely no problem banning camping in national parks but think it is a human right to do it in urban areas. Cities, in order to survive, need to enforce standards of behavior, and those who flaunt those standards need to be coerced into following them if there is to be a large number of people living in a small urban area.

The really sad thing is just building the housing would be cheaper than what we're doing currently. But as soon as the city proposes it the NIMBYs come out like a hurricane refusing to allow it.

Salt Lake City is an instructive example. They've made a huge impact on homelessness there with a housing centric strategy.

I don't care about their wishes, guided by drug addiction and mental health issues. To allow and enable this much squandering of human potential is a moral crime.

Get people clean of drugs, healthy, stable, and educated. By force, if needed. If from that baseline he decides to go back into a life of drugs and onto the streets, then so be it. But don't allow people to commit themselves to a slow death until they've been forced to step onto a better path and see what their life _could_ be.

The problem is that there’s a long history of people labelling all sorts of things they don’t like as being a mental illness and using that as an excuse to use treatment as violence against them. We called homosexuality a mental illness until very recently and forced people to have violent treatment for it, for example.

It's time we reverted it.

About 10% of humans have been addicts across most cultures throughout most of recorded human history, and they desperately need help (even if they claim don't want it).

There should obviously be a ton of safeguards in place before committing someone against their will (e.g. 1 or 2 doctors should declare that the patient is unable to care for themselves and make rational decisions, assessment at regular intervals, ensuring the patient has the right to get a new doctor, etc.), but I don't think we'll be able to solve homelessness without it, because this is what we used to do differently prior to the homelessness epidemic, and this is what other nations have been doing.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanterman%E2%80%93Petris%E2%...

Here’s some enjoyable reading for those with a few minutes to spare: http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist1/early.html

To me the confluence of cultures, like the brackish waters of the bay, are it’s hallmark. The issues around sudden wealth, excess, limited housing, and visionary governance seem to be more about the place than a particular moment.

That's not actually true, we use RCV to elect supervisors (and the mayor).

This is really key, and should be a bigger topic of discussion in mainstream political philosophy. Governments that purport to be democracies ought to be responsible for aligning policies and outcomes with the preferences of the electorate. It's far too common for people to dismiss literally any problem in an ostensibly democratic jurisdiction as "well that's what the people voted for," as if the only end goal of a government is to pass some bare minimum threshold of being considered a "democracy" and the rest of the responsibility is on the electorate.

This is not accurate. The Sunset, Richmond, Parkside, Presidio, Marina, and many other parts of the city are very clean (or at least not notably dirty for a city). Perhaps the Marina/Presidio could be called tourist areas but the Sunset and Richmond certainly are not.

Manhattan's answer is because of Giuliani's authoritarian mayoral reign. Cleanliness came at a cost of mass arrests and evictions of the homelessness, restrictions on shelters, and stop-and-frisk. Probably not a price that S.F. is willing to pay.

- yes, there's human feces and needles and tent cities in the Tenderloin/SOMA area

- Painted Ladies is an old-ass building, as is much of the residential sprawl around it

- Fishermans Wharf is a textbook tourist trap

- there's a ton of nice forest-y areas (Presidio, Glen Canyon, Stern Grove, etc)

- Sea cliff area is textbook rich person neighbourhood

- Financial district actually looks like a modern metropolis

Picking one facet and ignoring the rest is... cherrypicky.

I'll happily take a smaller paycheck if that means I don't have to constantly watch my back.

That is mind boggling to Americans outside of SF though. That’s the equivalent of telling people not to “dress slutty” if they don’t want to be raped.

SF is "not bad" in the sense that you won't get shot in the face. It is however quite bad in the sense that the amount of petty crime is so off the charts that you can't even compile accurate statistics because security personnel at retail stores don't even bother reporting it anymore.

A few months ago, I witnessed another theft in inner Richmond (one of the nicer neighbourhoods), the security guy did a half-ass attempt at running after the guy but gave up and came towards the customer support desk I was at. I asked if that was common, and the security guy literally just shrugs.

If they just wanted to get rid of people they wouldn't worry about any of that.

I moved to the SF Bay area from NYC 4 years ago and I routinely tell my friends that you need to watch out for human, not animal, feces on the street.

It's really sad to see people who are employed that are still homeless and have to deal with mental issues :(

The article touches on why that won’t happen though. Voter demographics won’t allow that. It’s either radical and young liberals which would go for every insane policy or the old and entrenched.

You’re joking right? If by easy to avoid you mean do not go outside. A friend lives in a very nice neighborhood in a beautiful home in SF. A block away while walking to my car there was a half naked man rambling to himself in the bushes. It is ubiquitous unless you mentally block it out.

San Francisco doesn't have anything like that. As the article discusses, the middle class has been fleeing San Francisco for decades. it's never going to elect a Bloomberg, let alone a Giuliani.

The city of Indianapolis years ago merged itself with its surrounding county, to unify city and suburbs. This was instigated by the Republican suburban leadership so that the metro region would remain under Republican control. Indianapolis has been a more politically moderate city than peers as a result.