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Comment by gavinray | Hacker News Reader

I've been all over the US, and I recently visited SF for the first time on a work trip.

Never seen such a desolate place, and I say this as someone who has been homeless before and slept in homeless shelters. Homeless shelters in Boulder, CO were about x10 less sketchy than the streets I walked around in downtown SF.

I'm not sure where we were exactly, but there was homeless shooting up in the street at least once every few blocks, plus garbage everywhere and human waste.

What the absolute fuck is going on down there

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I'll take the hits. It's lefty paradise. The city is 85% democrat and has the highest per capita tax revenue of any city in the USA. In other words they have the most money to solve problems via the government which is generally what the left thinks is good. The policies the city choose via its democrat leadership arguably lead to exactly what the city is.

ps: this post does not mean I'm on the right or that the right has all the solutions. But I do tend to think many left solutions are counter productive and I think SF is good example of unintended consequences.

The terrible governance that we see in San Francisco (and to an extent in the rest of California) isn't so much due to leftists per se, but rather the inevitable result of single-party rule. Since the state Republican party has essentially committed political suicide, Democrats know that they will get elected no matter how badly their policies impact regular people. Decisions and political appointments are based on ideology rather than results.

Other states that have single-party Republican rule have just as severe governance failures and corruption.

Some of the blame lies with the system of non-profits and perverse incentives (if they solve the problem they cease to exist and their upper management and other grifters lose their cushy jobs), so they devise solutions that seem plausible yet never produce results for the target population, except again for the upper management and system.

> devise solutions that seem plausible

But there are mountains of evidence! (In the form of an endless stream of low-quality sociology studies.)

> It's lefty paradise.

Ok, let's get into some definitions and corrections.

SF isn't a lefty paradise. It's a liberal paradise. "Liberal" has pretty much become synonymous with "neoliberal". And by "liberal" i include the vast majority of Democrat and Republican voters (certainly as neoliberals). Liberalism is really about aesthetics and is performative, like how racism famously ended when we elected a black president or misogyny ended when we appointed a female Supreme Court justice.

The primary differentiating factor between Democrat and Republican voters are social issues but here's why it's aesthetic/performative. Democrats might tend to self-identify as being against racism but, as you see in the Bay Area, will tend to adamanatly oppose any effort to build more or cheaper housing.

The entire political spectrum in US politics still works at the behest of corporate interests, first and foremost.

My point here is that you cannot separate economic from social policy, which is why such labels as "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" are fundamentally flawed.

If SF were truly a "lefty paradise", it would attack the core issue of homelessness and poverty (and the resulting crime), which is housing. But instead, you have superficial/aesthetic policies aimed at reducing the appearance of homelessness (eg clearing out homeless encampments).

There is no meaningful "lefty" or "leftist" movement anywhere in the United States. What many people label as "lefty" or "liberal" anywhere else in the world would be labelled as "center right" politics.

Complaining that the only thing SF does to address homelessness is clear out homeless encampments is exactly what the left does 24/7 in this city. Then they demand that the city double-down (for the umpteenth time) on all the other programs that the city dumps billions into.

And the whole corporate conspiracy canard simply doesn't work in this city, either. All the "pro corporate" reforms from the past decade were responses to the city absolutely freaking out about companies fleeing and the city losing the billions in revenue it relies upon for its social program expenditures, which on a per capita basis might exceed even most European cities, let alone other cities in the U.S.

But you're absolutely correct that the one thing the left doesn't do is the one thing that would help the most: reduce the cost of housing development. (As opposed to what the city has done and continues to do--create tens of thousands of 100% publicly funded units for the homeless, which because even the city is obliged to follow its own anti-housing policies, results in unfathomably poor RoI for the already unfathomably huge sums of money dumped into these projects. And which because it's become a drug addict mecca, generates homeless addicts faster than it can house them. Though, to be sure, the city has been this way regarding drugs for decades. My mother does in-home care with older drug addicts in assisted living facilities, and stories about how they got sucked into the SF drug culture in the 1970s and 1980s are common. Though unlike today, Marin was also an epicenter of predatory drug culture, the human detritus--and I mean that to insult Marin, not the individuals who suffered and continued to suffer--of which typically ended up in SF.)

All of that goes to show that the left/right dichotomy breaks down and is rendered meaningless in San Francisco. It's more of an issue of those who are willing to contest the entrenched landowner interests against those who are not. In that, the NIMBY/YIMBY/PHIMBY debate is rivened by sniping from all sides. One needs only glance over at the corresponding social media flamewars to realize how much of mess it is.

That sad thing is that SF is a very liberal and compassionate city. Voters perennially approve increased taxes to fund homeless, drug, and housing initiatives. By any standard except the extreme radicalism of today's culture warriors, achieving a workable, productive, and liberal consensus should be trivial.

The majority of SF residents are renters. And a good number of homeowners would be happy to relinquish some control regarding zoning to improve the bureaucratic situation--certainly anyone who has owned property in this city for any significant length of time has come to appreciate the excessive cost in both time and money of doing anything to their properties.

But national politics has completely overshadowed local politics. Renters oppose easing development costs (even when they come with extraordinary dislocation protections, such as mandatory, multi-year rent cost reimbursements) because the national political ideology of the left has daemonized any and all development as gentrification, which is intrinsically evil. It's a sister phenomenon to anti-corporatism--corporations are intrinsically evil, and therefore anything which might benefit corporations is to be rejected. No wonder politics on the left has become performative--that's exactly what the ideology and its advocates now demand. (The same is true of drug policy--precisely nobody in SF, or perhaps most of the U.S., IMO, opposes "harm reduction" as a primary consideration and target for drug and homelessness policies. But the left has transformed "harm reduction" into a rigid set of performative policy mandates.)

You have to acknowledge that things have gotten pretty out of control in SF, and that those kinds of behaviors and policies wouldn't be acceptable "anywhere else in the world" either. SF is radical by any standard.

> There is no meaningful "lefty" or "leftist" movement anywhere in the United States

I think Chesa Boudin would be offended.

> Ok, let's get into some definitions and corrections.

That’s just… your definitions.

> What many people label as "lefty" or "liberal" anywhere else in the world would be labelled as "center right" politics.

That sounds like a meme that only Americans believe in.

As a fairly left leaning European, the thought of labeling more or less ANYTHING in american politics as «left» makes me chuckle.

The most die hard (mainstream) rightwinger in my country would be labeled a die hard socialist by more or less anyone in america.

In your European city, can you walk into a shop and steal €900 of goods with full confidence that 1) you won't be arrested and 2) even if you were, the state would decline to prosecute? You don't have to call it left if you don't want to, but it's certainly not the standard.

Exactly. But most Americans don't realize just how normalized right-wing politics are in the US, which is why silliness such as this [1] gets traction.

Europeans, even right-leaning Europeans, will generally support universal access to affordable healthcare. That's just one example.

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-tweeted-my-cartoon-wo...

I just returned from one of the most tony neighborhoods in TX. In the last week, my niece had hide in a restaraunt kitchen after a carjacking gun battle broke out front, a store was mob raided, and she had to call the cops to a posh hotel where a woman was being beaten in the parking lot while the valets watched.

One factor:

Temperate weather and relatively little rainfall.

Is the problem addressed in some way? or people have concluded that there were no solutions?

I think it hit a low point during and just after 2020. I would guess it's slightly better now just based on my few visits there. For sure there is a ton of daily cleaning going on now on the side walks which helps just lifting up the entire perception of the street. It was smelling of urine constantly, now it's not nearly as bad any more.

The mayor finally snapped and realized that things need to change, but every attempt to improve the situation is opposed by some interest group or group of residents who still hold on to the same bad set of policies that let the problem get so bad in the first place.

When you have more than a billion dollar spent every year on homelessness, do they really want homelessness to end? Think about it. They call it “homeless industrial complex” for a reason.

Would be interested what that number is just for SF. (Assuming $1B is national expenditure.)

Heh, no, the $1B is for SF: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-has-an-unpre...

I once heard the city spends around $50k/year per homeless person.

The latest estimate for 2022 is 7,754 people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco – https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population

That gives an estimate of $390,000,000/year spent on homelessness in San Francisco alone.

Mind you the official definition of “homeless” is a lot stricter than people assume. Living in a car makes you not-homeless. Here’s a good podcast episode about that: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/according-to-need-cha...

My first question whenever thinking about these numbers is: If we just give them that money, will they stay homeless? I bet many would be more than able to get their life in order, if you gave them 50k … that’s more than minimum wage for SF.

And yet somehow SF manages to spend $1.1B on homelessness: https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-...

Many wallets are being filled here, and there is no oversight on where the money is going and if it's working.

I bet almost all of them be be homeless again within a year. The problems that made them homeless in the first place are not just money problems.

I think that’s where social workers (I think?) draw the distinction between chronically homeless and someone experiencing homelessness.

The average person who experiences homelessness stays homeless for 237 days[1]. That’s the highest estimate I could find on google. Some were as low as 90 day average.

I bet a lot of those people could fix the problem a lot faster, if you gave them minimum wage money for a year.

[1] https://embed.clearimpact.com/Measure/Embed?id=100076098

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