San Francisco’s Financial Crisis
californiapolicycenter.org
californiapolicycenter.org
Something not right? Let's fix it. Let's do this first and then that.
General California feeling: you're missing form 5858b. Can't help you. Come back later. Next available appointment: 3 months.
Half of their jobs could be filled by using proper software. But instead I have to print it, make an appointment, hand them the form, have them type it in and send it off.
That's half of your budget right there.
I have seen so many bright and starry eyed idealists think they can fix government when they get in. In fact the best man at my wedding / best friend is a DC bureaucrat, and you get him a few beers deep and the stories he tells… My goodness. The money is not being spent well and he is jaded as fuck.
Some of the absolute laziest and rude people I’ve ever interacted with are CA government employees who deal with the public.
Now isn’t it crazy that government employees, who ostensibly serve us the tax payers, treat their fellow citizens like shit? A travesty all around but it makes sense when you analyze the incentives.
In city government, frequently the professional managers are on a leash. Some councilman, friend of the mayor, etc has the juice to take care of their friends or countrymen. In citizen facing situations you can usually see this when everyone in the office looks or sounds the same - those are likely not civil service employees, but patronage jobs serving at someone’s pleasure.
I’ve worked in and around many big companies too — plenty of incompetence to go around there, even in sales orgs where getting fired happens routinely.
This dichotomy you're making between the free market and government is cartoonish and not particularly useful.
For a long time, the US tried to export democracy and capitalism around the world. Sometimes it worked, but it was more common that the attempt failed. It failed, because the culture, the values, and the institutions needed to support a Western-style society were not there.
There are countries where the bureaucracy is more efficient and functional than in the US. But maybe the attempts to import the best practices fail, because the culture, the values, and the institutions needed to support them are not there. So it's up to individual incentives, which is usually a recipe for failure.
Once the situation tilts back to the private sector, which IMO is the natural state of things, it starts to get corrupted.
My thesis is that over the longterm you must align incentives. In certain times in certain places you can avoid this. But the arc of the moral universe bends towards self interest.
Another example: Many countries have a system of administrative courts. If someone challenges a decision made by a public official, the case goes there. The process is reasonably cost-effective and predictable, as the judge usually considers only whether the decision was made according to the correct processes. Determining whether the decision was good is left to elected representatives. If a similar case goes to a civil court, the process tends to be more expensive and less predictable, as the judge is more likely to consider the substance of the argument.
The reason in the US that things aren't easier is endless lobbying. Literally every sector that makes a few million bucks hires a state lobbyist to ensure no one local fucks them.
Structural issues like these are a major reason for the inefficiency of American bureaucracy. You chose to shape your society in a certain way, and these are some of the consequences.
So it could have been a language gap thing that the useless paperwork was actual useful for some reason that I would only know if I could read Chinese.
...which is not a problem any more since the advent of OCR and translation services...
> and I’ve never read through
Maybe you should? Just point a camera at the thing and run it through a translator.
http://www.ontario.ca/page/own-private-serviceontario-centre
I’ve used Service Ontario services many times, and they certainly feel like a balanced blend of bureaucratic process and efficiency.
It’s certainly an oasis in the desert of dealing with the government.
Why would you work a government job given that it is underpaid unless there were benefits to even it out? And don't say helping people is a benefit, that kind of thing lasts a couple years and then most people burn out on helping people.
Why would you work a government job given that it is underpaid unless there
were benefits to even it out?
I don't mean this to be argumentative or something, I'm just trying to understand what you're basing your thinking on.
Because of World War II, and other mid-20th century government changes, European bureaucracies can sometimes be much newer than those in the United States, making them appear they are better designed, when they simply haven’t existed for long enough to become as terrible.
1. Scale, a lot of countries are closer to a city state than the size of the US government. State governments are run poorly for different reasons having to do with our political system. Yeah Luxembourg and Singapore are run really well but India and china aren't.
2. No political party is interested in fixing efficiency. The Democrats ignore it because they don't want to bring attention to government inefficiency/corruption issues. The Republicans want government to be as inefficient as possible so we are incentivized to get rid of it.
> Never mistake for stupidity that which is explained by incentive structure.
Seems to fit here also!
I would argue this extends to big tech as well. You don’t get the promo without building some useless shit to show “impact”.
Now we just found out that the company we started a year+ ago didn't get registered in CA "in time" so we owe $800 even though it's made no money. And by "in time" I mean it was two weeks past their grace period for being exempt for your first year.
So yeah, not really feeling CA nor SF at this point. We're looking to move and move the business somewhere else.
2. ???
3. Profit.
Since there is so much political contention to building more housing, there is no chance that housing prices will decrease (nobody wants to see their property lose value).
Now they are complaining about the problem they caused?!?
I don't know if this is ironic, justified or just funny. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Don't fall for easy bullshit and let it lead you to making "dunk" comments that don't actually engage the problems and instead act as thought ending cliches. That's their entire goal.
It's expensive there because a lot of people want to live there (ye olde supply demand thang, ya know?), and the more affluent squeeze out the poor folk. A lot of that affluence seems to be all of us lucky tech people, so in a sense we're part of the problem (not blaming, just noting).
There is corruption and incompetence too but that seems to exist lots of other places too.
Granted, corruption is a big part of it (i.e. public services wasting tax payer money instead of solving the problem), and dealing with that would be a step in the right direction.
So if you want to say: is San Francisco tolerant of the LGBQT+ community? Absolutely, with flying rainbow flag colors.
But that's the key driver in the culture wars, and it has nothing to do with the business of running a government (other than minimizing government persecution of that community.
All of these issues could and should be dissected, analyzed, and addressed. But blaming it on the boogeyman of "DemonRats are destroying everything" is tiresome.
You state "experiment after experiment" but don't give any examples. I'd be happy to discuss them individually if you'd like.
p.s.: My mother was one of those awful homeless people littering the streets of SF in her final years. She migrated from the burbs so she wasn't the city's fault. How she got there is the complicated issue of many of them and never gets properly discussed or addressed. That's my skin in the game of this story.
This is incorrect. It may have widened in both directions, but it absolutely did not shift to the right.
Transgender support from mainstream corporations (Target, Budweiser, etc) would have been completely unthinkable 10 years ago.
That’s just one example of many. What has happened is that the Overton window is broken because people don’t even engage with “the other side” anymore. So we just end up with both sides discussing things with impunity that were previously off-topic and still are for the other side.
These tactics are intentionally meant to divide us and it's wildly effective.
Disclaimer: I'm an atheist but believe people should have the right to worship as they see fit, defend themselves appropriately, and love and be whoever they want.
I'm a centrist and try to stay in the middle because usually that's where solutions are. Whenever political extremes get their way, it tends to go wrong. Case in point is SF. It's not just gender identity politics or allowing people to live outside on the streets, it's also the attitude towards crime, the prioritization of climate change over everything else (while rejecting nuclear energy), and the tendency to control businesses which was evident throughout the pandemic as many small businesses struggled.
Sorry to hear about your mother. I do wonder why you would let her even experience that for a day. Maybe you didn't know, and you don't need to explain, but the left's position here is to think housing is the solution, when I think there is a big factor of families failing to take care of their loved ones and then demanding government pick up the pieces.
The problem is that their arguments are now getting purchase because SF is indeed facing problems. Since this grift site doesn’t actually prescribe any solutions it’s hard to say how right or wrong they are, but there’s definitely a need for SF, and more broadly expensive cities across the U.S., to take a hard look at how they’re operating.
The fact that we are allowing the US’s great cities to crumble because people are forced to move to suburbs in the middle of the desert since housing is so expensive is an absolute tragedy for everyone.
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/California_Policy_Cent...
Ok, cool, but whatever the quality of the arguments in the article that's probably not the devastating hammer blow to defeat them.
Case in point: homelessness. Yes, it's a huge problem, but San Francisco is a dumping ground for the homeless, e.g., other states buy one-way bus tickets for their indigents/miscreants to shift the burden. It's a national issue that needs to be addressed on a national level.
Then there was this pandemic thingy, and the WFH shift has decimated the office worker economy.
So they blame it all on "crime, vagrancy, and drugs" without any note of the the external pressure helping to create those problems.
That said, the pols should always have their feet to the fire on their ability to do their damn jobs and be responsible.
But this is another point of the problem: anyone who solves the problem well is bound to just attract more of the problem. People are not immobile, and will move to where they have the best chance of surviving, so if Seattle is rumored to be handing out tiny houses to the unhoused, it will simply attract more of the problem. Whatever local resources are thrown at the problem will not make a noticeable dent in the problem locally (though the national problem will get some small improvement relative to its size).
It would be collectively cheaper and far more humane to boot.
The correct solution for individuals is to move out of these mismanaged high density areas.
Salt Lake City, that bastion of left-liberalism (/s) does a much better job, specially at preventing vulnerable people from becoming homeless in the first place.
Ultimately SF’s problems are well understood and the solutions as well, but there is no political will to confront the entrenched interests that led to this and an apathetic electorate that does not demand accountability is responsible.
The hard part is finding affordable ways to do so. This is compounded by the fact that a large portion of the homeless suffer from mental health problems (my mother was in that boat).
On the mental health front, we need to collectively find a way to institutionalize the mentally ill in a manner that is fair and humane. That should include indigent drug addicts who are unable to care for themselves.
It's not, though. Seattle ran into loads of problems with housing-first policies where the houses would get trashed and people with substance abuse problems would continue camping out as groups.
2) Build subsidized housing. SF likes to complain about the end of the state redevelopment agencies but did you know that with just one year’s worth of the $7B a year windfall from the much-despised Tech (difference between the 2022 and 2008 budgets), SF could buy or build a $1M condo for every single of the 7,000 homeless men, women and children in the city? Instead at least half of that was captured by civil self-servants in the city bureaucracy in the form of salaries and benefits.
3) Restore involuntary committal of some mentally ill unable to care for themselves, that was abolished by the well-meaning but clueless Lanterman-Petris-Short Act in 1967
4) means-test rent-control (half of SF’s residential units), which creates haves and have-nots and raises prices to astronomic levels for new entrants
5) remove land-use restrictions like single-family zoning that covers half of the city
6) force drug addicts into treatment, using coercive measures if necessary
And the “SLC solved homelessness” was a last decade story that has already unraveled due to sustained and increased funding not being applied (again national problem, local solutions can’t do much).
If we look at the author section of the website, it lists former members of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, members of the American Enterprise Institute etc.
Also the "left wing pressure group" says IRS filings show the Koch brothers fund the CPC.
The reader can look at the facts, some on their own web site, and decide if they are a right wing pressure group or not.
Code of San Francisco (2023 AD): If you try to prevent robbery, you will be killed.
/s
Maybe throwing money at the problem is counter productive? Nah.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_the_Sovie...
Evidently uncited are
* COVID concerns
* Rapidly increasing cost of goods and services that remains unmatched by wage increases
* Dwindling customer base as people find stores understaffed (thanks, "strategic" layoffs!), understocked, or both and give up and turn to online shopping.
* Dwindling customer base as people move the fuck away because they either just can't afford city life anymore, or (thanks to the overall success of the blood-drenched demonstration of the viability of remote work) are no longer forced to pay San Francisco rents to work for Really Solid software/IT companies.
"Walgreens Executive Says Shoplifting Threat Was Overstated" [0]
"Recent Retail Closures in U.S. Cities Follow Trends Established Before the Pandemic" [1]
Retail is just dying, but of course they're going to blame something other than their own failing / inability to compete with Amazon and the like.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shopli...
[1] https://www.planetizen.com/news/2023/05/123289-recent-retail...
* Target hired the same firm to provide armed guards at some of their East Bay stores
In particular, NYC feels incredibly vibrant right now, more-so than pre-pandemic. Maybe it's because of tourism, which is at 110% of pre-pandemic levels. In comparison, SF feels like it got left behind.
I left, in part, not because of COVID concern, but LOCKDOWN concerns. I was tired of "rules for thee, but not for me" policies that I disagreed with.
Same kind of journalism happened in the early 2000s.
The problem is that they don’t recognize cyclicality.
Arguably the most important startup in decades is headquartered there, the CEO is stating remote work is a mistake, and the CTO is regularly calling SF the best place to start an AI startup.
SF will still face problems but a lot of this fiscal hand wringing will likely appear foolish in hindsight.
https://twitter.com/sfstandard/status/1662145831351336977?s=...
It's kinda like how you wouldn't want to use the toothpaste that "9 out of 10 dentists recommend". Or billionaires often mention their secret to success is merely "reading a lot" or "waking up at 4am" or doing dishes [0]
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/10/why-jeff-bezos-and-bill-gate...