What Happened to San Francisco, Really? | Hacker News Reader

What Happened to San Francisco, Really?

newyorker.com

67 pointselsewhen56 comments

While I can appreciate the optimism of this article, it really only focuses on the perspectives of the rich and powerful and their pet projects to save the city, hardly reflecting the sentiment of the last sentence (“The only solution that’s a real solution is a solution in which everyone is involved”).

Try interviewing people like me who can only afford to live with housemates even though I’m 40 years old and supposedly make a lot of money because I work in tech. I moved out last month after a beloved clerk at a market in the outer richmond was savagely beaten to death by a shoplifter.

What has stopped you from seeking something remote?

i did and am remote now. prior to that i lived in sf for 7 years. a lot to love about the city, but not enough to keep me there anymore. lack of decent affordable housing seems to be the root of the city’s problems and i don’t see that changing in my lifetime.

As a young man, moving to SF was stimulating and launched my career. But now as a middle-aged man it became too depressing stepping over junkies passed out in front of my expensive yet crappy apartment just to discover my car had been broken into again. all for the pleasure of commuting to a mostly empty office to have video meetings with international colleagues.

not to say that these problems are unique to sf, it seems opioids have devastated many cities in america as has unaffordable housing. a broad solution could be to reduce wealth inequality or heavily tax those who insist they need to own more than 3 homes, but that’s basically asking the powerful to relinquish their power, which rarely happens.

my suspicion would be that more equitable wealth distribution would make housing even more expensive

in some scenarious even taxing third homes could ultimately reduce the supply of housing

a land value tax on the other hand...

Why would equitable wealth distribution make housing expensive?

My guess is that they meant: If you give a lot of people that previously couldn't afford a house more money it will increase the demand and prices. The issue is that there is a shortage of housing which is primarily due to zoning preventing the construction of houses in a lot of areas.

Ah this implies definition of wealth is purely $ value, not what their inflation-adjusted “afford to buy material goods and services” value.

for any given dollar a middle class/poor household would be more likely to spend it on housing or additional square footage than a richer household

Sf has the problem that it is not dense. Let everyone build a condo and prices will tumble

SF is the second most dense large city in the USA (after NYC). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... (look at the last table, bolded cities not a part of some other city's metro area).

Yes, I saw that in the news, terrible: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/store-clerk-death-sus...

I really don’t get why all of the fanfare and hand wavey attempts at outreach are necessary here. You have a well defined problem: high rates of property crime and drug use. How to solve it? Maybe try what they did in El Salvador, since that’ll actually accomplish something

The impression that I get from this article is that the city has too many bullshitters in it to actually solve concrete problems: the same problem of a company with way too much management

What did they do in El Salvador?

https://apnews.com/article/el-salvador-nayib-bukele-gangs-60...

How does this relate? There they actually enforced the laws and threw violators in prison. A similar strategy could be employed with drug dealers, property crime, etc in SF

From what I understand El Salvador went beyond "enforcing the laws" as we'd understand in a peacetime liberal democracy and instead jumped straight to borderline martial law and arbitrary arrests.

So I read the article. I have no doubt that some people would love to suspend constitutional rights and use the military to start rounding up anybody they don’t like, but that doesn’t feel like the kind of thing we do in the US.

Suspended due process and rounded up suspected gang members/men with tattoos until they tripled their incarceration rate

That’s the dilemma. Being progressive means being empathetic and a pacifist. Hauling people off the street into jail or other institutions against their will doesn’t play well with the voters. Until there is a tipping point and it does hopefully.

People dont see that some things just do not work?

Well I’m a centrist so I hope people get there eventually. You need a good balance of empathy and decisive action. I think one of the flaws in the progressive mindset is that care and love can solve most issues which it most certainly can’t. That and pushing evidenceless delusions like the trans issue are the only flaws with the left right now. The right on the other hand is a hateful, regressive, conspiratorial pit of snakes with no real plan other than being against any sort of egalitarianism.

> That and pushing evidenceless delusions like the trans issue are the only flaws with the left right now.

The reason they push this is because there's a particularly nasty streak of misogyny on the left, where they'll completely disregard any negative impact on women in favor of whatever benefits men.

So like the trans issue is mostly about men (who want to be women, or claim that at least) demanding and gaining access to women's spaces. Then there's the policy of trying to legitimize sex work, which basically just harms women for the sexual benefit of men. Also there's the whole issue of uncritical support for Islam, despite it being the most horribly misogynistic religion out there.

For those of us leftists who aren't misogynists, it's a real uphill battle having to deal with these assholes, especially when they try to claim that their beliefs are 'progressive' despite being anything but that, and that anyone who disagrees is doing so because of 'hate'. It's very frustrating.

Sort of like Feminists looking at how women are treated in Muslim majority countries in the Middle East, how they are treated in Israel, and then square the circle of who deserves sympathy and who doesn't. Sort of like people who claim to be women's advocates and enact policies that make women afraid to go out after dark.

> You have a well defined problem: high rates of property crime and drug use

Did we read the same article?

Here I thought TFA said the rates of property crime and drug use aren't exceptionally high, and relative to the distant past, actually quite low. But that against a backdrop of an empty downtown thanks to being all tech workers who are now remote, all you see is the ~normal urban blight, so it stands out in terms of visibility.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...

SF has one of the highest measures of property crime in the country. Article was mainly referring to violent crime. Don’t have any drug stats off the top of my head

Can me when San Francisco has "collapsed" so I can maybe buy a reasonably priced home. As it stands despite all the horror you see on the news no one really wants to leave.

San Francisco is in fact the fastest declining US city by population[1] and has seen one of the biggest drops in housing prices in the country[2]

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/05/large-cities-... [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SFXRSA

Did you even look at the content of the pages you posted?

From [1]: "The 15 fastest-declining cities from 2021 to 2022 and 2020 to 2021 were different, with major cities like Boston, Washington, D.C. and, most notably, San Francisco falling off the list."

San Francisco was #1 in 2020-2021 (i.e. the tech industry employee exodus at the beginning of the pandemic), and isn't even on the list for 2021-2022.

For [2]: while SF prices did decline, they are now at the level of Nov 2021 and are steadily recovering. (Not dissimilar to cities like Las Vegas or Austin.)

A house goes from $2 million to $1.9 million, that's a $100k drop! But only a 5% drop in relatively value. According to [2], housing prices have dropped to where they were 1.5 years ago.

> [Matt] Dorsey, a former police-department spokesperson, had the idea of adding fentanyl dealing to a list of crimes for which undocumented immigrants lose their sanctuary-city protections. "My hope was to incentivize a change to the drug market—if we went back to the good old days of heroin and Oxys, we’ll save hundreds of lives every year," he said. "It didn’t go over well with my colleagues."

I wonder what share of San Franciscans would actually oppose the deportation of undocumented immigrants who'd been convicted of dealing fentanyl. Are residents being poorly represented by their elected and appointed officials, or are they living in the product of their own preferences?

It's been said a million times, but I'll say it again for the ones in the back:

Housing prices and tech wages. City got great because everyone wanted to live there. Because everyone lived there, it made a lot of large business start up. These tech giants and other ritsy businesses pay a ton. People move there because of this, which drives houses up.

You hit a bubble where the wages drive the demand which drives the housing price, cyclically. This is what we all know.

The part we don't know or at least isn't talked about is the offshoots of these issues. Hypothetically, I go to SF and live in a camper because I want to get better job opportunities without buying a house. This exposes me more directly to other seekers, homelessness, and 'street people' (drug dealers, criminals, addicts, gangbangers) because I am living in the 'undesirable' places, forced into these locations due to my transient living situation. I have all this money from working, living in a bad area, likely depressed from living in a camper, lacking creature comforts, and suffering burnout, so I turn to these street people and now I am part of the problem.

The unique situation of transient individuals with tons of cash means that it assists in creating a bigger problem faster.

https://archive.ph/ayOW9

Good article - which captures the chaos that is San Francisco today. But probably completely confuses anyone who doesn't live there.

Let me add some more illustrations of chaos:

- Around Market and 9th to 11th, a mostly residential and expensive main and small streets, the noise is not that of the homeless in the street (of which there are many). It's mostly the INSANE level of noise of firefighters and ambulances. Second is the noise of the oh-so-touristic tramways. By contrast in the Mission the problem is the noise of the homeless shouting at each other and playing music in the street - early, all day, late. Firefighters and ambulances are rather quiet and much less frequent.

- "safest it has ever been". WTF? It has been years since people bothered to report "non-violent crime" such as smashing car windows for kicks and giggles. (There is an online system where you can get a number if you really need one for your insurance, without inconveniencing too many people.) And my friends and I have stopped even reporting most violent crime. Because what's the point? My score is now at 4 physical assaults and uncounted (because who has even the time) verbal ones. A friend has a better score but also uncounted: "every time I leave the apartment".

- Meanwhile, some neighborhoods are perfectly civilized: Usually no homeless and no poop on the sidewalks (dog or human), peaceful, construction work is discreet. No police in sight (same as mostly anywhere). If these people mostly live in these neighborhoods, they don't have anything to complain about.

- "millions!!! [...] for extra police overtime". Not for hiring, mind you. Just for paying cops to stands around doing nothing more profitably. Which is a double edged thing anyway: It's dangerous when SF cops DO something. For all the "progressiveness" of the city, many minorities don't feel safe when the cops are around. Some events actively ask the participants to NOT call the cops if something happens - because it would only aggravate the situation for the people who do belong there.

- It can be hard to get the official service to pick up trash for you. But on the other hand you can just leave stuff on the sidewalk and most will disappear fast. That's convenient. /s

- "too much ideology. Not enough action." There is a lot of that. Not just from the government.

- Transit. Great, right? There is a decent density of public transit in San Francisco. That should be good, right? Yes and no: It's slow. It's very often not on time - sometimes missing entirely. It sometimes isn't safe. It often doesn't feel safe. It's often disgusting. And even the giant busses sometimes have a hard time navigating the potholes.

- "The city has an annual budget of fifteen billion dollars". Really? I didn't know that. Funny. The web says $6.4B in 2010, $14.6B in 2023-2024. Amazing. So much money for so little result.

- Street cleaning. SF uses "street cleaning" as a pretext for parking tickets largely. On some streets, the street sweeper zooms through at warp speed, in the middle of the street, after the ticket brigade came through, and then you can park again. Elsewhere, the sweeper assiduously scrubs this way and that again - beautiful.

So anyway, chaos. And good luck San Francisco!

What can fix it? Beats me. Not one thing certainly. Less red tape of course, less corruption of course (of every kind including not doing one's job or using one's job as a platform for ones' obsessions), less infighting no doubt wouldn't hurt, more voting probably (but this is California, running on a platform "for housing" means absolutely nothing in practice.)

Oh: The weather is great. Hard to beat really depending on your preferences.

Actually there is something that might help everywhere in California: That would be to rebuild a state-run or state-funded mental health system at all levels and at a size that could actually make a difference. Ideally at the state level but perhaps San Francisco can help get that started.

It is really hard for a city to bootstrap mental health system given that people can just move to SF for great mental health care if the system is actually decent (saturating the system and eventually causing it to collapse). We already see this with happening cities with better social services than others.

The flaw with your comment is that you could pretty much post it in any city’s subreddit or discussion forum and it would be a common trope.

There’s always a bloc of people who believe that everything has gotten out of hand these days, everything is chaos, things were better back in the good old days. It’s unproductive bitter nonsense.

Then they go on and complain about the bloated city budget without doing any research on why that is. In San Francisco, many revenue generating agencies that normally aren’t part of city government feed income into the budget, like the Port of San Francisco, which makes the budget look bigger overall. It has departments that in other cities might be part of county or state government instead. Also, San Francisco is legally required to balance their budget.

I’d like to say that my advice to bitter city forum members would be to just move already and get it over with, but we all know they’d spend their time complaining about the next place they’re living.

When municipalities share problems, it's possible that many of them are experiencing them for the same reasons. It certainly doesn't mean the problems don't exist.

here is a 2022 ($14B) "budget explorer"

https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/san-francisco-budg...

The port is just $190M. (But the airport is part of the SF budget at $1.2B - Less than transit at $1.4B)

Police is only at $710M (good things they got a raise after that :-)

Here is a good one. "City administrator" is $600M. Only because it's in addition to HR, planning, controller, IT, etc.

Perspective from someone who was born and raised in the bay area…

> Around Market and 9th to 11th, a mostly residential and expensive main and small streets …

What?! This is just flat out wrong. The area around 9th and Market is basically civic center BART station; which was a low rent neighborhood where most of the residential buildings were SROs. Twitter got tax breaks to put their office there because it was and still is a dump. Even after you cross Van Ness into Hayes Valley you are still not in a fancy / exclusive neighborhood. Like the projects used to be right there.

> Safest it has ever been

Yes. There was a time when you could get shot in the Fillmore, Chinatown, the Mission and most definitely in the TL. Now the only place where you might run into that kind of trouble is bayview / hunters point / sunnydale - and I don’t know why you would ever go out there.

Transit is awesome. Best public transit in western US mainly because of density - the city is only 7 miles across. Have you tried public transportation anywhere west of the Mississippi before? I’m terms of schedule / timeliness, who looks at the actual muni schedules? Just use NextBus and go out the to stop like 3 mins before your bus arrives like a normal person.

Anyway, I could go on…

I agree that for all the fact base / revenue that SF gets the quality public schools are a travesty. But they have always been trash - with the exception of Lowell.

> which was a low rent neighborhood where most of the residential buildings were SROs.

It was. Now (south of Market, west of Civic Center BART) it's high rises, towers and lots of houses that have been remodeled and mid-rises on the side streets. Around Twitter basically. All of which expensive - because well, it's at the center and walking distance of everything.

And on transit like I said, yes it's there. And could even be decent. Except it's not. I mean, it's non-existent in other places. But that doesn't make it anywhere near "nice" in San Francisco. Again depending on the neighborhoods that you try to drive through no doubt. Many people still don't have a good alternative and use it. When we have to.

They may be charging a lot, but that does not make it a nice neighborhood. But I guess they figured they could fleece people who did not know their way around the city.

Downtown SF has always been a soulless wasteland for the homeless and people who do not actually live in the city. Life in SF has always been about the neighborhoods. So basically anything West of Van Ness, South of 16th, and North of Broadway (with the exception of Nob Hill) modulo the character of the neighborhood.

The trick with muni busses is to always sit by the second set of doors. Crazy people ride in the front. Thugs and teenagers in the back. Normal people in the middle. The muni rail is truly an abomination. But the daily game of sardines is part of the charm … I guess

>> There was a time when you could get shot in the Fillmore, Chinatown, the Mission and most definitely in the TL. Now the only place where you might run into that kind of trouble is bayview / hunters point / sunnydale

Friend of a friend was stabbed to death in Nob Hill not too long ago.

Oops, sorry! You said "shot" not "stabbed."

Surprised nobody mentions the smell. A heady mix of piss and weed

Not just piss. Piss is OK (I have several kids and the smell is nothing anymore). It's heavily fermented piss and feces and the odiferous chemicals that stick to your clothes that really sucks.

The city was in decay and decline for a decade. This didn’t just happen overnight. The warning signs was pointed out and the people who flocked there wrote off the warnings signs as “it’s just part of the quirkiness of San Francisco”, as they happily took their inflated tech paychecks. I had the chance to take a job there but when I did the math even at 200k I was making less than my peers in the Pennsylvania office who were paying 150k.

Now that it’s reached a tipping point in decay there’s some pretty crazy finger pointing going on. Well who do you blame in a uniparty city where everyone votes for one party, certainly not the people who voted these people in that enacted these policies.

The author points the finger at the super rich democrats of the city, the one they presumably decided to work for and offered them large inflated paychecks that helped create this income disparity. The whole thing reeks of hypocrisy.

Speaking of decay and hypocrisy. Do you think the Californians that move to Texas will vote for policies and politicians that made California into what it is, and Texas into California 2.0? Or will they integrate and vote for Texas values?

Hmm, maybe those who could afford the extreme expense of living there got tired of contending with uncontrolled violent crime and a really (literally) shitty environment? It's not as though people with money have their pick of the entire rest of the planet, the vast majority of which doesn't have those problems. How selfish of somebody to want to live peacefully, not step in shit, and not be endlessly taxed as a penalty for being productive.

The only ones seriously asking "What happened" are the ones whose policies made these problems and want to pretend that they aren't problems, or want to evade responsibility for them.

As a resident of SF, this was probably the best article about SF that I've read in years - it really captures a broad set of perspectives and paints an accurate picture of the landscape.

really enjoyed this too

Meh. The article presents a rather disingenuous view of "both sides".

Gumps? Gumps went out of business in 2018 (Chapter 11). What Chachas is mourning is not a centuries old company, it's the less than a decade old plaything of an investment banker who bemoans the effect of remote work on his San Francisco business… from New York.

TogetherSF? They've put forth some rather dubious political positions and bankrolled the comically tone deaf "Fentalife" ads. Who cares about the opinions put forth by a group only interested in pulling cheap publicity stunts?

Otherwise it's a puff piece filtered through the perspective of tech. How droll.

As a non-resident who has enjoyed going to tech conferences in SF in the past, taking along my family so they could explore the city while I was at the conference, this article did nothing to change my opinion of SF. There is no way in hell I would go to SF for a conference or take my family there.

What gave you the negative view? Was it personal experience or media?

Not OP, but I've seen SF in the news before coming here last week and it really looked bad.

It's sadly exactly as shown in the news - car break-ins and zombies around TL. It's just sad and not safe.

I don't know how the rest of the US looks like right now in terms of crime rate and drugs abuse - but as an european I have never seen anything this bad.

It makes me really sad that SF turned into current state. It’s the only city I’d considered to be perfect and that’s also why I know it will bounce back better than ever.

Some aspects are so nice it's quite likely it can stay disfunctional forever and still not shrink significantly.

+1 to the housing issue - this has led to a lost generation of the kind of young to mid-career professionals that would otherwise serve as the roots of the community.

I moved there in 2014 for work out of grad school, had no money to buy when I showed up and despite doing well, costs rose faster than my income. I was open to putting down roots there, but just do the basic math with the assumption of a small family and an eventual retirement, and you come to the conclusion it's not going to work for you in that environment. The good friends I made there mostly came to the same conclusion, and by 2019 almost all of them were gone, the pandemic just finished them off, including me who left in 2020.

It's not rocket science, if you literally make it impossible to invest and grow in the community you will have a transient population who leaves the minute it doesn't make sense to be there. I have also lived in New York City, and due to investments in transit and an environment that allows for development along this transit you have options to invest and grow in the city. Start out as a young professional 10 stops away from the city in Brooklyn, Queens or even the Bronx. When you're a bit more financially secure move to a neighborhood 5 stops away, keeping your community and family ties along the way.

There are two quotes in the article, which are completely off:

“To blame poor and displaced people for decline when you had a whole influx of people who came to mine the city’s wealth during the tech boom, drove the rents way up, got their money, and then, during covid, popped out? No,”

We didn't get our money, we gave it to the landlords and property owners. What we did get was our experience, that we can now monetize elsewhere and have a chance to meet basic personal and financial goals, and we aren't coming back. The rents went up because the region created many new jobs, but completely resisted creating new housing.

So then the question is: Who bites on cheap San Francisco housing? Is it students? Is it immigrants? Is it artists? Is it techies?”

Housing is nowhere near being cheap, it's basic math. Median SF house cost is currently $1.2M or ~$8500 a month in mortgage, tax, insurance, which is down from prior years. Median bay area income is ~$120K, about $84k after taxes and so ~$7k a month take home. Students aren't buying these houses, artists and new immigrants aren't buying these houses, the mid-career professionals that were just displaced are your only possibility.

San Francisco property owners leveraged their returns in boom years by restricting new supply, but increased the risks of exactly this scenario. I can only hope another shock doesn't hit right now, like the inevitable "big one". It's going to take time and doing things differently to build a more sustainable community and replace this lost generation. Start with building dense housing on the BART lines, again it's not rocket science.

They voted for this.

There's no hidden secret. It's right there in the open.

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