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San Francisco is a failed city. The failure of its prosperous element to do anything about it is an indictment of its entire culture.

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I agree San Francisco has its problems, but calling it a failed city is grossly overstating the problem. San Francisco continues to have a high degree of social mobility relative to the rest of the United States [0].

[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-geog...

You mean if you have a Stanford or CMU CS degree and wine and dine with VCs? Sure, its a great place for upward mobility. Now what about everyone who was actually born in SF and who isn't in tech?

One of the metrics, as mentioned in the article, is the probability of a child being in the upper quintile of income, given that their parents were in the bottom quintile (hardly wining and dining with VCs).

In SF, that probability is 0.122, or 12.2%… extremely high relative to the rest of the country. Atlanta is 0.045, and even New York City is only 0.105.

The draw of SF used to be that it was a free-wheeling, anything goes type of place. But that was decades ago. Now there is hardly a reason to go there unless it's something business related.

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