San Francisco Is Burning
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The problem is that city laws unreasonably favor the tenants, putting an unreasonable amount of pressure on landlords. It was so bad that my landlord couldn't afford to fix problems in her building; nor could she evict a problem tenant who threatened us all.
When we (the tenants) tried to work with the city to stop the aggressive tenant's behavior, the judge just threw it out. (This tenant was mentally ill and needed to live in a home with proper supervision.) Ultimately, all of us left, except the family who lived there for 20 years and paid almost nothing for rent. *
I don't have a lot of love for landlords; but San Francisco treats tenant protection as a win-lose negotiation. It puts landlords in a clear loosing situation of the negotiation, and then drags down anyone who wants a safe "no frills" apartment at a good price.
* San Francisco's rent control is unreasonable. If you live in a rent-controlled building for more than a few years, you can effectively live there for free. The landlord then can't keep up the building, because the rent for the open apartments needs to stay low to compete with luxury apartments without rent control. That's partly why San Francisco tenant protection puts landlords on the loosing side and drags down everyone else.
Is it common practice to take someone who is in trouble for an unrelated crime, and use it to coerce them into being what amounts to an unpaid undercover police officer?
I mean, I understand the idea of arresting someone from a criminal gang and then getting them to wear a wire to catch the big boss. But the way this is written it sounds like the two men didn't know each other.
Am I missing something here? Because that sounds incredibly unethical and I'm surprised if it's legal.
The US plea-bargain system seems to have so much potential for abuse.
EDIT: So many questions are coming to mind now. Like, why would the police entrust something like this to an untrained, highly stressed, and unreliable person when they could just use a plain-clothes officer?
Wouldn't it be very embarrassing for the police if the undercover guy freaked out and ruined the investigation?
Is their plea-bargain dependent on the success of the other sting? So staying out of jail could be dependent on their acting ability? Because if so that's absolutely insane.
> Like, why would the police entrust something like this to an untrained, highly stressed, and unreliable person when they could just use a plain-clothes officer?
How many undercover gigs can you do before people start to catch on? Also, whoever you want to target may already know the informant and have some implicit level of trust in them.
Yeah, I get the idea of using an informant who is linked to the person you're trying to catch. It makes sense as a way of gathering evidence against more serious criminals. It's a grey area, but broadly speaking I think it's ethically ok.
What I'm having a problem with from an ethical point of view is taking someone who just happens to have been arrested for an unrelated crime, and coercing them into doing undercover police work for you. This person hasn't been to trial yet, might be completely innocent, and is going to be placed into a potentially dangerous and definitely stressful situation.
That's why I was shocked by the article - it makes it sound as though Gideon didn't know Frank. Maybe the author just glossed over some link between them.
What are the safeguards around this? To give an absurd example, what's stopping the police from arresting someone for, say, taking a piss in a back alley, and then sending them in to infiltrate a violent criminal gang?
Bad behavior is mostly reserved for departments and precincts with too much time on their hands and can make the jump from keeping the community generally safe and free of violence to enforcing the law because it's there to be enforced.
You don't have time to keep tabs on informants, organize unnecessary raids, call all your buddies to beat some black guy to a pulp and write tickets for tail lights when you've got actual calls to respond to.
edit: Thanks for the down-votes, care to share why you disagree?
I certainly didn't mean to imply some kind of moral superiority over the US system. Our police have done some appalling, corrupt things. Conducting surveillance on the family of Stephen Lawrence is another one that springs to mind.
The story from the article feels like it's missing details that were either intentionally obscured to protect someone, left out for effect, absent-mindedly left out, or other possibilities. Your suspicions are indeed correct that it wouldn't make a lot of sense to put someone into a sting operation they have little to do with, since it's very easy to blow the entire operation.
Unfortunately there is nothing illegal about the practice. It's not extortion to coerce someone with something you're legally entitled to do. We'd need a new law banning the use of criminal informants in situations like these. (Ideally, banning the use of criminal informants without a court order.)
There seems to have been no link between the crime Hoffman was accused of and the gang she was sent to meet, other than that they both involved drugs.
> “I’d close my eyes, and my mind wouldn’t stop all night long. I don’t mean not sleeping. I mean not sleeping. You go to bed and you’re up all night. And then, the next day, you go to work…”
> I think Gideon’s answer to that last question reveals some narcissism
> I appreciate Gideon’s candor, but our conversation demonstrates just how contemptuous San Francisco entrepreneurs can feel about the residents who aren’t rich or hipsters or tech workers.
This bit stood out to me because it's like... you're asking for empathy in the same breath as showing very little yourself. It shouldn't be this hard for this reporter to see how a guy can be without much empathy for people he dislikes. After all, he's doing it right there.
Not mentioned in the article is whether Gideon tried to find another buyer. Given the previous owner sold the place for just $10k, he was probably desperate to get rid of it. Gideon realised he'd been the rube that bought a massive liability, and I'm guessing he found it impossible to find another buyer. (If he could have sold it, he'd have done that rather than try and burn it down).
> The numbers cited by Campos and others—45 fires in two years—also weren’t necessarily as suspicious as they seemed. It turns out that 25 fires a year is about average for the Mission.
So, a big fat pile of nothing, plus a narration of the (very real) inter-ethnic and inter-class tensions in the Mission intended to make the story sound more plausible.
Also, can I just add how irresponsible David Campos's role has been in all this?
> “I’m not saying there is arson,” he said. “The fire department tells me there isn’t. They haven’t found evidence of arson.”
> “Have you come across any clues?” I asked.
> “Nothing’s come up,” he said.
> “Are there rumors?”
> “There are comments,” he said. “Like with that fire that happened at the car-repair place.”
> He meant the Rolling Stock tire-shop fire of November 8, 2015. It destroyed the shop and two adjacent apartment buildings, displacing 21 people. Fire investigators ruled this one an accident as well, most likely started by an electrical fault or, again, discarded smoking materials.
> “The owner [James Albera] was sort of, ‘Hey! Now I guess we can go and build condos,’ ” Campos continued. “It was an odd comment that fed into the speculation.”
> Later, I found Albera’s verbatim comments to the media: “It’s terrible. It’s been in the family since 1960.” And then, when asked what he planned to do next: “I’d like to go residential, with stores on the bottom.”
> I e-mailed Albera several times to ask him about what Campos told me. Personally, I didn’t find his response to the fire suspicious. Even so, he didn’t reply.
Can't increase supply because NYMBY? Check. Can't increase rent because rent control? Check. Removing tenants next to impossible? Ok, this is true anywhere.
Gee, I wonder why the incentives are all screwed up?
Just a guess, but maybe it's all the douchebag millennials who programmatically remove other's choices.
You can talk all you want about "millennials", but tech workers need a place to live. They make a lot of money - and largely put a lot of it in the local economy since many of them are at a stage of life where conspicuous consumption makes sense for them. But because of Local and state politics, not one city will let anyone build enough of it. So if someone can't build a 400 unit tower in the mission, guess what? They'll find a way to get occupy 400 single family homes. No one wins really. Except some longstanding homeowners that get an underfed windfall in home value without paying any increased property tax, some unscrupulous landlords, developers with political connections, and some grandstanding politicians.
Meanwhile, tech people drawn from all over the world come here to be vilified as colonizers, low-income people are left in the streets or pushed to the farthest reaches of the Bay (or out of state completely), and principled landlords are left with a money hole they can't withstand.
It's overcrowded, it's overly-expensive, and it's jam-packed with two kinds of people: naive overpaid tech-startup people who are convinced their selfie app will be the one that saves the world, and the most aggressive homeless people I've ever met -- that is, the world that needs more than a selfie app to save them, but who are effectively "pigeons" (to borrow this landlord's crass terminology) in the eyes of the self-styled superheroes on their way to an overpriced bistro or a meeting about how to reinvent the bus system but with a prohibitively-high price tag.
The city reeks of marijuana smoke, and spending more than 20 minutes at Fisherman's Wharf left me lightheaded. You may scream loudly about your right to smoke this medicinal herb, but what of my right not to be compelled to feel its effects just because I dared to walk down a public avenue?
It's nigh-impossible to get around any way other than just walking for miles -- including to overpriced grocery stores and back -- or paying for another app startup's glorified taxi service, gallantly offering highly-priced "solutions" to a problem they helped create. This may be an unfair criticism, though; my own hometown has notoriously-bad public transit. It's a hard problem to solve, just made harder by the sheer crowded density of San Francisco.
There are no trees, except in tiny parks. At least one of those few parks is comprised of artificial turf (the plasticky kind), and would take about 1 full minute to leisurely stroll from end to end. If you combined all the parks, you might get something roughly the size of New York's Central Park. Maybe. The city has decided that the natural ecosystem which it boasts so loudly about protecting has no place within its boundaries. And so, you have nothing but cement, asphalt, and concrete as far as the eye can see.
As much as people talk about the "Bible belt" and how it's so hard to be left-leaning or atheist there (because you're considered "odd"), it's much harder to be right-leaning or Christian in San Francisco, where the assumption is that people of that ilk are knuckle-dragging trogdolytes to be scorned or ignored until the commonly-shared blue-tinted dream vision of history renders such people somehow obsolete. It's an attitude of "we respect all people, just...not you."
There's lots of talk to be found on street signs and in meeting rooms about celebrating cultural diversity and indigenous peoples, but in practice the people who are celebrated are rich CEOs or incoming tech workers riding in on H1Bs to displace the "indigenous" people of the area, crowding them out and motivating the kind of hostility mentioned in this article.
My business travel to San Francisco felt like I was walking into a foreign country; one that was on the decline, one that had some deep-rooted enmity for my own homeland (the "rest of the country"), like you might find between India and Pakistan.
To add to that point further, the drug problem in San Francisco seems to be absolutely enormous. I can't even tell you the number of times I saw someone literally shooting up right on the sidewalk in broad daylight. It was very disconcerting to say the least. I get the need for access to clean syringes, but it seems to go beyond disease prevention and almost into the realm of enabling. I say all this as an expert of nothing, just my observations after 48 hours in the center of town.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean here. Most harm reduction programs of this type are needle exchanges, they're not just giving them away. It seems obvious that it won't enable the person to use if they obtain a clean syringe, because otherwise they'd just use the dirty one they already have. Exchange programs also incentivize people not to leave old syringes lying around.
I think very close to zero people have ever decided, “you know, I'd like to use illegal IV drugs, but it's too hard to get clean needles so I'll pass”.
Maybe it's the parts of the city you spent time in (I try to avoid Fisherman's Wharf for pretty much any reason aside from taking a ferry to Angel Island) but I feel like some of your criticisms are a bit off base. It would be like going to New York, spending most of your time walking around Times Square, and saying that the city has nothing to offer. For example, Golden Gate Park, one of many parks in SF, is 20% larger than Central Park.
Are there a lot of problems the city faces, yes undoubtedly. But there's also a lot that's compelling out here. It may be worth trying to explore more of the city if you're ever out here again to try and at least understand what people see in it
1. Agree with most of what you have to say about San Franciso. Personally, even though I don't smoke, it doesn't bother me.
2. The real cheerleaders of San Fransisco are usually people who just moved here. Maybe their city was worse?
3. The weather is just grey. My dad had to move from the Richmond District because he was literally considering suidide. He said, he would get up, and just grey. He finally moved to Petaluma, and was happy, but all his buddies were still in the city.
4. Socially--it's great for single men, or gay man. It might be the worst place a single lady could ever end up in, on a social level. My last two girlfriends live in SF. I have seen them walk up to men they want, and get rebuffed. Now--the men were gay, but it's not easy ladies. (No one ever talks about this aspect of San Francisco.).
5. On the positives, if you do end up here, you just might be suprised just how strong unions are here. Whether a cop, a electrician, or garbage man; you will be taken care of--if you get into the union.
6. I do like most of the diversity. I don't like the income inequality though, but that's taking over every city.
7. Theft! Just remember to lock that bike, or put a kill switch in any vehicle. There's a good chance it will be taken. Actualy, the bike will be stolen, and you will eventually have a window broken out of your vechicle. Don't leave anything of value in the vechicle--ever.
8. My last thought is this, I always thought of SF as half a city. It's not like New York, and thank god. It's just a weird small city. It's nothing like the media portrays it. Just remember that song, 'I've never been as cold as the summer I spent in San Francisco". I forget the lyrics, but you get my drift?