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Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

It's incredibly obvious that housing, homelessness, and general city livability are major problems in SF to everyone, even passing tourists. How much clearer does it need to get?

Government officials are constituents too and they should be able to figure this out even without any public feedback. This is their job. Ignorance and apathy have no place there and they would be fired in any other industry for this kind of incompetence. Unfortunately they're also in charge of any rules around accountability.

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I don't believe housing is the issue. Housing is the distraction. The real issue is that the US incentivizes disparity. Shitty minimum wage, no car = no job (lack of public transport), no universal health care (health issue? Your life is over) and no free education (no money and no good grades? Good luck)

Some might contend that San Francisco has all of those problems addressed. There is adequate public transportation, a livable minimum wage, access to health care, and free education for all.

It may be worth considering how all the issues you so correctly and wisely identify have been addressed in the place that seems to continue to exemplify the worst of the crisis. Perhaps they're all addressed improperly or inefficiently. Perhaps trying to address the issues is simply too new to have had any impact at all. Perhaps the solutions are so successful that they've drawn people from elsewhere in need of help, making the crisis falsely appear to be ongoing. Perhaps the critical services you point to are insufficient somehow.

What are your thoughts on explaining this apparent conundrum? I'd very much love to hear! I want to understand.

So admittedly I'm not a resident of SF or California, but to address the first item on your list, housing - if it's a major problem identified by everyone, why haven't the public voted in line with that assertion? https://sf.curbed.com/2018/11/8/18075464/yimby-sf-election-v.... And trust me that's not the first group to try do something like that. For years voters have been turning down similar initiatives to ease the housing problem there.

I still hold my point that the public may get "outraged" or whine about the problem, but they won't act or vote in alignment with that outrage until it actually impacts them. The homeless/opioid epidemic finally crossed that threshold and so they did. But that just proves my point that it's the public that must act/vote and see themselves as the responsible party, and not wait for the government to solve everything.

The government is the people. At some point, the officials need to just get on with it.

The reality is fine-grained democratic voting on every issue does not scale to today's world. People do not have the time, attention, education and understanding to vote properly on everything, and when you add in personal biases, lack of risk management, short-term outlooks, majority power, and special interests; things break down completely.

Many of these things which could improve civic life do not really need a voting process. It's not a system for the people (not anymore) but stays around because it removes accountability and provides regulatory capture for the few who profit. Of course, as you say, the very people who do not take action are the ones that need to take action for this to get better. I do not have an answer for that.

> The reality is fine-grained democratic voting on every issue does not scale to today's world.

Tell it to Switzerland. The most recent referendum included such important issues as "should the government offer subsidies to farmers who leave the horns on their cows".

Having lived in Switzerland a while, direct democracy may not be perfect but it definitely works. It might not work in America but it works.

I don't follow. The fact that such an issue was voted on is not evidence that it should be voted on by the whole population. How many really care or know about that situation? Why do you say that "it works"? In what way exactly?

Switzerland is also around 8M people which is smaller than some cities in bigger countries so it barely qualifies for the scale argument.

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