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Comment by coreless | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, don’t worry— it sounds like madness to insiders, too.

The only real “crisis” about living in SF is the highest property values anywhere on earth mean you couldn’t actually live there if you wanted to.

The Bay Area is, for better and for worse, the closest thing we have to a model of a progressive utopia. That means if the presence of things like homelessness, brown people, or property crime make you feel unsafe, you will feel less safe there than you will in Irvine, CA.

On the other hand, if what brings you comfort is seeing your government focus on long-term, systemic inequities instead of trying to paint over the superficial consequences of the same, then SF will feel a little better to you — Oakland moreso — and in Irvine you will live in fear of being summarily executed by the Secret Police.

It’s like... based on the stories, I’m shocked that Alabama is still civil and solvent, you know? Just different perspectives.

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> The Bay Area is, for better and for worse, the closest thing we have to a model of a progressive utopia. That means if the presence of things like homelessness, brown people, or property crime make you feel unsafe, you will feel less safe there than you will in Irvine, CA.

The thing about the Bay Area that is so frustrating is that other progressive cities in the world (mostly outside of the US) seem to do a much better job managing issues like homelessness, equality, property crime, access to education, etc, with less resources. So for people who love SF and want it to succeed as a progressive example, it's frustrating that it seems to fall short despite all that is invested.

We want _effective_ solutions. SF has unique challenges, but very few people would say it has been trending in the right direction over the last 10 years.

For example according to HUD's latest report, SF, Oakland/Berkeley and San Jose occupy _3 spots in the Top 5_ of US cities with the highest unsheltered homeless rates. NYC has way more individual homeless people than SF in total, but NYC shelters 95% of its homeless population and SF barely manages to shelter 20%. There are _more actual people_ sleeping on the streets of SF than NYC despite SF being a tiny city in comparison to NYC. It's absurd.

Correct. The amount of money the city had to throw at these problems shows how the American way of spending their way to solutions isn’t enough. There’s zero attempt at being thoughtful and recognize what’s working (and why) — instead everything is a ballot initiative that’s voted on emotionally.

It’s a total lack of leadership and quality of governance, which to me stems largely from years of capitalism mixed with reductions in government which has created a super powerful and motivated global private sector, and no civic pride and reasonable reward for those capable individuals to work for the public.

We need to find a way to get our superstars in power, and not necessarily at the top only. We need a capable, civic-minded, and results-focused class of doer powering government. When the wage gap is 3-10x between private and public, and no culture of pride and civic engagement, this is what happens.

How can you spend your way to a solution if you can't even build a homeless shelter in neighborhoods already filled with homeless people?

People vote for the bond, politicians say OK now lets build what the bond funding described, people say hell no not in my back yard, nothing gets done, then people turn on the bond, the politicians, the whole idea of the project, future bonds, and future projects. A generational wave of political apathy and distrust fueled by bizarre takes on reality, actively ignoring data, and devaluing expert opinion.

It happens everywhere, but is particularly a hamstringing issue in CA due to how much outsized influence local council members (in LA at least) have on what is ultimately civic planning decisions that should be driven solely by empirical data and academic theory.

Guess who actually shows up for these local elections and council meetings and maintains a firm grip on the councilmans ear? Not renters, not homeless, not millenials, predominately home owners over 50 who want to close their eyes, jam their fingers in their ears, and pretend like its '63 again, property tax rate and all.

Homeless shelters are a humanitarian bandaid. They do not end homelessness, especially because they do not address root causes.

>On the other hand, if what brings you comfort is seeing your government focus on long-term, systemic inequities instead of trying to paint over the superficial consequences of the same, then SF will feel a little better to you — Oakland moreso — and in Irvine you will live in fear of being summarily executed by the Secret Police.

You're saying that a long-term addressing of systemic inequities is done by turning the public space of the city into the lowest common denominator of behavior, so that we are all exposed to the worst of it?

Doesn't that sound like dragging everyone else down instead of bringing the oppressed up?

> in Irvine you will live in fear of being summarily executed by the Secret Police.

What?

Irvine has simnifically less "systemic inequities" than anywhere in the the Bay Area, everyone here just has a lot of money.

And not sure what you are getting at with "the Secret Police", unless that is some sort of allusion to the fact that many of newer housing developments are heavily sold to foreign buyers in Mainland China or something.

The Bay Area is not a progressive utopia, dystopia maybe. Progressive policies are enacted when they are easy, like banning juul for unrelated products killing dozens, and avoided when they are hard, like allowing cigarettes to continue to be sold while 500k die a year. Or taxing chemo patients some 30% on their medical marijuana.

I think the bay area and CA in general is chock full of DINOs. All the feel good social generally agreeable progressive policies are enacted, but the hard stuff, the stuff that actually matters like repealing prop13, support for that policy is highly conservative in nature even if just about everyone in CA government has a D next to their name. Rejecting public housing and social welfare programs is conservative in nature. Rejecting transit builds is conservative in nature. Rejecting increased housing supply is conservative in nature.

Everything you see in California politics is labelled liberal, democratic, progressive, literally everything and anything as the term has lost meaning.

Here is how you actually tell which way a policy leans: if it favors the rich individual instead of the working class collective it is by definition not progressive, not democratic, and firmly a conservative policy.

Individual profit over collective good is the unified platform of the Republican party in this country and is represented in CA politics by entrenched local cabals (LA city and county governments are essentially feudal states) even if the actual GOP is not.

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