America’s Havana: Thousands Say “Ciao” to San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

America’s Havana: Thousands Say “Ciao” to San Francisco

city-journal.org

76 pointsjseliger67 comments

This is a weak rant that has little business being on HN. Just a bunch of random complaints that poorly reflects the totality of SF. Some hits are totally misplaced, like this one:

> But the culmination of local incompetence and misplaced priorities has to be the blackouts and fires. The monopoly utility, PG&E, began rolling blackouts this past autumn to prevent sparks in dry and windy weather. Millions went without power for days.

What on earth does this have to do with SF? PG&E is a state-wide utility over which SF has no particular authority, and SF wasn't even affected by the rolling blackouts.

Certainly SF has problems with property crime, homelessness, housing costs, and NIMBYs. But clearly people still love living here, as evidenced by the continual inflow of people to the city and the region. Articles like that this attempt to paint it as a wasteland feel completely out of touch with the actual reality of living here.

Having lived there for 3 years in downtown and recently moved away I couldn’t be happier. For how much tax Californian residents pay, San Francisco is a disgrace of a city.

> Certainly SF has problems with property crime, homelessness, housing costs, and NIMBYs. But clearly people still love living here, as evidenced by the continual inflow of people to the city and the region. Articles like that this attempt to paint it as a wasteland feel completely out of touch with the actual reality of living here.

San Francisco, objectively, has a net-outflow. This is not a normative statement.

https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/bay-a...

2500 people left over 8 years. While technically a net-outflow, it's statistically insignificant. The outflow for immigrants was around 80k.

The inflow for immigrants is attributed to the fact that SF is a gateway city, and doesn't really tell us much about SF's quality of life.

> The discrepancy between international and domestic migration in the Bay Area can likely be explained by what economists call "gateway cities." These cities, often planted along the coast, serve as entry points for foreigners moving to the U.S. The immigrants will register in the gateway city, but often move to other parts of California or the country within months, according to Phuong Nguyen, a research specialist at the California Department of Finance.

And while it might be statistically "insignificant" in the absolute, you have to look at how it compares to other cities to really understand how healthy that number is. A contrast: the net domestic migration of Sacramento County was +15,224. -2500 looks far less healthy next to that.

“Santa Clara and San Mateo counties grew by 46,048 and 16,727 people respectively, but they had negative net migration totals for domestic residents, at -99,374 and -20,960”.

That’s way more than -2,500, maybe you should have written articles about those counties.

1) I didn't write the article

2) If your argument is that Santa Clara and San Mateo counties are also bad (if not worse), I don't disagree...

That's not what your article says?

> The overall population of San Francisco County increased by 78,121 people between April 1, 2010 and July 1, 2018. Besides the annual thousands of deaths and births that occurred within that eight year span, the county had a total net migration of 52,066 people.

They distinguish between domestic and international migration, but that's not relevant to whether SF has net inflow or outflow.

If you'd read the immediately following paragraph, you'll note that this distinction between domestic and international migration is extremely relevant to whether SF has net inflow or outflow.

Once you control for this variance, San Francisco, objectively, has a net outflow. That's the conclusion of the linked article, as well.

As someone who lived between SF and LA for the last decade, most everyone wants to leave after they "make it." It's a minority, mostly naive newcomers who came from the suburbs like myself, who are enamored by it.

It's understandable to be biased against admitting a mistake, most people are, but eventually most see objective reason.

Agreed, SF has it's fair share of problems as most cities do. I'm not sure why the "well techies live there, why isn't it a utopia by now" comment still pops up.

I think the problem with SF is not that it isn't a utopia — it would be unfair to expect that of any city — it's that it's worse than nearly every other in the US, especially for those in the middle class and lower class.

You might argue, "well so many people continue to live here and love it" — and that's true...except most of the people that happily live in SF are rich tech workers that are comfortably in the top quintile of the income distribution.

The tech worker might love SF, and indeed it might even be a beautiful city — but what of the teacher, police officer, firefighter, janitor, and waiter? Is SF really the beacon of progressivism it claims to be if it's (quite possibly) the only city in the US where a teacher can't afford to live within a 30 minute commute of their school without roommates?

> This is a weak rant

I challenge you to do the following:

- Define what your assessment of the article as a "weak rant" means in objective terms.

- Pick a random sample of op-eds from major news outlets and measure them using your chosen metric

I claim no reasonable definition of weakness/rantiness will disqualify the OP while allowing more than 20% of opinion pieces. But maybe you can prove me wrong.

I spent 15 years in SF. Experience: Paying $4100 for a 2 bedroom, being assaulted on the muni multiple times, trying to explain to my parents why needles litter the sidewalk, going through a detective witness interview (after my neighbor was violently attacked and had her home ransacked). I was willing to stay. I love SF. Once I realized things would only get worse, I left :(

How can a city with so much income and smart inhabitants become such a #$*@&? What happened?

Huge wealth disparity.

Good intentions, bad government, as usual... Sadly... as usual

Not enough of a balance in local politics? Republicans and Democrats are both shitty sides of the same coin, so there's a reason they're 50/50 in most stable places.

See where some of the money goes yourself:

https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2018/san-francisc...

Things make more sense when you take a look at the post-WW2 black population growth in the Bay Area compared to the rise in interest in "local control" growth policy and the timing of some famous "Progressive" votes like the Freeway Revolts: https://i.imgur.com/6F0gP4l.png

I certainly can't speak to _intentions_, but I can observe the result of how basically every decision taken since the '60s has worked to maintain the segregation that used to be legal at the time: http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?bayarea

Yes, SF has lots of high paying jobs and smart people, but don't kid yourself, that's a very small slice of the 1M people who live in SF.

Just hang around outside a public school in SF when it lets out. The vast majority of people who live in SF are middle to lower class in terms of income.

Why do you think there is so much hate for tech in SF? Because most people who live in SF have zero contact with tech workers, but they hear all the stories of throwing money around their city.

Existing property owners have too much control to prevent new construction. Consciously and subconsciously they restrict new construction to boost property values. IMO most of SF's problems can be traced back to this. And it's a vicious cycle. Once you're in debt up to your eyeballs for your home, you do not want to see the problem fixed. SF city doesn't want it fixed either because they want more property tax dollars.

Of course there are other problems too but they would be easier to solve with cheaper property prices. California should tax property at their current market values instead of purchase price. This would fix the tax sort fall and put downward pressure on property prices.

That’s the housing crisis, yes. While related, it is not an excuse for shit in the street and high crime.

They could probably improve tourism by providing mental and homeless help outside downtown. Maybe break even or profit. No political will apparently.

Nah.. housing crisis causes the poor to have nowhere to go. It's the root cause.

Massive corruption and socialist policies. But, I repeat myself.

I loved it and couldn’t be happier not living there anymore. Lived there for three years. It is a great place to visit but a terrible place to live.

This piece seems to be a political hit piece on SF. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of critical analyses on the failures of both the city and the citizens of SF, but this is not that.

This appears to be someone who is mostly interested in just complaining. (And with a clickbait headline that isn't backed up in the article.)

Yes, you could feel the seething behind the words. Still tended to agree with it.

One nitpick, Chavez is a favorite punching bag for the right. Most don’t seem to know Vz was pillaged for decades by corrupt capitalists before that. If you ever wondered why folks choose communism when it’s never worked at scale this is why. After the experience you’d probably rather watch the world burn as well.

>Oracle, for example, has moved its yearly conference to Las Vegas.

This is kind of a bad example to show that San Francisco is losing its place as the US's premier tech city, as Vegas is a huge conference city and already hosts tech oriented conferences like CES and Defcon.

I think it actually is a good example, I think your argument would make sense if they were moving to a new growing location, but the fact that they're moving to a place they could have moved all along exactly shows that now there is some incentive that didn't exist before

Not really. They just outgrew the conference space in SF. They don't fit in Moscone anymore.

I think that the Schwab example is much better, as they could stay if they wanted (they have the money), but decided to leave anyways.

> Even the sights and sounds of the city suggest a certain derangement. When the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system was first built in the 1970s, its designers failed to understand the acoustics between wheel, track, and tunnel. Since the nineteenth century, competent railroad engineers have known that a tapered, flanged wheel will handle turns better and generate less noise. For some reason, BART designers ignored this design in favor of a cylindrical wheel with a straight edge.

The "some reason" was to withstand the crosswinds on the Golden Gate Bridge. We only use the top of the bridge's two possible decks, and the bottom deck was slated to carry the BART Marin line: https://i.imgur.com/hVT6fya.jpg

OK, but freight trains use the normal wheels everywhere else in America, including very windy places.

Freight trains are much heavier on the same gauge. The weight limit for a BART train loaded is 55 tons. Compare that to a freight car which weighs 30 tons empty, but can carry up to 100 tons worth of stuff inside it.

OK, but I assume those trains are sometimes moved around empty?

Ideally no. But a lot of them are also flat beds and cattle cars that’ll let air through them when totally empty.

I’m assuming that wind is taken in as a factor when deciding what stock to send where though.

You do hear of derailments due to wind sometimes for empty freight cars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wind-related_railway_a...

Interesting stuff!

Seems they are working on changing the wheel shape.

https://sf.streetsblog.org/2018/06/08/bart-makes-headway-aga...

Isn’t BaRT going ahead and tapering the wheels time reduce the noise? I think I heard there was one measure they were taking.

They already did, a few years ago. It's much, much better than it used to be—you can now have a conversation in the transbay tube. And the new cars ("Fleet of the Future") are actually quite pleasant, although they've been rolling out very slowly.

The worst if it wasn’t the tube so much as the MacArthur and the Berkeley interchanges as well as the civic center- 16th street dogleg.

I've noticed in Seattle how differently Covid-19 has impacted the city core vs the suburbs.

Suburbs seem almost normal. People are out. They are shopping. There are kids around. People are in parks. The big difference is nobody is drinking at bars or restaurants.

The urban core seems like something out of a zombie movie. It's dead. Everything is closed. There is almost nobody out and about. Few people are on transit. If you do see someone they have a mask on.

If I lived downtown right now I'd really be regretting my choice. Not having a yard, a car, and a home office right now would be awful.

Downtown is great for running and biking due to lack of foot traffic and pedestrians. Otherwise downtown is a ghost town as of late and it’s eerie at times.

It feels a bit misleading to immediately attack Boudin for his work in Venezuela. He was a translator there between undergrad and law school. His leftist background is certainly quite interesting but I felt that the early attempt to attack his character by associating him with Chavez comes across as a bit of a stretch that I think hurts the credibility of the author.

Yea that was my hint that this is just an ideological rant.

I was curious what the City Journal was, so I looked it and the Manhattan Institute up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy.... Worthwhile reading for anyone wondering where the original piece is coming from.

Personally, looking over their history, I think their interest in publishing a piece like this is likely rooted in ideological issues rather than actually looking at anything meaningful. (I also think they've been wrong about...very nearly everything they've ever offered a position on, so I'm skeptical about this claim that SF is on the brink of tipping over into a Mad Max set.)

Care to list everything they take a position on and been wrong about?

That's quite a claim.

You can read the article he wrote called "Chavez for Life"

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/chavez-life/

I kind of want to write a dystopian novel where to solve the housing crisis, the state of California contracts private businesses to build out rapid transit underground. But instead of paying them any money, the excess earth is dumped into the Bay and the tunnelers are granted land rights to anything above water. The Bay is only 12 feet deep anyway.

An ecological disaster resulting in the construction of a neo-feudal society in the new county of Rancho Musk. Everything between the Bay bridge and San Jose, suburban sprawl.

Hey kid, did ya know Treasure Island used to be an Island?

I have a silly fictional notion that California's way forward will at some time require being annexed by Oregon so that they can wipe away oodles of historical legislative choices in one swoop. Followed quickly by a "civil war" in which "South Oregon" secedes.

Most of these complaints aren't really city issues. BART isn't run by the city. PG&E provides power to 1/2 of the state.

The housing issue is one that the Mayor has some control over. But not a lot. There are too many landowning moneyed interests to get anything done with zoning. Even the non-moneyed interests work against themselves by supporting policies that actually hurt the poor.

Right now, it makes sense not to prosecute petty crime. Those folks really have nowhere to go, so they could be arrested, then released back to the streets, and now they can't get a job because they have a record.

SF needs to make major strides in up-zoning the entire city. That alone would solve a lot of the problems. Then they can start worrying about petty crime with all that extra tax money they would have.

SF isn't even the biggest city in the Bay Area (San Jose is) so if anyone is going to push on PG&E it should be a multi-county effort, not just rest on SF.

> Right now, it makes sense not to prosecute petty crime

Right now, ok, maybe an argument could be made for it. But petty crime wasn't being prosecuted before CV either. CVS Pharmacy downtown was keeping many products in the back (as opposed to the shelves) because police don't do anything about thieves that were stealing stuff in broad daylight. You literally had to ask the cashier to go and look for some items.

Left SF after 8 years. Many other world cities have what SF offers, including the beauty, restaurants, quirky bars and cafes etc. but the thing that stands out most is the concentration of talented, smart, ambitious people in tech. Tech scenes in other cities don't compare. Something in the air that will push you to be better.

I do hope said concentration diffuses to other cities, because in retrospect it's clear to me SF is a mess... the generally low quality overpriced housing, filth, and general anxiety walking on sidewalks in most parts of the city (not unfounded, been harassed many times). Goes for most neighborhoods. Was still fun experience in my 20s, but I wish I hadn't been so attached to the idea of living in SF.

I think it's fair at this point to say that any HN submissions that are critical of SF are going to be immediately flagged. Every single submission I've ever made that talks about these issues has been immediately flagged.

I've often wondered why people are so touchy about SF, but perhaps it's simply because startup people have a lot invested in SF. They live there, and they want to promote a certain fairytale image of the place that doesn't reflect the reality of shit-covered sidewalks, lack of police presence and public safety, crack dealers, discarded needles, and aggressive barking mad homeless people. But the danger is that it makes HN look like a place where vigorous debate and exchange of ideas and criticism is not welcome.

Analyzing the demographic flux of a metropolitan area can be really interesting.

That is not what this article is about.

The article brings up BART wheel/rail noise, which is an interesting window into SF’s unique and some might say self inflicted issues.

It’s my understanding BARTs screech comes from statutorily over-powered brakes grinding flats into the wheels.

The power rating didn’t take into account the fact that BART is both an all weather outside and an underground (dry) system. On wet outdoor tracks the indoors-only power brakes lock up and wear the wheels flat.

In turn these flats grind periodic indents in the tracks, and the whole thing has a feedback loop which ends up in the entire track being corrugated and no wheel ever being truly circular. Solid axles (no differentials) don’t help either.

Screeching and howling ensues to a level that is damaging to the hearing of passengers and staff alike.

The flat wheel thing is a mistake that was made what, 60 years ago. Everyone involved is dead. They've been finally working on fixing it. Yeah BART could be a better built systems if only people long dead had made better choices.

The property values and city taxes probably keep going up, so the powers that be and the NIMBY donors won't care about any of the little people problems.

So in economic techtopia, will it be decline be a myspace, or a facebook?

A milquetoast hit piece of a beautiful city.

We’re all aware of SFs problems, not sure why this article is worth even a glance.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi congratulated her in a tweet, saying, “I look forward to working with you to continue San Francisco’s proud tradition of standing as a guiding light for progress across America.”

Are you disagreeing with Nancy then? Since the 60's SF has had a continuous (60 years!) progressive rule and this is what we end up with.

Looking at the major problems in SF, I see a direct link to SF government policies:

Crime - stop locking people up!

Homelessness - we just need to spend more money!

Schooling - we just need more money!

Housing - unless it's subsidized, we'll block it every time

SF's problems are serious enough to warrant discussion. That being said, there is a growing narrative on the right of how the urban (read:liberal) centers are failing. This article is one of many such hit pieces.

Wait, this is a "hit piece" because it discusses SF's problems?

I find it absolutely astounding that people somehow think that SF's problems weren't caused by a specific set of policy proposals and politics. Yet, if anyone brings this up, even in a nonpartisan manner, all of a sudden the criticism is supposedly nullified because it's not coming from "our people". I find that more than a tad self-serving and duplicitous.

Because for decades liberalist idealism hasn’t effectively addressed the issues and people keep on thinking that the problem is they’re not liberal enough and double down on it(DA Budin). Although if ND is any representation some people are experiencing buyers’ remorse... We’ll see.

Reminds me of the US during the Vietnam War. Things weren't going well and when asked why, the answer was always "We need more. More soldiers. More bombs."

Never even entertained the thought the entire approach was wrong.

Oooof, spot on. They have governed pretty much unimpeded and what do they have 60 years later? The city might be great in some aspects but it is so in spite of its government not because of it.

Maybe because SF has been sucking all the oxygen out of the room and people continually apologize for all of its shortcomings and bad decisions. There's a lot I like about SF, but it's easily the most putrid city in America I've ever lived in.

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