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Comment by sjf | Hacker News Reader

The positives have to out weight the negatives of high crime, a large homeless population, high rents, small apartments, etc. Having nice parks is not unique to SF.

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The actual reason people are leaving the city are high rents and small apartments. How the hell do you work from home when you're sharing a place with roommates? And affording extra space for an office given current rents is a huge problem.

Crime and homelessness, while problems, aren't major factors for people in my experience. After all, those two things haven't really changed.

Homelessness is objectively worse, as in higher counts, in SF. Up 72% since 2011. And it is subjectively worse, as enforcement has dropped and homelessness has spread, become more bold, more petty crime, and caused a bigger disruptions.

https://cdn.abcotvs.com/dip/images/5380756_sanfrancisco2019....

> Crime and homelessness, while problems, aren't major factors for people in my experience. After all, those two things haven't really changed

I disagree. Its consistently brought up, along with high rent, as one of the worst parts of living in the area. In my experience, the people who stay in SF are willing tolerate it for access to all the amenities there. When the pandemic makes it difficult to enjoy those amenities, it will drive people away.

no... but neither is having a problem with street addiction and mental illness. SF has it bad, no doubt, but on recent (<5 years) to Seattle, Portland, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Milwaukee, I did see the extent to which this isn't purely a SF problem. NY was actually the best of the bunch, remarkably, though last time I was there was 6 years ago, and things have deteriorated remarkably in SF even in the last 10 years, accelerating in the last 5, so this may be less NY vs SF and more 5+ years ago vs now.

You are certainly not wrong. This is a major problem in many places in the country. It's gross. Portland and Seattle are definitely much worse than SF. LA is much nicer than what it used to be, and still better than SF, but I grew up in LA so I have the natural tendency to ignore everything bad with it.

I hear you. San Franciscans historically had an extremely obnoxious tendency to only see the negative side of LA. Seems like it's fading a bit, though, partly because SF's are too severe to stay smug, and partly because LA keeps getting more interesting. I grew up in SF but moved to LA for a while in the late 90s to work in the software side of film compositing/editing. Finally opened my eyes to how much fun it is. My guess is that with electric cars and more urbanization, LA will may well become a warm, crowded, culturally varied and ethnically diverse place with sprawling suburbs and dense urban areas, a lucrative and creative entertainment sector and somewhat smaller tech sector, clean air and water, beaches, and eternally lousy traffic.

Did you work for Dolby or RED? I've always thought it'd be fascinating to work in software for pro film production. I'd really like to hear anything you have to share about your experience.

Don't forget school districting based on Game of Thrones

And if you haven't heard, all the public school names are going to be renamed, since people like Lincoln and George Washington were terrible people who shouldn't be celebrated /s [1]

[1]: https://abc7news.com/renaming-sf-public-schools-school-name-...

>The names of presidents and other political and historic figures could soon be purged from SFUSD schools. This includes George Washington, Diane Feinstein, even Abraham Lincoln.

What did Diane Feinstein do? :)

Go to Tennessee and ask that. Be prepared to listen for a long time.

I don't know why you were downvoted. Even if someone supports renaming a school called Lincoln to something else, the ... extreme nature of such a thing is a consideration for people to consider whether or not SF is a nice place to live. Because there are people in charge making decisions like this, and people in charge wield power, and if you live in SF you'll be subservient to these leaders.

I'll add, the fact there are people who downvote information is quite possibly another strike against SF.

I think the downvotes fall into two categories. Some people agree with the renaming, and others just don't care either way. In a subthread about why people might want to move away from SF, "they're going to rename some schools" is not particularly relevant, and comes off a little flamebaity.

My personal opinion is that some of the renaming is a bit over the top, but I'm glad we're re-examining our historical "heroes"; most of what kids read in their US history classes paints an idealized, unrealistic picture of these figures, and ignores real harm they caused, both by their actions and attitudes. Regardless, I just frankly do not care whether a building is named Lincoln High School or John Doe High School. If ditching Lincoln's name makes a bunch of people feel more comfortable, it's no skin off my back.

What's actually important is that we teach the truth, and all of it. When we teach kids about Thomas Jefferson, we should certainly give him credit for the statesman he was, and for what he did to free the US from England. But we should also teach how he owned slaves throughout his entire life and saw no problem with that, and how he was a rich, elite landowner who believed that only a very small, single-digit percent of the population should be allowed to vote. Even Washington, who seemed not entirely comfortable with slavery, owned a slave that was only set free upon Washington's death. And Lincoln... well, his main concern was keeping the Union together. If that ultimately meant allowing the South to keep slavery intact, he was fine with that.

I don't bring all that up to say that they were awful, irredeemable people with no positive qualities. Some of them, if born today, might grow up with very different attitudes. But I think it's reasonable to suggest that quite a few people, especially non-white people, might not be particularly comfortable sending their kids to schools named after these people. And it's perfectly ok that they feel that way.

Of course it's relevant. It says a lot about the local government, about their priorities and perhaps about the people who live there that led to it. Their attitudes on this are reflective of their attitudes on other things. The exodus is being driven at a surface level by the lockdowns, but by now the lockdowns are well past the point of being driven by leftist ideology. See:

https://www.city-journal.org/california-race-coding-criteria...

End of lockdowns in CA are being tied to vague "racial justice" goals. These things are all connected. Renaming a high school says "we consider this the most important thing we could be working on right now" which is clearly absurd when you consider the real problems CA has.

I assumed "everybody knows" that Lincoln was not a super abolitionist. And "of course" it's ok if people don't regard him as a super hero.

But despite being a lifelong Democrat there is a certain level of concern over purity that makes me uneasy. All my Jewish cousins who were in Europe mysteriously disappeared during WWII. Yet, I own and enjoy a German car whose corporate origins are very intertwined with the history of that period of time. I think the Apollo program was pretty cool, and that was fundamentally rooted in the exploitation of German expertise from rocket research involving Nazi slave labor during the war.

So, if someone is disgusted with these things and personally avoids them, that's cool. But if they are on a crusade to purify society from them, I probably don't want to be neighbors.

And you definitely don't want them as an _unelected_ committee member with authority to decide the direction of your children's educational future.

I do think a community should decide. I don't think outsiders should be telling people they have to keep the school named after Lincoln, if they want to change it, democratically.

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