Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

latimes.com

231 pointsundefined1454 comments

I'm leaving San Francisco next month also. I just see no reason to continue living here. The weather is nice in California, but the city is so mismanaged it's a joke. The homelessness has been an issue for decades now and local politicians always talk about it, but what do they actually do to help? I genuinely have no clue where the high taxes go. I just find it so ironic that San Francisco is a bastion of liberalism, yet in Tenderloin every day for decades tech bros have stepped over needles and homeless people on their way to make their 200k a year. Why didn't they build more houses here? Oh, the views would be spoiled! Right. People can continue shitting in the street then. We don't mind that view.

People of San Francisco passed a law t̶o̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶o̶w̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶r̶o̶b̶b̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶u̶n̶d̶e̶r̶ ̶$̶1̶0̶0̶0̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶f̶i̶l̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶c̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶c̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶p̶s̶.̶ They also expect safe neighborhoods. You can't have both.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26040812

Liberal policies such as this does not solve the actual problem. Instead of providing food and shelter to the poor, perhaps starting an infrastructure program to employ these people and fix the damn roads, they empower the poor to go rampage stores to survive.

Edit: I might be wrong. I think I am misreading this, it seems to be not just SF city per se, but the entire state of California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47

See sacramento article: https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2019/09/25/grab-and-dash-the...

> People of San Francisco passed a law to allow any robbery under $1000

That’s just not true at all, come on, you’re intentionally spreading misinformation.

It raised the limit to $950 for the felony threshold for simple theft. Robbery is still a felony.

“Prop 47 doesn’t cover robberies, theft by the use of force or fear. It doesn’t cover burglaries,” Gascón said. “If you break into a structure with the intent to commit theft or another felony, that continues to be a felony. If someone breaks into your car to steal even a pack of cigarettes, that’s still a felony.” https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/san-francisco-shoplifting-...

Gascon isn't the DA, Boudin is (the son of leftwing activists who convicted of felony murder for killing two policemen - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesa_Boudin). With his parents in prison Boudin was adopted by Bill Ayers, another Weather Underground leader who also made headlines for saying (in a video interview - https://daleyeagerdotcom.wordpress.com/2020/01/15/breaking-v... reminiscent of Hobsbawm) we might need to kill 25 million Americans if they resist communism and this was an acceptable price to pay to achieve social justice.

Boudin was proud of this heritage and campaigned as having impeccable socialist credentials as the adopted son of Ayers. He went on the record announcing how devastating it was to have parents in jail and vowed to reduce prosecutions. He announced a policy of not prosecuting for property crimes especially if the offenders belong to certain victimhood groups, he fired a number of prosecutors who were responsibile for prosecuting gang crime (https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/01/10/new-san-francis...), and he instituted a policy of pressuring victims of violent crime to not press charges and accept "restorative justice" programs, especially if the offenders were members of victim classes - even for murder. Victims of violent crime report substantial pressure from Boudin's office repeatedly calling and demanding they agree to diversionary programs while victims of property crime are often ignored entirely and police discourage the filing of reports. Despite this, the city now leads the nation in property crime.

Citing quotes by Gascon for a State proposition is not a sufficient characterization for the special brand of lawlessness we have here in San Francisco.

It's beautiful irony that the most capitalist place on earth has Boudin as DA. I don't have anything against him for hs background or the fact that he is proud of it. None of that precludes him from doing a good job. In fact it could indeed be beneficial because he has awareness of issues from a perspective few do. That said the proof is in the pudding and it is unconscionable that the city that is the engine room for creating new wealth suffers from the problems described so often here. What's going on? It makes no sense from the outside. It just looks like a social version of asset stripping.

The "special brand of lawlessness" includes having hit an all-time-low robbery rate in 2019, the latest data available.

>who convicted of felony murder for killing two policemen

That seems improbable. Why would anyone be charged with felony murder if they killed someone? It seems like a contradiction in terms.

Edit: to be clear, it's easy to look up that yes, his parents were convicted of felony murder, and no, they didn't kill the police officers. That's how felony murder works, so I wonder if the comment above is preaching to people who think "felony" is an intensifier for "murder" or whether it's an honest mistake.

If anything under 950 is a misdemeanor and San Francisco isn't pressing charges on anything that isn't a felony, it's effectively legalized theft. You don't need to rob anyone if you can walk into any store and take whatever you want and the police do nothing about it.

Watch some recent episodes of Soft White Underbelly with homeless people in SF. It will really open your eyes to how much the problem is the cities disinterest in doing anything at all to fix things. All of their 'fixes' are really just enablement.

That's a very high limit for simple theft, so now simple theft is what occurs the most. Why would anyone commit felonies or robberies when they can just walk in and take below that limit without any enforcement or consequence?

Making crime easier to commit doesn't reduce crime.

Theft under the $950 threshold is still a crime, specifically a misdemeanor, which can result in jail time. The whole idea that theft is going totally unpunished is a false narrative.

Doesn’t matter if they don’t enforce

Not intentionally. I corrected the post before you posted.

But did that sound correct that they’d allow any robbery? Using that logic, Texas allows any robbery under $2500:

Texas Penal Code § 31.03

(3) a Class A misdemeanor if the value of the property stolen is $750 or more but less than $2,500;

(4) a state jail felony if:

(A) the value of the property stolen is $2,500 or more but less than $30,000, or the property is less than 10 head of sheep, swine, or goats or any part thereof under the value of $30,000;

Arguably the larger problem is that you (general "you" as in people like you) think this could even be a thing, like you've just completely bought into your biases and didn't do any sort of research on the topic. Your original assertion that robbery under $1000 (or any robbery, really) becoming defacto uncriminalized is so beyond the pale I'm not sure how _anyone_ wouldn't just automatically think they were being mislead or trolled, but somehow your biases or whatever on the subject caused you to not only unquestionably accept such a wild claim, but to repeat it to others.

You're mostly right but 47 didn't even raise the line to $950. It was already $950. What it did do is remove the discretion prosecutors formerly had to use a felony charge for crimes valued at less than $950 for defendants without prior violent felony convictions.

By comparison, the same dividing line in the state of Texas is set at $1500.

Minor correction: in 2014, the people of CA passed Prop 47, which reclassified most non-violent property theft crimes as misdemeanors [0]. This change is largely credited with the dramatic increase in shoplifting in SF.

What’s interesting is why SF appears to be the most affected county. It might be because it continues to elect soft-on-crime City Attorneys or that it fails to investigate organized crime rings that then operate with impunity. My favorite example of this is Fremont PD doing SFPD’s job and busting an international auto theft ring mostly operating in SF[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47...

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/31/thousands-of-stolen-l...

The incarceration rate of SF county is higher than any country or major city in Europe. Persecution ain’t the issue. Lack of housing, healthcare and honourable work is.

Even if you released every prisoner in America, besides the rapists and murderers, the US would still have a higher incarceration rate than Europe. I'm sure the SF specific numbers would tell a similar story.

You can't simply compare European to American incarceration statistics without taking into account that the US is an extremely criminal country for the developed world. And no, this doesn't have to do with universal healthcare or any other hobby horse. America had much higher homicide rates going back to the 18th century, well before modern European welfare states. (Not just the US, the Western Hemisphere in general has always had much higher rates of violent crime.)

The fact of the matter is that we're a violent society. Absent total abolition of prison, we're always gong to have much higher incarceration rates than Europe.

Incarceration rate is an invalid indicator. You need to look at the crime rate, the release rate, and the rehabilitation rate.

There are cycles of poverty and culture causing this but the government’s actions turn SF into both a honeypot and an accelerant for crime. It does this by turning a blind eye to crime both in talk and action.

Criminals know that SF is a great place to commit crime. This draws them in from all over and they commit more crime.

The DA is selling the narrative of rehabilitation but the criminals are just taking advantage of it to just commit more crime.

People think overlooking petty crimes should be the norm, but they're ignorant to the long term impacts and complain when their cities turn into Gotham City without Batman.

Cities cut overall violent crime rates significantly in past decades by applying logic from the broken windows theory[1]. The real reason this works is bc a significant amount of crime is carried out by a very small number of individuals...and enforcing more penalties increases the chances police will scoop up a portion of those individuals. The unfortunate downside of this strategy is that some people (that aren't in that category) face overly harsh consequences in relation to their crime. New versions of this should be tried to try and minimize that from happening.

It should be expected that taking the complete opposite approach would likely lead to much more than a slight increase in petty crimes. Buy hey it sounds good initially and wins votes on the left so why wouldn't they

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

I wish I believed giving the homeless jobs would fix the problem but I watched my dad who owns a business try and help several local homeless or down on their luck types and more often than not they just take advantage of people then go right back to drugs or worse they have mental health issues and probably will never be able to function in society.

If someone is addicted to drugs they don't get to just stop doing drugs without a lot of work on their part and usually a lot of outside help. If someone has addiction issues you can't just give them a job offer and assume all their problems are solved. No matter how thankful or earnest they are in moments of sobriety their addiction tends to have an overwhelming hold over their behavior.

Addiction is not just an idle habit you kick with some perseverance and self control.

Exactly.

"I tried to help some cancer patients by giving them jobs and the occasional free meal, but a lot of them just ended up dying of cancer anyways."

The day America stops treating addiction as an individual moral failing and starts treating it as a lifelong disease and a collective social failing is the day we finally start to address these issues.

Ask anyone who tried to quit smoking, how hard was it? It's difficult because of chemical dependencies. You need to get the body used to a lower dosage over time and incrementally lower the dosage. That's the only way you can make it work. It's possible thanks to vaping. It would work most likely work with other drugs like heroin.

> Instead of providing food and shelter to the poor, perhaps starting an infrastructure program to employ these people and fix the damn roads, they empower the poor to go rampage stores to survive.

We spend over a billion a year on the homeless. It’s an intractable problem, and the weather, social services, and accepting (of panhandling) population drives demand to locate here.

Yes it's intractable because having homeless people is considered more desirable than actually solving the underlying problems because it would hurt special interests.

The average SF resident loves having homeless people because of the secondary benefits that homelessness brings.

Can’t tell if sarcastic or not. People literally do love the secondary benefit of saying they help the homeless, and politicians basically run on that. Obviously the parent comment saying demand is created was talking about homeless demand to travel to an area with better benefits and/or lesser enforcement of laws that homeless would break, like camping on sidewalks and using the world as the toilet.

Prop 47 makes theft, not robbery a misdemeanor. Big difference.

I witnessed a theft last week where a fellow just walked out with a load of merchandise whilst paying customers counted their coins. The initial social response among the bystanders and customers was alarm. "What just happened!?" Employees responded: "Let it go, it happens all the time."

The impact on the "social bond" of society became suddenly clarified. We live in a lawless society. Those that follow the laws are fools pantomiming a voided social contract in outdated custom.

Shoplifting is tough because it can often be cheaper for the store to write it off than to sufficiently improve security. I think a misdemeanor for theft is fine, but I agree that these laws should be enforced.

The "social contract" doesn't serve those in poverty. What's there to lose? Freedom in exchange for three squares and a dry bed? The "law and order" approach sounds great if you're inclined to authoritarianism, but with the largest (absolute and per capita) prison population in the world, what's to show for it? We're a "Christian nation" when that means banning abortion and homosexuality or torturing Muslims, but Jesus would be appalled at how we approach charity, poverty, and forgiveness.

Thanks for correction, I was wrong. I've corrected the post.

> Instead of providing food and shelter to the poor, perhaps starting an infrastructure program to employ these people and fix the damn roads, they empower the poor to go rampage stores to survive.

Why not both?

"In 2013, the Utah Housing and Community Development Division reported that the cost of emergency room treatment and jail time averaged over $16,000 a year per homeless person, while the cost of providing a fully subsidized apartment was only $11,000."[0]

The author quoted above makes an excellent case – multiple times – for reducing cost to society if we'd just spend the money to get people off the street in a chapter titled, Criminalizing Homelessness. Think of the number of hours spent by police responding to calls related to homelessness and what social ills it creates. Consider that there are functional individuals who want to contribute to society, but medical bills or a run of bad luck has created circumstances under which this is impossible. Getting those people back into the economy could be useful.

I'm not saying this addresses other issues, such as mental illness. There's quite a lot of services that would be needed there, as well. Also, job training, etc. Another chapter, We Called for Help, and They Killed My Son, deals with the first part.

There's also the problem of addiction among the unhoused. There's a chapter on that as well. I've spot-checked info in the book a number of times and found the information to be well researched. According to the chapter, The War on Drugs, what we've been doing to combat drug use is an even more colossal failure and cash sink than probably most of us realize (assuming that you already think it's a failure).

The book has me convinced that it's cheaper for society, overall, to just pay to help people rather than funding the punitive system that's currently in place.

[0] The End of Policing, by Alex S. Vitale pg 97 ^^ This book is excellent. I've already bought copies for three people who are close to me who I think will be open to its message.

  the cost of providing a fully subsidized apartment was only $11,000.

Sure, but that doesn't count spending on emergency room treatment and jail time in addition to the cost of the apartment. Housing didn't stop the other resource consumption or criminal activity.

It also doesn't count the other costs of providing that housing in the first place. The current debate in Mountain View of turning over one hotel to unhoused people includes spending $70,000 per room just in construction/conversion costs for a nice hotel that's barely 30 years old.

This works on a micro scale or closed system but that is not what happens when providing more resources causes people to migrate to your area to take advantage of the resources without ever needing to be contributing to them. A population will simply be over run by those desiring the free housing and this is obvious is any program created like this to tackle the issue. They always run out of room for these high demand resources and eventually cities may have taken care of the homeless problem for the people it meant to, but thousands of new people show up. If it were that easy as just providing housing and the problem was fixed then poverty across the whole world would be eliminated. Not saying that’s not possible, but you would literally have to do that across the entire world or in an entire closed system to make it work.

The main problem is that any politician who tried to get these policies in place would find themselves out of a job pretty quickly, unfortunately.

Yeah, but we throw a really nice gay pride parade to show we're good people. Loads of BLM support on walls. Many of my colleagues updated their instagram filters.

I interviewed at a company based out of SF last week. The HR person had this long comment about diversity and how that is important at their company and asked what I've done in my career to support diversity. I told him a story about how a company I was at had decided to outsource some of the QA work to India and when the first employee in India came to the US to onboard I was very welcoming and did everything I could to help him feel welcome and part of the team including hanging out after work.

This HR guy said "Is that really diversity though?"

I guess he was looking for a more symbolic or virtue signaling example and with another minority group other than Indians. Something like "I was the first person at my company to put a BLM sticker on my cube."

The thing is, as San Franciscans, we really support all the oppressed transgender teenagers in Mississippi. What's that? Build more housing, so they can actually afford to move here and escape the oppression they face in Mississippi? Uh, no, you see, we support them to the extent that it doesn't affect our property values...

The misinformation about Prop. 47 is stunning to me. It did not change anything relating to violent crime, nor did it make petty theft legal. Petty theft is still punishable by jail time. Robbery is still a felony.

What it actually did is raise the line between misdemeanor and felony theft from $450 to $950.

As chomp pointed out, the limit for felony theft in Texas is $2500.

What law are you referring to? Prop 47?

There is no law which allows robberies.

'Allow' and 'not enforce for motivated individuals' are very close together.

You can actually, but you need to provide enough basic services so that people in desperate situations have free, healthy, and convenient food, housing, medical care, and education.

Yes, San Francisco is lagging cities in Texas in providing social services, which is why its homelesssness/street-disorder/drug-abuse problem is so much worse.

There is a point at which you have to realize/admit that your ideological narrative, and the public sector interests who popularize it, are wrong. The left coast cities, from San Fran to Vancouver, have prioritized decriminalization of drugs, social services, and hands off policing for 'minor' crimes like theft, and have been overtaken by deliquency and squalor as a result.

We left about 9 months ago. I'm not going to pontificate and judge people. From our point of view, the policies seemed to be designed to incentivize us to leave, so we left. We'll miss SF, but we were never welcome.

>> Despite suggestions of a California exodus to other states in recent months, most who leave that region do not move far <<

Right. I left CA to Vegas and it’s like every second car on a stoplight has CA license plates. Houses in decent areas are overbidding. What Covid didn’t do - liberal policies finished. SF flooding with feces, rising crime, exorbitant taxes and lockdown nonsense.

We had enough. Voting with my feet

The way San Francisco is managed finally made sense to me (in a bad way) once I learned about the Second Great Migration and the fact that there was basically no black population here until World War 2. Making the cost of living as expensive as possible is a wonderfully deniable way to drive out people who have been repeatedly denied the ability to build generational wealth: https://www.forbes.com/sites/priceonomics/2016/05/11/the-afr...

I've thought this for a while: NIMBYism and other anti-development policies is how liberals implement "red lining" with plausible deniability... even to themselves. They're not trying to exclude the poor and minorities. They're trying to protect the environment! Never mind that these policies encourage sprawl and waste.

It's more than that- dodd frank made financing for building spec houses/housing next to impossible unless participating in a hud or similar program. These policies result in the exact opposite of what you would want to build class mobility/ American Dream/ generational wealth: more rentals (without lowering rental costs, since govt guarantees a min return), less home ownership, and a higher barrier to invest in the housing market.

What?! Dodd-Frank had nothing to do with it. The housing price crash allowed institutional buyers to make a new asset class out of SFR. They bought hundreds of thousands of houses. They aggressively increase rents because they’re levered and their returns come from rent increases. This has caused rents in the rest of America to sky rocket. Not only do they vacuum up inventory, they never sell it. This hurts would be homeowners two ways.

It used to be that SFR was all small funds or investors. These investors hold fixed 30 year notes and don’t have to be aggressive with rent increases. A turn is more of a concern than a rent increase.

Dodd- Frank had nothing to do with that. The fix is to require these institutional funds to liquidate to owner-occupants after a decade. Let them cash out the appreciation and wind up the fund.

Let’s not make this a partisan thing please. Remember the EPA is from the Nixon administration, for example :)

Nixon was a crook but he was the last Republican to have some sensible policies.

> I genuinely have no clue where the high taxes go.

I worked on a public project. The funds were misappropriated in my opinion. Your tax dollars are wasted like in every other state. Therefore: lower taxes.

SF trolled tech and let them have the Tenderloin. It took all those bright folks a decade to figure it out.

Don't understand this comment? Did SF encourage tech companies to locate in the Tenderloin?

It's more sarcasm than not. He's saying it was never a desirable area but tech companies moved there anyway despite theoretically having the money to be nicer places.

Name a tech company with an office in the Tenderloin.

I can't think of one, but I also can't tell the difference between the tenderloin and SOMA anymore.

Everyone's comments makes sense to me if you swap SOMA in for tenderloin

Microsoft, Twitter, Dolby are 3 who share an intersection! Square and Uber just a block away.

Zendesk, twitter, and dozens more.

Yes. It did. The mayor was in our office to celebrate the tax incentives of companies to relocate there. Then Twitter followed.

They’re intelligent, not bright.

What is the difference?

18 Intelligence, 3 Wisdom.

Not OP but

Intelligence is having knowledge (think book knowledge )

Bright is like sharp. (think street smart or think things through that are complexed)

I have friends that I consider very intelligent that are not bright. One makes $200k as an actuary but can't figure out how to talk to his kids in a way that sounds human/normal.

These days, tents. https://sfist.com/2021/03/04/insanely-it-is-costing-san-fran...

Worth noting that the actual tents are cheap and what's expensive is the security, social services, meals, etc that come along with it.

For comparison, the cost to incarcerate someone in California is around $7k/mo and what that money is spent on is broken down at https://lao.ca.gov/PolicyAreas/CJ/6_cj_inmatecost

Last I checked, California cost per inmate was more than double the national average. Interestingly, from what I remember, 20 years ago the same cost in California was about national average.

California should investigate contracting the prison service to Oklahoma: Oklahoma spends per prisoner something like a quarter of California spends, so California could save lots of money this way, and Oklahoma would make a lot of money, a great example of positive sum trade.

Of course, that’s not going to happen, because California rulers don’t want to incarcerate all these people, and from this perspective, high cost is a feature, not a bug: it helps in arguing against incarceration.

Right off the bat I'm not sure you want to look at Oklahoma as a shining example of how to treat prisoners.

https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2019/feb/5/oklahoma-num...

> tents are cheap

But that plot of land its pitched on might be worth $200 per month (using FiDi pre-pandemic parking rates).

The article states:

>"Most who left San Francisco stayed in the Bay Area economic region, according to the study, and some 80% remained in the stateMost who left San Francisco stayed in the Bay Area economic region, according to the study, and some 80% remained in the state"

I'm curious where you fall on the exodus spectrum? Are you leaving California or just SF? Where did you decide to relocate to?

Not OP, but I left SF for NYC.

Here's an interesting article that starts to answer where the homeless budget is going: https://www.sfpublicpress.org/surge-in-s-f-homelessness-fund...

It's not even just the homelessness. Public transport sucks too. Just given taxes and cost of living, I just don't see the value at all.

NIMBYism is a scourge

It's puzzling to me that NIMBYism seems so common among people who identify as liberal. It's clearly just another way of kicking away the ladder and is inherently with the stated goals of liberalism. At least neo-liberals seems to have gotten this one 100% correct.

NIMBYism isn't congruent with liberalism. Liberalism is an anti-authoritarian, market philosophy. NIMBYism is about leveraging authoritarian policy to dictate what others can do. If housing in SF were left to market forces, there would be a completely set of different problems...but NIMBYism wouldn't be one of them.

Why would this be puzzling? Liberals support diversity until the rubber meets the road and they have to live near diverse sets of people. That's why they vehemently vote in favor of NIMBY policies.

What I notice in Berlin is a conflation between NIMBYism and desire to solve problems with good planning and not just filling in every yard in the city so no apartments get sunlight anymore.

What you need is simple incremental growth. Let people decide what they need instead of dictating what they need. This means increasing the number of available options. If there is a way to increase options while retaining things like sunlight then you should do that.

The incremental growth ship sailed 15 years ago. They need to zone with the intention to knock down badly built old buildings and build 3+ number of floors there instead.

LINOs

I'm wondering what you think of the idea that the people we call "liberal" in this country aren't really all that "leftist" - they're just more left than our "conservatives". This is especially true for economic beliefs, I find. Like, ask an Italian communist (they still exist!) whether Joe Biden is a leftist and he'll choke from laughter on his ravioli. And after all, Barack Obama's world leader bff wasn't some Green Party guy in Bolivia or something - it was Angela Merkel.

I came around to this some time ago and I'm always curious if it makes sense to others.

Liberalism isn't a leftist ideology, why on earth would you expect a liberal to be a leftist?

What do they do in the conservative cities that's more successful?

Conservative cities? There isn’t a lot of data, just small cities like Fairbanks and Colorado Springs as well as big city suburbs like Mesa (suburb of Phoenix).

Enforcing quality of life laws. It doesn't even have to be a conservative city. Both Boston and Miami look like first world cities compared to SF and LA.

Boston? Conservative? You have no clue what you’re talking about

They said Boston _wasn’t_ conservative.

I would classify neither as conservative cities.

That's what I'm saying..

These cities are considerably larger and the homeless can be corraled somewhere out of sight. The difference is that in SF you have to see them.

Allowing new housing to be built to satisfy demand.

SF is surrounded by water on 3 sides. Where do you propose all these new houses be built?

Maybe one of SF’s tech companies can invent a technology that would allow housing to be stacked vertically.

> Where do you propose all these new houses be built?

That's your problem right there, when you write "houses". Cities need apartment buildings, which allow more homes per same area than single family houses.

> SF is surrounded by water on 3 sides. Where do you propose all these new houses be built?

Up seems to be the obvious answer.

New construction can replace old construction. In theory.

Let builders tear down old buildings and single dwelling house and build up and denser. NIMBYism prevents this currently because people want to "keep the feel" of the area. Well that's impossible. Things always change, you can't go back, you can only delay and price yourself out of your own house. At least most get to sell at a good profit.

Vertically.

What did Hong Kong do?

"Allowing new housing to be built to satisfy demand."

No they don't.

Switzerland is one of the most conservative places on Earth, at least culturally, and they have super strict rules on what you can build.

The issue has little to do with NIMBYISM really. SF is a relatively popular destination, it's going to be really, really hard to keep people on the very bottom end of the scale in housing there.

Vancouver 'built built built' and didn't make a dent in affordability - just the opposite, it's one of the most unnafordable places on earth.

>Switzerland is one of the most conservative places on Earth, at least culturally, and they have super strict rules on what you can build.

It doesn't matter what gets built, just that it gets built and that everyone gets a place to live in.

>The issue has little to do with NIMBYISM really. SF is a relatively popular destination, it's going to be really, really hard to keep people on the very bottom end of the scale in housing there.

If its a population destination and the rest of the country isn't then why would we tell people that they shouldn't come here? What about all those poor people who wouldn't be poor in SF?

>Vancouver 'built built built' and didn't make a dent in affordability - just the opposite, it's one of the most unnafordable places on earth.

Pretty much everyone I have heard talk about Vancouer is that Vancouver failed to build enough housing.

To say that Vancouver built built built requires an ignorance of historical building rates. Vancouver, like the American west coast cities, severely underbuilt for decades and only recently returned to historical average rate of home building, which does not help address the accumulated deficit. For example in 2009 the whole city only built 9000 new homes, which is 1/3rd the average historical per-capita rate.

Throw the homeless in jail basically.

It "solves" the problem in that the homeless are no longer visible. Whether that is a "solution" is up to the individual to decide.

Winter also self-limits the homeless in many liberal and conservative states.

In my limited experience, they're just far less kind. They won't hesitate to arrest you, and if they do, they'll throw away all the stuff you had collected and take your dog to the pound if you had one. Police won't help if you call, and if someone else calls about you then you are presumed guilty.

The end result is that the homeless either end up leaving, or moving their camp to somewhere out of the way like the woods. If you're an eye sore, people will call 911 on you 15 times a day.

I'm not advocating for it, but "let's make the homeless in our city so miserable they don't want to be seen" seems to be effective in reducing the eye sore.

Did you vote at past elections? If you didn't, you're partially responsible for the shit we walk on.

For very small values of ‘partial’, maybe.

Sir, you are gravely mistaken about the 'Loin. People do not shit in the street there. They shit in 20-pound bags left upon the street:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemcneal/bag-of-...

Important distinction. Take note.

What people call "homelessness", are different (yet overlapping) problems that can be mitigated separately:

1) Public urination / defecation: There is a need for more public bathrooms. That's cheaper than spending millions of dollars cleaning poop and urine from the streets.

2) Public intoxication and substance abuse: Decriminalizing drugs and letting people get as intoxicated as they want is not a responsible approach. The responsible approach would be to treat drug addiction as a health problem. That means, prescribing medications to help the addicts manage the reasons behind their addiction (anxiety, depression, PTSD and other conditions), their addiction, and making sure they do not overdose.

3) Littering: sentence people to do community service cleaning the litter.

4) Homelessness: Many homeless people do not want to comply with shelter rules, so they live in the streets. The shelters won't allow intoxication, drugs, etc.

The public bathroom issue is in part due to corruption in the city government: https://missionlocal.org/2020/02/citing-mohammed-nuru-charge...

I support opening up more public restrooms but those are extremely expensive to maintain and secure in areas with large homeless populations. People use them for drug dealing and prostitution, and vandalism is constant.

Public bathrooms smell pretty horrible, I doubt someone may feel sexually aroused in there.

Public intoxication and substance abuse: Decriminalizing drugs and letting people get as intoxicated as they want is not a responsible approach.

You won't stop me or anyone else with your nanny-state laws. It's easy to get bricks in Cali, good luck!

There are 2 types of states: states that people complain about, and states that nobody cares about.

My wife and I used to enjoy going into SF for shopping, dinner, Opera or a show. It has become a shit hole and even before the pandemic we just stop going. To be clear I feel a great deal of sympathy for the homeless population and I believe the policies of the local government as well as the failure of our mental health system are the cause. Providing housing and mental health support would really help.

> "I just find it so ironic that San Francisco is a bastion of liberalism, yet in Tenderloin every day for decades tech bros have stepped over needles and homeless people on their way to make their 200k a year"

What is the irony?

That the most liberal place has such disparity, I assume.

Where is the black middle class, or upper class? See the Housewives of Atlanta. Nothing like this to be found in Oakland.

I agree that’s not irony, and cities will often have the highest disparity simply by having more people.

Tokyo is the biggest city in the world. 10x the population of SF. Not that many homeless addicts lying around, and the average skilled worker doesn't make that much. I can name you 50 cities bigger than SF that don't have this problem.

So it seems the correlation between population size and 'rich people literally stepping over needled addicts' is not that strong.

> I just find it so ironic that San Francisco is a bastion of liberalism, yet in Tenderloin every day for decades tech bros step over needles and homeless people on their way to make their 200k a year

Why's that ironic? Isn't that exactly liberalism? Accepting and tolerating different people behaving in different ways and not forcing them to change? Individual rights and responsibilities, limited government intervention, freedom of way of living, rejecting authoritarianism and the nanny state?

I feel like tons of people don't know what the word 'liberalism' means.

That's a lost battle. Liberal in the US means almost the complete opposite of the original definition.

It’s pretty fascinating how in a country “by of, for the people” they’ve chosen to sit on social media, complain about wanting freedom from social ills, but also the freedom to optimize their time to avoid dealing with it.

Y’all want to disrupt something? Extreme ownership models really seem like the last social structure to disrupt.

My knowledge of SF zoning and housing problems is quite limited, but how in your opinion building new residential property will help the problem of homelessness and drug abusing? For homeless and drug abusers to be able to afford housing, prices must fall by a couple of orders of magnitude.

Cities are the root cause, imo. As a society we need to spread out towards the countryside more.

Cities are more efficient and sustainable. Most importantly, cities bring people together to enable cooperation, therefore acting as a multiplier on what is produced and generally making humanity better off.

What’s needed are better run cities.

The connection to nature one finds residing in the countryside is pretty much impossible to replicate while living in a city. Wildlife diversity, fresh air, ability to grow and harvest a garden - all of these are much more accessible outside a city and I believe lead to much more wholesome human experience. The concrete and glass of a modern metropolis do not make me feel like humanity is “better off”. Just my two cents though

I don’t disagree with you. I am an avid backpacker and really enjoy nature. Many studies show people have better mental attitudes when they can view trees daily, etc.

I’ll just note that there are a lot of different points on the spectrum between country side and concrete/glass metropolis. Many of these points are great places I would still count as cities, and they still allow for gardens. I am NOT arguing for us all to live in high rises in midtown Manhattan. I do think that we should build nice, dense areas that still have green space, while allowing humans to live close together to gain the increasing returns that make society great. Hopefully we cut down on cars and get the fresh air as well.

I'm not so sure that's even possible. The city reduces every single person's available personal space, naturally tensions will increase as a result.

How about towns, dense in the middle, with greenways out to nearby nature?

My thinking is there is more space for nature if people are a bit concentrated in one area. Hong Kong is an extreme example, over two thirds of the land is nature [0], the rest seems to be mostly high-rise skyscrapers! I think they did a good job with the small space they had to work within.

I was hoping that you weren't thinking like a giant suburb or exurb where we are in cars all the time? That can be such a drag.

[0] https://www.pland.gov.hk/pland_en/info_serv/statistic/landu....

>enable cooperation

If this were the natural state of large cities, it wouldn't require government regulation (better run cities) to accomplish.

If not done very carefully, that's just sprawl and bad in its own way. What we need IMO is not to move to the country so much, but back to smaller towns and cities. Some centralization of infrastructure - schools, hospitals, police and fire departments, roads and sewers etc. to connect them - still makes sense economically and ecologically. Somewhere between 50-100K or so new scaling problems always seem to appear - traffic, crime, the waste and corruption that comes with a larger bureaucracy, and so on. Big cities have historically had some advantages to outweigh those costs, but in the world of the last year or so I think more people are starting to reconsider whether that's still true.

After the city of Detroit had lost most of its population, there was a real problem with the cost of providing infrastructure and services to a single home in each multi-block area. There were proposals to concentrate those things into multiple "villages" with the space in between (other than roads) reverting to nature. Unfortunately they never got to try it because too many of those isolated-home owners refused to move. I'm not saying who was right or wrong, but it prevented the experiment from happening and I think we might all regret that some day.

Ah, I'm not from the US, so it might just me the phrasing. "Countryside" where I live is the small towns and vily.

My opinion has only been made stronger since having been to San Francisco.

Well, if that's what you meant, then I guess we're in full agreement. :)

Dense cities make the problems more visible and makes decentralised solutions less effective, but the problems aren’t inherent. There are plenty of well functioning cities with high population density. And there are plenty of low density urban environments that suck hard.

> I genuinely have no clue where the high taxes go. I just find it so ironic that San Francisco is a bastion of liberalism, yet...

Have you ever stopped to seriously consider if this is the realistic end result of liberalism? This is a very common trend for major cities that have been under liberal control for decades (Philly, Baltimore, Chicago, etc). And yet somehow the politicians convince the population that this time around will be different.

It’s because people don’t so much like their party as they have visceral hatred for the other one.

But wouldn't it make logical sense for the general population to consider trying something different? We're talking decades of single party control (left wing liberals), and these cities are rat-pits.

I guess that's why it's so powerful that the left currently owns the mass media...they stir up that visceral hatred to the point where people forget about reality.

Republicans don’t even try and compete in major cities anymore. In fact they use them as a foil to convince their suburban and rural constituency from voting for the party that has “New York values”, etc. they literally just insult that part of the country so how could they win?

And why would a Republican do better is a question I’d ask? Their track record across the vast swaths of America they control are full of drug addicts, high rates of welfare, and crumbling towns. It really is the white ghetto. Outside the affluent suburbs the country is more or less not doing any better than the major cities.

Regardless, the Republican argument would need to change to “effective government” from their typical “no government” stance. People do want self sufficiency and they do want to be treated as individuals and not reduced to group identity. But there are certain things republicans would have to change to break through.

While I agree, the recent Texas power outage is the result of a free-market system for energy. California hasn't done well with energy either, but for different reasons. My point is that funny things happen when markets fail and when empathy-driven policy goes too far.

You’re uninformed about the situation in Texas. Electricity is regulated in Texas more of less the same way as its regulated everywhere else: regulated monopolies control the distribution grid, and power is generated in regulated markets and fed into the grid. That basic mechanism is used not only in the US, but Europe too: https://fsr.eui.eu/electricity-markets-in-the-eu/ (“Please note that while in the EU electricity markets have been deregulated, other regulatory models can be in place in other parts of the world.”). The problem in Texas wasn’t free market for energy specifically, but failure on the part of ERCOT (a quasi-regulatory body that oversees the grid) to impose appropriate reliability requirements in the face of unpredictable climate events.

My understanding is that no one provided incentives to cold harden production or keep surplus capacity on standby. p999 events like that are where markets fail because it's rare for utilities or consumers to have that time horizon, and "we're only sending power during a cold spell to customers already on the premium plan" isn't politically viable.

Your last sentence is exactly what regulations are for. it's like you destroyed your whole argument with that last sentence deliberately?

> the recent Texas power outage is the result of a free-market system for energy

Texas was not the only area that had problems. Louisiana is regulated and had outages, people with no potable water, etc [0] Nearby states did not have available power to send via the interconnects. It was really cold for a really long time. Everyone talks about how it snowed ten years ago in Austin. I know, I was there. But do they also mention that this cold spell was the worst cold spell in 100 years?

There are many bad things that can happen in this world, we can't afford to prevent all of them. As a society we do not have unlimited money to spend, decisions need to be made, sometimes we have to muddle through. Societies have to prioritize where to spend their limited resources.

I get the feeling that there's a lot of partisan politics involved in the dialogue around things like this, always in hindsight! I don't understand the urge people have to knock down others who are doing something different. Not everyone thinks the way you or I do. The Texas power system has its pros and cons. They've been enjoying cheap power for a long time. They, along with others, struggled during this record cold. I don't understand why this needs to be a partisan issue, or what business it is of anybody outside of Texas. I'm sure they'll make adjustments and improvements to their system. They get to decide, it's their system, right?

I wouldn't say that regulation is a failed model because the power went out in Louisiana. I also don't agree that markets are to blame for a 100-year cold snap in Texas. Disasters happen.

(Note that I don't necessarily agree with the parent you were replying to. I grew up in a city like the ones mentioned, and the problems were more due to corruption, I believe. Politicians are not our friends, none of them.)

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2021/02/17/te...

I live in New Orleans and by and large things were fine. Maybe 50K people lost power and water in the state and most of those were in BR. (Lake Charles is still recovering from the hurricanes). It was much worse here in Jan 2018.

Entergy turned over its grid control to MISO, as well as built a (huge waste of a) gas peaker plant that I will concede was used in this situation but probably wasn't needed given our connection with other states. Louisiana may be an economic colony of Texas, but please don't drag us into apologia for the national media or Texas' poor decisions.

> the city is so mismanaged it's a joke

> I genuinely have no clue where the high taxes go.

> tech bros step over needles and homeless people on their way to make their 200k a year.

> Why didn't they build more houses here?

I don't think you've learned about Prop 13 yet. Ignorance is bliss here. Yes there are answers to your questions, but California is more enjoyable when you're just confused about these things.

This the one?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_13

No, this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

Basically, home value for property taxes gets assessed once, when you buy the property, and it can only go up by inflation after that.

Just replace them with land value taxes that are assessed for each block or maybe the entire neighborhood. Then split the tax bill based on the area of land owned so that you get a fixed rate per square foot.

I may as well represent a different perspective here.

I am not leaving San Francisco. It's beautiful here. I'm excited to see it get weirder. I will always choose to live somewhere that is exciting over somewhere that will be the same forever. Everything about San Francisco has always been "temporary." This city is boom/bust, constantly changing. It's interesting, having a front-row seat to the ways that people and culture change over time.

Some of the most interesting, most cherished times for native San Franciscans was the 60s/70s, when crime was way higher than today, there was no real tech presence, and the art scene here was booming. It was expensive then, too. It's probably always going to be expensive to live here.

If you're here, you can probably already feel the city starting to get into the bust times, the times when the culture really starts to get shaken up and things start evolving into something new. It's not for everyone, but for a certain kind of person — it's better than anywhere else.

You probably won't agree with me, and that's okay. I don't expect, or want, everyone to. But the changes I've seen in SF recently — personally, I like them. There's so much potential.

EDIT: The level of hostility in the comments here is a little staggering. Please, readers, consider that others may have a different perspective than you. Obviously, I am not condoning any further human suffering. If that's all that you can see in my comment, consider if the cynicism in your comment may effect others.

Come on dude. People aren't talking about the "weird" or quirky aspects of SF. We're talking about fucking needles, and human feces in the street. Stop protecting this shit by labeling it as something other than human suffering and a public health disaster.

My friend lived in SF for 3 years, then left for a year. He called me to say, “dude what happened to SF? Apparently it’s all shit and needles now.” I had to explain to him that nothing has changed. He was just reading sensationalized media.

I live in SF, I would like the city cleaned up, more accountability for taxes, more focus on tax payers over homeless. But at the same time, SF represents liberalism in the US so is a target for conservative media and the problems are massively overblown. People act like the Tenderloin is the whole city, or tech people who never left soma. The city is incredibly beautiful overall.

The top comment at time of writing is complaining about taxes AND how terrible it is to see homeless and we are evil. It’s a hot take totally free of substance, short of kicking people out of the city there are no easy solutions that involve lower taxes and helping all the homeless. These people want to sound compassionate but mostly sound like they want suffering out of their eyesight.

Downtown SF has emptied out because we’re still in the middle of a pandemic. I don’t know if it will last but it’s so dumb to act like people left for any other reason than a pandemic making city living awful. There’s a good chance it will bounce back.

Most of SFs biggest problems like affordability are caused by too many people wanting to live there. These are problems other cities are jealous of. The mayor of Miami literally bought a billboard right now begging people to go to his city. And that jealousy combined with hatred of democrats means people will massively exaggerate problems.

Again, I highly recommend visiting any other neighborhood besides soma or the tenderloin.

> and the problems are massively overblown

For all the places I have worked in and visited through my life, including poor countries in Africa, Europe, Russia, and places as extreme as Afghanistan, the only place I have ever seen someone openly defecate in the street is San Francisco. And I've seen it many times in San Francisco.

It's not overblown. Your reference points have been distorted. It's not normal. People don't do that in other cities.

...This actually happens in the downtown of literally every major metro in the US because the US is terrible at dealing with the underlying issues that lead to this sort of thing as a whole.

Just because you haven't exposed yourself to it nor seen about it in disgusting sensationalist shitshow that is media in the US doesn't mean it isn't happening.

Is there some CDC or HHS data on public defecation?

e: remove false info

I’ve seen it in Vietnam, India, and heard about seeing it in Brazil from friends. I’m sure it’s more common than you think, we just have a very embolden and large homeless population with not enough public toilets and way too many substance abuse / mental health issues.

I was born and raised in Brazil where I lived until 25 in a major city with no shortage of poverty and inequality. I have never seen or heard reports of people defecating on the street. Though at least in the northeast it’s common for men to urinate.

I was born in and grew up in SF. I still go once in awhile. SF got a lot worse.

I didn’t grow up with tents surrounding City Hall nor tents lining the sidewalk in the Tenderloin.

Go look at Polk Street in Nob Hill. Go look at Van Ness. Go look at the Castro. Those aren’t SOMA or the Tenderloin. I saw a smashed bus shelter right off Van Ness. I saw graffiti and garbage on the sidewalk in Nob Hill. There are multiple tents pitched right off the freeway off ramp in the Castro.

The problem of SF is not affordability. It is that its policies make it a honeypot for homeless. These people are in no shape at all to work. Think mental issues, drug abuse, etc...

These issues are societal and not limited to SF. Furthermore, SF’s policies don’t seem to be helping at all.

If you want to contain it, turn Salesforce tower into a homeless shelter and ban tents on sidewalks. Establish work programs to clean up street. Perhaps some of the people will turn around their lives.

The towns and cities on the Peninsula are probably laughing at SF. All the homeless are drawn to SF and have disappeared from their sidewalks.

Many towns on the Peninsula are not cool with homeless pitching tents on sidewalks. They get their tents taken down and are directed to homeless shelters.

SF seems ok with it, so all the homeless go there and pitch tents. Homeless elsewhere hear about this and head off to SF. SF politicians run on leftist agendas and then pour money into this endless pit.

> The towns and cities on the Peninsula are probably laughing at SF. All the homeless are drawn to SF and have disappeared from their sidewalks.

Haha absolutely wrong. While not as bad as SF, homeless issues everywhere else in the Bay have also gotten much worse. Mountain View, San Jose, Fremont, Oakland, everywhere.

Nope. It seems better in Belmont, San Carlos, Burlingame, San Mateo, and Millbrae. Don’t notice the homeless hanging around CalTrain stops anymore. There used to be a few tents pitched along the tracks upper Peninsula. I don’t see those anymore. There is zero discussion of tents in social media mid Peninsula. Discussion is only focused on providing food and isolated cases of people losing jobs.

You don’t have to believe me. Go check out videos on YouTube. Use your own eyes.

https://youtu.be/1tv0FjfGbUs https://youtu.be/HmOIQv0yu-U

Now search for other cities in the Bay. Go see what you find.

Oakland doesn’t count. It has the same policies as SF and has gotten worse.

> The mayor of Miami literally bought a billboard right now begging people to go to his city.

Going on a bit of a tangent here, but I moved to central FL a couple years ago and I tend to browse jobs from time to time just to see whats around me, so while I don't live in Miami, specifically, I have looked around. Looking at Florida is weird, compared to some other places I've been, the market in FL seems rather disappointing, in both the quality and variety of tech jobs in the state. I feel like career wise, it'd be better off to go back to GA or NC. Culturally Miami seems past it's prime as well. You never really here much about or here about people talking wanting to move there like you do most of the other cosmopolitan US cities or even cities in the Midwest and South. I'll give south FL one thing though, the area sparked a great underground rap scene in the 2010s.

Yeah I don't really get what's happening with Florida either. The state has more population than New York yet is beaten out in the tech sector by what would normally be seen as hill-billy fly-over states. Not even the space coast has a lot going on, though I guess the market for space-stable software is kinda limited.

At least housing is cheap enough you can stumble into a 3b2b with a pool and a 20 minute commute to the city on a 80k salary

Seems like there's a lot going on in Miami: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_qRK9VplNY

Miami has had a nice cultural revolution in the last 10 years or so. A lot more art and culture than before and tons of things to do besides partying on South Beach. Many areas of Miami feel more like SF in LA than Trump country.

> Most of SFs biggest problems like affordability are caused by too many people wanting to live there

It's caused by not building places for people to live.

>Most of SFs biggest problems like affordability are caused by too many people wanting to live there. These are problems other cities are jealous of.

Is this supposed to be some kind of joke? How the fuck can you brag about incompetence? Seriously. This isn't magic. All you have to do is absolutely nothing to achieve this outcome. It's basically the opposite of prosperity. Vancouver is also suffering from this "success". Berlin too. Are they examples of cities to look up to? Hell no.

People are not jealous of your city taking jobs hostage and extorting people who want to live there. After all, the pandemic ruined your cities' ability to take jobs hostage. That's why people are leaving.

When I think of SF I think of hundreds of thousands of people who failed to make it because of gate keeping.

Given that they're spending 60k/yr per tent and 100k/yr per hotel room to kick the homeless can down the road, which is about 5 and 8 times what I spend on my own housing per year, it does seem like there are easy, better, cheaper solutions, actually --- give them apartments. That might require building some. I hear SF residents are against that idea though.

> People aren't talking about the "weird" or quirky aspects of SF

Someone has to stand up for these aspects of the city, and I guess today it's my turn.

> I'm excited to see it get weirder ... personally, I like [it]

I think the problem is that the 'weirdness' is more like 'human suffering'. People treat it like a charming part of the experience for their benefit... but like it's real people suffering.

If you’re imagining crime and homelessness, that’s not exactly what I mean by “weirdness” – those are problems that San Francisco needs to fix... and will probably always need to fix.

I mean Noone here is complaining about about having too many quirky stores. They are complaining about crime and homelessness. I don't think you're perspective is that different from them on what makes the city good,you just don't care as much about the bad.

SF’s homeless problem is out of control in a way that it isn’t in most large cities. You can’t say “that’s just life”.

SF's homeless problem is the US's homeless problem. Talk to people camping on the sidewalk and each one will tell you a different story, but with common themes: horrible home situation in a different state, crime -> prison -> loss of work opportunity, depression & drug abuse. These are suffering people that the American People have decided to let suffer. Yes, SF has enough money to get them all off the streets and into housing and only does that for half of them. But SF doesn't deserve all the blame.

I certainly never said that homelessness is “just life.” I’m just realistic. San Francisco will probably always have this problem to some extent, and it’s our responsibility as San Franciscans to help alleviate it as much as possible.

None of this has to do with my original point about San Francisco’s recent changes, which I have personally experienced as having a much higher density of artists.

> San Francisco will probably always have this problem to some extent

But why?

Other cities don't. For example Liechtenstein has literally no homeless people in the entire country. They had to close their last homeless shelter... because it was empty.

Many other global cities have single-digit homeless per 100k population. Why does San Francisco have literally ten thousand homeless people and why are the numbers still growing?

"will probably always have this problem" is bat-shit insane.

> will probably always need to fix.

Quitter.

If I spent 40 hours a week fixing the same bug I'd be fired from my job.

One of the most strangely written cope pieces I've seen pro-SF so far. San Francisco has never been less exciting.

Sure, it'll remain the Enterprise SaaS capital of the world for a while, but all the most exciting and interesting people have higher expectations than never-ending battles with NIMBYs and deranged city councils.

It's been feeling like time for a change for years now. I'm glad to see it happening.

All I can say is that my experience is much different than yours.

SF’s bust now is $1m+ condos in Western Edition, not really a bust.

SF was built on gold mining and capitalism. There was a counter culture period but it’s a money making town.

I’ve not lived here for too long but I agree with your sentiment. It’s a wonderful city and I’ve met wonderful people and have had great experiences so far. No city is perfect and to the contrary of what most people complain about, I am happy that this city has a big homeless budget and that my tax dollars are being used to provide them some kind of relief, that the city Government is not prosecuting an already unfortunate class of people for doing exactly what any one of us put in such terrible circumstances would be coerced into doing.

If you really want weird you should try some favelas outside of Rio. You'd love it there if you're looking for weird like they have in SF!

>I will always choose to live somewhere that is exciting over somewhere that will be the same forever.

If you were to ask the local home owners they want it to stay the same forever. In fact, the city isn't changing at all, it's the people that are changing.

SF needs to get the message fast that there are serious issues there that need to be fixed. Money is not going to fix a lot of these issues, policy changes will. Coming from someone who left for Colorado.

I actually want SF city to meet its fate and be an example for other cities what not to do.

I think that plan will backfire. Look at Detroit.

Secondly, everyone will draw different conclusions when looking at the same data.

I don't think San Francisco will ever be Detroit. The geography constrained SF from physically expanding to the point where it can't sustain itself, unlike Detroit.

I think more likely is hitting some low point, and then a crackdown/reversal of the politics. I think a more apt analogy is SF now is like NYC in the 80s, and the 90s cleanup is coming sooner or later.

If strip clubs and peep shows replace all these empty retail fronts we’ll get there.

Sounds like open liquor laws will be a go post covid. Party time.

For better or for worse, accurate or inaccurate, there were two lessons pretty universally drawn from Detroit: (1) White flight is very, very bad news, and (2) Heavy unionization makes factories uncompetitive.

Especially (2) -- again, I'm not saying whether this is the right or wrong conclusion -- weighs heavily on the states that picked up auto manufacturing that fled Detroit. Obviously there are contrarian takes, but these have very wide mindshare, and I don't think it's true that "everyone will draw different conclusions".

I'm not sure factories closing down in the Bay Area is a big issue as there aren't a lot. The bigger issue is upper middle class and upper class people and their taxes leaving. On the other hand, the area generally (if not necessarily just SF proper) has a lot of attractions that Detroit never had. So it's reasonable to assume that housing prices could drop to a more sustainable level. Of course, one implication is that municipalities would probably have to operate on lower budgets than they do today.

In general, SF and Bay Area are not necessarily the same story. Plenty may choose to live in South Bay especially if prices drop but not in the city.

As a Detroiter I'm curios to hear why you think Detroit went the way it did.

Over-dependency on a single industry, unwillingness to diversify, and an arrogant assumption that the same work could never be done elsewhere. Add in highways, commuting, and an infrastructure maintenance death spiral as domestic car production lost its major advantages. Rising crime added to the death spiral, as people who could moved out and the general deprivation of Detroit grew.

Many of the suburbs developed their own economies, which further encouraged people to move there instead of Detroit proper.

Lots of racism played its part in various ways. Lots of room to debate the precise degree, though the debate is probably not helpful at this point.

These days the high taxes (property and income) and auto insurance rates are big problems.

Only a few of these really apply to SF. Though the arrogance of assuming the good times will roll on forever seems accurate.

According to this talk [0] the reason is that the newly established car industry encouraged a massively unsustainable development pattern that eventually led to the bankruptcy of the city and since its the first city to be built with this pattern it was also the first to fail. Lots of other cities are suffering the same fate. New low density development at the edge of town at the expense of the self sustaining downtown core and then at some point the maintenance costs exceed the tax income and you get a city wide decline.

[0] https://youtu.be/Em7nqDqQ8oM

That's a very optimistic point of view on the ability of people to learn from examples. No matter how hard SF fails, there will be lots of people going around and telling how it have failed because of not building enough social housing for the poor, not having high enough taxes, and allowing rich to escape after robbing the city dry. Just like there are people saying that communist countries fail because of US sanctions.

There is no chance SF will change in time. It's just not how the city works.

I can imagine it gets lucky, and things fix themselves.

They just got a huge influx of cash from Congress so the message is lost in irrelevance.

First, the underlying report is at : https://www.capolicylab.org/calexodus-are-people-leaving-cal...

Interesting to notice the title for the report vs. the title the LA Times headline writers selected.

Second, much of the data is being reported as Year over year deltas and ratios of %, which is mathematically accurate but hard to interpret. A increase of over 900% in people leaving S.F. sounds pretty spectacular, but the same metric has Alameda at over 400%, and LA is over 130%

I got estimates of the populations from https://www.california-demographics.com/counties_by_populati..., and used that to normalize the exit rate by percent of population.

S.F definitely leads, with 2.3% net leaving, but only 19 of 57 California Counties in the report actually grew.

L.A., San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Orange Counties all shrunk, but the "Everyone hate on S.F." bandwagon gets more clicks.

I left SF 8 months ago after renting a small room for 5 years at ~$2k/month with housemates. By moving ~150 miles away I was able to buy my first house, ~2100 sqft on 4 acres (!) for ~$600,000. Any thoughts on what to do when the pandemic ends and employers make us come back to the Bay Area office?

I really do love San Francisco, it's so naturally beautiful, the hills give perspectives of communities, so many neighborhoods and main streets, so much stimulation, I learned about deep learning from housemates there in 2015 and was able to make a living out of it that I probably wouldn't have been able to elsewhere. Wish I listened to my other housemates espousing bitcoin and the original ethereum ico...

I made $200k salary last year and yet have no prospect for ownership of a nice home anywhere in the Bay Area, let alone San Francisco, and I'm one of the lucky ones. Even the shitty houses where I grew up near Compton, CA are asking more than half a mil now. Not sure how this all ends...

> Any thoughts on what to do when the pandemic ends and employers make us come back to the Bay Area office?

Get an employer which allows remote work.

As someone it tech who has spent the last two decades or so thumbing my nose at SF/bay from the East Coast, making bold predictions that the entire house of cards paying 400k for talent you could get for half that or less on the East Coast... Now that it's happened/happening I am not happy about it at all. Having wages collapse there is going to put a drag on the rest of the market across the country. I've spent a lot of time sneering at SF tech-scene from across the country, but I'm cheering for it now.

I think you’re right to be worried. The piercing of the Bay Area reality distortion zone, combined with the unprecedented embrace of remote teams, may well mean that for the vast majority of tech workers their value will be judged against someone also very good who is willing to work for considerably less money.

I think the bigger issue in this scenario is that they now can’t move to the Bay Area themselves and both make great money.

Ive left SF before as well.

Homelessness issue is a joke to the city. Transportation was horrible. The non-tourist parts of town were a toilet for people (way more than you'd even think, without seeing it). I am a younger white guy who doesn't necessarily look timid, and even then I've been threatened in the BART by drunk dudes on multiple occasions.

It's expensive. It's politics 24/7. It's crowded (not just bustling, but more as though you took a large city and squeezed it into a small city).

The local governments have failed everyone there.

I love SF but they stole shit from my car, ran over my motorcycle, and then stole my motorcycle when I fixed it. Like, dude, I'll be back eventually because it has great geography and I have lots of friends I adore there.

But Jesus, man, I need a break. This is too much for so little time.

We left the Bay Area to be closer to family. It was going to happen at some point, but the pandemic just accelerated the move. The Bay Area is still my favorite place though, so ironically I’m able to save up faster to buy a house there (for retirement) by not living there currently, assuming remote incomes don’t drop drastically after the pandemic.

Anecdotally, at our apartment complex in Asheville, there are three cars with California license plates right next to mine, so at least some people had the same idea as us with regard to where to move.

Remote salaries will dip

Knoxville here, can anecdotally confirm an increase in the number of California plates I see around town.

I’ve lived in San Francisco for about ten years and I’ve never been more excited about the future of this city. We have an incredible opportunity to build a city that works for everyone and not just a glorified dorm room complex for young tech workers. The next few years are looking very good!

Hats off to your optimism, but having lived in SF it looks the govt has only gotten more dysfunctional. It was never about “building a city that works for everyone” and good luck on changing that.

Civic participation is a long, hard slog that rewards the people who stay with it. Best of luck to you wherever you landed.

There is no lack of civic participation in SF. That’s why it’s the way it is today. It’s community organizations like Calle 24 who don’t want tech folks and don’t want new housing. They run the city.

What makes you think that things are going to change? I don't live in SF, but things look like they are getting worse.

What happens when the only people left in a city are the ones who truly love it and want it to be as good as it can be?

Exactly. The worst thing for SF is for all the new transplants to not be there for the city, but rather for the money while thumbing their nose at the city. They will invest zero into it, but displace those who contribute to culture in their wake.

No offense but this comes across as a little naive. If you go visit the parts of SF that people don’t talk about, you pretty quickly realize the wealthy (tech folks included) are a very small slice of the city and live in their own bubble of trendy restaurants and jaunts out to Tahoe.

Most people are lower or middle class families struggling to get by and even if they didn’t “love” SF they don’t have a lot of options when it comes to leaving.

Are you betting on "boomers" dying? The worst people are those who own their house and insist that things shouldn't change, ever. They will not leave until they die. They can have their house. All they have to accept is that their neighborhood will change slowly, because all neighborhoods change.

There is no way to make the city work for everyone. The city has so many constraints on it, there is no way for everyone to be happy.

For one, it's incredibly geographically constrained. Because it's constrained, housing supply is restricted, which drives prices up enormously and displaces the majority of the population. If you open up housing development, and high-rises start shooting up everywhere, the identity of the city diminishes, and it will lose a good deal of the character that most find appealing about it. Maintain development restrictions, however, and you get people complaining about the NIMBYism and extremely high prices.

In regards to the homeless, how do you resolve that? I mean, if your solution is to provide them with housing in one of the most geographically constrained and most expensive places on the planet, well then you're going to contribute to the first problem. If you're going to move them somewhere else, you'll ease up on the housing constraint issues, but upset the homeless population, and a good deal of people who thought that the homeless were perfectly entitled to live in the middle of most expensive city in the country.

What about the culture? The artistic community that had a larger presence in the city a few decades ago absolutely hates the influx of tech workers. Tech has taken root as a primary identity of the city. Does the city work for everybody when the tech workers continue to displace artists, or the artists prevent the tech workers for moving in?

In what way are you going to come up with solutions that "work for everybody?"

I don’t know, but as I am both an artist and a tech worker, I have a large stake in whatever comes next, and I know that the future belongs to the people who show up for it.

I hope you can spread your optimism. You guys are sitting on a gold mine and you just need to dig the gold out.

Area is priced highly, jobs can be done from anywhere else in the world, so it is natural regardless of politics and all the other crap that people migrate to cheaper areas where they feel they can live out of. The SF/SV bubble is leaking out and pressure is being let out to the rest of the world mostly US. Obviously, SF isn't the only high priced area in the world that is leaking out.

With lowered rent prices, this should help alleviate economics on lower paid people. Who's to say these areas won't go sky high again though.

I'm sure those living in the rest of the state can't wait for them to move there and recreate the same problems they were fleeing.

You have got to be kidding. SF, and California generally, has had systemic problems that have virtually nothing to do with the recent tech boom.

That’s true, the State of Jefferson folks probably won’t listen though.

Those who left SF Bay Area, do you regret it? Why or why not?

I'm currently thinking about moving to a different state as it makes sense financially, but I have an attachment with the Bay Area and what it offers (especially as an immigrant), so I'm hesitant to move. I'm interested to hear experiences of people who recently left.

I moved to Reno short term once covid hit and have zero regrets. Saving 1k a month in taxes alone. One thing I really appreciate is not having to wait in line for everything e.g. lunch, gas at Costco, post office, car service etc.

San Francisco, the city itself is a very different beast from the rest of the Bay Area.

> Those who left SF Bay Area, do you regret it?

Fuck no.

> Why or why not?

Even during the pandemic, NYC is an infinitely better city. Cheaper, too.

I never understood why companies paid the living costs of SF instead of locating in the Midwest or smaller cities. Someone told me it’s because SF is where all the talent goes so it would be unwise to locate elsewhere.

Maybe COVID has revealed that geography is not as important to success as people believed.

1. Closeness to the Stanford university ecosystem which promoted tech. Berkeley isn't too far away physically, though it may not be very near ideologically. Talent helps.

2. Matthew Effect: The (talent-)rich (cities) get richer.

3. Weather. I have lived at some point in the midwest. Shovelling snow in a morning storm so that you can get in the car to go to office is not something I'd want to do again. Maybe Denver has mild enough weather to be considered a replacement. On the other hand, Colorado is a beautiful place and it'd be sad to see it overrun by large crowds of morning commuters. Austin is a viable alternative, Texas school boards notwithstanding.

4. Covid is not a long-term trend. Nothing beats the bandwidth of a physical meeting, or a discussion over coffee.

While I think all that's true, tons of people manage to deal with states with snow including metros with major university systems. It's not a deal-breaker for most. Furthermore, there are lots of ways people can get together and collaborate. I even live near a local office that I rarely go into. I mostly meet people when traveling.

i live in denver. winters are getting warmer and drier but the summers lately have been very very hot and wayyy too much smoke from fires. still amazing weather though!

you're right on the traffic it's always sucked but not as bad as like LA of course.

with the population growth it goes right back into highways.. always building/expanding ;(

i feel like in theory we should be super bike/walk friendly; if Minneapolis can build bike highways that are used in the dead of winter we should be able too. but we don't. my neighbors prioritize and fight politically for street parking. you can't even see into intersections because they let cars park right up to the edge. they're trying to make a street near me a bike corridor - put in fake roundabouts - but it's not a protected lane and they still have parking on the street ffs.

the light rail should have been more promising too. we do have good buses though and the train to airport is nice. maybe can someday finish the boulder extension.

we're building a ton of condos in the center of denver so i really hope we get more pedestrian first voters.

And also please let's keep outdoor dining/drinking post COVID. take back the streets from cars!

I don't drive and live purposefully where i can walk or uber. it's great unless you go to the mounatins a lot.

i supported a mayoral candidate who really wanted to restore the street cars - it makes a ton of sense would love to see it return on a few of the major streets like colfax downtown to CU hospital.

I'm not sure about 4. in a corporate setting. In academia, maybe, but in corporate physical meetings the person with the greatest reality distortion field uses them to his/her way.

Which is the purpose of these meetings.

Could you clarify more on the ideological differences between Stanford and Berkeley? Also other universities. I had no idea that something like that even exists. Are they (also) different on the political spectrum or in some other area?

People closer to the ground can comment better. But to summarize, tenure decisions in Stanford reputedly take into account whether you are involved in startups etc. Berkeley is more traditionally academic, as far as I understand.

As for the political spectrum, Berkeley is left-liberal. I am not sure about Stanford. It is also somewhat liberal, even though conservative/libertarian think-tanks like the Hoover institution are based on the Stanford campus.

5. Because in 1956 William Shockley moved there, for somewhat arbitrary reasons

I believe it was to take care of his ailing mother.

Maybe if she had decided to retire to Florida, Silicon Valley would be in the Sunshine State.

At around 2000 - 2010 San Francisco had the reputation of being an amazing city. It wasn't a tech hub back then but it was a very cultural city with a lot of diversity, art and amazing views. A lot of people just wanted to live there, including tech workers. One my friends worked at google and lived in SF because she told me she was so "enamored" by the city.

In fact that's why those google shuttles exist. Because back then tons and tons of people loved the city so much that they wanted to live in SF while working in Mountain View.

When tech started rising more and more, tech workers started moving into SF turning it into the tech hub that it is today. This upped property values which in turn drove a lot of junkies and homeless people out of the condemned properties as those properties were getting repurposed to take advantage of the growing market.

That's why you see shit on the streets and needles everywhere. Rising property values essentially took what was happening behind closed doors and put it in the middle of the street. Everybody applauds all the social programs offered to the needy by SF until it they see it up close and personal.

So really there's two main root causes for why SF is the shit hole it is today:

1. Excessive amount of tech workers. 2. Drug availability.

The Tech worker thing is new. The Drug problem is old, although I'm not sure how much the recent opioid epidemic contributes to that.

Anyway this seemed like a tangent but to address your point: Companies wanted to move to SF because the tech workers WANTED to live there. The companies relocated based off the location of talent.

The situation today is the end result of a feedback loop produced by Tech companies and Tech workers from 2010 to now. Tech workers move to SF, so companies follow. This causes more workers to follow the companies.

You'll see this correlation everywhere. If companies don't want to be in a certain city, for sure there's an amount of skilled workers who don't want to be there either.

I’m glad SF and tech exists, met my wife here and made an unimaginable amount of money.

Was a C average student in high school and debated even going to a mediocre college.

Anecdata - San Diego prices are going way up - folks moving from Bay Area.

More likely it's low interest rates and everyone dumping cash into real estate because of inflation scares

Everywhere is. There's a shortage of homes (reduced build the past decade due to surplus at the time), and the rock bottom mortgage prices + remote work requiring more space means a lot of people looking to buy. High demand + low supply = rising prices.

Texas too.

https://www.dallasnews.com/business/real-estate/2018/11/02/s...

https://www.dallasnews.com/business/real-estate/2021/03/04/d...

If you’ve lived in both you’d know there’s not much to worry about lol

For someone who has not lived in either can you elaborate

Santa Barbara as well. Never thought Santa Barbara would be a place people moved to save money...

Also prices are going way up in the Bay Area, I’m not sure what this proves yet.

I’ve seen prices in northern Marin go up about 30-40% in the last couple months.

My realtor told me the last handful of houses she sold were to tech employees moving from Bay Area (Twitter, FB, etc)

Prices in Calgary, Alberta are going up too. I don't think there are many folks moving here from Bay Area.

There are more people leaving California each year than being born in it. The study in the article focuses on movement between 2019-20. I’m not sure if they’re addressing the question the right way, as 2020 was a pretty unusual year and this has been going on for quite some time.

I haven't been to SF, but if it's the same as Downtown east side in Vancouver, it's understandable, it's been taken over by the homeless. I'm from a 3rd world country and the situation is even below my standards.

I don't understand the framing of the article when they say

> The number of people leaving California typically tracks with the amount entering the state. But the findings show that wasn’t the case in the fourth quarter of 2020, when 267,000 people left the state and only 128,000 entered.

So that's 130k people leaving for one year (not a quarter like the way it's phrased, I've looked up the statistics and 130k a year makes more sense). And the negative growth of the state's population began before the pandemic. I'm failing to see how losing 0.3% of your population is not the beginning of an exodus?

https://www.macrotrends.net/states/california/population

> I'm failing to see how losing 0.3% of your population is not the beginning of an exodus?

It could be the beginning of an exodus, but it is not strong evidence that an exodus will follow. If done for affordability reasons, it reduces demand a bit to create a new equilibrium with supply.

Anyways, I’m not clear why anyone with a background in tech would be confident that a 0.3% drop was evidence that a huge drop was just right around the corner.

You would not be wrong if that was the first year. But it follows a multiple years long trend. The only reason the population of California kept increasing was because births were offsetting the net lost of migration until 2018.

More people are leaving California currently than coming to it. Perhaps that isn't a biblical level exodus quite yet, but it's coming with time. Just be patient. Rome didn't fall in a day.

Yes, the subtle shift to "net" population change is again hiding the story.

change in population = migration from rest of word - californians leaving the state + births - deaths

In California, that means existing residents are moving out, people from the rest of the world are moving in. That has led to record low growth rates in 2019 (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/05/california-populati...) and an estimated population decline in 2020 (https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/California-s-pop...)

In some sense, it doesn't matter whether population goes up or down, we should not have a policy that population must always go up. But for CA the problem is that wealthier people are leaving while poorer people are moving in. This is exarcebated by a policy of high income taxes and low real estate taxes -- real estate is much less mobile than people. And this is further exarcerbated by a policy of very progressive income taxes, which makes the state budget sensitive to a small number of wealthier households leaving.

California still was at positive population increase before the pandemic because of foreign immigration. Also, Texas had more people than California just back in 1940, it isn’t weird that it’s huge growth over the last 80 years has come to an end.

I would say a population decline for any big state is a bit unusual, no?

Nope. Look at New York. Anyways, if you want to see the reality, do a Google for “California population”, it will include Florida and Texas in a graph that goes back to 1920.

The exodus from NY was pretty remarkable and widely commented on. It was devastating for the state and led to the bankruptcy of NYC.

I would like to mention that according to existing residents in San Francisco this is a good thing. They want you to leave.

Tl;dr: not the usual Californians-leave-in-droves-for-redder-pastures story. Exodus from SF city has drastically increased, but is mostly still within California, or even within the Bay Area economic area. It has also increased relatively more towards the Sierra Nevada area.

That's an interesting way to frame it.

You sure a bunch of blue staters are moving to redder pastures? The way I see it is a bunch of blue staters are fleeing totalitarian extremists.

I like SF where it is. Close enough that I can take the bus there but far enough that I don't have to have a conversation about UFOs with a bum unless I choose to.

I’ve thought about this quite carefully, and I’m convinced we need to kick California out of the union. There is too big of an impedance mismatch with the rest of the country, and it creates and exports too much economic inequality.

The usual retort to this is “what will you do without California’s economic engine?” And that’s a fair point—America without California will be less wealthy. But that will be fine; and in fact probably better. Think about it. People reminisce about the 1950s and 1960s as the good times. What did America look like back then? It looked a lot more like Iowa. Poorer than California on average, but economically flat with a low ceiling (few high income people) and a high floor (few really poor people). There are few upper middle class people (very little knowledge industry jobs) and consequently very little of the ecosystem that upper middle class people bring with them (housing, retail, restaurants, etc., that are unaffordable to normal people). Upper middle class people are what drive malaise among the rest of the population.

People in places like San Francisco, Portland, etc., complain about the tech industry people moving in. And the response of tech industry people is “hey, we’re not billionaire, we’re working stiffs like everyone else.” Jeff Bezos might have oodles of money, but it’s just on paper. He’s not buying enough houses to move the market prices. It’s Amazon engineers that are buying houses with their high salaries in sufficient numbers to drive up property prices. And as a result, people can’t afford to live and raise kids where they grew up. And that imposes devastating costs on middle class people. For middle class people for whom child care is a major expense, being able to drop the kids off at their grandparents regularly is a huge boon economically and socially. (Remember, the median American adult lives less than 18 miles from their mom.) Then comes all the other stuff. The corner burger joint is replaced by a fancy one that charges $18 for a cheeseburger. The diner where you can get a $1.00 coffee is replaced by a fancy coffee that charges $5.00 for a coffee. Conveniences and frivolities become far more expensive. The local gymnastics studio where you can send your kid twice a week to get her out of your hair doubles it’s prices. Etc. Jeff Bezos, by contrast, has no impact on any of that.

I think the natives complaining about the influx of high income professionals actually perceive the reality correctly. Most of them aren’t qualified for high paying jobs at Google and Facebook anyway. These industries moving in won’t help them in that regard. It will simply create a large contingent of people who can now outbid them on access to fixed resources, which will make their lives worse.

As Portland is in Oregon, and Jeff Bezos is in Washington, could the proposal be to have CA, OR, and WA become their own country?

WA and OR yes, but only the part west of Cascades. The parts of these states east of Cascades are totally unlike the ones west of them. For Oregon, actually, Portland area is totally unlike the rest of Oregon culturally, so southern Oregon would also probably prefer to stay with the Union instead of leaving along CA and western WA.

So your solution is not to kick the wealthy out of the union, but to kick California out of the union, simply because it has a large population of wealthy people?

The problem isn’t the wealthy people per se. The problem is industries like tech that generate highly paid upper middle class jobs that most people aren’t qualified for (and realistically will never be qualified for), as opposed to a larger number of middle class jobs that most people can be qualified for.

There is a reason people pine for coal and oil jobs. Head out to east or west Texas sometime. Lots of prosperity for middle class people through skilled, but not college required, jobs that most people can learn. But few upper middle class knowledge workers to drive up prices. The result is much more palpable middle class prosperity than places that are much richer on paper, like the Bay Area. (Also far less racial segregation, for exactly the same reason.)

> The problem isn’t the wealthy people per se. The problem is industries like tech that generate highly paid upper middle class jobs that most people aren’t qualified for (and realistically will never be qualified for), as opposed to a larger number of middle class jobs that most people can be qualified for.

You talk as if that is a problem. If you are surrounded by rich customers you also get to charge more for your low skill job. The problem is that there isn't enough housing for both high skill and low skill workers.

The financial sector is probably a larger driver of income inequality than tech. Do you kick out NYC too?

We would gladly leave.

>I’ve thought about this quite carefully, and I’m convinced we need to kick California out of the union. There is too big of an impedance mismatch with the rest of the country, and it creates and exports too much economic inequality.

I agree about one thing. California actively drives economic inequality.

Here's my theory about the entire economy of the US transforming since 2000.

Thanks to globalization manufacturing jobs went to China and other countries. This caused a decline in rural communities where a handful of companies were exporting manufactured goods to the rest of the US and some of them exported to foreign countries. However, sales within USA were the primary driver of revenue. The internet makes centralization easier. This means you can set up a headquarter anywhere and reach the rest of the USA. Similar events happened with industries starting to consolidate. Think of Walmart eating local companies. Centralization shifts profits to corporate headquarters. More money is leaving the local town than is coming in. This causes a death spiral, especially when the city has over leveraged itself on infrastructure which is a common problem for small towns. The new winners are the headquarter cities. Lots of money is leaving from small places and entering big places. Big cities have more headquarters so they are benefiting massively. This drives urbanism a shift from rural places to urban places.

Automation increases productivity at the expense of obsoleting skills. This causes a shift to low skill jobs of which there aren't many as the manufacturing jobs have moved to China and the high skilled jobs moved to cities. So now the country is suffering from a labor surplus. Low skill labor sees immigrants as competition. So the cycle of right wing activism starts.

The chasm between skilled and unskilled is now so great that the best answer is to retrain people. America has collectively decided that employers do not have to train their employees. Instead everyone gets access to student loans and must fund their own education through future income. In principle this is okay if you make sure people don't over leverage themselves on a degree that cannot bring in the required income, something that is very common when there is a low skill labor glut. Okay, but the loan program enabled millions of students to enroll, surely a two digit percentage of them did get a high skill job in the end? This is where there story starts involving California.

California is massively benefiting from urbanization, globalization and automation. It's the ultimate place to go after your got your fancy STEM degree. The desire to prevent new housing and discourage people from coming to California is absolutely egoistical from this perspective. SF is supposed to be an economic power house for millions of people who are forced to leave their hometown because of economic decline. Yes, they will be rich, but only after they spent years working in SF. From that perspective California is sabotaging the success of the entirety of the US by running a dysfunctional state.

>It will simply create a large contingent of people who can now outbid them on access to fixed resources, which will make their lives worse.

Land is fixed, housing isn't. You can always build more.

I agree with some of your points, but I think you overlook that being a "headquarter state" actually kind of sucks for your average person. The rise in incomes for typical people don't come close to offsetting the inflation that results from the large influx of high-income knowledge workers. All my wife's friends who attended the University of Iowa with her and stayed in state own houses and are getting on with their lives in their mid 30s. That's a wild fantasy in D.C. or NYC or SF. California's net domestic outmigration is over 5 per 1,000 (more people leaving than coming in). That's the inverse of places like Georgia, Florida, Idaho, Oregon, Arizona, etc. Middle class people are running away from the headquarters states.

You obviously don't want to go full Detroit and completely lose your local industries. But more of the U.S. becoming like California would actually be bad too.

Why not have Congress pass an amendment striking down Prop 13 or the Supreme Court rule against it?

If I read it correctly, California state constitution amendments are from popular vote in the state - the California legislature can only put them on the ballot to be voted on (and then, its a 2/3 vote there - easier to get 8% of the previous total vote to petition).

The Supreme Court can't rule against it because it is constitutional because it is the constitution.

The die-hard San Franciscan is probably saying "Good!" They don't want anyone living there that's above average, is able to earn a living, or doesn't want to poop on the sidewalk.

But good luck running a city when 100% of your population is incapable of contributing more than they take.

It's ok, they're going to relocate and keep pushing the same culture with their votes, slowly destroying the next place.

I left 8 years ago, couldn't have been happier. SF is beautiful, but the lack of political diversity (ironic for a city so outspoken on diversity) is what pushes these crazy ideas and policies that will ultimately end up with this outcome.

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