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Comment by Moodles | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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."

How big is this company

over 100B

Might as well name and shame them then...

"By relocating our manufacturing facility to China and laying off the corresponding employees domestically we have been able to vastly improve workforce diversity numbers".

IIRC East Asians don’t count toward diversity number.

Yeah because equal outcomes and partitioning based on race and other irrelevant characteristics is a really great idea.

Sarcasm is on a roll this evening.

Ridiculous that "diversity" explicitly excludes the people that don't fit that narrative the left wants to push.

East Asians aren’t white enough to be invited to the tee time and they’re not diverse enough to get special quotas so they keep doing what they have always done which is study harder and perform better.

The HR guy was probably looking for an answer that wasn’t “we hired this nonwhite person specifically because he was cheaper than someone in the United States.”

I don't think it's symbolic or virtue signalling. In the SF area, "diverse" is just an HR term of art that means "black, Hispanic, or female". (You'll often see people say things like "we'd like 40% of our candidate pool to be diverse", which only really make sense under that definition.) The idea of building a welcoming environment for people from all walks of life is usually referred to as "inclusion".

No, it's not symbolic, just the opposite, it's Orwellian newspeak/totalitarianism.

By your very own words: ""diverse" is just an HR term of art that means "black, Hispanic, or female"", i.e. a completely subjective, odd, and contextual local moralism.

The problem is that these folks believe that any 'questioning' of their methods or approach are in fact 'questioning' of the underlying positive impetus of their motivation (i.e. we all agree 'not being racist' is good, but that doesn't mean we have to buy into any specific moralisms about diversity).

But anyone who asks that kind of question in an interview is either a clown or a pill-swallowing victim, and it's definitely a massive 'Red Flag' in that you're entering into a dystopian social nightmare where you'll need special help 'interpreting' thew Newspeak.

People from outside the West are already having enough trouble keeping up with the basic PC stuff, this is getting ridiculous.

It's a sign of social decay, and that SF has 'peaked' in terms of it's relative importance. Thanks to COVID, the rise of China, Trumpian foreign policy which has engendered a lot of mistrust, the 'decentralization' has begun in earnest.

I work with developers in E. Europe and 20 years ago they would have jumped at the chance to move to the US, now they have a strong preference for staying home - the only motivation is money, but since there's massive Purchase Power differential, even their low salaries offer them fairly high standard of living - and their economies are growing consistently 4-7%/year.

The story really is not about 'people leaving SF' - it's about 'The End of Short-lived SF Mecca'.

Note that SF proper was not a 'centre' of anything really until about 2010: Google, FB etc. are all 'Valley'companies, not until the rise of Twitter, Salesforce, Stripe did we see 'SF Values' come to start to infiltrate the definition of 'Silicon Valley'. The Bay will remain important, possibly even the 'most' important, but much like broad relative US decline (i.e. 40% of global GDP in 1960, 25% today), the relative influence will wane. The 2010's were 'peak SF'.

Edit: I should add - a regular from outside the Angloshpere upon hearing the question 'what have you done to support diversity' would basically be baffled and probably have no real idea what the interviewer was asking. I don't think many Americans in these situations realize how hyper-American (at very least Anglo/American or Western) these kinds of things are. Imagine asking that question of someone from Hong Kong, Delhi, or god forbid the true capital of 'complicated diversity', Lebanon.

Hyper-liberal American, I say without scorn. I can assure you no one in Bakersfield is asking these kinds of questions.

Does just showing up to work count? At most of the places I've worked I've been the only white guy on my team.

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...

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.

As someone whos nowhere near liberal enough to want to live in San Francisco, isn't there some kind of diminishing return effect where the better you're homeless services are, the more homeless come to take advantage, and the worse the problem becomes? Especially with the fantastic weather so less exposure deaths? If Texas spends no money on homeless people who don't help themselves they have to leave or die. What's the ratio of Texas homeless that have been in Texas their whole lives vs San Francisco homeless who have been in California their whole lives?

I don't know all the stats, but I know Waco, TX has a large homeless population since I helped out a bit there when I was younger. A quick search shows that Waco spends $39,000/yr per homeless individual[0], and the famous Church Under the Bridge[1] (an open-air gathering under the I-35 overpass) has been unable to meet normally but is making sure that people still get fed [2]. (They are mention feeding 80 people--there were hundreds when I attended, but there are a number of kitchens around so it sounds like most attendees are getting their food elsewhere).

I don't know why anyone would assume that homeless people are starving in Texas. What do you think all the shelters and kitchens are for?

[0] https://www.waco-texas.com/housing-homelessness.asp#gsc.tab=... [1] https://www.churchunderthebridge.org/ [2] https://www.kwtx.com/content/news/Waco-Church-Under-the-Brid...

If you have better services, you attract more potential workers to your city. If you provide resources to educate them, you grow GDP. If you treat people like trash, then you get a bizarre dystopian landscape.

SF is over 5x denser than Dallas, which is the densest major city in Texas. The problem with homelessness is people can't afford to live in homes. It is a lot easier to avoid homelessness when you have essentially endless space to build housing.

If you and fellow San Franciscans were willing to think in 3 dimensions, you'd realize you've got essentially endless space as well.

SF has additional earthquake protection laws that kick for buildings taller than 8 or 9 stories iirc. I think they're expensive to do, because a lot of buildings stop at that height.

I certainly can't afford to live on Madison Ave in NYC. But instead of living in a tent on the street on Madison Ave, I live in a city that is much cheaper than NYC and I don't live in the most expensive part of town.

Should NYC provide me housing if I start living in a tent on Madison Ave?

NYC actually does have a law where they are required to do just that:

https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/todays-read-behind-n...

As another commenter linked to, they should and will. (SF, in contrast, will not - homeless advocacy groups in California generally aren't fans of shelters, so there's not much pressure to ensure there are enough beds to go around.)

> SF is over 5x denser than Dallas

San Francisco is also 3x less dense than Paris (Paris, France).

SF could add homes for 1.5 million people and still be as livable as Paris, if it wanted to.

Paris is not on a fault line either. Or built on large portions of land that suffer from liquid faction.

SF like most American cities has suffered poor city planning and no foresight about future population growth.

That isn't a credible argument. We've known how to engineer for seismic risks for a very long time and many dense, tall cities are built on top of faults in seismic risk zones at least as severe as San Francisco without issue.

For example, Tokyo and Seattle. San Francisco even has the advantage of being merely fault adjacent. In cases like Seattle, a major thrust fault runs through the city. It doesn't prevent dense construction.

> It is a lot easier to avoid homelessness when you have essentially endless space to build housing.

This is hyperbole and dramatically wrong. It's one of those statistics that's repeated in Bay Area circles but has no bearing on reality.

Houston metro is almost the same size as the entire 9-county Bay Area metro: 7M population, 10K sq mi.

Bay Area 9 county: 7.4M population, 7K sq mi.

Houston metro pop density = 0.7K people / sq mi. Bay Area 9 county = 1.05K people / sq mi.

So, the Bay Area 9 county is only 1.5 times as dense as Houston, largely because Houston allows many more high rises.

You've taken a statement about SF and applied it to an area 140 times the size of SF. Obviously that will result in it being nonsense.

SF is the size of downtown Houston, and Houston does not have these problems.

Applying statistics from SF, which is effectively the "downtown" of the Bay Area is not a valid comparison. The population density of San Francisco is not impressive, period. Downtown Houston is much more developed than San Francisco, and that would be a more valid comparison for density.

But this also doesn't get to the main point which was cost and housing density. Cost per sq/ft in Houston (excluding the lots, which are enormous compared to the Bay Area) is $107. Median house price in downtown Houston is $310K.

Costs per sq/ft in the Bay Area are anywhere between $280 and $800. It's not a close comparison in price at all, despite being a comparable density.

On an absolute basis, SF has horrifically restricted housing policy that makes it incredibly difficult to build new, denser housing. However, compared to the broader bay area, SF has incredibly progressive housing policy.

It is ridiculous to compare downtown Houston, which is surrounded on all sides by a zillion square miles of suburbs (under city control!), to SF, which is surrounded by a limited number of more expensive and more restrictive enclaves that SF has no power over, and most of those places are a bridge or tunnel away. Obviously there is going to be less demand, and less premium for land if there are 10,000 other plots within 30 minutes. That just isn't the case in SF.

If the bay area as a whole had better housing policy than it would help SF a lot. But they don't, so it makes it worse for SF. And SF has no control over the housing laws passed in other counties. SF is of course partially at fault, as they should have better housing policy themselves, but they are not entirely responsible for the problem.

I'm not even comparing that. I have been to SF all the time. SF--just SF--is not as dense as downtown Houston, where housing is affordable.

According to Google, downtown Houston is 1.84 square miles. Houston is 669 square miles. So downtown Houston represents about 0.3% of Houston. The reason it is affordable in downtown Houston is because the other 99.7% of Houston exists, and if it weren't affordable in downtown people would just live elsewhere.

You don't have the same choices in and around SF, therefore there is a lot of demand on much smaller amounts of land, therefore it's a lot more expensive!

It's the same reason rent is really expensive in NYC, even though they are way more dense than SF. Lots of demand, not many alternatives.

So SF needs to reform their overly restrictive building regulations? Ignore the NIMBYism and do what is better for the city as a whole?

San Francisco is lagging cities in Texas because Texas actually has seasons and would rather not have a bunch of rotting corpses under their many overpasses.

That is not why San Francisco is lagging Texas. Texas usually does not have harsh winters.

Last I heard rents were astronomical in SF, which appears to be the opposite of what I was talking about.

And yet rents remain sky high in those same cities, despite the pandemic shuttering workplaces and slowing local economies, because lots of people still really want to live in them. There is a point at which you have to realize/admit that your ideological narrative, and the interests who popularize it, are wrong.

The thing is businesses can not rebuild and move buildings quickly. When jobs disappear rents will go down. It seems impossible San Francisco could be the next Detroit but it’s actually not that improbable. There is just so much inertia keeping businesses from being able to move that they can’t or won’t. The actually physical cost to spent billions to build a headquarters but also the need to be closely located to other businesses that you will work with. Without this inertia you would see much more businesses leaving than are now, and there are more than ever leaving.

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.

The laws are enforced.

I haven't seen any conclusive evidence that shows Prop 47 has led to higher crime rates. In fact there are many studies which show there isn't any, while at the same time the state is saving tons of money not incarcerating non-violent offenders.

I haven't seen any conclusive evidence that Chesa Boudin has led to higher crime rates, though I'm not sure how controlled the comparison is of pandemic-city levels vs normal crime levels.

Crime happened before prop 47, crime happened after prop 47. Crime happened before Chesa was elected DA, crime happened after he was elected DA.

I wish there were no crime, but to point out an example of one crime being committed and then jumping to broad conclusions, while also misrepresenting the supposed rationale for the increase in crime, it's a bit of a red flag for me.

The consensus on there not being an increase in the crime rate is that police are no longer responding to crimes...so there is no increase in the statistics of criminality...

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

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

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.

It's unlikely that a shop would seek enforcement if it could result in a violent altercation and scare away customers. Likewise police are more likely to expect violence if they are only called in dire emergencies.

A friend worked at a Macy's in Nevada for a few years. Staff were told that shoplifters should be assumed to be armed, and that security would not normally confront them. Staff would often stand by and let shoplifters walk out the door with big hauls of stuff. Large daily losses to theft were just budgeted for.

I saw a 160lb security guard tackle a 90 lb woman who was probably in her 50s; that was freaky enough. I can't imagine one with resistance.

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.

> 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-...

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;

Hey but the fact that Texas has a higher threshold for property crime to be considered more than a misdemeanor would destroy the “liberals are destroying cities with their soft on crime policies” narrative. Which is literally the only reason anyone originates these claims.

I guess it speaks to the success of right wing media in our society that well educated and well informed people get so badly taken in by them.

Texas also has extremely high gun ownership rates, and is one of the few states (maybe the only) that allows the use of deadly force just to protect property.

"There's a good chance you get shot to death" is probably a better deterrent than even a felony, though it's a little morally concerning.

I'm not sure where people get the idea that this is unique to Texas, or that Texas even has the most liberal allowances for use of deadly force. That is definitely not the case.

As a semi-random example, $500 property crime was the threshold for justifiable homicide in Nevada (appears to be $1200 now + a $0 threshold for some classes of property). Criminals knew this and often carefully limited their activity to avoid this threshold, with odd property selection effects.

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.

There's a positive expected value to such positions, specifically espoused on a place like Hacker News. Among venture backed businesses there's affirmative action for that kind of right leaning thinking.

> ...unquestionably accept such a wild claim

For people who don't read or, apparently, Google for five seconds, verisimilitude and truth are the same thing. To be fair, that's true of everyone who doesn't read, not just libertarians.

Doesn’t matter if they don’t enforce

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.

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

Here in Seattle, people just stop reporting when they know nothing will happen.

Just to add some colour to this:

    This. I moved outside of Portland a few months ago
    after three serious incidents on my property involving
    violent vagrants. In all three cases the police took
    over an hour to show up and did absolutely nothing.

    I had a man trying to break in to my backdoor. When
    I confronted him and demanded that he leave, he began
    swinging punches and pulled out a knife. I managed to
    restrain him and the 13 year old girl next door called
    911 (in hysterics). After keeping this guy pinned
    for 30 mins while waiting for the cops, I gave up and
    released him. He then attempted to assault me again. So
    I pinned him for another 15 mins, the neighbors called
    911 again. Still no cops. So I let him go and kept
    kicking the guy in the ass (literally) until he left
    my property.

    The cops show up about 75 minutes after the first
    call and said "Our hands are tied. We can't do
    anything." They didn't even bother to look for the
    guy. They just wanted to leave.

    I've seen this happen first hand in developing
    countries. You know what happens when law enforcement
    doesn't do its job? Violence escalates due to rise of
    vigilantism - as communities are left with no choice
    other than to employ street justice.

    After three incidents (none as bad as the first) I found
    myself concluding "The next time one of these guys tries
    to break into my property or threaten my family I am
    simply going to kick the shit out of them... There is
    no point calling the police."

    I am a peaceful person that has never even been
    in a fight. That's when I knew it was time to leave
    Portland. Who wants to live like this? I don't want to
    assault anyone, but I also want to live in peace and
    feel assured my family is safe.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/krk5la/how_are_yo...

Next time, say there is a dead body and you heard gun fire. In the UK you'd get every cop for miles and the TV news.</s>

This is the way to get the cops to come in New Zealand too.

Otherwise, it’s the old “can’t do anything until you’ve been assaulted” routine, and hours of waiting.

But mention you heard gunshots and the Armed Offender Squad boys roll around in no time.

Don't be surprised if it backfires and puts you in legal hot water over making false statements to police.

How would that situation be improved if cops were required to spend time and energy pursuing cases where a kid stole a packet of gum from a convenience store?

The fact that cops aren’t responding to cases of violence has nothing to do with the shoplifting laws passed in SF, and frankly, that law should explicitly open up more resources for cops to be able to investigate such violent behavior.

What exactly in Portland prevents them from acting on violent vagrants. Depending on the timeline, this likely has more to do with the fact that police unions across the country deployed a deliberate don’t do police work policy because people decided to protest against the minority of police that were killing in percent civilians merely because of their skin color of the zip code they were arrested in.

Not pursuing "small" - quoted because up to $950 is rather big chewing gum really - crimes creates wrong incentives, and it skews general culture of (dis)respect to law, and property. Essentially normalizing bad behavior will inevitably affect bigger crimes happening. Taking into account that it especially influences youth (breaking rules is cool enough when you're teenager, if you can shoplift without punishment it starts to look like an invitation) we are witnessing a crime problem growing for a at least a generation ahead.

EDIT: "chewing gun" to "chewing gum". Guns are usually not chewy for certain.

San Francisco high in property crime but low in arrests:

"San Francisco has by far the highest property crime rate in California, with more than twice the number of reported thefts per capita than Los Angeles or Santa Clara counties, according to a new report by the Public Policy Institute of California.

And when it comes to arrests, San Francisco is 50th out of the state’s 58 counties."

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/SF-ra...

Did I say arrests?

Where is your data from if not arrests?

FBI UCR is based on reports, not arrests.

It’s always a bit problematic to compare SF County to other counties like LA. SF City and County are the same geographical area where, Los Angles City and Los Angeles county are not. LA county includes 60+ suburbs. Santa Clara county has San Jose metro but also 14 suburbs.

Put it this way LA county is 4000 square miles, Santa Clara is 1300. San Francisco is 47. I bet if you target the most urban areas of those counties the numbers get a lot closer.

>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.

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.

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.

Why is it false? All you stated is the letter of the law, but laws aren't magic. They don't enforce themselves. If crime isn't reported, policed, and prosecuted, then it is -effectively- unpunished.

Who is getting even arrested let alone jailed for misdemeanor theft?

It's not a false narrative, though what is a false narrative is that it's directly because of prop 47, and not retailers adopting policies directed at limiting employees confronting thieves, resulting in fewer being caught. To the extent prop 47 plays a role, it's because police departments deemphasize followup enforcement on misdemeanors, though there is no legal requirement that they do so: a crime shouldn't need a disproportionate punishment for police to enforce it. And since the same police leaders choosing nonenforcement are also using the increase in crime to lobby for reincreasing punishment, there's an argument that, insofar as Prop 47 is involved, it's because police policymakers are conducting a lobbying campaign by deliberately allowing crime to occur to build support for greater punishment.

Police don't choose whether to drop charges.

The vast majority of nonviolent crimes here now have no police involvement whatsoever. They just have you file an online report for you to forward to your insurance (if any). This includes catalytic converter thefts that can cost over $2000 alone to resolve, let alone other property loss plus vehicle damage.

> Police don't choose whether to drop charges.

Police do choose whether and what resources to devote to investigation after a report. If they never identify an offender because they don't do anything with what they are given by retailers, there are no charges to drop.

> The vast majority of nonviolent crimes here now have no police involvement whatsoever.

Which is a choice by the police.

  Police do choose whether and what resources to devote to investigation

... and when the DA publishes a policy directive of non-prosecution of property crime, like in SF, police stop spending resources there. It's a catch-22.

Do you seriously think retailers had their employees confronting thieves? This isn't a recent change, they were always instructed to call the police instead of interfering. And if crime isn't being prosecuted then why would police waste limited resources on catching thieves just to see them out on the street with no consequence?

You are looking at this backwards. It's all directly because of policy changes, because that's what changed the judicial behavior, which affected upstream police behavior, which affected upstream public's behavior.

> Do you seriously think retailers had their employees confronting thieves?

Well, since I've known people who worked as loss prevention managers and who did it, and since the news article on the issue posted elsewhere in the thread specifically identified that retailers have changed policies in ways which reduce that, yes, I am reasonably think that they were doing so before and are doing so less now.

> And if crime isn't being prosecuted

To the extent that is a problem in some places (which no source I've seen indicates it is generally, though I've seen some indicating it may be in San Francisco specifically), then that too is not a requirement of the law (misdemeanors are not nonprosecutable) and the same criticism shifts within law enforcement to DAs, it's still not the law’s fault.

So why would retailers change their behavior then? Again you're looking at this backwards. The law changed, so the prosecution changed, so the arrests changed, so the police response changed, and so the retailers (and general public) changed the way they report and deal with crimes.

Why are you placing blame at everything downstream instead of what actually triggered the changes?

Can you name a single person in the Bay Area who served even one full day of jail time for a misdemeanor not involving a firearm and/or domestic violence in the past year?

Under the current "zero bail" guidelines, even felony suspects can be put back on the street the same day. Look up Idris Muhammad, who set three fires while already on probation, was quickly released, then set more fires and busted shop windows.

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.

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.

The current US homicide rate is the same as in England in the late Middle Ages. It’s been 5-10x higher than the UK the entire 20th century. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/11217607.0002.206/--deci...

Also, we have had Obamacare for a decade. We have a less complete social safety net than European countries, but people act like it doesn’t exist.

As a counterargument to the claim that Europe is less violent than the United States, especially over a historical period going back to the 18th century: Nazi Germany murdered more people in a single named process than the total number of murders in the United States for the entire 20th century.

An estimated 12 million Africans were forcibly shipped to the US (and precursors) and they and their descendents enslaved for generations.

Did you forget to count them?

I’m not minimizing the evil of the Nazi murders. Just pointing out the US started out with a fundamental violence problem of incredible scale.

There is a case to be made that war is just legalised murder, but nevertheless in these comparisons the context does not normally include war.

And would you really want to? The US is far from innocent with its use of nuclear weapons, fire-bombing Japan (Truman: "there were more people killed by fire-bombs in Tokyo than dropping the atomic bombs"), Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and so on.

Note that I'm not saying you're wrong about Nazi Germany, just that, the whilst the death tolls may be either swift or cumulative, it remains the case that all countries are guilty on the war front.

So to repeat: the context is criminality not war, where the distinction is the normally accepted delineation of the two.

I wasn't even including war!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust

> Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.

Notice the use of the word "murdered" in the second sentence of the article, as well as throughout the rest.

The context was violence, not criminality. But even if it were criminality, the Holocaust is widely considered a crime against humanity.

> I wasn't even including war!

Maybe you never intended to, but your comment reads:

> Nazi Germany murdered more people in a single named process

Reference to Nazi Germany does not, as you say, necessarily equate to war. However "a single named process" would to most readers be treated as narrowing it down to "a single named process" - World War Two.

The most obvious simple reading of your comment would give the clear impression you meant the war. If that wasn't the intention, if the named process was the wider genocide, or simply the Third Reich, then fair enough. But I'm sure you can understand any misreading.

This is putting the US into a worse spotlight than you think.

If it's possible for a mass murdering nation to become more peaceful than the US then that implies that the US completely failed at dealing with violence. Since you are starting off from a much lower base it should be much easier for your country to take care of the problem.

Edit: As other countries pointed out the US did commit war crimes as well.

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.

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.

Correction:

They day we start dealing with it is the day when your kids are addicted. Until then, it’s not our problem.

I’m not sure which drug it’s going to be. Maybe Adderral or Vyvanse being gateway into higher dose amphetamines, or something, but it’s gonna have to be a common drug amongst most of the kids before we take addiction seriously.

Even when it's people's kids they as often as not don't take their addiction seriously. With families there's a lot of enabling and co-dependence that occurs. That's in addition to the views that addition is some moral failing or idle habit.

I think issues around not taking addiction seriously or not understanding it are facets of us collectively not taking mental health seriously.

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.

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.

The risk of getting shot by is also significantly higher.

And non-quip: the police haven’t given up in Texas.

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

> 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.

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

  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.

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.

Dodd frank made it next to impossible for small investors to finance rentals or spec houses, or for builders to finance new inventory.

I'd say that benefits large investors.

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.

They’re intelligent, not bright.

What is the difference?

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.

That does not seem to be the typical definition of intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence#Definitions

Intelligence is usually defined in terms of adaptability, ability to learn, solve problems, etc.

18 Intelligence, 3 Wisdom.

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

Zendesk, twitter, and dozens more.

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

Like the other people who replied, you flunked geography. None of these companies are anywhere near the Tenderloin.

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

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.

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?

This is what happens when several orthogonal concepts are distilled into two categories. Nobody actually knows what left or right actually mean. Originally it was just about economic policy, left being larger government, right being smaller (no party was extreme because that's insane). Now right can also mean authoritarian or racist. To many it's simply left=good, right=bad.

It was never originally about economic policy, you've got them mixed up. Right was originally about support of the French King, authoritarianism, conservatism. Left was in support of the French Revolution, liberalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left%E2%80%93right_political_s...

The terms have lost all meaning in contemporary American discourse. “Socialist”, “liberal”, “leftist”, “progressive” are just used either as a pejorative or arbitrary categorical unrelated to any prior representation.

To a “progressive”, “liberal” is a pejorative. To a “liberal”, “leftists” are the enemy. To “the right”, all 4 words mean the same thing and are interchangeable in usage.

Unfortunately this is true. The two-party system is removing all nuance from arguments, forces everything into one of two boxes and it's dividing the country. The number one issue to solve is election reform. We desperately need an election system that's not extremely prone to the spoiler effect. If we don't get this, politics will only become more of a shit show or worse we might see more violence. It's encouraging to see that places like Fargo and Saint Louis have success in adopting STAR voting.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I would classify neither as conservative cities.

That's what I'm saying..

Sorry misread.

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

They said Boston _wasn’t_ conservative.

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.

Cmon - they are just too busy trying to steal more of my data

I think it’s more likely that they end up with floating apartments, likely in shipping containers, parked just outside the city’s legal limits.

If SF land is so valuable why not just build more of it?

Same reason you can’t build houses on land you already own. They won’t let you.

New construction can replace old construction. In theory.

> 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.

Building islands would be cool too. Didn’t Dubiai (sp) do that?

Let's please not wreck the San Francisco Bay with artificial islands.

You mean more artificial islands built on landfill.

> 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.

Vertically.

What did Hong Kong do?

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.

"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.

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.

"severely underbuilt for decades "

First - there is no such thing as 'under built'.

A community can house as many people as it houses - and that's that.

There can be an 'amount of new development relative to other places' - but not without a massive dose of 'housing ideology' can you say how much is over or under.

Second, the notion that 'there was less building for decades and then a lot of building, but not enough to catch up' doesn't really make sense, because even with an ideological view of 'how much is correct' there can be no such thing as 'pent up unfulfilled demand from previous building'. There are not a bunch of people living in Calgary or Seattle 'waiting' for the opportunity if only affordability was there.

Plenty of places in the world are 'more expensive' than neighbouring regions and yet don't 'build out quickly'.

Lastly, and most importantly, Vancouver has built up quite dramatically over the last two decades, and even as it has done this, affordability has plummeted.

The problem with 'NIMBYism and Housing' is the degree to which that position is ideological and that people don't recognize it as such.

There is no such thing as 'over/under' building for any specific community, there is only such a thing relative to net demand in nation for example that is either growing or shrinking for natural reasons or migration.

> First - there is no such thing as 'under built'.

Yes, there is. In a regime of rapidly increasing life expectancy, there is a demographic certainty of future housing needs.

??? Life expectancy, birth rates, net migration are the factors of an overall nation, not not of any city.

Nobody has been able to put forth a single reasonable argument for why SF must tear down their homes and put up apartment buildings other that 'because it should'.

And FYI there is no housing shortage in the US overall, there never has been, housing has expanded commensurate with population.

Not only that - housing is relatively cheap in the US.

Of course there is a lot of demand to live in SF vis-a-vis Sacramento, there always will be, but otherwise, there isn't any reason to build a single home unless the residents want that.

I guess we’re just going to disagree there. In my view it is completely immoral to give birth to people but not build them a place to live. It is as immoral as suggesting that people should leave their city upon retirement, and for the same reason.

"It is completely immoral to give birth to people but not build them a place to live."

If you mean to say 'people have a moral right to live in the city they were born in' - fair enough - but this notion falls apart instantly unless you want to somehow give 'born and raised SF' kids some kind of literal non-market advantage.

If you live in an 'expensive place' then your kids can live there, as long as they are wealthy enough, that's the cost of living in a wealthy place and there's no way around it.

By 'building more to facilitate affordability' - well that certainly would enable more people to live there, but the demand will come from all over not just 'the kids of'.

SF is a small city and it's expensive, if parents want their kids to live there they can literally give them their homes. Otherwise, their kids can get good jobs or live in Santa Rosa.

There is plenty of space in North Cal.

Finally, SF residents can make up their own minds about how they want to do it. More building, less building, it's entirely up to them and nobody else's business.

My question is did they build houses or apartments?

Because building houses generally does nothing for prices. Zoning for managed apartments is the best way to increase the housing supply.

The build massive numbers of apartment buildings that totally changed the nature of the city. And it's still unaffordable.

>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.

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

This makes no sense.

? People who live in SF (or any community) are already housed in SF. 'Everyone' already has a place to live.

Unless by 'everyone' you mean 'everyone who wants to live there', which is absurd, because if cost were not part of the equation probably 50x the number of people in SF would not mind being there.

That's why we have suppl and demand.

"why would we tell people that they shouldn't come here? "

This is really baffling. You do realize that if SF when from 600K people to 5M people (vertical, like HK or Vancouver) that it would be a completely different kind of city, and wouldn't resemble the current SF in any way?

Nobody has a right to live anywhere.

Every community has a right to influence the future of their own community.

If SF residents want to 'go vertical' that's fine, if they don't that's fine as well.

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

'Hearsay' (i.e. some random people said some stuff about an issue) does not help your argument.

The facts are 1) Vancouver built out massively. You can see the city skyline has been totally transformed and 2) it's still completely unnafordable.

Why is it unnafordable? Because of demand from foreign places and ultra low interest rates. Local salaries are not enough to supply that kind of demand. A lot of people moving in from foreign places (or just buying). For a variety of reasons.

As a 'global safe zone' the demand is massive, far more so than the locals can endure.

In this specific case, the problem is not 'build more' - the problem is 'don't allow foreign ownership', 'get interest rates under control' and 'reduce migration to normal levels' (Canada always has higher than normal migration, that's fine, but the amounts set lately are massive and most migrants prefer cities, putting additional pressures).

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.

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).

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Stepping over needles is considered an acceptable tradeoff in SF. That's where the differences lie.

Right, but isn't that exactly the irony, or at least the hypocrisy? That people with the most liberal sensitivities seem willing to accept this level of visible human suffering for whatever personal benefits they get from living there?

People will stereotype Texans as rugged individualists ready to shoot you for stealing from a fruit stand, or Chinese as some heartless mass that will run you over and go about their day. But I don't see any cities in those places with such visible social problems.

Those drinking the SF Kool-Aid will tell you it's because of the weather being a magnet for homeless people, or some other such nonsense. As if nowhere else in the world keeps temps above freezing year round.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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....

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.

>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. :)

> 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.

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 point is why “deregulated” energy systems don’t actually leave those choices completely up to the market. Regional Transmission Organizations, like ERCOT, are quasi regulatory entities that are supposed to ensure grid reliability. These entities actually engage in all sorts of central planning, and then conduct various types of auctions with precise parameters to set prices. The “deregulation” part is mainly about shifting from government regulators setting prices to having artificially constructed markets setting prices. It’s nothing like the free-for-all people are imagining.

ERCOT is a bit different in that it doesn’t use what’s called a forward capacity auction. All RTOs in the country have markets where users pay generators for instantaneous electrical production. RTOs other than ERCOT, however, also have what’s called a forward capacity market. The RTO projects how much peak power will be required three years from now, and conducts auctions to provide the required capacity at the lowest price. Then there are various mechanisms attached to that which ensure that a generator that commits to providing a certain amount of capacity actually does so when the RTO calls it in. ERCOT instead maintains a fixed reserve margin—it tries to ensure that capacity is about 13.5% higher than peak projected demand. That’s different, but it’s still not a free-for-all.

Amusingly, many people called the lack of a capacity market a positive thing. In practice it tends to prop up coal plants, because those can reliably commit to providing a particular generation capacity years in advance, unlike renewables: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/flexibility-wit....

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.

I drew an equivalence to highlight that the problems related to the record 100 year cold weather crossed regulatory boundaries, which was the topic of discussion.

In Louisiana 2 million people lost power (42% of the state population), 800k had to boil water (17%), and 5 people died (1 of every 940k).

In Texas 4.5 million people lost power (17% of the state population), 12 million had water problems (43%), and 40 deaths as of a few days ago (1 of every 685k).

I don't think my comparing the two states to prove a point was out of bounds. The numbers show significant impact in both of them. I know Oklahama got it pretty bad, and Mexico was impacted. Cold weather kills. Water pipes were going to freeze regardless of electricity. People don't go to shelters when they should. I know the numbers are not the complete picture, but back to the original point: This was a 100 year cold spell, not a free market failure.

I'm not sure of your angle, I might be misunderstanding your comment. I didn't mean to trash Louisiana. It's understandable that this record cold would cause problems. I don't think it's fair to single Texas out, and the numbers above support that.

The power producers that did winterize couldn't run their plants for lack of gas due to wellheads and pipelines freezing [0] (Texas Railroad Commission jurisdiction) and an emergency order directing gas away from power plants (TRC again) [1]

[0] https://www.texasmonthly.com/news/blackout-crisis-texans-ele... [1] https://www.ft.com/content/12640ebb-5c20-4d00-aec0-9c8810541...

Gotcha. Thanks for the links!

I'm just finished reading about the people in Texas who got $10k bills. I'm wondering if these people, residential customers, knew the rate limits were increased for those 32 hours? It's not fair if they don't have a mechanism to monitor or limit the rate they're willing to pay. I wouldn't call that a complete failure of their system, but it needs to be made right. A 10k surprise bill sucks. They pushed the risk to these people, and the regulators there knew it. I don't know where the money is going. I'd try to negotiate it down. I also think it should be easier to declare bankruptcy. People are more important than companies. I'm hoping they get bailed out at some point, they are as deserving as anyone else. I'd be outraged if people don't get the tools to monitor and limit their usage rates.

This writeup on the 1989 cold spell might also be of interest:

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/A-t...

Interesting. This thread has refined my opinion.

I still wouldn't characterize this as a "free market failure", implying there is no room for competition, or everything needs to be the same as the rest of the country.

I paid a lot of attention to the following from the grandparent's linked texasmonthly.com article: "You essentially pay up front for peace of mind. But because neither regulators nor state lawmakers ordered anybody to pay, nothing was done." (regarding winterizing, costs to keep the grid robust, etc)

I assume that the regulators and the politicians weren't smart enough to do their part. Free markets can be great, can be better than too much regulation, but need to be tempered by the people's interests. The politicians involved failed big time. Didn't they think past their next reelection? Hopefully they make adjustments, both in their current regulations, and in the processes around reviewing and maintaining those regulations. I'm disgusted at the oversights that led to this. They had regulators who were responsible for this stuff! I'm curious how this will play out.

On a related note, it's not a free market if the customers don't know when the price increases a hundred fold or more.

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.

The republican party is only staying afloat via voter suppression, radicalization, and gerrymandering. That said they're doing a pretty good job of it. They're trying to double down on it in the South as well, plus take away even more women's rights to do what they want with their body. It's still anyone's ballgame but the left is slowly winning by sheer numbers and demographics. The R wall can't hold forever but they don't seem to be willing to change.

> 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.

The "just replace them" requires rewriting/amending the state constitution again.

As long as property values are going up across the state, as a whole (of which SF is only a part of), voters tend to have a disincentive to do so.

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