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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

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...

View on HN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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.

Did I say arrests?

Where is your data from if not arrests?

FBI UCR is based on reports, not arrests.

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>

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

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.

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.

>who convicted of felony murder for killing two policemen

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

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

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

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

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

Making crime easier to commit doesn't reduce crime.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

Doesn’t matter if they don’t enforce

Not intentionally. I corrected the post before you posted.

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

Texas Penal Code § 31.03

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

(4) a state jail felony if:

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exactly.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Why not both?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

How big is this company

over 100B

Might as well name and shame them then...

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.”

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

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

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

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

The risk of getting shot by is also significantly higher.

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

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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