We Must Save San Francisco

The article demonstrates a grand rhetoric and a total lack of capacity to actually dig into any nuts and bolts issue with the city, such as: land use, parking, public safety and justice policies, schools, bureaucratic corruption.

The fact of the matter is, the city politics have been vicious for decades. Credentials for national leadership get manufactured here because the politicians left standing are good at the job(which is quite different from being good for the populace). Tech doesn't make the city exceptional - tech is just a piece of the puzzle, another horse to jockey.

Take the school board, for example. The stories have made headlines: ineptly renaming schools and eliminating selectivity for "woke points" while pandemic-related issues remained unaddressed. Those headlines get made because the board was banking on those actions giving them progressive credentials, not because it was being asked for. They took a huge risk and miscalculated. But what happens if you manuever such things successfully? That makes you a Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom - in other words, polarizing yet successful on the big stage.

In this light, SF has an up-or-out purpose to its dysfunction: encourage risky moves here and you get savvy statesmen later. It's in the interest of the Democratic Party to keep a machine active here to develop those candidates. However, the party itself is beholden to its biggest donors, so the things it prioritizes and encourages are warped according to financial incentives; the city government now has an ongoing federal investigation precisely because the incentives for politicians to behave and play fair are missing.

And so I would have to conclude that if you want to "save" San Francisco you have think big picture too and work on incentives for the city to generate better policymakers that can clean house. The money incentives automatically create a lean towards dysfunction, and this is a thing occurring on multiple levels of government, not just locally: "If you want to advance you have to do X and not do Y" is going to make X happen and Y not happen.

Portland, Oregon is having a lot of problems too.

https://www.koin.com/is-portland-over/from-wonderful-to-war-...

As someone who goes through Portland only occasionally it is pretty sad seeing the immense amount of trash visible while driving along.

SF and its politics did this to itself so no, we don't need to do anything.

They definitely raise a very provocative point

> Responding to it by mobilizing a machine to fix one of the few remaining hubs of U.S. productivity is one of the highest impact problems we could take on. > As tech is one of America’s few remaining sectors of real productivity, breaking up this collective and scattering it across the country will be a great loss.

What cost does come and make ripple effects when a place like San Francisco tanks and crumbles? I never contemplated that before.

The author is bringing up pretty bluntly honest stuff too in the section Before interacting with a city in meaningful ways, its inhabitants need their basic safety needs covered., basically quality of life issues, which makes one think of broken windows policing type of discussions.

The article says the private market cannot fix the city. I disagree. As citizens leave and property values collapse, voters will become engaged. One side effect of becoming one of the richest cities on earth is that there has been no pressure to reform government whatsoever - all of its bad habits just scaled up as taxes increased. Politicians and those to which they hand out jobs have enriched themselves beyond any municipal bureaucracy perhaps in history.

If things actually turn, I believe the residents will vote in people that actually solve things, as finally their own wealth will be impacted.

The main group that will suffer here will likely be property owners. From what I understand they tend to be the ones that worked against construction of dense housing and public transit which would have solved a lot of these problems.

Hopefully the rest of the country will take note and avoid these mistakes.