Why San Francisco’s city government is so dysfunctional

> If SF politics is really controlled by a wealthy cabal then why have they allowed the situation to deteriorate so much?

Because they can't influence supervisor elections or school board elections as well as they can elections for mayor. The reason why San Francisco mayors are always re-elected is because they're very middle of the road in terms of politics and risk tolerance. Activist policies are usually the product of the Board of Supervisors, the school board, the district attorney, or public initiative, all of which are completely independent of the mayor's office. Sometimes the mayor's office will try to head off policies by offering watered-downed versions as an alternative. This doesn't always work, but it does contribute to the sense that they share some of the more radical policy preferences.

If you don't believe that the mayor's office has been significantly more conservative than the other political centers of San Francisco, just look at the police department. However dysfunctional you think the police department, it's not because the mayor's office has ever appointed a far left, defund-the-police police chief that seemingly every liberal has been demanding for decades. Police chiefs are appointed by the mayor the same way the monied elite choose a mayor--someone who is middle of the road, will keep their head down, and keep things moving along as best they can amidst the fracas. And as you would expect, their performance always falls short because their job isn't to succeed, but to avoid failure.

In general the mayor's office is expected by the old money elite (and increasingly some of the new money elite, like Benioff) to be the caretaker of a city with often times very extreme and contradictory policy demands. They're expected to avoid controversy, blunt the extremists, negotiate (quietly!) among various interests (e.g. unions), and pick up the pieces when things fail.

> The wealthy people who control NYC politics seem less tolerant of such issues.

Maybe. But I tend to think that a more important factor is that NYC still has a larger working class. The upper middle class, which increasingly dominates San Francisco politically, is disconnected from the city. Their politics come from social media and national narratives. They're more focused on avoiding feeling guilty about drug addicts and the homeless than on actual results. That's why the policies keep getting pushed further and further left (far beyond what was ever demanded 10 years earlier) despite the lack of results.

The thing about the rich elite, especially old money, is that in many ways they're far more grounded than the middle classes, especially modern middle classes. If you own buildings or businesses, local politics matters immensely to you. No matter how conservative or liberal you are, what matters above all else is consistency and avoiding surprises. Consistency and security is critical because you're immobile. The same is true for the working classes. No matter how pissed you are at economic inequality, the last thing you need is the ground constantly shifting underneath your feet. Similar to old money, consistency and security is critical because you're immobile.

San Francisco has too few of the latter kinds of people. At the end of an election cycle, its votes that matter, not dollars. The result is that moderates, which are still quite powerful, are always playing defense rather than offense.

There’s more than one wealthy cabal. There’s the ultra rich power brokers like the Aliotos, Getty’s and then there’s the moderately wealthy people at the top of the government itself. Especially anyone associated with Willie Brown.

Government jobs are extremely lucrative, many pay six figures and opportunities to supplement with graft are plentiful. It’s a powerful club to be in and you’re potentially set for life. My spouse is a lifelong resident and remembers rushing to city hall with other hopefuls every time the city opened up applications.

The FBI is still working it’s way through the public works department with noted criminals like Mohammed Nuru and RoDBIgo Santos. I don’t really know what the Getty’s get out of playing kingmaker, but it’s pretty obvious what Willie Brown et all get out of neglecting the city and funneling money as they see fit.

I think your imagery paints an image of a much more organized group than exists.

There are probably at least two dozen families, each of which has a few powerful members. Getting them all to agree on anything besides their own self-interest of maintaining their own wealth and power is quite hard.

But the city government has delivered very well on that one shared interest of theirs. They own a lot of property and property values are way up over the past few decades.

Why assume that the ultra wealthy should care about the lesser citizens? What about all the rampant looting in NYC? I don't think they cared then.

Maybe many of them just aren't pro American. In almost every other country the media/politics carefully try to project some national pride and sense of unity; it's actually the opposite here in the US isn't it?

Simple: NIMBY. There are places they can live where they don't have to dip their toes into the literal shit. And they keep the "riff-raff" out with harsh NIMBY-ism.

You have Pacific Heights, Presidio/Richmond (especially where Feinsteins, Pelosis, Cockers, Dorseys, etc. live) as well as Marin and Hillsborough, et al.

They can let it happen because they can create their own little bubble world and never interact with "the deplorables".

I grew up in the Bay Area and went to "good schools" with these peoples' children so I've seen them up-close-and-personal. They are not nice people.

New Yorkers in my experience are far more practical and "based" compared to Western large blue cities.

SF has extremely high land values and the value of the land isn't going down. If you bought land 50 years ago you became rich off the work of other people.

Property taxes have been frozen which basically just throws more money into their throats.

Well, I think there are some good reasons for that. It's traditionally been an antisemetic trope, and often smoothly blends into antisemitism (Rothschilds, etc). It's also one of those things where the evidence is by necessity weak, and you really can't write weakly-evidenced critical articles about rich people without getting sued.

Personally, I'm very glad that this isn't a mainstream way of understanding problems. Rich people are kind of fungible, in that they usually don't want to pay taxes, but other than that usually have about the same range of politics as everybody else. Focusing on individual malfeasance tends to protect dysfunctional systems.

Especially not the Economist.

I mean they spend paragraphs bashing the 'leftie' DA before admitting the problem is actually the police being rubbish.

I knew they were biased, but the article seems especially bad.

This has to do with collusion between the ultra wealthy class, the media class, and the political class.

Upsetting super wealthy people too much will get you the gawker treatment, or something similarly debilitating.

Elected officials are a lot like C-suite: they run the company, but they don't own it. Owners sit on the board and rarely seek publicity.

Being a member of one of those families is no guarantee that you will be supported in search for office by the wider group or even your own family.

My impression is the prevailing opinion within the families should not be attempting to hold office directly and that Angela's bid was not widely supported even by many of her relatives, let alone the wider group we're discussing.

Do they try to get elected? why would you need to get elected when you can control any candidate, or control things regardless of who is in power???

I think you are confused about what upper class (old money) is. They don't work. They do charity and art. Politicians work for them.

I’m sorry you’re getting downvoted but as someone who has subscribed to The Economist for 20+ years now, I feel the same way as you do.

In areas that are on the periphery, their coverage feels shallow and unsatisfying. I would imagine that the writers, who are some of the best in business, are doing their research but trying to make the content accessible. I can’t fault them for that. However, in this day and age, I would expect them to offer more depth.

You’re not wrong but you also miss the point. I subscribe to both the Economist, a newspaper that covers a range of topics and Stratechery, a newsletter that specialises in tech.

On any tech topic Stratechery dives in deep, analysing the incentives, actions and outcomes of each player. Every quarterly report from the big tech companies is analysed. The author also has the courage to make predictions, many of which turn out to be true. It’s worth the money in my book.

The Economist also covers tech topics but at a high level, and for an audience that isn’t tech inclined. Take for example, this gem of an article - Why Companies Struggle With Recalcitrant IT (https://www.economist.com/business/2020/07/18/why-companies-...). For a layman it’s a great intro on software is always delayed and over budget. For those of us who work in IT, it’s all obvious stuff.

A person familiar with IT might say “go deeper, talk about other issues”. In fact, I did just that. I contacted the author and pointed out a couple of difficulties in software that increase complexity, like dependency management. The author was aware of this already but chose not to add this for the sake of keeping the article a manageable length [1].

That’s what the Economist does - covers a wide range of topics, while not assuming the reader is knowledgeable about any of it. Even though finance focussed newspaper, they painstakingly explain every term before they use it. But these two constraints - covering breadth and not assuming knowledge mean there is a limit to how deep they can go on any topic.

If you find a newspaper that analyses every topic in the world to your desired level of detail, please let us know. Also, if the newspaper isn’t staffed by aspiring fiction writers gratifying themselves by writing impossibly large “long reads”, that would be even better.

——

[1] - their response to my letter :

Dear nindalf,

Thank you for your letter. You're right, of course - I've always thought it's a bit like an ancient city like Istanbul, with modern buildings sitting on top of layers of old architecture that's only half-mapped and whose builders are long forgotten. Unfortunately there wasn't space to get too evocative in the piece itself.

I've forwarded your letter for publication, though, because it's an important point.

Best,

Tim Cross

Technology Editor

The Economist

Possibly, but I don't think its required.

The Irvine Company is very similar in Southern California. It seems like they own everything when you want office real estate.

So, it's corruption, right?

Well, except that if you talk to any contractors (like your internet provider installer) you find that they love The Irvine Company because there is someone who has a little bit of competence for them to talk to when they need to. As opposed to every other real estate company that seems to be staffed by brain-damaged monkeys.

So, you can posit corruption. Or, you can posit that real estate management is one of those markets that tends toward monopoly because you can amortize the costs more effectively the more properties you own.

It is kind of ironic, isn't it? These days Tucker Carlson talks about pardoning Assange, the deep state and that house prices in SF are too high for the middle class. Literally Noam Chomsky could be saying the same things.

But people still believe that Republicans will take away your freedoms and Democrats will solve everything (I don't believe either will solve much).

I read the article last night. I lived there from '98-'01, during a somewhat different cultural moment, in the Willie Brown era. It was if anything more corrupt and dysfunctional. The music writer Bill Wyman wrote a good article on this back in 1999, which probably still holds up:

https://www.salon.com/1999/11/03/sf/

I don't think there's that much ideology to it. The place is corrupt and dysfunctional because it's conditioned itself to be corrupt and dysfunctional. Brownback's Kansas government had similar problems; same in Ohio.

Well, it could be true, but not necessarily in a right wing vs left wing sense. People with stupid amounts of money playing stupid political games, propping up people who have no business being in political leadership but are funded to be “our person in office” with some specific agenda but no real attention to the actual roles (buying authority but not desiring or able to actually manage). I don’t know, sounds a lot like USA in the Middle East.

The word you're looking for is progressivism, not liberalism. American liberalism is just progressivism wearing liberalism as a skinsuit.

Low because they don't arrest anyone. But that isn't on the police - they don't arrest anyone because the DA doesn't prosecute anyone.

Property crime is sky high... if you happen to get caught breaking into a car the penalty is a warning. That is the policy. You have to break into many cars and be caught (which is hard to do) many times for any action.

Boudin has indefensibly ignored violent criminals, too. Like a woman being assaulted while trying to open the door to here condo, fully on video and there was no prosecution. Even a few cases of murder from repeat offenders who were let go repeatedly after violent assault.

If you live in SF, try the Citizen phone app for alerts near you. There is some crazy stuff happening all around the city. Lately, cars keep inexplicably flipping over on city streets.

The craziest update I've seen was an alert about man dressed like a clown wielding a sword-cane.

I think that's irrelevant to the point which is that in electing a candidate campaigning on criminal justice reform SFs voters are reacting more to national issues than local ones. SFs criminal justice system is already quite "reformed" and probably the issues that people are seeing aren't primarily in SF

They may also be low because there are no state prisons in SF county, so people with longer terms may be counted in the jurisdiction where they're being held.

If you look at the property crime rates, it’s certainly not because people behave.

SF has very high property crime, but fairly low violent crime. Most of the America’s incarceration rate is driven by a small number of prisoners serving long sentences. Usually for violent crime or drug trafficking.

An amazing statistics is that if the the US released every prisoner except the murderors and rapsists, we’d still have a higher incarceration rate than the EU.

A city full of bike thieves, shoplifters, and public defecators isn’t going to have a high incarceration. Even if the police are vigorous about arrests, those people just don’t spend very long in jail.

Obviously the latter. Have you read the rest of the article?

"Before covid-19 San Francisco was the car-break-in capital of America; but with fewer tourists, criminals have shifted their attention. Home burglaries are up. Shootings have more than doubled in the past year. Viral videos show daytime heists, with perpetrators sauntering out of stores without consequence. Lax enforcement of drug laws can become fatal when even small amounts can kill."

SF's incarceration rates are consistent with its demographics.

For better or for worse, homelessness in America can largely be attributed to Regan-era changes in policy [1] that prevented people from being committed against their will to psychiatric hospitals. It was done in the name of human rights, but naturally there were ulterior motives.

It's time we reverted it.

About 10% of humans have been addicts across most cultures throughout most of recorded human history, and they desperately need help (even if they claim don't want it).

There should obviously be a ton of safeguards in place before committing someone against their will (e.g. 1 or 2 doctors should declare that the patient is unable to care for themselves and make rational decisions, assessment at regular intervals, ensuring the patient has the right to get a new doctor, etc.), but I don't think we'll be able to solve homelessness without it, because this is what we used to do differently prior to the homelessness epidemic, and this is what other nations have been doing.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanterman%E2%80%93Petris%E2%...

> you force them to get the psychiatric help that they need

The problem is that there’s a long history of people labelling all sorts of things they don’t like as being a mental illness and using that as an excuse to use treatment as violence against them. We called homosexuality a mental illness until very recently and forced people to have violent treatment for it, for example.

100% this -- is this really an unpopular opinion?

How about hygiene? Where do you think they relieve themselves? How many times a day do you think they'll need to use a toilet and how many times do they find one? Hint: they don't really care. Source: experience living in SF.

Both from reading/researching and talking with people who work directly with the homeless locally, this seems to be the crux.

The really sad thing is just building the housing would be cheaper than what we're doing currently. But as soon as the city proposes it the NIMBYs come out like a hurricane refusing to allow it.

Salt Lake City is an instructive example. They've made a huge impact on homelessness there with a housing centric strategy.

I'm mostly in agreement with that, as I follow a "live and let live" philosophy. Where I part ways with that binary choice is when the person is actively a menace to themselves or others; their behavior has a 'high' cost to society. I can't get on board with respecting someone's right to self-determination when they repeatedly and regularly damage property, attack people, or are otherwise damaging to the fabric of society. In this case I believe the person has lost some of their right to self-determination.

What to do about it? I don't really know; software development is my gig so this is far outside my expertise. But from what I observe, prison as it currently is implemented doesn't work, and doing nothing isn't working either.

Given the right environment and help, I'd hope that some (many? most?) can transform themselves and become healthy or at least functional in society. Some options that seem to help: a 12-step program, CBT and other therapy, drugs, low-dose hallucinogens (LSD, mushrooms, etc.).

And then when they defecate on your doorstep and urinate on your porch, what do you do? Offer them treatment, they refuse, so you "respect their rights" and move on? Wash, rinse, repeat?

It is strange that people have absolutely no problem banning camping in national parks but think it is a human right to do it in urban areas. Cities, in order to survive, need to enforce standards of behavior, and those who flaunt those standards need to be coerced into following them if there is to be a large number of people living in a small urban area.

How does someone have the right to take public property as their own? Maybe if the areas were designated but we are talking about people who eschew shelter.

Does taking a dump in front of your building count? Because I have many experience of that, including a couple where they entered my building and took a big dump in the lobby.

How do they do that and get their homeless number to zero?

I don't consider it humane to let someone live on the streets begging until they happen to die of a drug overdose.

I don't care about their wishes, guided by drug addiction and mental health issues. To allow and enable this much squandering of human potential is a moral crime.

Get people clean of drugs, healthy, stable, and educated. By force, if needed. If from that baseline he decides to go back into a life of drugs and onto the streets, then so be it. But don't allow people to commit themselves to a slow death until they've been forced to step onto a better path and see what their life _could_ be.

You want a cop to physically detain a homeless person which will just result in sending him through a pointlessly cruel and expensive criminal justice system where he'll pop-out the other side with nothing but unpayable debts that'll drive him through the same cycle again - all because he urinated on a car of someone who won't even realize it happened?

Underrated observation. S.F. has always had a scraggly personality since the Gold Rush days. It's where Dirty Harry and tons of '70s police procedurals were set in, after all. The issue is that despite tech wealth since the late 2000s, none of it has seemed to better the city and in some ways has increased wealth inequality.

Manhattan's answer is because of Giuliani's authoritarian mayoral reign. Cleanliness came at a cost of mass arrests and evictions of the homelessness, restrictions on shelters, and stop-and-frisk. Probably not a price that S.F. is willing to pay.

San Francisco's geography is extremely heterogeneous (especially considering the size of the city). All of these are simultaneously true:

- yes, there's human feces and needles and tent cities in the Tenderloin/SOMA area

- Painted Ladies is an old-ass building, as is much of the residential sprawl around it

- Fishermans Wharf is a textbook tourist trap

- there's a ton of nice forest-y areas (Presidio, Glen Canyon, Stern Grove, etc)

- Sea cliff area is textbook rich person neighbourhood

- Financial district actually looks like a modern metropolis

Picking one facet and ignoring the rest is... cherrypicky.

Sure, there are a couple of attractive areas, but a lot of it is just ugly sprawl. I love driving in to the city and looking over rows of boxes smashed together in rows. It looks a lot like Tijuana. So much of the city is treeless and just poorly maintained old buildings from what looks like the 50s and 60s. Sure, lots of old victorians and some of them are even taken care of. The parks are pretty. Overall though, I don't get the appeal. SF is perpetually cold and dreary. I know some people like that, but it's definitely not my cup of tea. Throw in the high cost of living, the crime, homelessness, the sidewalk poop(stepped over some last time I was there)... But hey, it's expensive, so someone must like living there, right?

> There's human feces everywhere outside the tourist/financial districts,

This is not accurate. The Sunset, Richmond, Parkside, Presidio, Marina, and many other parts of the city are very clean (or at least not notably dirty for a city). Perhaps the Marina/Presidio could be called tourist areas but the Sunset and Richmond certainly are not.

Probably smells better.

You clearly have no idea what you are talking about.

San Francisco was brilliant before tech, and will be shining in the next boom. Some things are bigger than now, and maybe bigger than we can fully understand.

Here’s some enjoyable reading for those with a few minutes to spare: http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist1/early.html

To me the confluence of cultures, like the brackish waters of the bay, are it’s hallmark. The issues around sudden wealth, excess, limited housing, and visionary governance seem to be more about the place than a particular moment.

Let me explain. The authorities there made it ok for people to do that. Police will not arrest you. You can use the streets as your bathroom. They even announced it on the local news (around 2014-2015). Either they are too stupid to realize people would take advantage of that, or they are malevolent and wanted to destroy SF for whatever political reason.

> Just because people vote for it, it doesn’t mean it is what people want.

This is really key, and should be a bigger topic of discussion in mainstream political philosophy. Governments that purport to be democracies ought to be responsible for aligning policies and outcomes with the preferences of the electorate. It's far too common for people to dismiss literally any problem in an ostensibly democratic jurisdiction as "well that's what the people voted for," as if the only end goal of a government is to pass some bare minimum threshold of being considered a "democracy" and the rest of the responsibility is on the electorate.

> And to make it worse, each member is voted on a first past the post system

That's not actually true, we use RCV to elect supervisors (and the mayor).

Not sure why this got down voted, I was just asking a question. Thanks HN. Seriously though thanks for the responses, I was legit curious what people thought. I'm gonna go watch last black man in san francisco again.

What is a "diversity problem"?

What do you mean by a "serious diversity problem"? Not white enough, or what?

San Francisco (and much of California) has effectively a one party system. This means that often the real elections are primaries or along party lines. Chesa Boudin and Gavin Newsom are both in the same political party, but their political views are vastly different.

in this social respect though, one party actively promotes 'diverse' lifestyles while the other just accepts them. I don't think SF would have come to be under the latter, nor could the latter exist in SF

You don't actually live in SF or you would know that there's not actually literal piles of shit everywhere.

Forget both of those old works. Looper came out in 2012 and oddly has a pronounced depiction of homelessness and poverty in America. And none of it seems exaggerated today. Though it was made after the Great Recession, so maybe Rian Johnson was just merely projecting then-current trends.

Oh, we've got ecological collapse too, so the eating people thing seems plausible enough for me.

SF is great once you convince yourself that crime, lawlessness and misery are "values" rather than the result of poor governance. When I lived in SF, it was fun watching who could admit the government wasn't great, and who did extreme mental gymnastics to avoid unpleasant reality.

I'm an Asian American. I have absolutely zero confidence that racist attacks against Asians are going to get better any time soon against people like me especially when a DA like Chesa Boudin refuses to take any single form of accountability in regards to crime.

I'll happily take a smaller paycheck if that means I don't have to constantly watch my back.

> My way to deal with car crime is not owning a car, with the extra income I can afford to mostly use ridesharing for most of my needs and rent a car for the rest of them.

That is mind boggling to Americans outside of SF though. That’s the equivalent of telling people not to “dress slutty” if they don’t want to be raped.

I think there's a certain kind of voice that's common on here who moved into SF. Got an apartment in one of the new apartments downtown and then experienced a concentrated blast of poverty which isn't representative of the majority of SF. It doesn't help that most new construction in SF has been in these parts of the city either. My point isn't that SF doesn't have huge problems, but that if you live in these parts of the city you'll be seeing a lot more of it on a daily basis than is maybe entirely realistic

Well, there is lots of working being put in by a lot of people to fix parts of it. For example CA is in the process of passing a law to upzone large swaths of single family housing. The YIMBY movement is gaining steam. I think one fo the saddest things in politics at least in the west is this sort of defeatism where large swaths of the electorate think that things are unfixable. I think especially as technologists we should recognize that real problems exist, but also that fundamentally they are all fixable and we should try to fix them.

I've lived in Toronto, SF and Sao Paulo. In 18 years living in Sao Paulo, I've witnessed one gun-related incident and was victim of robbery once (I lived near Heliopolis, one of the largest slums in the city). In 18 years living in Toronto, I was involved in zero. In my first 2 years in SF, I was harassed twice and witnessed retail theft 2 times.

SF is "not bad" in the sense that you won't get shot in the face. It is however quite bad in the sense that the amount of petty crime is so off the charts that you can't even compile accurate statistics because security personnel at retail stores don't even bother reporting it anymore.

A few months ago, I witnessed another theft in inner Richmond (one of the nicer neighbourhoods), the security guy did a half-ass attempt at running after the guy but gave up and came towards the customer support desk I was at. I asked if that was common, and the security guy literally just shrugs.

I've lived in San Francisco for 16 years. Yes, I have experienced the homeless problem. I had my car broken into once when I left my backpack inside. I have never been mugged or robbed or had any physical violence occur, or be threatened. We have many lovely friends who live here. San Francisco is under a lot of pressure: population, finance, environmental. It is not a dystopia. It is a community where people build their lives and deserves love and support. I have spent significant amounts of time in New York, Paris and other world cities. I do not find San Francisco to be all that different from New York or Paris.

The homeless and those issues pretty much only exist in the tourist areas near downtown, the tenderloin, soma, etc. The tourists come and see all of that and get the idea SF is some horrible dystopia, but unless you live in those areas, it's not a problem. I lived in Noe Valley for 3 years and never ran into a single problem from your list. SF is so much more than downtown.

As the article notes, cities usually only will do so if you both want to leave and have someone willing to take you in on the far end.

If they just wanted to get rid of people they wouldn't worry about any of that.

California is a net exporter of poor people. Yet it still manages to have more than 25 percent of the nation's homeless population while only holding 12 percent of the nation's overall population.

Link to this report?

I would love to see data as well, but I don't consider self-reported origins to be all that convincing. If I were homeless and moved to a city where it's "easier" to be homeless, I would probably claim that I was previously housed there if asked.

It's crucial to dig into the criteria for what studies consider living in the state at the time of becoming homeless. Plenty of studies consider prison to be "housing" so someone who was homeless before moving to California, then commits a crime and spends a month behind bars, and is homeless after release becomes categorized as living in California when they become homeless.

You're linking an article lacking in data.

What would be some of those issues for you?

Woodside and Atherton are closer to 30 miles to the south. I should know. I live 20 miles to the south.

Yes yes, too many poor people. That's definitely the problem /s

> There are homeless in several parts of the city, yes, but those parts are easy to avoid if that's your inclination.

You’re joking right? If by easy to avoid you mean do not go outside. A friend lives in a very nice neighborhood in a beautiful home in SF. A block away while walking to my car there was a half naked man rambling to himself in the bushes. It is ubiquitous unless you mentally block it out.

yep.

I moved to the SF Bay area from NYC 4 years ago and I routinely tell my friends that you need to watch out for human, not animal, feces on the street.

It's really sad to see people who are employed that are still homeless and have to deal with mental issues :(

No, it’s actually crazier in a sense. The contrast between the populations, the “virtual fences” created across main streets where you have chaos in one side and first rate everything on the other, seeing all the crazy on the backdrop of Twitter and Uber buildings and ultimately recognizing the futility of a place so rich destroying itself like a misdirected, spoiled trust fund brat. It’s the city that had everything going for it other than a common sense. I love SF but get it the fuck together.

The article touches on why that won’t happen though. Voter demographics won’t allow that. It’s either radical and young liberals which would go for every insane policy or the old and entrenched.

Or any other place with an extreme wealth gradient.

The housing crisis is perpetuated by a lack of coherent planning. It's also why transit is suboptimal. It definitely doesn't help that it isn't one big city, it's actively detrimental.

That assumes SF city politics would take over the suburbs.

The city of Indianapolis years ago merged itself with its surrounding county, to unify city and suburbs. This was instigated by the Republican suburban leadership so that the metro region would remain under Republican control. Indianapolis has been a more politically moderate city than peers as a result.

No, I'm saying that NYC is a very large city (speaking geographically, by population, or by politics). It has the super-liberal UWS and Greenwich/East Village, but also the UES, Staten Island, eastern Queens, Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, old-line Italians in Arthur Avenue, Howard Beach, and a lot of ordinary middle-class areas. All those areas balance out the nutty leftism of other parts of the city.

San Francisco doesn't have anything like that. As the article discusses, the middle class has been fleeing San Francisco for decades. it's never going to elect a Bloomberg, let alone a Giuliani.

No city on the Peninsula in their right mind would want to merge with SF. SF has close to 10x the crime, worse schools, etc... What is there to gain?

At this level of evidence, every problem in a nominally democratic society could be explained by “voters” in the abstract. Would you blame local discretion over land use, Prop 13, or CEQA - semi-permanent features of the Californian democratic system - on today’s San Francisco voters? How about the lack of national healthcare system that can support drug abusers and other mentally incompetent which drives a lot of net migration of homeless people to the city?

Nope. There are plenty of local problems that the city has been completely inept at solving. Go look at how much it costs to build a mile of tunnel and how late it is. Roughly 1b and 10 years late and the clock is still running.