Poll finds more than half of Bay Area residents plan to leave for good | Hacker News Reader

Poll finds more than half of Bay Area residents plan to leave for good

sfchronicle.com

60 pointsNeverFade54 comments

I would count myself part of this statistic and I imagine there are quite of few folks here that would agree with me.

I left for SF to help further advance my career and I am incredibly thankful for the city and its people for getting me from a lowly help desk to now a systems engineer (making way towards SRE soon).

The city, however, is still incredibly hostile to new people who haven't bought a house or found generational success and I can't ever see myself raising a family in this area (even though I would love to).

Public transportation is still terrible (needles, human feces, etc) and the police/lawmakers have declared their intent to never enforce laws. How often do you see people jumping over the turnstiles in the BART stations?

> police/lawmakers have declared their intent to never enforce laws.

My understanding is that the lawmakers alone (legislature and governor) own this one.

Big city police chiefs might be along for the ride because they're purely political appointees that serve at the pleasure of their masters. Outside of that, the "only respond to life-threatening crime" policy isn't popular.

> My understanding is that the lawmakers alone (legislature and governor) own this one.

Why aren't they doing anything about it? Serious question,

I'm not familiar with politics in CA and the Bay Area but every time I hear about how bad it's getting in SF I have to wonder why no one seems to want to do anything about it, and worse creating policy that makes the situation worse.

SF isn't run by dummies (idk maybe). Why does it seem like they are sitting on the sidelines watching their city go to absolute shit.

They ideologically are opposed to doing anything about it. The left has gone completely off the rails over the past ten years on social issues, it just gets ignored because the right has gone off the rails more

You know how war hawks and neo-cons's answer to foreign politics they don't like is throw war at it?

Well, in SF, the answer to social ills is more compassion -always. Oh, people are sitting/squatting and begging in front of doors, let's not enforce loitering ordinances (poor old Ross had to pass a new law specifically to address this scourge in the Haight. Oh, people are shitting on the street? Oh, we must be doing something wrong, we'll not enforce any sanitary or defecating in public laws, that will surely alleviate the situation (look, Tokyo has very few public toilets yet their homeless don't shit on the streets).

Also, SF projects and wants to solve the issues that plague the rest of the country (or sometimes the world). Oh, the police in Podunk Alabama beat people up 100% of the time? Gosh, we better make sure the cops will never have that chance to make that a problem in SF. City government in Podunk Oregon has discriminated against amputees? Well, gosh darn it we'll make sure we never do that in SF and to prove it we will only hire amputees going forward!

Ping me if you don't mind. :)

> city, however, is still incredibly hostile to new people who haven't bought a house or found generational success

It’s also quite hostile to those who have. The only people it coddles, paradoxically, are those who inherited property rights.

This article blames housing but doesn’t talk about crime and vagrancy. Stores get looted in broad daylight. Asian Americans have to fear physical attacks. Filth, needles, and feces are a regular sight. Some blocks are open drug dens. Criminals get released with barely a slap on the wrist.

It’s not just housing - it’s a city that has so overly committed to ideological policy making, like “restorative justice”, that it has sacrificed public safety and fails to meet basic expectations for quality of life. Between that, cost of living, and California taxes, I am surprised the polling numbers aren’t worse. For the bay to become attractive, it needs a more fundamental change - it needs a diversity of ideas and politics that it has been missing for quite some time.

Crime follows homelessness and unemployment around. If you fix homelessness, and give people meaningful work, or the best substitute, and invest in them as people, they stop doing as much crazy shit.

It takes time. Once you have a street culture which includes public defecation and leaving drug detruitus around, it takes time to fix. Sure, you can Bloomberg "tough on crime" it away, I suspect some of that isn't viable now for a number of reasons. Not the least because some of the public health and mental health interventions, and the universal income stuff strongly suggest that kindness works better.

I'm not pretending the problem isn't there. I just think that the root cause isn't the needle per-se: its why people are reduced to needles on the streets in the first place. Blaming this on lax social policy around arrests misses the point I think.

(Where I live in Brisbane has pretty high rough-sleeping, and street drug use. Intervention programs to help people seem to work better here, moving them on, or beating them up, or locking them up doesn't seem to work that well overall)

> Blaming this on lax social policy around arrests misses the point I think.

No.

I'm old enough to remember visiting SF in the late 90s. The city was overall clean and safe. Only a few vagrants. The parks were parks and not shantytowns.

Fast forward to today. None of this is true.

That blame lies squarely on city leadership and the policies they push regardless of outcome.

In the 80's and 90's, how often did you go to Dolores park? After dark? You didn't if you knew any better, because it was dangerous. It was dangerous for different reasons than threaten the city now though. There were gangs that controlled territory, in ways that you only hear about in movies these days.

Gentrification has its issues, and San Francisco's certainly has its share issues, but lets not see the city's past through rose-colored lenses.

"There were dangerous areas before" does not negate "things now are fantastically worse".

It doesn't negate "things are bad now too", but you'll need to be more specific if you want to claim that things are "fantastically worse". Specifically, none of my friends have been mugged or threatened with a stabbing recently, though a friends sister was gunned down a bunch of years ago. The SFPD managed to find her killer and bring him to justice finally this year. It's popular to hate on them for being ineffectual but they (and the prosecutors office) got it done.

To be clear, I'm not saying things aren't bad - they are. I'm saying let's not pretend that things were great in the past either.

Not sure you are aware, but criminals avoid doing crimes in Daly City and opt for SF because SF will prosecute less than San Mateo. If you are not aware, not all crime is done by people who live in SF --many come to SF because there is less prosecution.

I knew kids in HS who would shoplift not because the needed to but because they could. These guys would totally take advantage of the situation in SF if they were that age again. It's not normal to have people casing houses at night with flashlights but it happens in SF and people on NextDoor are like, "yeah, it's the city, that's how cities are" trying to gaslight newcomers. My ass. That's not how it is in cities. It's like that in _some_ cities (SFO SEA NYC) because the law is soft.

There were homeless before in SF and it was never like it's been the last few years. It's definitely not like that in San Jose. And outside NYC (which also adopted SF-style enforcement) many other cities do not suffer the same wonton disregard for civilized behavior.

Even in third world countries with poorer homeless people, this does not happen.

If it wasn’t for the ceaseless gaslighting on my local subreddit, I would have never learned that I was a compassionless NIMBY who belongs in the suburbs! Who knew that it was perfectly normal for cities to be overrun with crime, trash, drugs and graffiti!

Kindness clearly doesn’t work better than Bloomberg stuff, every time restorative justice type stuff was tried (the 70s, now) crime skyrocketed and every time it stopped crime plummeted across every city

Basically Seattle, too.

We've had about 200 incidents of rock throwing at cars on freeways this year. City "leaders" finally did something about it at around incident #175 by clearing the homeless encampments along the freeway. Up until that point, if you didn't like rocks going through your windshield, it was because you lacked "compassion."

> The Silicon Valley Poll is a survey of 1,610 registered voters in five Bay Area counties...

> The following sources were used to recruit respondents:

> • targeted advertisements on Facebook and Instagram.

> • text messages, sent via the echo19 platform, to cell phone numbers listed on the voter file for individuals who qualified for the survey’s sample universe, based on their voter file data.

That's it; just those two sources.

As someone that lives in Oakland, I would agree with the conclusion of the survey. I know several people that are leaving SF and the sentiment reflects mainstream news about SF's future.

I don't find any of the responses surprising, nor would I think most Bay Area residents, but

1) conclusions that neatly mesh with popular narratives should always be met with a heightened degree of skepticism simply because narratives and reality are rarely so consistent;

2) people tend to say one thing but do another, especially when there's a powerful narrative driving expectations;

3) this only begs the question to what extent these sentiments and expectations differ from residents in other areas, such as as Seattle, Washington, or NYC metro areas;

4) it begs the question of how actual relocation patterns have matched similar, previous survey responses (this is the first survey by this group, but there have been others before); and

5) it begs the question of why it matters, because so far people leaving have simply been replaced by richer people, and if you consider global cities like Seoul or London, neither of which are even in the top 10 most expensive large cities, San Francisco alone has quite a ways to go to even reach those CoL heights.

Also, suffice it to say that Joint Venture Silicon Valley is not a disinterested party. A cursory inspection makes me think they're supported in a non-partisan manner by a diverse array of groups interested in economic development. Their agenda is economic development, which even without any negative connotations means they need to drive home the point that the current environment is unsuited for, say, stable, equitable economic growth. From their perspective, there's very little to gain by actually answering questions #3 and #4 above (or improving survey respondent diversity, for that matter) because any answers might deflate the impact of their survey "findings".

Some things are just in plain sight. All you need to do is make a trip down to San Francisco downtown and the rest of the areas in SF. I don’t need to look at any data, for that matter but looking at it only reaffirms the observation.

I think the biggest mistake policy makers make in improving a worsening situation is to double down on their policy stances instead of stepping back and observing the consequences impartially and accepting failure of their actions. Only then one can expect to improve, otherwise any set of successive choices you make, will suffocate you in a local optima.

That said, I think SF gets disproportional attention from the media while the rest of the west coast is eroding: LA, Seattle and Portland [1]. I think this is a west-coast problem of illberalism.

[1] The Urban Land Institute, a think-tank, runs annual surveys ranking the desirability of cities to property developers. In 2017 Portland ranked third. Now it has dropped to 66th out of 80: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/06/12/portland-...

This was representative of my late-20s friends; about half of them ended up leaving the Bay Area to have kids. It's not at all representative of my late-30s parent friends. Almost all of us bought houses and are presumably staying here for good, barring unforeseen catastrophe or major changes in life circumstances. It's like we passed the selection filter and now we're in the 50% staying.

The Bay Area attracts more aspirants than it has room for. That means that inevitably some will leave. I'd model this as tournament economics, tenure in academia, or the up-or-out culture at many big companies, though: you get lots of attrition in your first 10 years, and then after that you're in.

Note that the sample population was recruited through Facebook and Instagram ads, which is not exactly a random sample. In particular, it's likely to skew toward younger residents (who tend to be more mobile in general), toward people who are not parents (who have more time to be on social media), and toward people who click on ads and have time to fill out a survey.

https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/sv-poll-2021-rep...

There are enough people on Facebook and Instagram that you could have a demographically balanced/representative sample.

It is demographically balanced - their sampling technique made sure of that.

My point is that it's probably not balanced by free time or choice of activity. It's going to be biased toward people who spend time on Instagram and Facebook, simply because that's what they draw their sample from. So someone like me, who spends the bulk of my time either working, playing with my kids, or seeing friends in person isn't going to be in the sample at all. I'd argue that such people will be overrepresented among folks who are planning to stay in the Bay Area, simply because they're the only ones who can afford to. Was talking with a neighbor recently who's been in the neighborhood for two generations (50+ years), and he said that it used to be mixed middle-class with all sorts of people living there, but among people who bought in the last 10 years, it's been 100% tech.

I agree that it's not balanced by free time. I think all surveys will have this problem. All of the respondents need to have enough free time and be willing to fill out the survey.

I don't think that's a big problem with the methodology of trying to measure sentiment of a large population of people.

An observation: The survey refers to the Bay Area, while most of the comments here refer to SF and the problems unique to SF, such as needles and feces. Of course housing is an overall Bay Area problem no doubt.

I’m on my way out. The endless mask mandates, with elementary school masking the most egregious, is getting tired real fast. The Bay Area has some of the highest vax rates and hospitals are empty, yet they’re psychologically draining us before winter even hits.

There’s no science or proven efficacy. Masks are just a back door business closure.

The Bay Area has long been intensely hostile to families.

I don’t question your motivations, but it would take a lot of high quality data to convince me that mask mandates have any significant effect on people leaving the Bay Area or even being unsatisfied with life in the Bay Area. Where I live almost no one has gone unmasked in stores even during the few periods where the mandates were lifted.

I visited SF for a few job interview two years ago. I immediately felt that unless you are uber rich, living in that type of city is not great. It's good cor career advancement but other than that you can have most of the same experiences in cities without so much crime.

Just a weird thought (Sorry) : What would happen if all roads were put on auction to become privatized toll roads?

Bad idea I think. It would crush the lower middle class. Gov should handle infrastructure that's shared even though at times it sucks at it. DMV on the other hand, any bidders that can privatize it? The current situation is completely unacceptable and it has been for decades. Many departments in Government need to be rethought and gutted out, starting afresh. With new stack, new databases, new infrastructure and new vision. 18F should take the lead in defining the vision from the techonology standpoint: https://18f.gsa.gov/

Edit: Not sure why people are downvoting for a silly question, no question too silly and should be open for debate. :-)

We are already limiting access to housing in urban centers by driving up prices. If it is a good idea I don't know, it is what we have and I cant think of an easy replacement. Rent seems to scale to match earnings, toll roads would do the same and compete for the same budget.

We could also do government housing and pay a standardized fee that reflects building cost but then you would need a different formula to prioritize one case over the other. You would have to tell people to leave which is much less accepted than being unable to afford it any longer.

Roads are for transportation but people use them as a place to live(?!) The street the default place to live for everyone??? Imagine how absurd that is.

We pay more than enough in state taxes to fund the f’n roads. They should be in better shape than they frequently are.

I think the incentives wouldn’t work out. Capitalism and private enterprises only work well when there is a healthy amount of competition —- a fantastic example is consumer electronics, which has tons of competition leading to rapid tech development and cheaper devices. Just think of how cheap a 4k TV is compared to 5 years ago. A bad example is healthcare, which has very little competition, which leads to extremely high costs.

Capitalism simply cannot work towards society’s benefit when competition doesn’t force prices to be cheaper for higher quality products.

If roads were private, I really do not think different companies could compete for better service. Your home will only attach to a single road after all. The consistency of road design and laws across the US is a huge win as well; that could be problematic if it was privatized.

Over time, monopolies would also develop. We see this with ISPs all the time: you have a single provider in a region, and prices are very high relative to the very poor service. It’s very easy to imagine one road company purchasing all roads in a region and having complete price control, driving costs up without making service better. And probably avoiding maintenance.

Eventually, citizens would probably get tired of roads being privatized and have the government make them public again.

On the flip side, with driving being much less convenient, maybe people would look into more efficient modes of transportation!

I can’t wait for half of all housing to become vacant and housing and rent prices to totally not go down at all.

You couldn't pay me to live in San Francisco, but Berkeley and Mountain View are to die for.

Conservatives have used San Francisco as an example of failed excessive liberal policies, and as a liberal, I have to agree. It's a total disaster.

Seems far too simplistic. Berkeley is actually even more liberal on many issues so your explanation doesn’t really make sense.

> Berkeley is actually even more liberal on many issues so your explanation doesn’t really make sense

This isn’t a single-dimensional system.

Right, I said “on many issues” expressing nuance. As compared to the other poster who claims SF is so liberal that it has problems and Berkeley is not liberal so it doesn’t…

Berkeley is part of Alameda County, but San Francisco has its own county.

Berkeley is almost a village with a uniform liberal population, many young affluent students.

San Francisco is a large city, and at scale is where these policies break down. You can't walk through downtown SF, their system has failed. It's indisputable IMO.

> Berkeley is almost a village

120k isn't a village, and if it was...

> San Francisco is a large city

800k definitely wouldn't be a large city.

What exactly do you mean by "you can't walk through downtown SF?"

I mean the streets are covered in human shit and there are homeless insane people shooting up waiting to sneak attack you if you drop your guard. If you take shelter in a Walgreens you will find thieves filling up trash bags with goods from the shelves while the security guards watch, helpless.

I’ve spent years working in and walking through the TL and civic center every day. Not once have I worried that someone was gonna “sneak attack” me. There absolutely are violent street crimes in SF, including in downtown, but the idea that downtown is some kind of mugging war zone is a farce. Its bark is worse than its bite.

2PM on a bus by Powell station a crazy homeless guy broke a full 40oz over the back of my head without any warning. He thought I was following him on behalf of the government because I had a bright red Nexus 5 phone.

I've also seen 2 stabbings in the TL, one of which killed my friend. Also a mob shooting in a carpark, again in the TL.

Sounds like you should stop hanging out in the Tenderloin. The rest of us lived there for years without being stabbed or hit with bottles. No doubt there are parts of the city with problems but you’re exaggerating greatly for no reason.

You can in fact walk through downtown SF.

SF has gone as far left progressive/liberal as Florida has gone gone far right-wing conservative.

It's weird that american society is so divided, rather than meeting in the center as time goes on.

I would wonder if this is natural progression, or covert propaganda performed by foreign states to weaken american imperialism.

>>>I would wonder if this is natural progression, or covert propaganda performed by foreign states to weaken american imperialism.

Heh, this one is coming up a lot recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28823926

Nobody likes to really address this, and those who do get shouted down real fast, but... this entire thing has been well documented [0] and intentional [1].

[0] http://www.marxist.com/georg-lukacs.htm

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institu...

Mountain View was a lot nicer place for people to actually live before Google and LinkedIn showed up. If you talk to long time residents they're not thrilled about the changes.

Downtown MV is still pretty nice, and beats the heck out of most of the south bay. Not as charming as it used to be, though. The big used book store moving away was a huge loss.

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