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Comment by tosh | Hacker News Reader

FWIW: Vienna had a housing crisis 100 years ago which lead to “Gemeindebauten” and eventually turned Vienna into one of the most-livable cities in the world. I know, it would be naive to reduce this to housing policy but it certainly played its part from what I can tell.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeindebau

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Similar ideas in some other places did not end as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka

Still better than not having any though?

Not until they start to fall apart and their owners demand that they are provided with same or better home.

This may be managed by building high rises, I wonder what happens when these start to fall apart.

Austria is a wealthy capitalist society with enough money to spare to dedicate some to things like housing people. It's a reasonably well-run country. My guess is if the homes have problems, they fix them.

Ex-communist countries, on the other hand --

you could say this to anything, e.g. startups. so what is here to learn?

I wouldn't be surprised if 1934 Vienna could build housing an order of magnitude more cheaply and efficiently than the San Francisco or California governments.

Especially in a city where the board of supervisors will block a 500 unit housing development for fears of "gentrification".

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/Why-did-S-F-superviso...

It was the socialist authority that carried out a lot of the construction though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Vienna

Can't see that happening in SF, they'll probably just tighten up the laws on loitering and rough sleeping and send them to private prisons instead... even if it costs more.

SF isn't sending anyone to prison. It's open season on any type of burglary or theft. You have to leave your car completely unlocked and windows rolled down or they will 100% get smashed in.

Is this everywhere or just certain places ?

Needing to roll your car windows down is only a thing in certain neighborhoods and typically it is only the case at night. A friend used to have a car they parked in SOMA - where they lived - and they had their windows joy-bashed a few times before they gave up and parked their car in the east bay. I also know other people who park their cars on the streets without any issues.

In general SFPD will not investigate anything short of a violent crime (I have personally experienced about $2k in property theft that they did not both to even file claims on for insurance purposes. I have needed medical treatment from an assault that was never investigated. FWIW, on one another occasion the police actually did catch the perpetrator of an assault with deadly case against me - though this was part of a much more serious set of crimes that happened on camera on a muni train).

In short SF has some serious problems. The police have by and large abdicated any sense of personal, professional or civic responsibility. In the absence of law enforcement, the results are simply whether people choose to be decent or not. For the most part SF is safe, but there are also some serious a-holes who try to make life shitty for everyone else.

SFPD don't investigate because the DA wont prosecute. Actually the DA has the lowest prosecution rate and highest dismissal rate of any DA in California (maybe in the U.S.) for even those things that the police do investigate, which is, as you point out, very little.

"Since taking office Jan. 1, 2020 through March 1, 2021, Boudin has tried just 23 cases resulting in 16 convictions, including four assaults (three convictions); one auto burglary, one residential burglary, one gun felony (no conviction); three sexual assaults (two convictions); two robberies; seven misdemeanor DUIs (four convictions); and one misdemeanor vehicular homicide, which he lost. In 2019 during the same timeframe, Boudin’s predecessor, George Gascon, tried 294 cases and got 203 convictions.

The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office obtains convictions by trial as well as convictions via plea agreement, however, they only release the number of convictions obtained by trial and have thus far rejected public records requests for convictions settled by plea agreement. Total convictions, therefore, are likely higher.

In 2020, SFPD presented 6,333 felonies to Boudin’s office. Contrast that with neighboring Alameda County, where 6,331 felony cases were presented, resulting in 1,413 convictions. Alameda dismissed only 11.4 percent of cases, while San Francisco’s dismissal rate was 40 percent."[2]

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"Prosecutors filed charges in 116 of 266 cases presented by police involving petty theft in 2020, compared to 450 of 647 cases in 2019, according to the data provided by the District Attorney’s Office."[1]

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[1]https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/data-shows-chesa-boudin-pros...

[2]https://www.marinatimes.com/chesa-boudin-by-the-numbers#:~:t...

> The police have by and large abdicated any sense of personal, professional or civic responsibility.

The SFPD police department are heavily scrutinized, understaffed, underfunded, undertrained, and unsupported by higher levels of political officials, whom ironically carry around their own private security detail wherever they go in SF, who seek to villainize them for their own political gain. The DA's office throws everything out. You have "defund the police" clueless types abound.

The fact that SF has anyone who is willing to do that work in that city is nothing short of a miracle.

Maybe, though as a taxpayer, my perspective is more that they are overstaffed and overfunded since I see next to nothing in services coming from that department. Maybe throwing more money at an inefficient government agency will work on this one, but generally it’s not that hard to find people who will do nothing for good Union wages (would be different if they were doing their jobs). Yeah Boudin sucks. Even Gascon was perhaps too lenient as well, but the Union is also just using this as an excuse to justify their refusal to enforce any laws. It’s possible for multiple levels of government to be broken, and I see no reason to think that SFPD deserves any benefit of the doubt here.

That's socialism/communism/anarchy and would never fly in the US. Almost half of Vienna is owned by the government and 60% of residents in Vienna live in social housing. It would require the US to stop treating housing as an investment vehicle.

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