Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Last time I visited SF the city literally smelled like a toilet. I've lived in and visited a lot of "bad" parts of various cities and the condition of SF was shocking. I'd never seen anything in the US quite that filthy or with so many obviously mentally ill people roaming around in a state of perpetual psychiatric distress. I've been to places that probably had higher crime rates but the condition I saw in SF seemed more degrading. Even in the nicer parts of the city you could smell pain and squalor.

How is allowing the city to get that bad progressive? Isn't that creating an even more radically two-tier city where the rich live in gated homes and work in posh offices while everyone else can't afford to live somewhere that doesn't smell like human waste? (If they can afford a roof over their head at all. Real estate costs in SF are still batshit insane.)

SF may well be the city in the US with the most radical division between rich and poor. Nobody who isn't rich can ever hope to afford homeownership unless they want to commute three hours.

How is any of this progressive? To me it looks like a lot of elitism plus general political incompetence and corruption coated with a superficial veneer of low-effort progressive rhetoric to sell it to naive young liberals who vote for mere words and don't pay attention to outcomes.

I've become fond of saying this: "Texas is more progressive than California because in Texas a working class person can afford a place to live." That seems to sometimes wake people up to the rank hypocrisy of all this.

We've created a political environment where we give far, far too much weight to words and not nearly enough to deeds or outcomes. Ultimately only outcomes matter and when measured by outcome SF's policies are not progressive.

> How is any of this progressive? To me it looks like a lot of elitism plus general political incompetence and corruption coated with a superficial veneer of low-effort progressive rhetoric to sell it to naive young liberals who vote for mere words and don't pay attention to outcomes.

You're right. SF isn't very progressive. It does occasionally have a progressive policy or candidate, but mostly it chases big tech money and just pretends to be progressive. The politicians are mostly mainstream dems, who are just as corrupt as other politicians. The cops aren't as bad as NY or LA or Chicago, but they're not better than average in terms of competence or racism. Boudin is progressive, but he's being recalled.

SF likes to pretend that it's better than other cities, but for the most part, it isn't. It is richer, and a lot of SF's problems are attributable to it being richer without being more equal.

The GOP angle that SF proves progressivism turns places into shitholes is also a complete lie. The city isn't very progressive, and it also isn't actually a shithole. (I mean yes it's literally dirty, but not nearly at the level the media likes to rant about.) Similarly with the whole "Boudin caused SF to have a crime wave" thing. SF's crime stats during the pandemic were not especially different from other major cities, and the DA doesn't have much of an impact on crime stats anyway, especially not in the short term.

> We've created a political environment where we give far, far too much weight to words and not nearly enough to deeds or outcomes. Ultimately only outcomes matter and when measured by outcome SF's policies are not progressive.

Right. And some people try to argue against progressive policies, by saying that "progressive" deeds don't lead to the desired outcomes. But SF isn't a good example of this. It has progressive words but NIMBY deeds, so of course it isn't getting progressive outcomes.

Is there anywhere in the country that you think is an actual poster child for progressive ideas implemented well?

Colorado and Massachusetts come to mind as possibilities. I've lived in the latter and it did not seem too badly run, certainly much better than SF. It did still have the unaffordable housing problem that dogs every "blue" city and state, but nowhere near as bad as SF.

The unaffordable housing problem is not just because of NIMBYs. It's also because of a lot of regulation in general including endless environmental reviews that add tons of cost and uncertainty to housing development. When you increase the up-front cost of building anything by tacking on a bunch of compliance and regulatory requirements, you bias the market heavily toward luxury high-end developments in which the builder can recoup the cost. You can't build affordable housing in a high-cost environment because it doesn't deliver the margins.

As a rule any regulation with difficult or costly compliance is a tax, and usually a regressive one since huge corporations and/or high-margin products are less impacted.

> Is there anywhere in the country that you think is an actual poster child for progressive ideas implemented well? Colorado and Massachusetts come to mind as possibilities.

I don't know of any one place that does a great job. Different places have tried different components of progressive policies, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. Like Salt Lake City isn't overall progressive, but it's done a good job building housing for homeless people. Berkeley has a reputation for being more legitimately progressive than SF, but I haven't looked into the details on that and I'd bet there are still serious issues. Massachusetts and Colorado have done well at some things. And at least SF, like Massachusetts, makes health care relatively accessible even to poor people.

> The unaffordable housing problem is not just because of NIMBYs. It's also because of a lot of regulation in general including endless environmental reviews that add tons of cost and uncertainty to housing development. When you increase the up-front cost of building anything by tacking on a bunch of compliance and regulatory requirements, you bias the market heavily toward luxury high-end developments in which the builder can recoup the cost. You can't build affordable housing in a high-cost environment because it doesn't deliver the margins.

Agreed. And it's tough because you do want environmental reviews and building codes, especially in an earthquake zone. But Cali in general definitely goes overboard on these and other red tape. Also the land is expensive, labor is expensive because the workers need to live in or near SF, etc.

And SF has rent control. This is sort of a progressive policy, and it's basically the only way that less-than-rich people can still afford to live there, but it also skews the market and makes the remaining places even more expensive.

When has progressivism ever led to a different outcome? ISTM that you're quite simply in denial about what progressive policies entail, as a matter of fact. The Progressive movement, starting from its earliest origins in the late 19th and early 20th c., has consistently been pro-elite and opposed to meaningful, grassroots-led improvement for "the little guy".

There seems to be a certain species of naive leftist who is about as clueless about economics and how to get things done as some rightists are about things like womens' reproductive health. Stuff like "we need to subsidize mortgages to bring down housing costs" or "stop evil developers! housing is too expensive!" is the same level of ideologically driven willful stupidity as "a woman can't get pregnant from rape."

It’s almost like one side doesn’t have a monopoly on effective policy. It’s too bad we can’t have laws based on efficacy, regardless of which side of the aisle they come from. “If either the left wing or right wing got control of this country, it would fly around in circles.”

Most frustrating of all to me is the Enlightened Centrism memes which equate a rational middle position with agreeing exactly half with both sides and poisons the well for anyone trying to find policy that is effective, regardless of its origin.

I've been saying for years that we need an "American competence party" that takes a centrist position on culture war issues and focuses on actually fixing things in the real world.

A big part of why our politics is so broken is the culture war. It's a godsend to incompetent and corrupt politicians since it allows them to pay lip service or toss low-cost political bones to their "base" while freeing them from the need to do anything hard or get any real results. With the culture war politicians don't have to be competent or earn your vote.

Works for both "red" and "blue" sides. There are terribly run places with all-Republican single party rule.

Unfortunately the trend has been toward hyper-polarization on culture war issues, making it even harder to select for competence over "correct" cultural alignment with the base. The right likes to bash political correctness but they have their own form of it as well as their own "safe spaces" where only their speech is tolerated. It's definitely a both-sides problem.

Have you read this?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecasting:_The_Art_and_...

I found it fascinating and I think would form the base of your "American Competence Party". Sign me up!

How are you using progressivism here? I ask because it seems to have a lot of different meanings depending on who is using it.

This is a really consistent pattern in HN comments.

Someone says, "X isn't producing the results people who advocate for X wanted." Then someone else inevitably chimes in, "X was never intended to produce those results from the beginning! It was a plot to benefit a few at the expense of everyone else all along!" X is variously Capitalism, Communism, in this case Progressivism...

What is the point of making comments like this? It seems very useless and gets us no further towards a discussion of things that might work.

Please drop the rote attempts at agitation. Agitation has never motivated anyone to make the world better. Only a vision of how things could be instead can do that.

Identifying things that cannot possibly work is a necessary part of discussing things that might work.

> The Progressive movement, starting from its earliest origins in the late 19th and early 20th c.,

You are not thinking clearly about the history of American politics if you group all the movements that called themselves "progressive" together as one.

GP likely very of aware of the intended meaning.

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