Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

Do you know what “recall” means

Large cities with crime rate higher than SF, according to your source: Detroit, Baltimore, Memphis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Dallas, Los Angeles, Phoenix.

Your source says St Louis has a crime rate 2.9x higher.

Maybe consider that you just hate SF, for your own personal reasons?

(And your source is based on voluntary reporting, so there's huge biases there. SF sounds like the kind of place that could manage to push for more transparency..)

Anyone who grew up in the burbs in the 70s-90s and goes back today can observe this.

Anecdata - I have a sibling who lives in fairly rural MAGA country outer exurbs and yet has both bubble tea & pho shops in driving distance.

Similarly "well everything is so far in the burbs".. ok well, I've lived nearly 20 years in NYC and my average commute has been about 40 minutes. All my friends live all over the 5 boroughs, most of which are a good 30-40 minutes by uber or subway. We mostly see each other weeknights after work in midtown/downtown since thats closer.

Remote or even 2-day in-office hybrid work makes the trade offs of being 30~60 miles outside the city much more attractive.

The city has many conveniences and also a ton of inconveniences, it doesn't take a lot to put the balance out of whack and make you question why you pay so much for it.

And even then. Do you remember in the early 2010s with the rise of edX, Coursera and co when one of the founders was predicting that in 20 years almost all learning will be online, universities will ho bankrupt and close with less than 50, including the online ones, remaining?

The reality is that the vast majority of adults can't be bothered to maintain their motivation and finish an online course. The stats on course completion rates are abysmal. I've been there, of course, I have enrolled into probably more than 10 different courses, all of which sounded very interesting, but none of which i was motivated to see through the end.

While I think what you're talking about is a big deal and the biggest mistake every state that wants a tech industry fails at (yet New York, Massachusetts, and DC/Virginia seem to do ok), a bigger one is the fundamental culture of Californian tech. Most other parts of this country, people are too scared to take the risk to leave the "good" job for a startup. It's a negative feedback loop that dampens any chance of growth. California is the one place where people feel safe enough to ditch a good job for a cool one, and it pays in spades for the state.

To the rest of your comment - I think big tent parties are good, but not ones that require ideological fealty the way current parties do, you can't build a durable majority with left social issues, a weird mashup or left wing and right wing economics and "progressive" requirement that everyone hew to proper "optics".

That's a recipe for never fixing any of the actual problems, with the added benefit of giving your base and activists plenty of ideological wars that can never be won.

The last is really not true; Schwarzenegger was elected well after the California Republican Party had durably stopped trying to appeal to California voters in a way that could win statewide elections or legislative majorities and instead committed itself to appealing to the most extreme of the national Republican donor class. That's why they (and particularly Darryl Issa, who hoped to used it as a vehicle for his own election) funded the recall drive, aiming for an opportunity where they wouldn't actually need to get more votes than retention to win.

But once the recall was set, Schwarzenegger, who had basically no connection to the institutional Republican Party, swept in and blew away the establishment Republicans (leading to Darryl Issa’s literally tearful exit from the race that he has spent $1.7 million out of his own pocket to make happen).

> The Democrats in California, a party with near zero internal coherence, and no real stability at all, win because

Largely of the lack of internal ideological coherence and stability, making them able to run at least one candidate that fits the moment and district in any given election.

Yes and: Disempowering legislators empowers administrators and lobbyists. Power is zero sum.

I supported term limits until I saw first hand how agency heads run circles around legislators.

Now, I advocate making legislators more powerful, more independent, and therefore less dependent on lobbyists, contributors, and agencies.

Make legislating a real, full time job. More resources for staff, to help mitigate infoglut and provide real constituent services. Etc, etc.

> campaign funding and competitive districts/gerrymandering.

Absolutely. I advocate pretty much all the good government reforms. Public financing of campaigns, approval voting for executive positions, proportional representation for assemblies, restoring fairness doctrine, open government as default (eg something like data.gov for most everything). Etc, etc.

PS-

Lawrence Krubner's blog Demodexio is really good. Dives into nonobvious, nonsexy, common sense fundamental structural reforms for democracy, elections, and policy work.

So far, Krubner's advocacy matches my own experiences and observations. Here's just one great example:

Should the votes from voters combine on a per-issue basis, rather than a per-party or a per-candidate basis? [2022/05/13] Why did Kenneth Arrow think that Approval Voting would do a better job of bringing to the surface the real concerns of voters?

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/should-the-votes-from-voter...

Not sure where this bizarre idea came about that people whose houses dramatically increase in value should:1) be able to avoid paying taxes on that value and 2) pass the house down, in whole, to their heirs without paying increased taxes.

Voting against my self interest when all it does is affect my bank balance? No problem. But if it forces my kid to change neighborhoods (and therefore schools) while giving up a home I plan to retire in... that's harder.

Crafting the message, targeting the various groups, etc. Yes, there are folks like you who may do it, but convincing the majority is an uphill battle.

Not really; yes, it reduces total volatitlity in property tax revenues asymmetrically, since tax assessments fall without restriction in downturns irrespective of turnover, but rise with a sharp limit in upturns outside of a limited set of qualifying events.

But stabilizing property tax revenues, even to the extent it is true, is made less relevant by the way Prop 13 cuts property taxes so low that it shifts the burden to other, more volatile, revenue streams. (While the assessment increase is what most people focus on with Prop 13, it also capped nominal property tax rates in California at a low rate.)

https://www.kron4.com/news/thousands-cited-for-evading-bart-...

To say that it’s the least important problem ignores a pretty wide swath of ostensibly less significant problems (cigarette misuse near buildings, litter, speeding, unlicensed drivers, unlicensed panhandlers, take your pick). I’m going to need a citation on that claim.

If I got that correct, then I would first say that there are massive numbers of people who want to live in SF who have been kept out by the $4000 prices, and lowering it to $3500 or $3000 would bring in far more people.

Further, thinking only in terms of service workers and tech workers misses a lot of what goes on in the city, there's a ton of people in between.

But even if I'm wrong, then having a huge number of vacant apartments is really good news for all renters in the city. It puts pressure on all other landlords to power prices. It changes the market segmentation, and drives improvements in prices or apartment quality for all market segments adjacent to whatever price the conversions initially target. There is no downside to a bunch of vacant office space converting to vacant apartments.

One problem with mass conversions, and in general the way that SF has done planning—zero change allowed for decades then dumping a bunch of new stuff in a small area—is that it takes a long time for the new neighborhood to gain all the character of a neighborhood, for example the little shops, the community groups, etc.

Ok, thats still a benefit. Allowing more people to live in the city is still a good thing.

> To what end?

To allow more people who want to live here, to do so.

Definitely would help a ton though, and I probably shouldn't be hopeful of a single solution here.

Except, the correlation is real and well known.

> At least 550,476 people commute to jobs in San Francisco and San Mateo counties.

When I lived in the city, I would often work downtown. When I would stay late, you would see up close and personal how the downtown area became a ghost town as the majority of people left the city for home. That’s both a brain, talent, and tax drain on the city, and represents a lost constituency that has no connection to local issues.

This crazy idea that "woke" politics are somehow responsible for the rise in crime and the deterioration of living conditions is a talking point invented by Fox News. There is literally zero evidence for it. Boudin failed because the police admitted they refused to work with him. End of story.

I'm happy we'll have a new DA and hopefully the city will also make folks get mental health help when needed and get serious about building housing (i.e. get out of the way).

>it's all about scolding people and identity politics to distract from meaningful policies like universal healthcare, elder/child-care, etc.

You've described national politics in the united states; it's not unique to SF liberals at all.