San Francisco Became a Failed City
12ft.io
12ft.io
I was in San Francisco a few years back. No amount of beauty, natural or architectural, and there was a lot of that, can cover up the sadness I saw amongst the homeless. People shooting up. Others drinking cheap malt liquor and crying and drinking some more.
There is just something really broken in that city, and I have lived in poverty and have seen broken cities before. Perhaps it’s to do with the contrast between the wealth and the fate of those people on the streets. It’s hard to pinpoint it but I just couldn’t wait get out of there as quickly possible.
Compound that over time, and you get what SF is. (The same is happening in other cities like Seattle). It’s heartbreaking that for so long the systemic issues of these places went ignored. From my understanding there is change, but it’s only come once problems like homeless have reached a tipping point instead of the resident preemptively addressing it years/decades ago.
It’s maybe comforting to think that “protecting your assets” isn’t harming anyone else, but there are plenty of places with higher rates of drug abuse than California, yet California has the largest homeless population in the country, followed by Hawaii and Oregon, two states that also have short housing supplies.
There was also constant solicitation for petitions of all sorts. Nobody I spoke with seemed to have a coherent plan beyond raising taxes. I was chastised by a woman in a $2MM house for not having solar panels on my property in Georgia like she has. In my head I’m shouting “I can’t afford that shit!”
Perhaps the Bay Area residents should study up on taxation and economics before passing half baked legislation.
It's worth noting that the author evokes the spirit of her great(-great?) grandfather in the opening paragraph, describing him as a humble butcher's mate. She omits to mention that he went on to become the largest private landowner in US history, at one point owning ~2 million acres of land in California, Oregon and Nevada with his business partner. I'm a little skeptical when someone who comes from extreme wealth tries to direct attention away from it.
Bowles repeatedly mentions old-time gossip columnist and SF journalistic institution Herb Caen, who died in 1997 only a short time after filing his last column. While lamenting that disappearance of 'Baghdad by the Bay,' his affectionate nickname for the city, she ignores the fact that SF was in the grip of a crack epidemic for much of the 1990s and crime was ~40% higher than recent highs. It was a lot more dangerous back then. The 1970s were pretty rough as well.
Bowles frames the recent DA's race as a confrontation between liberals and leftists, while skating over the fact that the recall effort was largely financed by conservative donors from outside the city, accompanied by a PR blitz heralding the result as a political sea change.
It's a superficial article that ignores the structural factors or historical context in favor of simplistic pandering.
Comment from my GF that lived through that in SF. Used to be when leaving a taqueria crackheads would snatch the burrito out of you hands if you weren't careful. When you ate in a restaurant you kept the strap of your purse around your arm same reason. And personal experience car breakins are nothing new.
Bonus: I remember Valencia street at night in the 80's.
Failed city, please.
What your GF described in the 1990s and what we (individually different perspectives) see peaking right now in the 20s both describe failed or failing urban environments.
I do not accept that this is normal for any American city. I don’t like disagreeing or criticizing a city I have little experience with - believe me I’m from Jax, FL - it’s not an extremely affluent city. What you describe is unacceptable for any proud or hopeful American.
The reality on the ground as portrayed by the media doesn't match the actuality at all.
There is also the perspective of your racist light tech bro that grew up in a traditional racially segregated upper class white neighborhood. That is super annoyed with having to live amongst blacks, Hispanics, and step over random ne'er-do-wells.
Then there are the very wealthy real estate interests who think if only you could push up the blacks, Hispanics, and scruffy looking people they would be even wealthier.
I think your worldview is very very sad. But I don’t think I can convince you to see a better side of humanity. Cheers
My dumb pet theory is that SF found itself between the two motions of the left-right pendulum.
A city that tolerates huge amounts of homelessness and urban crime and which therefore should be dirt cheap to live in and subsequently provide _some_ opportunity to its inhabitants to pull themselves out. But… it’s astronomically expensive and filled with people who largely don’t work for the “tangible world” and who’s industry and wealth is unreachable to most without the means for education.
So it won’t swing left to cater for the poor but it also won’t swing right to make it unattractive to the poor.
In the meantime everyone knows that you can run amok and basically run-sack a wall greens and you won’t go to jail, there’s filthy rich people everywhere who may help you with a handout and the weather is forgiving. If I was homeless in America I’d be tempted to get on a bud and try to get to San Francisco.
Anecdote: a couple of weeks ago I took an Uber to Civic Center to BART back to the East Bay. It was the evening but not super late. The driver deposited me on a street behind Market that was, I realised as I got out of the car, filled with people smoking crack or taking other hard drugs. I didn't feel particularly unsafe walking past them all - if nothing else they seemed pretty out of it. It was squalid though. Around the corner I saw one police car. Parked across the street, doing nothing. Observing, I guess, in case someone like me got into trouble? My main thought was: how on earth is this good for anyone? What sort of lives are any of the people I'd just passed going to have? And how many people got robbed to fund all this poison?
A second anecdote: I was on a bus going down Geary. Ticket inspectors got on to check out passes etc. An older man, very thin, was asked for his ticket. I don't have one, he said. He was clearly homeless. Look, said the ticket inspector, I'm going to write you up. But I'm also going to get you help. He proceeded to get the man's details.
These felt like two very different approaches. Only one of which has a chance to improve lives.
Personally I feel the larger problem is the mostly invisible city workers and non-profits that are constantly sidelined by the visible elected officials. There are a great many projects slowing making an impact. But they often lose funding or support once someone has finished using them for some Twitter/photo op.
Pet projects are the norm, feels like no one wants to do the hard work to reform processes in place that allow for deadlock :(