Can anybody from SFO relate their experience? Hard to tell these days what is editorial bias or sensationalism and what is true.
SF was always dense. At some point, all these tech companies moved in, and it became what I call a "commuter city" where a huge proportion of people there during the day don't actually live there or necessarily want to be there. It also shifted the culture, probably for the worse. Of course many living there beforehand might not like that. Yeah some people own property, but generally big business stands to gain the most from the influx, not the residents. I wouldn't be happy in their shoes either, and the only reason I wouldn't be NIMBY about it is I'd just leave. The NIMBYs basically lost; the city grew anyway.
And it comes from every side, not just a "left or right" thing. People with nice houses don't want their neighborhoods to deteriorate. Renters don't want rent to go up. Even the stereotypical SJW people against gentrification... that's NIMBY.
Also, being a dense, very wealthy area with relatively fair weather, SF is naturally a place for homeless people to congregate. Besides the obvious squalor that brings, businesses don't trust just anyone off the street. No public restrooms, no chairs in Starbucks, covers on everything in Walgreens, ID requirements to enter stuff, you get the idea. There's no obvious solution to that.
If anybody is dedicated to 'social justice', to remove/resist facilities to relieve oneself just seems so far off the mark. I'm sure a lot of this is due to me not being in a city as dense as SFO, that undoubtedly has to change the dynamic. How much is this a "this is just a great place to live" issue, and how much is this a "this is a great place for easy resources if you're disadvantaged" issue?
Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way, but in a chicken and egg way, I'm curious if a city with this much "not-here" going on, do people give money to initiatives and charities and people who ask for money/food on the street, or is it typically a city where people avert their gaze? I ask this because if resources were hard to be secured without effort, and if the city is generally expensive to reside in, the amount of those without resources should decline, right?
Where my hypothesis / thought-experiment falls apart is from what I can tell, most of California has amazing weather, so even sleeping on a sidewalk it's got to be quite hospitable and paradise-like (as odd as it feels to say)
To another: The folks living in the street are generally not the same as those in the laboring class. So indeed, those without resources working especially in the service industry are declining, and this is becoming quite an issue with cost and availability of these businesses. The people on the street mostly seem to thrive off the excess wealth the city casts off. But to be clear, although it doesn’t freeze, SF is no balmy paradise.
I don't know but would wager that it's not those people. All sorts of people live in SF, like anywhere else.
Is this seriously the reality of SF? Never been there. If yes, that's pretty bad and degrades the city in some aspects to 3rd world place. But then again I am in Europe, many things like crazy homeless people I saw often in LA are unheard of here.
What do you do if you do multi-hour walk around the city? Or hop from one restaurant/cafe/bar to another one?
It's not very difficult to deal with, just annoying enough that at some point you might get tired of it. I walked everywhere, only avoiding a few streets. You can find the cafés or even public seating areas that are hospitable, but it may require a little trial and error.
The one actually hard thing is finding a bathroom. Many businesses don't have one even for paying customers, unless it's a sit-down restaurant.
If you're a local, there's of course social engineering tricks you can use, like going into a branch of your bank to make a withdrawal, then asking to use their bathroom.
Restrooms are the first victim of the tragedy of the commons.
In Sunset, Parkside, Richmond, Sunnyside, Glen Park, etc the coffee shops and restaurants have chairs. Many with the space have outdoor seating. Lots of them have bathrooms too - the ones that don't are for building space reasons not because of abuse. The bathrooms are supposedly for paying customers only (like much of the US) but I happen to know if you have kids they waive that restriction (blowouts rightfully generate pity from anyone who's ever had kids). I've never been asked for ID to enter a store. My local CVS does have some products behind locked covers but only a few more than my parent's small town CVS. It doesn't have a security guard. Everything is just more normal and relaxed.
That said there are areas of the city where things are much more annoying due to theft, vandalism, and so on. Walking into a CVS in Mission/SOMA vs a CVS in Diamond Heights is like two completely different brand of store. Crime has definitely increased.
Fast forward 20 years later, the town grew substantially anyway, within the terms of the restriction. And all the problems that the lawyer and his supporters said their restriction would prevent happened. Traffic, densification (loss of “small town” feel), escalating housing prices, a majority commuter population… and much less of an escape valve to fix it all. The NIMBYs basically lost. And it has a knock-on effect, because families pushed into commuting to support themselves have to look even further out from their Bay Area jobs to find an affordable places. But the same lawyer still shows up to city council and planning commission meetings to remind everybody about how close they are to the limits on how many houses can be built this year.
> We can't just paint 1,200 curbs, it's going to be a longer process.
https://twitter.com/aarieff/status/1582408966163660802?s=46&...
This is the method for any change. SF thinks it peaked in the 80s or 90s and any change requires community consensus lest the 50 people that use a bus stop a day are inconveniencing the single car owner that parks in front of the bus stop.
I’ve since moved to Seattle and it’s crazy to see shit can actually get done here.
This gives everything I've been told or heard about SFO somewhat of a 'superficial' veneer (forgive me for lack of better words, I do not mean offense) based on the assumption that a city governed by its constituents ought to resemble them, but I'm seeing stuff like this where the words and intentions are right, but the actions and results are incongruent. Is this a mismatch between the politicians and residents or is this a "yes, but do it over there" thing?
p.s. congrats on the move! in your opinion, what makes Seattle different? I've been there before, it was a beautiful and welcoming experience. People are friendly like here in the sticks, but there's just a lot more folks.
The core of the problem is that SF has spent decades investing in giving every person, block, and neighborhood ways to participate in planning and changes. Generally this means giving out some kind of veto. So when the time comes to do something "Yes, but do it somewhere else" is the predominant response.
To put it another way - everybody wants more shelters for the indigent, nobody wants one near where they live. The planning system is structured around enabling this.
What are the resources (aside from this restroom) afforded to those without, near SFO? I'm tempted to think about this time when a local made a habit of feeding the deer, eventually they went from not being seen to no longer fearing people and would walk right up to the porch expecting sandwiches and RC Cola. Is it possible the abundance of resources exacerbates the situation where those seeking them arrive?
As to that question... it's a difficult one to answer. My understanding is that it's both difficult to study and politically sensitive.
Unfortunately I think you're right. A lot of delicate conversations fall into this category, and not just in SFO. As time passes my perspective shifts and I begin to realize our actions being at odds with our beliefs is not an ideologically linked trait, it is an innate quality of humanity.
It is as if having the correct belief-system is sufficient and on par with actually living those values- the emotional reward is the same.
It seems most of those are caused by just poverty, not able to afford living expenses pushed people to the streets.
Some amount of them are coming from other cities who get rid of their homeless by sending them to cities like San Francisco, but Sam Francisco also sometimes send homeless away similarly, this happens all over the US, as a kind of way to spread it out more evenly so it's not as visible in any given place.
The fundamental issues of poverty are hard to solve, obviously, every country, city, nation, has always struggled with this. It's also a little more complicated due to some of the homeless also suffering from mental illness or drug addiction, that doesn't always make them qualified to even work, so it's like poverty mixed with what to do with the people that can't contribute to the work force as effectively.
There's also the case of temperate climate, that's pretty attractive to people who live in the streets, but it's also convenient for a city, if homeless are dying of frost bites or heat, you might feel more compelled to give them shelter, but when outdoor tents suffice you might instead choose to shelter them outside like that and just keep moving them around so they don't stay to the same place too long for the neighbors to complain.
I've heard San Francisco has a policy that when they give shelter, it has to be a full apartment with social service support, whereas New York and other cities go for more warehouse shelters, beds in a big room. The former is nicer to people that get to have access to them, but it hasn't scaled, whereas as the latter isn't as nice but has had more success actually sheltering them and hiding them from view I guess.
> Homelessness Rises Faster Where Rent Exceeds a Third of Income
-- https://www.zillow.com/research/homelessness-rent-affordabil...
> According to responses from a 2019 survey of homeless people identified through the PIT count, a quarter said losing a job was the primary reason they became homeless
-- https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/fixing-san-francis...
> When unhoused adults 61 and older were surveyed during the 2019 PIT count and asked why they had become homeless, 22 percent said it resulted from a job loss and 20 percent cited an eviction.
“The fastest-growing segment (of the homeless) is 51 and older who are homeless for the first time,”
-- https://sfseniorbeat.com/2021/06/22/people-over-age-51-remai...
It's only 46 square mile and has over 800k inhabitants. It's the second densest city after New York.
The surrounding Bay area adds 6.7 million more people, a large amount of who regularly go into the city for entertainment or work. I think it's an estimated 160k additional people that come in to the city per day from the outer areas. And there is an average of 131k tourist in the city each day as well.
So you have almost 1.1 million people in a 46 square mile area.
The city is fully built as well, there's no lots left, everything has a building on it with no room to grow, nowhere to expand out.
You could only expand up, but that would require destroying and rebuilding. The landscape is also all hills and valleys, huge slopes, it's not the easiest to work around.
The mayor is born and raised and still lives in San Francisco.
All in all, I just think running a city like that, of that size and yet so populous, that also has so much wealth at the top, a relatively strong middle, but also large lows, it's got a lot of all classes of things, it's just a harder problem because of the sheer scale and density of it all.
Seattle is twice the size at 84 square mile, and has a smaller population at 740k. The city has developed more recently as well, and a lot of the newer development are big tall skyscraper, there's still a little bit of building too small in some places, but it still hasn't reached anywhere the sheer density of San Francisco.
The other problem facing cities such as San Francisco is that despite its density it does a piss poor job at public transit and is still focused on car-first infrastructure. To your point, the surrounding area is ~7 million. It’s physically impossible for all of them or even most of them to drive everywhere without gigantic infrastructure problems. It will simply not work. Ever. It is physically impossible.
As in exaggerating it's livable land size? Or the other way around?
This occurs because the city occupies ~225 square miles [1] and so when you look at density it turns out Columbus isn't much of a big city at all.
If you look at this link from Wikipedia, Columbus is even larger than San Francisco or Boston! Wow so big. But the relevant metric is density, not square milage.
I could have been more clear here but I just wanted other readers to note that you can't just look at square milage or even population, you have to look at those together to get density to help derive insight.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
While that may be true, a huge fraction of the city is single family homes. Increasing housing capacity would be trivial were the political will to exist.
You'd have to re-appropriate people's family homes, or buy it from them. You have to destroy, possibly decontaminate, and then rebuild, there's the neighborhood to think about as well, with neighbors having to deal with the construction and the newly obstructed view, etc. Does the infrastructure support feeding water, gaz, electricity, internet as needed for a large apartment complex, and so on.
It is feasible, but can you think of a more complicated situation then this one? As it comes to cities and paths to increase housing, San Francisco seems to be one of the hardest one to accomplish.
[eta: I'm not making an opinion about what is good/bad/should be done. Just expressing what I understand is happening.]
I've never heard Seattle described as a place where "shit can actually get done," but I suppose its not quite as bad as SF at this point.
And the SF office of Google is SFO. But nobody calls the city SFO.
Yes they do. And some also call it Frisco and San Fran.
After 35 years in the Bay Area I have settled on calling it "The City" but will bust out with "San Fran Frisco" on special occasions to just to be irritating to those who desperately want to "fit in."
The American South is probably more ethnically diverse than the North. If you're in the South, you are going to encounter black people. They're 13% of the nation but they're up to 30% of the population in some states. Whereas, there are some states further north where the population is mostly white. Like the joke that when Prince died, Minnesota's black population died.
So the areas developed different styles of racism. The South has more of a "know your place" kind of racism. You can live here, you can shop here, you can blah blah blah. But "know your place". Defer to your "betters". Etc. The North has developed NIMBY. "Yes, you are equal to me, but just not here." A "roll up the windows and lock the doors" kind of vibe if you will. Redlining was as much, if not more, a Northern thing.
And while San Francisco is geographically South, it's got a lot of the North mentality about race relations. They want to deal with it by not dealing with it. They should be able to buy houses and shit with dignity, just not here.
And it's a kind of attitude that can pervade while claiming to be fighting for racial equality. And those people may truly believe they are fighting for racial equality. Which is why we should always be a bit introspective and concerned whether our own actions are prejudiced in some manner. Because it can develop despite our best intentions.
Then I realized, that entire friend group is distinct from my other groups, with almost no overlap.
100% believe this.
There's a lot of San Francisco (and Bay Area) out there that has nothing to do with the startup scene, and many, many people who have no connection to and couldn't care less about it.
You should have gotten out more.
Running joke between me and the rest of the startup team in SF was that every time we go to an event, people lead conversations by asking what stack I use, which version of Python, and why the heck I'm messing with XMPP. I understood the importance of seeking out non-techies.
It sounds like your books are giving you an inaccurate view of San Francisco, because almost nothing is more on-brand for the city than red tape and NIMBYism.
Black people have been leaving SF steadily for 50 years. That's the experience.
MTV, SFO, MPK and all of this lingo is not familiar to all
The airport is actually a couple of cities away (there are a lot of cities in the Bay Area).
NYC - JFK LGA EGW
PARIS - CDG ORY
London - LGW LHR
Tokyo - NRT HND
SF - SFO SJC
If someone starts refering to a city by the airport code I'd be completely lost because most airports and their codes don't reflect the name of the city they service.
Just be glad you don't live in Cumaná I guess.
Keep a skeptical eye whenever you see an article trashing SF. We are the boogeyman city for right wing demagogues in the USA.
Edit: Responding to a sibling comment:
> No public restrooms, no chairs in Starbucks, covers on everything in Walgreens, ID requirements to enter stuff, you get the idea. There's no obvious solution to that.
Lest people think the whole city is like this, this kind of thing is limited to a few square blocks inside the downtown area. As a gone-native SFer, I would have no problem finding public restrooms anywhere in the city, or a coffee shop with comfy couches soft enough to nap in.
This city is nuts.
It's always been nuts. (Since the arrival of the Europeans, I don't know what it was like with the Ohlone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohlone )
First it was sort of concentration camps for the Native Americans run by Spanish Catholics.
Then "Commodore John D. Sloat of the United States Navy sailed into Monterey Bay in 1846 and began the U.S. military invasion of California," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California#U.S._Conquest_and_t...
Minutes later gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill and the Gold Rush was on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush
That was a pretty nutty (to put it mildly, very very mildly) time...
Eliding all the craziness between then and the "Bohemia by the Bay" period brings us to the 1950's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Renaissance) which then leads directly to the Summer of Love a decade or so later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Love)
There has always been a dark side to the city, from the tortured and murdered Indians, to the Jonestown Massacre. Sick shit has gone down here. It's not all sunshine and roses.
Last but not least, this city has been the catch-all for all the folks who are too weird or crazy to fir in in the rest of the country. There's even an old joke about it here.
It's only in the last twenty years, since all the tech companies and hype have come, literally since the Dot Com Boom (and bust). Remember that?
Before 2000 nobody but the crazies came here to live. I can't emphasize this enough.
All this "What's up with San Francisco?" is a young person's perspective. It's only by totally ignoring the entire history of the city up to ~2000 A.D. that the current situation seems puzzling or strange.
So anyway, to answer the immediate question: Yes, red tape and bureaucracy are wielded here with a perfection of hypocrisy. If you don't know a "fixer" you can waste hundred of thousands or even millions of dollars and years trying to get projects approved.
We do build things: the new Bay Bridge, and a tunnel under Chinatown, but some of the things we build are crap: The Millennium Tower is sinking, the sidewalks are pulling away from the buildings in Mission Bay (Mission Rock?) The new transbay terminal cracked, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transbay_Transit_Center#Extend...
Then there's the recent and ongoing FBI probe into corruption, with the arrest of the director of Public Works among other things ( E.g. https://sfist.com/2020/07/15/ongoing-fbi-corruption-probe-hi... )
So yeah we have things like empty "luxury" condos next to folks living in tents in little shanty towns.
(The condos aren't actually lux, they look nice but the construction is crap, the folks in the office are sales not managers or maintenance, to get maintenance you call a call center in another state or country, the owners are a faceless LLC or other corp, etc. These things are all over the place!)
The city does house and feed some homeless people, credit where credit is due. Some folks have been put up in hotel since COVID and some other things have been done.
But we spend $250,000,000 (a quarter of a billion dollars) on less than 10,000 homeless people. As you can imagine most of that money is not just given to the homeless people themselves. Most of it goes to people who are not themselves homeless. Those people don't actually take any homeless people into their own homes and care for them. I'm not sure exactly what they do with all that money, but I'm sure the folks who get paid to "deal with" homelessness in SF are able to pay their rent or mortgage regularly and on time. (I feel a rant coming on, so I'ma stop myself there.)
So yeah, this is a case where the sensationalism is actually warranted in the sense that the situation here is "sensational" (but not in a good way, unless you have lots and lots of money, then you can avoid the worst of the bad stuff by isolating yourself in the nice neighborhoods and taking uber, etc.)
The educational system here is also wildly mismanaged. I could go on but this is already a long post. We recently recalled three school board members for being too nuts and radical for SF! Also the DA got recalled!
(A friend of my sister works for a school, the new principal of which turned out to be so fucking crazy the kids themselves went on strike! They literally walked out! I don't think this made the paper even locally, and I forget the name of the school, if anyone asks me I'll ask my sister about it, okay?)
To sum up: it's nuts here, it's always been nuts, but at least it used to be mostly fun nuts, and now it's more like a 90's cyberpunk dystopia nuts.