Downtown San Francisco is in trouble
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But in this case, for SF, it's been exacerbated by the deep poverty and mental illness that sleeps on its streets. It could be America's most beautiful city but the frog of its decline has been slowly boiled for decades and now it's, frankly, gross. We were making so much money that we covered our eyes at the destitution around us as it got worse and worse. So when was the compassion, the empathy, ever going to kick in? Now, when it finally hits us in the pocketbook?
This is a lie that was sold to the public for votes (power) and taxes (money).
The only thing that “will be done” about the homeless and crime in SF is eventually someone will come to power who will get rid of them. Not the problem - but the people.
It will not be compassionate but it will happen. This is what inevitably comes to these places in which the incumbents in power are unwilling or uninterested in solving anything.
I experienced SF leadership protecting them and giving them more rights to live outside and do anything without consequences. It seems they tried really hard to solve the problem for at least a decade, and it only got worse with every policy and decision they made. The solution to the problem has to factor in incentives that may lead to worse outcomes for the city, and I don't think that has been done properly.
What would less rights to this look like just curious.
What you're suggesting is to do nothing at all, which achieves exactly what is going on right now.
I very often hear a call to end tent encampments.
I very rarely hear any sort of thought out policy on how to end homelessness.
> "Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are "in want of common comforts, sir.”
> “Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.
> “Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
> “And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”
> “They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”
> “The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.
> “Both very busy, sir.”
> “Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”
This is in fact the most commonly adopted practice for “dealing with” homeless people in places like the United States: violently destroying their homes and property at regular intervals, so that they are out of sight and therefore out of mind of people without empathy.
The only way they’re going to stop is if they hit rock bottom. If you’re enabling their behavior that’s never going to happen. And yeah, it’d be rough for them and some will die, but that will cause some others to never go down that road.
You've got it backwards: they're getting high all day because they're homeless and doing what little they can to cope with the insane amounts of stress that entails.
Once you recognize that inverted causality, the solution becomes obvious: provide them with housing and help them back onto their feet.
Yet with your so called obvious solution the problem has gotten worse.
Seems to me you expect all the working people to just pony up money and pay for all the homeless peoples housing. A lot of people are renting their home and can barely afford to scrape by. They cannot afford to pay for someone else's housing as well. You want to screw these people who are trying to contribute to society. I am not okay with that.
As far as affordable housing, the issue in SF is created and continued by its own residents. They deserve a big part of the blame. If they want to fix it, vote in people that actually allow some damn affordable housing to be built. They all say they want to fix it, as long as its not fixed by putting affordable housing around them.
I think you may be responding to the wrong comment? I never said any of this stuff.
$100 million dollars divided by the approx. 8,000 homeless people in SF¹ (and that's just the ones the city was able to go around counting; I can guarantee that number's far below the actual homeless population) comes out to $12,500 per person. That doesn't cover the year's rent for even so much as a closet in SF, let alone something that even marginally qualifies as a home.
So no, the solution I claim has not been done. Far from it. I'm quite frankly amazed the city could find hotel rooms for that cheap - or, the more likely explanation being that the city is only putting that money toward a fraction of the homeless population.
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¹: https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population
Now this is some proper fucked up high horse shitty cruelty. Its appalling to read it here to keep things polite. It seems you have no clue whatsoever about addictions, how to treat them, what works and what is just some arrogant entitled wishful thinking. I realize similar extreme people are rather outliers, but not so much as we would wish for, hence the topic discussed.
One of those moments when its so darn easy to say 'we have it figured out in Europe in much better and humane way than across the pond'.
I could write an essay about how we have methadone, heroin etc. no-question-asked dispensaries in the middle of one of the richest cities globally, shelters for the poor and actually treat mental illnesses appropriately, but I don't think your type cares about that. Needless to say, we don't have these issues at all while having similar folks as part of society.
People addicted to drugs are only going to stop if they have a reason to. It used to be a mantra: addicts will only stop if they want to and you can't force them.
There are plenty of enabling parents out there that eventually learn this lesson the hard way.
You can either setup incentives pulling those people away from population centers (free food, drugs, shelter) or bring back Mental Hospitals and forcefully incarcerate. What LA/SF seem to be doing now is ... providing free food/drugs/shelter and protection in downtown and wondering why regular citizens complain. Something has to give, the worse it slowly gets the more drastic snap overreaction when things flip and someone radical gets in power.
- isn't 100% effective (no solution is 100% effective), OR
- involves making any decisions for the mentally incapacitated
Chronic homelessness can be brought to miniscule levels with the approach that Idaho has taken: "just get people into homes." Once that happens so many doors fly open for these victims, usually because they acquire an address.
But, again, you have to accept that 5% will get left behind, and that some people will have help forced onto them.
Homeless shelters and public housing ain't 100% effective, yet I know of zero YIMBYs not pushing for them, let alone "fight[ing] tooth and nail against" them.
The quality of life in the city has really taken a hit.
The term "homeless" is a convenient ideological mislabeling of the problem that most homeless in San Francisco have, which is drug addiction.
Addictive drugs distributed on the street are big business. You can see it in person by walking the block long tent cities in San Francisco. (Probably walk with somebody else if you want to do this.)
Homeless addicts in San Francisco aren't all depressed philosophers that are self medicating. They are drug distribution network customers. A sort of subscription business if you will.
Cities are machines.
San Francisco is a machine that kills people by encouraging drug use by enabling illegal drug possession and street dealing in broad daylight. The SF police will not arrest for drug possession.
The supposed "compassionate" policies of San Francisco are euthanizing homeless people.
The results of this "compassion" kills more people than COVID at its peak did. Yet instead of doing anything about it, people behind these policies double down with policies to aid and abet the illegal drug business that is killing the very people they claim to be so piously advocating for.
What makes these pious advocates justify this in their minds? When people have enough money to satisfy most all of their material needs, their form of competition changes to zealous virtue signalling.
The extremely highly compensated white collar workers of FAANG companies that live in San Francisco cause these policies because they are so detached from reality, their concerns aren't the concerns of normal people, and so the political representatives they fund represent these impractical ideologies, that include things like not prosecuting shoplifters until the point it's not uncommon to be in a store like CVS or Walgreens and watch people sweep the items on a shelf into a black garbage bag and then walk out. (I've personally seen this and other bizarre theater.)
There's no reason not to return to that situation and the market should drive it. Some commercial->residential conversions (not easy with a skyscraper, but in some cases doable), some clubs opening up in super-cheap, formerly expensive space, some artists moving back across the bay, and SF could be back.
It's not like it hasn't reinvented itself before. The dotcommers just squeezed too much of the weird out of the place.
Anecdotally, during remote work, I’ve seen a lot of younger people who aren’t on visas go live wherever/not move to SF for their jobs even if their team is in SF, while the established SF residents with houses and families stayed, as they did in the South Bay. The difference is that people who worked in the South Bay but hated it were never living there and instead in SF, so it hasn’t hollowed out as much as SF, which was more of a choice. Also from what I’ve seen, immigrants from India/China preferred to live in the South Bay anyway.
SF is great and I think it’s inevitable that it will see a resurgence. My guess is that young people at some point, being inherently contrarian, will eventually start rejecting remote work and want to live the lavish tech office lifestyle with other 20-something’s again. Likely the 2010s Google/Facebook experiences will be viewed with nostalgia and young people will try to recreate it in their new companies - it already almost doesn’t exist anymore since major company offices are sparsely attended and have had all the perks slowly cut back.
You assume a lavish tech office lifestyle will return in a world where the Bay doesn't have a monopoly on tech talent.
It remains to be seen whether or not tech workers can demand reality conform to their wishes. It also remains to be seen if revanchist Bay Area tech leadership could force the world to back-off and let them have the spoils again.
SF doesn’t have great kid infrastructure any more so I imagine this will continue, though spread more to the east bay as well as the peninsula is pretty crowded.
Not with open floor plans you're not. Maybe if employees got personal office space like was common at one point.
Meanwhile, most people in my social circle (early 30s, tech) are rooting for just that to happen.
Prices are out of control. And if us overpaid tech professionals feel like that, imagine what it must be like for blue collar workers, or the dude driving our Uber or cooking our food.
We may finally see a long-due correction. The most privileged of us might lose some of their privilege as a result, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
The solution to make this a comfortable transition is to slowly drain businesses out of SF and spread them around to different cities and states. Ease into it instead of hoping to wake up to a bloodbath.
I looked up “negative flywheel” and is corporate mba jargon, it seems to be an evolution of the business management term “flywheel effect” but for negative situations… except it’s more contrived because the business world already defined that as a “doom loop” which at least makes more intuitive sense.
Karma is a circle and it will come back to hurt white collars.
I took BART - there are hardly 10 cars in the entire parking lot by 8AM. The lot used to be full. There were three people in the train car I boarded, which used to be pretty full.
I walked from train station to the venue, there are very few people overall in the city. It used to be usually busy on workdays people trying to get to their workplaces.
I felt less than 10% of the people who used to commute are now going to the city, I am not sure if there are any official stats published.
If possible we can learn from HK and start using all the space for something useful and more engaging.
Handouts to rich real estate people instead of to other rich real estate people was always a bad idea.
Policy has consequences. Yes, nice consequences for hundreds of emerging towns and neighborhoods, while SF get what it deserves from decades of anti-housing anti-building exclusive policy.
Urbanism means inclusion and cooperation. Urbanism doesn't mean give favor policy to well developed cities who allow vested interests to exploit newcomers.
1) Saw a woman slip in urine on the sidewalk, she fell on the sidewalk and broke open skin while touching the urine.
2) Someone non-chelatly smoking crack on the sidewalk, ensuring they blow the smoke in the face of every passerby.
3) Someone dedicating in a potted plant.
4) A fist fight (when was the last time you saw a fist fight outside of high school?)
5) Someone passed out on the sidewalk with a needle still in their arm.
And this is just a sampling. I don’t think if you make housing cheaper all these things will go away. Some of it is definitely exacerbated by homelessness, but then you get people moving to SF because of how much they support homeless. Now SF is known as the city to be homeless in, as you will likely end up better off than before, without lifting a finger.
Post-WW2 was the height of urban cores in the US. The 60’s social unrest and a slide into urban decay led to population declines that lasted until the 90’s. People fled to the suburbs for cheaper housing, better schools and more safety.
San Francisco lost 20% of its population between 1950 and 1980.
Considering the problems SF is facing I wonder if we’re entering another multi-decade cycle of people leaving urban cores for the suburbs.
Anecdotally, I’ve also heard of more tech companies shifting offices to suburbs instead of urban locations. Eg Amazon opening offices in Bellevue and shifting workers out of Seattle. Most 30+yo people I knew hated the city and wanted a suburban office.
Eventually the cost and blight of cities will (are) driving out millennials who will have their kids and wfh jobs. As the boomers start dying we’ll see easier and cheaper “in fill” housing in nicer and more built up town. Prices in cities will fall with demand declining and a new generation will discover them and it’ll repeat.
The real world is inconvenient and costly. We'll disregard it and just interact with each other via technology.
It's all personal choice. I lived there for a long time, and if it wasn't so expensive, I'd move back in a heartbeat. I wouldn't care about SF specific laws, it's the cost of living in ANY city. Personally, I would rejoice if all cigarettes were illegal -- that would make me want to move to SF even more, to take such a wonderful stance against cigarettes.
All cities have laws that other places don't have. Why you for some reason only confine it to SF is strange.
I just adore SF.
Even all these things about homeless - that is true where the homeless are, but last time I went there a year or two ago, there were no homeless, or exceedingly rare - I went to Glen Park, Noe Valley, Inner and Outer Sunset, Excelsior, Forest Hill, Parnassus Heights, Cole Valley, Marina, Pacific Heights...so many places in SF - no, or rare, homeless.
It's the same exact thing in Los Angeles. If you go to where the homeless congregate, there they are. But I could drive around Los Angeles for days and not see a homeless person.
But people like to catastrophize. ALL San Francisco is horrible, ALL Los Angeles is horrible. No, sorry.