> Yikes.
I don't know about yikes. Hard to make the case that there's a ton of value in commericial space with the crime, drugs, and filth that constitutes soma, especially now that office space is just an incidental thing to most SF companies.
I don't know about yikes. Hard to make the case that there's a ton of value in commericial space with the crime, drugs, and filth that constitutes soma, especially now that office space is just an incidental thing to most SF companies.
Never seen such a desolate place, and I say this as someone who has been homeless before and slept in homeless shelters. Homeless shelters in Boulder, CO were about x10 less sketchy than the streets I walked around in downtown SF.
I'm not sure where we were exactly, but there was homeless shooting up in the street at least once every few blocks, plus garbage everywhere and human waste.
What the absolute fuck is going on down there
The latest estimate for 2022 is 7,754 people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco – https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population
That gives an estimate of $390,000,000/year spent on homelessness in San Francisco alone.
Mind you the official definition of “homeless” is a lot stricter than people assume. Living in a car makes you not-homeless. Here’s a good podcast episode about that: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/according-to-need-cha...
My first question whenever thinking about these numbers is: If we just give them that money, will they stay homeless? I bet many would be more than able to get their life in order, if you gave them 50k … that’s more than minimum wage for SF.
The average person who experiences homelessness stays homeless for 237 days[1]. That’s the highest estimate I could find on google. Some were as low as 90 day average.
I bet a lot of those people could fix the problem a lot faster, if you gave them minimum wage money for a year.
[1] https://embed.clearimpact.com/Measure/Embed?id=100076098
Many wallets are being filled here, and there is no oversight on where the money is going and if it's working.
ps: this post does not mean I'm on the right or that the right has all the solutions. But I do tend to think many left solutions are counter productive and I think SF is good example of unintended consequences.
But there are mountains of evidence! (In the form of an endless stream of low-quality sociology studies.)
Ok, let's get into some definitions and corrections.
SF isn't a lefty paradise. It's a liberal paradise. "Liberal" has pretty much become synonymous with "neoliberal". And by "liberal" i include the vast majority of Democrat and Republican voters (certainly as neoliberals). Liberalism is really about aesthetics and is performative, like how racism famously ended when we elected a black president or misogyny ended when we appointed a female Supreme Court justice.
The primary differentiating factor between Democrat and Republican voters are social issues but here's why it's aesthetic/performative. Democrats might tend to self-identify as being against racism but, as you see in the Bay Area, will tend to adamanatly oppose any effort to build more or cheaper housing.
The entire political spectrum in US politics still works at the behest of corporate interests, first and foremost.
My point here is that you cannot separate economic from social policy, which is why such labels as "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" are fundamentally flawed.
If SF were truly a "lefty paradise", it would attack the core issue of homelessness and poverty (and the resulting crime), which is housing. But instead, you have superficial/aesthetic policies aimed at reducing the appearance of homelessness (eg clearing out homeless encampments).
There is no meaningful "lefty" or "leftist" movement anywhere in the United States. What many people label as "lefty" or "liberal" anywhere else in the world would be labelled as "center right" politics.
The most die hard (mainstream) rightwinger in my country would be labeled a die hard socialist by more or less anyone in america.
Europeans, even right-leaning Europeans, will generally support universal access to affordable healthcare. That's just one example.
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-tweeted-my-cartoon-wo...
That’s just… your definitions.
> What many people label as "lefty" or "liberal" anywhere else in the world would be labelled as "center right" politics.
That sounds like a meme that only Americans believe in.
And the whole corporate conspiracy canard simply doesn't work in this city, either. All the "pro corporate" reforms from the past decade were responses to the city absolutely freaking out about companies fleeing and the city losing the billions in revenue it relies upon for its social program expenditures, which on a per capita basis might exceed even most European cities, let alone other cities in the U.S.
But you're absolutely correct that the one thing the left doesn't do is the one thing that would help the most: reduce the cost of housing development. (As opposed to what the city has done and continues to do--create tens of thousands of 100% publicly funded units for the homeless, which because even the city is obliged to follow its own anti-housing policies, results in unfathomably poor RoI for the already unfathomably huge sums of money dumped into these projects. And which because it's become a drug addict mecca, generates homeless addicts faster than it can house them. Though, to be sure, the city has been this way regarding drugs for decades. My mother does in-home care with older drug addicts in assisted living facilities, and stories about how they got sucked into the SF drug culture in the 1970s and 1980s are common. Though unlike today, Marin was also an epicenter of predatory drug culture, the human detritus--and I mean that to insult Marin, not the individuals who suffered and continued to suffer--of which typically ended up in SF.)
The majority of SF residents are renters. And a good number of homeowners would be happy to relinquish some control regarding zoning to improve the bureaucratic situation--certainly anyone who has owned property in this city for any significant length of time has come to appreciate the excessive cost in both time and money of doing anything to their properties.
But national politics has completely overshadowed local politics. Renters oppose easing development costs (even when they come with extraordinary dislocation protections, such as mandatory, multi-year rent cost reimbursements) because the national political ideology of the left has daemonized any and all development as gentrification, which is intrinsically evil. It's a sister phenomenon to anti-corporatism--corporations are intrinsically evil, and therefore anything which might benefit corporations is to be rejected. No wonder politics on the left has become performative--that's exactly what the ideology and its advocates now demand. (The same is true of drug policy--precisely nobody in SF, or perhaps most of the U.S., IMO, opposes "harm reduction" as a primary consideration and target for drug and homelessness policies. But the left has transformed "harm reduction" into a rigid set of performative policy mandates.)
> There is no meaningful "lefty" or "leftist" movement anywhere in the United States
I think Chesa Boudin would be offended.
Other states that have single-party Republican rule have just as severe governance failures and corruption.
Temperate weather and relatively little rainfall.
Essentially, "wow, the circumstances are so bad that this obviously bad outcome is happening. Yikes at those circumstances."