San Francisco Falls into the Abyss

San Francisco empowered some of the most wealthy people not only in the US currently but in all human history. When working from home became not only possible but necessary many left. Most of those who left ended up nearby in other less dense parts of the roughly eight million strong metropolitan area of which San Francisco is merely a central part.

The failure comparison context that saturates this piece is based on analysis that is mistaken about the composition and goals of urban areas. This is because this piece is not about analysis, but political slant. The Hoover Institution has a very strong agenda and beliefs that drive its actions. This is perhaps most clear in the final sentence that explains that all these problems can be changed by voting differently. This conclusion is not clear and not supported by the piece. Much of what is going on in and around San Francisco is driven by the population and commerce there over which the government has limited control.

It is difficult to make progress with complex social programs when one's agenda is preset in long static beliefs and prevents taking the situation seriously.

> But because the income distribution is such that the median income is greater than its simple arithmetic average, the median income of taxpayers who left San Francisco would probably have been around $250,000.

What? That would be extremely unusual, if true. (The long tail on the upper end is unbounded, while on the lower end income is bounded at 0. So for income, usually mean >>> median.)

Did they get mean and median reversed?

= = = = =

Edit I drew a random sample of incomes for 1,000 people (between $0 and $1 million) and used Pytorch to update these incomes to achieve mean $196,000 and median $250,000. (I also heavily penalized income < $0.)

The shape of the distribution of incomes to achieve such a feat, as one would predict, is absurd. X axis is income in $, Y axis is the number of people with that income out of 1,000. (First image.)

If instead the economist got his understanding of mean and median reversed, you get the second image, which is zero-inflated but otherwise uniform in income.

https://imgur.com/6OiIF3V

Quite the opinion piece largely devoid of citations. A two-year trend where people who had to move to the city are moving out is totally indicative of a fall into the abyss exactly like what happened when the auto industry pulled out of Detroit.

You couldn't pay me enough to move to California, but this article is nothing but the exaggerated ramblings of someone who thinks that progressive policies will be the downfall of civilization.

How does this article fail to mention the pandemic. That is crazy that they talk about 2019-2021 but never once address it.

Over the last 12 months, San Francisco has seen the second-biggest worker population gain of any area in the United States, according to LinkedIn.

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/2023/1/18/23542444/s...

This whole rant is so cringe it reads almost like satire. From the sound of things, the people leaving for other expensive areas were just wealthy semi-tourists who weren't contributing anything meaningfully positive to the city to begin with. The sorts of people the author expects SF-ers to look up to as parental figures or something. Good riddance.

The only thing that is likely to cause SF to experience a Detroit-level exodus is climate crisis. Where will the people migrate to? Probably Detroit!

The comparison is absurd. No one would live in Detroit because it’s bleak and sprawling. San Francisco is beautiful and cosmopolitan. The trajectory of Detroit is irreversible and structural, while for San Francisco it’ll be an enduring global destination for as long as it stands. Two year blips during a pandemic aren’t sufficient to mark a trend, and SF city politics have been broken for generations.

I lived in SOMA in the 1990’s, and 5th and mission was an open air drug festival too. The tender groin was foul, and civic center was a wasteland of feces, condoms, needles, and occasionally people who died overnight and hadn’t been cleaned up yet. The streets were covered in human waste even in residential areas.

When I’ve come back to SF, it is generally a lot cleaner than it was, and has gentrified. I’ve not been back post pandemic, and I can imagine it’s reverted. But it was not possible to be worse than it was when I lived there.

Yet, people loved it there and I miss it. If it weren’t for the vacuous tech culture chasing VC and exits I might be back some day.

Regardless of the political slant of the article, I really wish the city didn't have to be such a shithole. It's like twice the price of the south bay, way farther away from most tech companies, filled with angry crazy homeless people and criminals, not really that walkable, inundated with needles and trash and feces... I'm jealous of people who moved to the bay area already with relationships because I hate hate hate the fact that my best chances to find someone are to move to SF.

Am I being gaslit by this article?

The article claims the median income is higher than the arithmetic mean. Since income is typically exponential or even pareto this is almost inconceivable. It then claims (in parenthesis) that Florida has a state income tax.

In Detroit, the memory of abandonment is kept alive with the constant visual reminder of abandoned manufacturing infrastructure and homes from 70+ years ago. You can't escape it. I used to drive in from Lansing with my friends to see concerts back in late 90s. Miles and miles of abandoned factories, warehouses, and neighborhoods right next to the highway. Take the wrong exit and you felt like you entered a post apocalyptic world. We would brave the concert, then drive back to a factory town that somehow didn't receive the same treatment.

I used to commute to SF for a year and it was shocking to me how the home to one of the wealthiest companies and residents are overwhelmed with homelessness and crimes.

The scene of downtown was something out of a dystopian movie where you see wealthy people walking by a drug addict with needles on the ground and yet everyone appears to conform that this is the norm

I'm definitely oversimplifying the problem here but intuitively shouldn't a city with high income have more money to spend on infrastructure?

Where are the taxpayers money spent on?

I only saw five turds last time I walked on Market Street. It's not like it's everywhere. No proof that they weren't from animals either.

I left when they made it illegal to be naked in public.

https://www.kqed.org/news/11613510/the-history-of-nudity-in-...

The credibility of the assertions in the article aside, most of the problems that SF is experiencing are of its own creation, so I cannot commiserate too hard with its plight. And I recently moved away, so I care less.

Every city, whether you admit it or not as part of a deliberate strategy to succeed, is building itself a reserve of advantages and points against future adversity. SF has natural bonus points for geography, weather, etc. And intangible bonus points for talent pools, etc.

SF chose to squander points over the years by letting conservative liberals prevent it from modernizing its policies and infrastructure, letting tax money be spent on ridiculous homeless-favoring policies, underinvesting in long-term improvements while diverting money to enrich union Muni drivers and city workers. Favoring people who are here already, over those who want to be here but couldn't afford it, who gladly pick up and leave from their rental properties with no attachments.

All leaving it with a fragile tax base and city services so entrenched with lazy interests that it collapsed at the pandemic's pressure.

If you want a lesson in how a city with so many advantages can sink its own ship, study SF.

most people do not know that a very significant portion of the residential population in SF is ethnic Chinese. Workers and excecutives alike travel to San Francisco each day from nearby residential areas that are not at all like the commercial streets of San Francisco. Many people there, like New Yorkers, had developed an aversion to interacting with the skid row and excess-party crowds that line the popular areas, long ago. That aversion was part of the formula on how it went so badly, in the modern chapter.

I have watched a lot of talks from the Hoover institute because I like some of the people they have on, but after awhile I noticed a certain lack of intelligence, not because they are not smart or educated, but because their ideology gets in the way Victor David Hanson is a good example.

Detroit is "motor city". It didn't fail. Everybody bought cars and moved to the suburbs. I don't know how you can blame that on the city government.

That's what I mean - they want to support their dislike if liberals by saying dumb things. Do they think we won't notice? Or is it the wealthy people who leave their money to the institute won't notice?

I agree with whoever flagged this.