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Comment by atarian | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, SF hasn't fully recovered from the pandemic and the Chesa Boudin era. Apart from empty office buildings due to WFH, a lot of major retail stores have also exited downtown (CVS, Walgreens, Uniqlo, etc). It's going to be a long time before SF goes back to the way things were before.

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Weird to pin this on Boudin; as someone who's lived in SF for 12 years, I can assure you he was more or less irrelevant to most of the problems we have.

CVS and Walgreens have been planning to close stores for years now; they're making big noises about shoplifting etc. in order to deflect blame.

Things have definitely gotten worse over the last decade.

Crime used to be less brazen and more limited to certain areas.

Chesa Boudin was responsible for the poor urban planning, poor transit, horrific traffic, high costs of all services, and insane rents for shitty apartments, which were the main factors that made SF unlivable?

I didn't realize a DA had the power to pull so many strings behind so many disparate things that made the city a horrible place to live.

Or that under his successor, any of the metrics that a DA is supposed to be responsible for are actually turning around. Are they? They haven't up here in Seattle, despite everyone insisting that a tough-on-crime DA will solve anything...

It's almost like you deliberately misinterpreted what I said so you could make some vague point about Seattle which has nothing to do with SF.

Looks to me more like they took issue with you pinning a lot of SF's long-standing problems on a single DA who served only a couple of years

How exactly are we supposed to interpret the oft-repeated, but at face-value, nonsensical meme that SF was actually fine, until Chesa ruined it?

All of the city's serious problems were around long before him, and will persist in the exact same way, now that he's gone, much like they have in Seattle. You're getting needlessly political about your single pet issue.

Because all of that was part of SF's charm as well. The crime is not. It's community destroying.

Chesa certainly didn't invent the problems, prop 47 and other nonsense is typically Californian, and SF "deserved" Chesa in a way for harboring stupid anti-enforcement policies elsewhere, but he took to the job with gusto and enjoyed blaming things on racists and conservatives when people complained. He spent a year yammering on about how he was fighting anti-asian hate and then a largely asian coalition got rid of him - showing how little even the target of his "benevolence" thought of him.

He specifically took the position of DA because he planned not to do the job. He was "looking for alternatives to prison and incarceration" which is not the job of a DA. His job was to prosecute criminals and let others decide on policies.

Yeah, he shit on SF.

Absolutely incredible levels of homelessness, tent cities, shit on the sidewalks, tons of petty crime (Most metrics of which peaked in the 2016-2019 period, by the way, before Chesa), and open-air drug use and overdoses, in addition to all of the problems already mentioned were 'always part of SF's charm'?

The goalposts sure have shifted over the past decade, now that there's a particular political creature that can be blamed...

The reality is that he wasn't the cause, and his successor won't be the solution, but he has been an excellent lightning rod for the frustration everyone feels.

> vkou: "poor urban planning, poor transit, horrific traffic, high costs of all services, and insane rents for shitty apartments"

> also vkou: You mean "totally different stuff"

No. The first things, not the second set of things. Do you feel a need to be this way?

> The goalposts sure have shifted over the past decade

Yeah, that stuff was charming when that's all it was. It was old and crowded and expensive because nothing was modern or planned to be upgraded. How quaint.

> The reality is that [Chesa] wasn't the cause

Yeah, like I already said. But he doubled down on it long after it was clearly stupid and killing people, and he did it ideologically which meant he'd never see facts even if his nose was rubbed in them, and that ideology was based on missing his parents as a child because they were in prison for murdering police and security in an armored car heist. It combines to make him the spokesman for toxic progressivism.

> tons of petty crime (Most metrics of which peaked in the 2016-2019 period, by the way

Everyone in SF knows that's because they don't take reports of petty crime now. They literally don't even log calls - the same way poop on the street became.

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