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SF is also quite close to the national homicide average while being denser than most cities.
City boundaries within a metropolitan area are often quite arbitrary. A murder can happen on one block and be in the city and two blocks over and outside the city.
A good example is Detroit. Greater metro Detroit has 4.3M people, but the city of Detroit has 632,000.
And the city of Detroit is where most of the poverty is and most murders happen, within the larger metro area, so you end up with super high murder rates for Detroit and super low murder rates for the surrounding area.
But in the grand scheme of things it’s just one big metro area.
The largest cities in big conservative states are where all the Democrats in those states live. And the rural areas in all the big liberal states are where all the Republicans in those states live. Democrats by and large run the cities.
Economically speaking they also embrace a basically libertarian style of free market capitalism (in respect to everything except land use), which is another reason they’re not a great comparison.
SF is a single party city defunding the police. While they parallel Singapore in the single party system they are close to the opposite in nearly all other aspects and it shows. Both places are awash in money but one of them only seems to get worse the more money pours in. If I had to choose between the political system of San Francisco and that of Singapore I would choose the latter.
It is a good thing I do not have to choose though since I don't like either of those systems, it is just that watching the slow-motion train wreck of San Francisco (among others) being run into the ground by self-proclaimed saviours of humanity is so disheartening, especially seen in the light of the claims made by those who push these policies. They must know that they are destroying the place, they can not be so blindsided by ideology. This only leaves the possibility that they are so hell-bent on staying in power that they will do anything it takes, no matter the consequences. How they can rhyme this with their self-proclaimed virtuous goals is beyond me.
As to "fixing the problem" I'd say that when your house is on fire you first take to the firehose before you chastise your children for playing with matches.
Chasing the poor out of the city by sending armed thugs after them, redistributing wealth from poor to rich by ratcheting up rents, keeping rich to poor wealth redistribution to a minimum, and importing more yuppies until gentrification is completed. At some point the poor will be displaced thus reducing wealth inequality in the city thus reducing crime.
Stop criminalizing poverty and try actually solving the problem.
In other words, liberals have the uncomfortable task of ruling the richest cities with the largest wealth and income inequality, in such a way that is both progressive and economically liberal. So you end up not regulating the real-estate industry or providing livable wages, but you are also not bulldozing the tent cities or investing in larger prisons to more effectively mass-incarcerate poor people crimes.
Are we talking about the same city? SF real estate is super regulated, it’s my go to example of real estate regulations taken to an insane level. This is the city where any citizen can appeal any project for just a few hundred dollars, and basically every medium-large project is a negotiation with the SF board of supervisors (and often random non profits too, just look at what happened to 469 Stevenson St).