Americans clearly have very low expectations for their standard of living.
As demonstrated by the amount of insane 'actually the murder rate isn't that bad' comments in this thread.
As demonstrated by the amount of insane 'actually the murder rate isn't that bad' comments in this thread.
I think you are violating this guideline.
One SF startup I saw had executives mostly working remotely in Sonoma county (wine country) or Marin County (mountains and beautiful views) or Atherton. HR declared themselves remote also. For office visits, many Uber-ed in or drove in, conveniently avoiding all the chaos outside.
The median listing home price in Atherton, CA was $10.4M in February 2023. Unfortunately, it is easy to ignore the other half when decision-makers in power living in some of the most beautiful places on earth.
Low-level workers were the ones trekking into SF daily and dealing with reality.
(That is, if you think now's bad, you should've seen it then.)
A city where gangs are killing each other off but never bother normal people will feel much safer than a city where a comparatively few people are killed but it’s from the greater pool of everyone.
That's simply not borne out by the statistics. Long term trends have been steadily down, and even in the short term:
2017-2022 [0]:
* ~9,000 fewer incidents in total.
* Rape halved.
* Robberies 2/3 of 2017.
* Burglary/Motor vehicle theft increased but Larceny theft decreased by more than both combined.
Q1 2017/2023 [0]:
* ~4,000 fewer incidents in total.
* Only Motor vehicle theft and Arson were slightly up on 2017 levels.
Q1 2022/2023 [0]:
* Total incidents down by 9.7%
* Burglary down by 11.2%
* Motor vehicle theft down by 8.5%
* Larceny theft down by 12%
* Assaults did increase by 2.2%
* As did Robberies by 13.6%
[0] https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...
Much like other commenters in the thread, I’ve had a man threaten to “cut my mother effing throat” in broad daylight in front of a dozen bystanders. Thankfully, he turned tail once I drew a handgun and no one died that day. Police showed up 45 minutes later and were of no use, so why bother reported the three times I’ve had guns pointed at me in traffic since 2020?
When police response times are at or above the hour mark and the best you’ll get is an “oh that sucks man, need a report for insurance?” people stop reporting crimes. Now the politicians get to pretend crime is “better”.
Putting aside arguments of social responsibility and taking a purely self-interested perspective, it's typically cheaper and more effective to provide for these people than it is to lock them up. When there's nothing to take away, enforcement doesn't provide any deterrent and frequently leads to an escalation of behaviour instead.
It really doesn't seem that complicated to me. Countries that have affordable housing and jobs don't have this problem.
The link between poverty and homelessness, as discussed elsewhere in the thread, is mostly due to policy choices local to SF and California as a whole that greatly disincentivize building more homes to keep up with demand. I come from a country where (with some exaggeration) it feels like an urban park might have higher population density than San Francisco. There's no reason why one of the most desired markets in the world should be that way, other than through artificially restricting the supply.
> Countries that have affordable housing and jobs don't have this problem.
Very few countries, whether housing is cheap or expensive and whether jobs pay well or poorly, have this problem of people strung about, high in public, engaging in antisocial behavior. Most countries don't turn a blind eye towards drug addiction from a personal liberty standpoint, which I think is quite a uniquely American concept. Most will imprison people for possessing or consuming any and punish with death those who traffic. There is broad cultural acceptance of behaving in this way.
Poverty exists, which leads to homelessness.
This is not because of "local SF and California" policies. Homelessness is a problem in nearly every North American cities, from Vancouver to New York. Large cities in Europe also struggle with it, albeit to a lesser degree.
I'm not against building more housing, but no matter how much you build, not everyone will be able to afford it.
And I don't know where you got the idea that the USA is "turning a blind eye" to these problems. There's no blind eye. The US has the highest carceral population in the world. Cities already spent hundreds of millions on police. The problems are not being ignored, the solutions attempted just don't work.
It's an order of magnitude higher in San Francisco at ~2.5% of the population compared to New York at ~0.8% and Vancouver at ~0.3%. SF isn't the only city with homeless people, but it likely has it to the highest degree, with other undesirable traits like open-air drug use, public defecation, and property crimes.
> no matter how much you build, not everyone will be able to afford it.
That's true, but we should still build more so that more people will be able to afford housing. No policy choice will completely eliminate poverty or homelessness nor reduce it for free without opportunity cost, so as a society we have to make prudent tradeoffs that help the most people for the least cost.
> Poverty exists, which leads to homelessness.
Are you suggesting that we're capable of totally eliminating poverty?
There's no question there's a huge homeless problem in SF but the number of murders there are really low compared to a southern or midwestern city.
Even being rich in US doesn't protect anyone from being murdered randomly...