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[1] - https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-...
It seems to me that rising crime in the western world is a general pattern. The biggest port city in my (European) country (still pretty small compared to big US cities, granted) switched to a right-wing nationalist government about a decade ago, after literal decades of unbroken social democrat rule. And gang violence has only gone up since then.
I'm not blaming the current mayor for that, because other nearby cities are suffering from the same problem, including those run by social democrats. But the policies that the right wing have been shouting would definitely work to keep crime down haven't been working here, demonstrably.
The current Democratic Vice President of the United States is a San Francisco politician.
The Democrat who has been engaging in national political media battles with the second-ranked contender for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2024 is a San Francisco politician (also, Governor of California.)
There may be some reason to see a connection between San Francisco politicians and the Democratic Party at the national level.
>The current Democratic Vice President of the United States is a San Francisco politician.
No on both counts. Nancy Pelosi has had nothing to do with San Francisco politics for the last 40 years.
“Federal politician who lives in San Francisco” != “San Francisco politician”.
If you're insinuating that progressive politics per se somehow inevitably lead to crime and urban decay, have a look north of the border.
What passes for centrist politics up here in Canada's major cities would make Berkley look like a conservative stronghold (at least in terms of economic policy... maybe we lag behind in biodynamic freegan wine co-ops). Yet Toronto and Montreal are by far the safest large cities on the continent. We absolutely have the same kinds of problems — homelessness, poverty, inequality — but our "socialist" welfare safety net and public healthcare have so far kept us out of the dystopian mess that seems to be unfolding in the US.
> but our "socialist" welfare safety net and public healthcare have so far kept us out of the dystopian mess
I've been to Vancouver a while ago and that's the first time I've seen open drug market and homeless camp taking over a city block. SF didn't feature such sights by then yet, that came later. Haven't visited since then - maybe something changed, but certainly the same dystopian mess could be found in Canada back then.
One thing to note: Toronto's police annual budget is about the same as SFPD's, even though Toronto has more than 3X as many people. In other words, SF has much worse pre-capita crime than Toronto, even though they spend 3X as much on policing per capita.
I ask because left-to-right isn't really a one-dimensional scale. California has legalized recreational weed, for instance, and that's not a thing in Germany or Scandinavia (or even the Netherlands, technically). Those countries have much nicer prison conditions, but there's also no way anyone there - from the voters to the police to the government - would tolerate the sort of crime that the justice system in SF tolerates.
In general, I suspect on many axes San Francisco/California politics are to the left of European social democracies, while being to the right on others. It'd be helpful to understand what specific ways it needs to move left to solve these problems, and why you believe that'd help. Of course you might just say "SF should be at or to the left of the Scandanavia on all axes", but I don't think that's a very substantive critique.
(I'll add, with the caveat that I suspect these are apples-to-oranges comparisons: some quick Googling suggests that the district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg - which spends more than anywhere else in Berlin - puts around 2.5EUR per resident per year towards homeless programs, whereas apparently SF spends more like $600 per person per year. I don't know what the apple-to-apple numbers are and couldn't find them at a glance, but I do have a hunch that spending in SF vastly outstripes that of anywhere in the EU, another way SF would be further to the left.)
[0]: https://healthysanfrancisco.org/ [1]: https://www.medi-cal.ca.gov/
My understanding is that the worst difficulties (bankruptcy, avoiding care, crippling premiums, large out of pocket) are in fact experienced by middle income people who don't qualify for Medicaid/Medicare. There is none of that in the Netherlands.
The things you’ve listed aren’t income inequality, they are a social safety net. Having access to healthcare doesn’t put you much closer to a billionaire in terms of wealth. Perhaps a weak social safety net is to blame, but given that SF has some of the most extensive social services of any city in the US, that also seems unlikely.
If I had the money I made in the us then I could have maybe put them in a private hospital. You’re only as free as how much money you have in your pocket, nothing else matters.
It's hard to directly compare policies when the systems are so much different. But I gather a great deal of SF criminality is due to people that are not from California and do not reside there legally. Those would not be able to live in any European country like that, they would be forced to leave. That's one example.