A lot of "progressive" policies that people are worried about have little actual impact, especially when the price of housing is completely ridiculous and creates so many problems on its own.
It all comes back to housing. If you have a desirable place, people want to live there, and at some point if you don't keep up with growth then your city starts to lose the really important people that kept it running (nurses, teachers, police officers, etc).
It's not like SF almost kept up with growth... They didn't try and fell so far behind in a deliberate attempt to keep a status quo, which completely led to the current disaster.
Asserting that e.g. people pooping in the street is caused strictly by expensive housing would require some mental gymnastics IMO, there are simpler explanations and simpler ways out, without blocking on solving the expensive housing problem. If for example we ended up with a nice peaceful city but the police budget was really really high (so they could live locally), that would be a much less hairy problem than we have today I think. Nice peaceful city tends to generate more tax revenue also.
> Asserting that e.g. people pooping in the street is caused strictly by expensive housing would require some mental gymnastics
Key word being strictly, i.e. expensive housing is the cause of street pooping, and there is ultimately no other way to prevent street pooping other than to reduce housing costs broadly.
Raising police salaries is obviously a much easier problem to solve, right? It is something that is already under government control and it can be modeled using a simple spreadsheet. Housing cost on the other hand is not really possible to model accurately, the system is too complex and has too many inputs.
Also like any other job, the best way to get good police officers is to have lots of competition. If you are desperate for staffing, you aren't getting the best.
That is a better solution than building more housing?
A community is a social construct, you have to keep a lot of things in balance for it to work properly. The most important part is giving people a roof over their heads. Overpaying for police (or teachers, or nurses, etc) isn't going to save the day. It's the same reason you can't buy your way out of the homelessness problem!
That would mean if they suddenly came into power in SF they would fight to keep the doom loop stabilized.
SF is essentially a single party system. Everyone has to run Democrat, even the conservatives. It continues down to liberal hypocrisy in the citizenry, which mirrors the conservative hypocrisy. Every abortion is immoral except the one I need, everyone deserves affordable housing except in my neighborhood.
The end-to-end government in SF, which would include the state and federal, is not meaningfully progressive. It’s extremely progressive on visible, local issues. But it’s to such a point it’s absurd. This is how you end up with a very conservative tax system while petty property crime is de facto legal.