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Comment by pfannkuchen | Hacker News Reader

Sorry if my point wasn’t clear. I am saying that conceptually some of the other problems people are discussing aren’t strictly caused by a housing shortage. The path we took from a prior “okay” state to the current “not okay” state may have been rooted in a lack of housing, but not all paths back to an “okay” state necessarily require that we solve the housing problem.

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.

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Seems unfair to call a suggestion to fix the main cause of many problems “mental gymnastics”. Raising police salaries and lowering housing costs are both about making things more affordable, just from different ends.

That isn’t what I was calling mental gymnastics.

> 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.

The starting salary for an SF police officer is over 100k. At some point money isn't the only issue.

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.

100k while living in SF is peanuts. Paying, say, 500k per officer and increasing the number of police would be tremendously easier and cheaper than fixing the systemic housing problem. If we still can’t find good candidates at 500k I would be very surprised. Also need to follow through on prosecution of course. And, again, not saying this is necessarily what should be done, just commenting on whether it is physically possible to make SF nice if we decided to ignore progressivism completely.

So currently 9% of the city budget is spent on police and you are suggesting we increase that to 40%?

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!

Police departments have a lot of costs other than salary. It appears that only 3% of the budget goes towards salaries. So, yes, I don’t think it’s completely unreasonable to massively increase that in order to curtail street pooping. I don’t think anyone has really tried to buy us out of the homelessness problem. The issue is pretty clearly a lack of will, not a lack of resources.

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