What if San Francisco never pulls out of its ‘doom loop’?
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L.A. pulled out of a decades-long spiral within the past 15 years (Skid Row notwithstanding), as developers took advantage of high demand and low/0% interest. Staples Center and Bottega Louie deserve a lot of the credit for that.
Cleveland did...eventually. It took decades of home-grown investment and federal tax dollars.
Washington D.C. did. Mostly. As with Cleveland, it took years, largely because Congress controls a lot of its budget and purse strings and it was convenient to use the Capitol as a punching bag.
Detroit is still in the process of pulling out of its decades-long spiral. It's no longer at rock bottom, but it's still got a long way to go.
It's hard to say whether SF is starting a doom spiral or just returning to its naturally seedy state (SF was a port city before it was a tech hub, with all of the seedy establishments that being a port city entails). Only time will tell.
It's not and he's wrong and I'm sure there's plenty of other media you could consume that would be less ridiculous
Nice try, but this isn't as big as a problem outside of SF and Oakland. Other cities have a semblance of order and while there are still people outside they are not out of control and they seem to be in a relatively normal state of mind. The main question for me is will anybody be held accountable for this at all.
The first group gets through it, finds a job or a $20 greyhound fare to somewhere they have family, or where they can afford a home on what they can earn. The second group is stuck.
Treating these as though they are a homogenous group is super pointless. For one thing, the systems in place do support the first category and make it possible for them to escape homelessness. The second group — I’ll just say this: it’s not uncommon for Hollywood celebrities, who have access to infinite money and the most people who care intensely about them to help them get into rehab, to have massive substance and MH problems, and to OD or die by suicide. If they can’t even be helped, what amount of money and skilled intervention will cure every meth addict on the SF streets plus the new ones who arrive every day? (Without violating their civil rights by forcing them to get treatment)
Is it just a matter of scale? You can stop 1 panhandler, but if you had 100 people to stop you couldnt?
If that's the case, once problems reach critical mass, is there any going back?
The bigger the city, the more political processes select for crazies. In a village of 100 people (1) more people are involved, since individual influence is felt (2) there are fewer crazies, since you can only go 2-3 std. div. out.
In a bigger city, (1) fewer people follow politics, since there's no direct influence on their lives; civics is dominated by crazies. (2) The absolute number of crazies is higher. If you have 100,000 people, just by statistics, the craziest crazies will be crazier.
Having a small number of very bad crazies can ruin civics, since they often operate outside of civic processes. If just one person is willing to tarnish your reputation, smash your windows, or send a death threat, that can have a chilling effect.
The worst cities in the US are near-100% blue or near-100% red, since there's no moderating factor.
Transient cities also tend to be worse (where a lot of the population don't expect to keep living there in five years), since no one cares about civics. SF is the sort of place people most people move out from when they decide to start a family.
SF is close to a million people, VERY blue, and that leads to extremist politics.
Note: I'm extrapolating from what I see with cities where I live, as well as accounts from SF. I don't have first-hand experience there. But I think there are a lot of reasons why SF politics might get particularly broken.
So, as of the past 5-10 years there are these really progressive district attorneys who really do not like to prosecute people. I'm not going to say who generally funds their campaigns, because I'm tired of being downvoted, but you can find out pretty easily.
Considering Detroit once held the record for patents filed, this isn’t all too far fetched. Maybe there is some type of awful natural law to be found even?
People forget what drew (and to a lesser extent, still draws, despite the valid complaints) people to California is the weather and climate, the nature, the mountains, the desert, and the ocean. It’s objectively one of the most gorgeous and geographically diverse states (and I don’t say that lightly, as a Texan myself).
There will be a devastating earthquake here sooner than later, but after what I imagine will be a particularly devastating 3-5 year initial adjustment period where certain segments of the media will be jumping at the bit to say “California is dead” (remember NYC and Covid?), I have no doubt people will be flocking back in greater numbers than left, likely looking to buy at a significant discount before prices inevitably shoot up again.
Because, despite it all— People want to live here.
Look at Santa Barbara, for example— it has almost no corporate presence yet some of the most expensive real estate in the state and nation. Yet it’s not a summer destination like the Hamptons, but a year-round thriving city. That’s not an accident, but because Santa Barbara is situated on one of the most beautiful coastal inlets on one of the world’s most desirable coasts, georgraphically and weather-wise.
Nowadays, whenever I see on TV streets lined with dirty slush piles and gray skies above, I think with a shudder, "Thank God I don't live in that anymore."
Maybe. You've got two examples so far. Can you go even further back? Which cities were industrial hubs prior to Silicon Valley and Detroit, and what became of them?
Mill towns from the industrial revolution come to mind. Factories and boarding houses created such thriving industry that towns literally spawned around them, but within decades they transformed into abandoned buildings in towns devoid of any economic opportunity.
(I have little experience of Detroit proper, but I assume the weather is sufficiently similar to Lansing and A2)
When you say, "if the weather is that important to you" you're speaking of something you know not of.
The wealthy and powerful that created this problem would like to solve it while simultaneously continuing to exasperate it. It doesn’t take a genius to see that this will never work. At best, a temporary, politically palatable status quo can be achieved which is basically what US cities which are considered functional have.
San Francisco may recover or it might become the next Detroit. To some extent it doesn’t matter because without fundamental systemic changes it’s only a matter of time before the next city suffers the same fate.
[^1^] the latest set piece I saw with this was fascinating, two people victim of same crime, drawing two opposite conclusions from lack of interest in taking a report, both only from injecting ideology
Not only are a very vocal progressive lot of people in socal being soft on crime, they're protecting the unhoused rights to commit crime. Ostensibly this is human rights in action, but I believe it's helping the well off feel better about nimbyism by telling others how dare they kick homeless out of their neighborhoods (because dear God they may come here)
Take a look, those are some terrible crime stats.
An ultra-hyper-mega-doomloop-of-death?
Hell in the 90s the violent crime rate routinely topped 1,800 per 100k. Today it is 1/3rd that.
I remember San Francisco in the 90s. Today's San Francisco is Disneyland compared to then.
My theory is that we are all suffering from collective cultural amnesia and have forgotten that the world existed prior to 2019 and thus have forgotten that while things go up and down year-to-year they have been getting better on the whole for decades.