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Comment by VWWHFSfQ | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco and Oakland are facing combined close to $500 million budget shortfall and are requesting a federal tax payer bailout. The second major federal bailout in eight years. Oakland has one of the highest violent crime rates in the entire country and they just cut more public safety and health jobs. I can't see how anyone can look at the situation in the Bay area and not anticipate anything other than continued decline.

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Sounds like someone needs the suburbs to subsidize them.

Oakland is already gigantic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

As of 2019, the stats show Oakland around the middle at 1,300 violent crimes per 100,000 people and San Francisco towards the bottom at around 700 per 100,000. The worst were around 2,100 violent crimes per 100,000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rat...

Puts Oakland towards the middle internationally (and domestically).

  The second major federal bailout in eight years.

No idea what you're talking about here, but hacker news sure has a gigantic hardon for Bay Area and California doomporn.

This is why one party rule is bad.

Just look at the bottom ten states for any measurable statistic people care about.

Healthcare outcomes, standard of living, GDP per Capita, poverty, educational attainment, obesity, etc.

All deep dark red.

Exactly. One party rule is bad. The failurs of the GOP to put up viable local candidates in SF and the the Democrats in deep red states are not good for the health of the country

Exactly why we need ranked choice voting.

I used to hear conservatives lament that large cities were unwinnable for Republican candidate, and these days I don't even hear that; it seems that they just accept it as a law of nature that they will be governed by Democrats. And as an example, Jacksonville, Florida just flipped that way.

And I wonder - what would Republicans offer a city? My assumption is that they'd just blow a hole in any city budget with tax cuts for the wealthy, thereby achieving defunding of city services, but that's my bias. Still it doesn't seem like anyone in a big metro is buying what they're selling to the point where the Republicans don't even seem to try selling it anymore.

> what would Republicans offer a city?

There are a lot of local policies that are in the vein of the traditional GOP politics (small govt, personal freedom, less regulation, etc.) that are very applicable to urban living but do cut against national GOP politics. If they could separate the local from the national they'd do great.

Some examples:

* Cutting land use regulations to encourage more housing development. Urban areas suffer from ridiculously high housing prices due to overburdensome regulation

* Give parents more input into how their children's education via school choice.

* Reduce red tape/bureaucracy for accomplishing things in cities like slow permitting processes and starting businesses

From what I see in the comments about San Francisco (I'm a neophyte about it, never having even visited), it does not seem like people are desirous of less regulation. It seems that a tent city/open drug market is about as unregulated as it gets. (I get that ignoring regulations is different from removing them, though the practical difference seems small). I'm also suspicious of the idea that there's some great supply of land or buildings available for cheap housing if only it was deregulated; isn't San Francisco a small place?

You're not going to find open-air downtown drug markets, public defecation and decriminalized theft in Mississippi or Arkansas. For that, you need to visit one of our progressive West Coast cities.

Those are much smaller problems than those in the comment you're replying to

That's simple whataboutism. You can always find a worse problem to deflect to.

It's not whataboutism. You implied that the deep red states have less severe social problems, which is incredibly false.

That's because Mississippi And Arkansas are too damned poor to support the homeless. They've pushed them all out to the West coast where people actually have pocket change to give them.

Can you explain how the homeless people who defecate on the streets because of a lack of facilities and shoot up drugs in parks are better off on the West Coast?

Drugs are taken and sold openly in San Francisco and LA.

This is reasonably well studied and not true. California homeless are not, in fact, largely migrants from other states.

Got a source for that?

I do.

That’s stuff you only find in cities anyway. Virtually all American cities vote Democrat. This is simply a correlation.

Why don't all American cities look in these regards like San Francisco does? They don't, so something is going on. I think there's something broken about San Francisco, and people have been suggesting that for coming up on 3 decades now:

https://www.salon.com/1999/11/03/sf/

The problem post-pandemic is common to San Francisco, Portland, Los Angeles and Seattle.

Not sure if you meant this as a counterpoint or as confirmation, but let's be clear that that ALSO doesn't sound like solidly-entrenched one-party rule is good.

I wasn't sure if the person I was responding to was expressing a sincere belief, or just one of the conservatives that love hypocritically pointing out SF's flaws. Figured with this we'll find out.

California has the highest poverty level of any state in the US under the Census Bureau's Supplemental Poverty Measure.

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

If you don't understand per-capita and why raw sums are meaningless in context of the most populous state then I don't know what to tell you.

The numbers are a percentage of people in poverty by state.

Read page 32 of your own document.

Where it says "Number and Percentage of People in Poverty by State"?

And where it shows California at 11%, fairly low on the list

11% is not the number for the Supplemental Poverty Measure. The percentage for the Supplemental Poverty Measure is under the heading SPM. It's 15.4% for California, which is the highest of any state. D.C. is at 16.5%, but D.C. is not a state.

I agree mixed government wins. I moved to Massachusetts almost 20 years ago and I don't understand why it isn't held up as an example for other states. Everyone thinks MA is deep blue, and it is on social issues. It was the first state to allow same sex marriage. It has the toughest gun law enforcement in the US (break the law and you are going to jail for 2 years) and consequently has the lowest gun death rate in the US - 80% lower than many red states!

But MA also elects Republican governors on the regular. Mitt Romney was Governor from 2002-2006. Republican Charlie Baker ran the state so well that by the end of his second term the state's "rainy day" fund hit the legal max of 15% of the state's annual budget, so last fall every taxpayer in MA got a check for 13% of their previous years state taxes! And state income taxes are not high, basically a 5% flat tax. I would argue this frequent election of people who have run businesses is what also keeps the state at the top of the list of states in per capita GDP.

It's unfortunate this is legal. It's contrary to the whole notion of anti-federalism that experiments gone wrong in one location can receive investments to continue from the federal government. I'm sure someone will rebut this by saying that the federal government bails out everyone everywhere but that is missing my point. Not every city is suffering a budget shortfall.

While I think SF should be able to function on a much leaner budget (There's so much waste and corruption in the city), this isn't a great take.

Investing in one of the most important cities in one of the most important states in the USA is in everyone's interest.

SF contributes 6.5% of California's GDP, a state that alone would rank as the world's 5th largest economy. SF's economy is higher than several other states put together [1]. Additionally, Californians pay significantly more federal taxes than they receive in return, so they are the ones subsidizing other states' budgets.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

It's not investing. The city has gotten worse in spite of a larger budget over time. The waste and corruption need a way to be corrected and budgets need to be managed; there's no incentive if bailouts have a well established path. If you want more of something, subsidize it.

Not letting one of the US's crown jewel cities with a 236B economy spiral into decay over a ~.7B shortfall is financially prudent. Not doing so would certainly cost the taxpayers more than that, so it definitely meets the literal definition of investment!

Again, I agree that there's plenty of corruption to stamp out, but letting one of the most important cities in the USA decay over a relatively meager amount of money is not the way to go.

This is a reasonable point.

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