San Francisco: An Elitist Bubble Ignoring a Crime Epidemic? | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco: An Elitist Bubble Ignoring a Crime Epidemic?

dustin-godevais.medium.com

121 pointsnlsvb214 comments

You're seeing this everywhere. Chicago, Philadelphia, and so on - although the problem may be worse in San Francisco. Cities are struggling in the post-pandemic era as the rising cost of living due to inflation in food and other essentials has driven more criminal activity, mostly around theft. This is happening at the same time where many cities are also trying more progressive, reform-based approaches to policing and charging criminals.

If the only risk for stealing the author's scooter will be I get briefly detained and released the next day to await my trial, what's stopping me from stealing a different scooter every night? Even if I get caught 50% of the time, I'm making money the other 50% of the nights.

A lot of city residents need to come to terms with the fact that some of these progressive criminal justice reforms may need to be adjusted a bit, given that we now have years of evidence of their effects. Otherwise, you're going to drive every law abiding, tax paying citizen out of these cities.

And/or:

We need to make affordable housing available, make a car-optional lifestyle more viable, etc.

"The beatings shall continue until morale improves" isn't an effective approach to anything, especially since if the victims of such hostile policies actually rise to the occasion, they are typically not rewarded by having their lives work better. Instead, policymakers go "Oh, beatings worked! Let's do more of that!"

(Hard eyeroll)

> The beatings shall continue until morale improves

Sure beatings don't improve morale, but since we're not talking about improving the morale of thieves, but rather about making theft a losing proposition, I think the point is not as invalid as you frame it. Unless your point is that there's no advantage in creating consequences for crime because you don't think negative consequences have a deterring effect, which is not something I agree with. Surely you have been put in time-out by your parents or gotten a toy taken away which illustrated this point for you.

We're talking about people looking at $1,500+/month rent with multiple roommates... if they're lucky, for the rest of their lives. That is not offering people a future. There is no viable path to prosperity. There is no path for lower-class folks to achieve a private residence with a spouse. When these people increase productivity, rents will capture that wealth.

Why should people play by these rules? A tiny condo in SF is over 10x median income before taxes... and we have a very high median income.

The entire system of intentional real estate shortages we have is effectively a cartel. It's a zero-sum game, which is extractive by nature. We need housing for lower-middle class people. We need housing for poor people. We need people to have a future to lose. We need people to have a path to build wealth. Right now, in most liberal urban areas, we just don't. We make up every excuse in the book to preserve the faux-utopia for the incumbent homeowners who set up the system decades ago and have all literally become multi-millionaires from it.

I don't disagree that SF has a major problem with housing affordability. I also think that problem was self-imposed by the use of restrictive zoning and ordinances that made it nearly impossible to construct high-density housing of any kind. (Look at Bob Tillman's struggle as one example.) I also think this conduct by state and local governments are hypocritical, odious, and disgusting.

That said, I also don't see how these things can justify one's decisions to steal from others in the same place. At the very least, you're still free to go to another location where the rent isn't $1,500+/month with multiple roommates. There are honest ways to exercise your disgust and unwillingness to stay within the confines of a system that's stacked against you. Within a few hundred miles of SF are tons of options.

>That said, I also don't see how these things can justify one's decisions to steal from others in the same place. At the very least

When the system is literally rigged against you with things like... and I can't stress this enough... literal inherited tax advantages. Again, I think it's hard to argue that the legal system isn't bordering on tyranny.

Thankfully we can already see changes moving forward at the state level, but I see the increases in property crime as something akin to the beginnings of a type of political revolution.

I live in this area. I am quite well off. It's still quite difficult for even me to find or afford a place to live.

>Within a few hundred miles of SF are tons of options.

This is just ridiculous. There aren't any serious economic opportunities 100 miles from SF. If someone is trying to make their way through life as dishwasher, expecting them to travel 200 miles per day is an absurdity.

I want to be very clear here, I'm not a bleeding heart. I'm just saying, we look back at the great depression, we see hoovervilles. We are living through an extended post-depression era where we never had a New Deal or WW2 to give jobs and homes to the less well off. Instead they turned to opiates and meth, and this is what happens.

There are honest ways to exercise your disgust and unwillingness to stay within the confines of a system that's stacked against you. Within a few hundred miles of SF are tons of options.

If you are homeless and completely destitute, the big cities are where you can find enough soup kitchens to survive.

SF is already the second most dense city in the USA. Sure making SF as dense as Manhattan will make SF as cheap as Manhattan, but that be progress?

Increasing supply only works if demand is fixed. But...what if increasing supply only induces more demand? Tokyo is the only city doing well in this category, since they have a lull in demand due to demographics.

Not sure if you either remember being a kid and/or have kids of your own, but negative consequences are almost always inferior to positive consequences, or simple reframing. That doesn't mean there should be no negative consequences ever, life is hardly so black and white. But a discipline system built primarily on negative consequences has troubling relationship costs that only become obvious much later down the line.

Parenting via negative consequences is actually very similar to industrial externalities. Sure, there are results right now, but the cost of those results will devastate the environment 10, 20, 100 years from now.

> Surely you have been put in time-out by your parents or gotten a toy taken away which illustrated this point for you.

Your parents also put a roof over your head, feed you and hopefully provide a positive environment that fosters growth. The government is 100% punishment, even the support it gives gets fed into structurally unequal feedback loops. Like WIC cards given to people who can only spend them at food deserts.

Notice I am not advocating for a complete reversal of these reform-based approaches - I said they need to be adjusted a bit. It is unlikely anything is done 100% correctly on the first attempt, and we are seeing firsthand that there needs to be some further disincentive for so brazenly committing crimes of theft in these areas

It's so weird to me how Oregon, for example, tried to adopt Portugals policies on drugs, but seemingly stopped reading at "legalize" and didn't implement anything like mandatory rehab if it's found you need it.

Notice how I opened with "And/or".

Interesting how you're characterizing enforcement of property crime as "beatings", and not stealing things as "morale".

The OP assumes people are stealing to alleviate financial duress caused by inflation. If that's accurate, then giving people relief in a way that doesn't encourage them to intentionally be failures and doesn't make it someone else's responsibility to pay for their needs is the optimal solution.

Stealing alleviates one's personal duress at the expense of someone else's. If they instead worked a real job, they would at least be providing at $18/hr, SF's minimum wage, of services to their community.

SF already spent over a billion dollars on housing alone. People should ensure that is prudently spent rather than asking for even more.

Years ago, I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. At that time, working a full-time minimum wage job wouldn't cover rent in the cheapest dive I could find listed for San Francisco. At that time, a room in an SRO was like a thousand dollars a month in SF.

I've said many time that I believe California is the dumping ground for homeless people across the nation. California has something like 12 percent of the US population and 25 percent of the US homeless population and a high percentage of chronically homeless.

I was responding to a comment that opens with You're seeing this everywhere. Chicago, Philadelphia, and so on - although the problem may be worse in San Francisco.

The comment wasn't about San Francisco per se and my reply was not about San Francisco per se.

The nation as a whole needs to address certain things. San Francisco likely cannot solve this alone, no matter how draconian they are willing to be.

People go there for the weather, among other things. That's not a factor policy can resolve.

> make a car-optional lifestyle more viable

You are more optimistic than I am. I’m 40, have never driven a car, and grew up in a very rural part of the country, went to college in the suburbs, and now live in a pretty urban area.

A lot of people say they want a car-optional lifestyle, but most really really don’t. If you make a car-optional lifestyle more viable, the vast majority of people will make up a new excuse for why it won’t for them. “I have to carry… The kids need to… My job is… It takes too long…”

The long term strategies you suggest almost certainly are the long-term answer. But that's just it, those solutions may take years. San Francisco may not last that long.

Yeah, let's put off trying to implement actual ("long-term") solutions because we are in a crisis. Then make new excuses next year for how we still can't afford to think long-term because our problems are so bad right now.

The trouble is that they’ve been putting off long-term solutions for a very long time, at least 30 years.

The best time to plant a tree was yesterday. The second best time is today.

Right, because all these brazen thieves have a right to do that because housing is expensive.

No. They don't have any such right.

But if you design a world where it's more punishing to play by the rules than to break them, some people will break them.

That's just reality.

Thus, punishing breakage of the rules more severely would lead to fewer people breaking the rules. As per your reasoning, to reduce crime we have to make breaking the rules more punishing than abiding by them.

If you go far enough down that path, you get a world where people break them anyway and get better at covering up and more people look the other way.

Prohibition did not put a stop to people drinking. It just helped make organized crime rich and powerful as ordinary people continued to drink, didn't want to die from bathtub gin being poisonous and crime lords were the only reliable source of safe alcohol.

Prohibition created a black market, off of which criminals stood to profit. By comparison, locking people up who break into cars or serially shoplift does not create a black market.

And on a pedantic note, during prohibition drinking dropped to about 30% of it's pre-prohibition levels. Even after the repeal of prohibition was around 60-70% of pre-prohibition levels [1].

1. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w3675/w3675...

The world currently has some serious problems that aren't going to be fixed by punishing people hardest hit by that fact. White collar criminals often hurt more people and to a greater degree and tend to be coddled in comparison.

There is an element of classism here to which I object. I'm well aware some people just like hurting others and will do so on any excuse.

I did say "and/or" and every single reply here sounds like no one heard that, as if I started my comment with something like "You meanie face! Instead of punishing people who are clearly victims of the system, we should help them!"

That framing doesn't exist and I think it's a waste of my time to continue to engage people who seem to be misreading my initial comment.

Thank you for the pedantic note. I didn't previously know that. (It doesn't impact my point, for the record.)

Buying alcohol illegally didn't cause your neighbor hundreds of dollars in property damage, unless you count drunk driving.

They prohibited alcohol on the theory that men would stop beating their wives.

Furthermore, giving enormous amounts of money and power to organized crime had knock-on effects, none of which were good.

> We need to make affordable housing available, make a car-optional lifestyle more viable, etc.

Yes, but that won't solve all our problems. We have to distribute out the hot places to live, we can never make enough affordable housing if everyone wants to live in a few select cities.

Having lived in Europe, I don't thing they have figured it out either (except for the car-optional lifestyle).

If you solved all our problems, they would magically be replaced by new ones.

"Oh, I'm so bored. It is a tragedy!"

"My orgasms aren't as fantastic as porn movies imply everyone else has. It's not fair! Whatever shall I do?"

Etc.

But, I mean, some kinds of problems are better to have than others.

> We need to make affordable housing available, make a car-optional lifestyle more viable, etc.

> "My orgasms aren't as fantastic as porn movies imply everyone else has. It's not fair! Whatever shall I do?"

Ok, you are self reflective. What next?

Nope.

My point is I'm not trying to solve all of our problems and framing it like I am is as ridiculous as some rando on the internet accusing me of not enjoying sex as some kind of bizarre cheap shot.

Unless that is a shaggy dog, then I don't get what it is doing in your comment.

Yes, affordable housing, we need it. No, no one has a clue on how to achieve it (except maybe stop having children like in Japan or maybe become a city state like Singapore and have the government sell to everyone in the middle class an affordable flat).

I have a clue on how to achieve it. But no one is listening to me.

Possibly because I'm a woman and everyone thinks I'm only good for sex and will jump on any chance to comment on sex at me while shooting down or ignoring everything else I say much of the time.

And don't claim it's because I brought it up. The expectation that men can comment on sex and women can't without inviting social nonsense is a sexist assumption.

I've studied housing issues. I blog about housing issues. Etc.

I think I'm done here. This entire conversation has been a profound waste of my time today.

I had no idea about your gender, nor did I think about what your gender might be while I was replying to your comment. That's why I thought why those comments were just distractions in the conversation. I don't see how gender should have been relevant in this conversation at all, and I still see the comment as a shaggy dog.

But, ya, I also agree that this is conversation is a waste of time.

> You're seeing this everywhere. Chicago, Philadelphia

From what I have seen (as someone who frequents and pays attention to American cities) making this comparison is unfair to both SF and the other cities in the comparison. It's not like "crime is kinda up and SF is leading the pack", it's more like "crime is kinda up and - holy shit SF is off the charts".

The problem is so much more acute in SF, and it needs to be singled out in order to get it fixed. The "Oh this is happening in all cities" is both false and also hand waves away the problem in SF specifically.

That is fair - I've only seen other cities firsthand since the pandemic, not SF.

The Tenderloin in SF was a worst in class skid row area pre-pandemic; post-pandemic it is a full blown open air drug market zone, ala Hamsterdam from The Wire.

Hamsterdam in the Wire seemed kinda organized and civil

I'm currently rewatching it and no it didn't - there are several scenes where the cop who started it experiences how awful it has become for the people who live near the area. The other corners improved because nobody was selling drugs on them, but hamsterdam itself was a complete shitshow. Don't you remember when bubbles was walking around at night and even he was horrified by what he saw?

Also, for anyone reading this who has not seen the show - watch it. I know it's fiction but it does such a good job of showing how complex all these problems and their solutions are.

I don't recall this and should definitely rewatch it. I haven't seen it since 2009, so I probably forgot a lot.

Yea that's true, it's not a great comparison. I just meant in the sense that it's a de-facto open air drug market/use zone.

> as the rising cost of living due to inflation in food and other essentials has driven more criminal activity

This is a big assumption. Do you have anything that backs this up? I'd be incredibly surprised if the FED jacked up interest rates, the Federal government cut expenditures or increased taxes to curb inflation we'd see a large fall in crime.

What if we built a ton of free and low-cost housing, created a public healthcare system and made it easier for struggling people to get welfare assistance for staples like food and clothing?

> What if we built a ton of free and low-cost housing?

Lets imagine homeless people are 3x more likely to commit a crime than the housed. Currently 1 in 800 people are homeless. If you eliminated the homelessness problem you'd end up with less than an even 1% reduction in crime.

> Created a public healthcare system?

Most crime is committed by young people who have very limited healthcare needs.

> made it easier for struggling people to get welfare assistance for staples like food and clothing

I was homeless for a while, and even among the homeless most could eat and were clothed. Such a small % of the population in the U.S. doesn't haven't enough food or clothing that making sure they did couldn't possible drive much of a reduction in crime.

Those might all be nice things for a society to provide, but it isn't going to reduce the crime rate.

> Those might all be nice things for a society to provide, but it isn't going to reduce the crime rate.

Sure, because this whole conversation very intentionally ignores the biggest drivers of the crime rate. Most crime is committed by people the “law and order” crowd has no interest in going after. If we really want to make a dent in the crime rate, we should tackle things like wage theft and police misconduct and civil asset forfeiture.

Wait — that last one’s not actually a crime, because crime is socially constructed and we’ve decided that stealing is okay if the right people do it. The entire point of this “crime wave” project is to find ways to criminalize people we as a society don’t like.

I'd also like to see some stats on drug abuse and how that relates to crime and homelessness. It anecdotally seems that here in Portland most problematic homeless and criminals are addicted to meth or fentanyl. I know the war on drugs was a disaster and am a great fan of Portugal's approach, but fentanyl and the new meth seem to be a new kind of problem.

> A lot of city residents need to come to terms with the fact that some of these progressive criminal justice reforms may need to be adjusted a bit, given that we now have years of evidence of their effects.

Or we need progressive economic reforms to go with them.

You can avoid property crime two ways:

1. Massive police power that brutally punishes anyone who does it so that the incentives are always against it.

2. Create an economic environment where acquiring sufficient resources through legitimate means is easier and more rewarding than through crime.

For the past 50 years, the US has gotten worse and worse at #2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite...). We could turn the country into a police state and go all in on #1.

But a much better world to live in is one where we focus on fixing #2.

The goal of "crime wave" rhetoric is #1. You can tell because the people pushing it ignore far costlier crimes such as wage theft that tend to be committed by people whom they don't want to punish.

Heck, for the past decade or so, police themselves have stolen at least as much via civil asset forfeiture than has been taken in burglaries [1]. Yet the "law and order" solution is to hand them more power.

[1] https://boingboing.net/2020/12/21/us-police-have-stolen-68-b...

A bit of #1 helps with #2. You just need enough to nudge the cost/ benefit so crime isn't perceived to pay (or if it does pay, that it isn't perceived to be worth the risk).

> This is happening at the same time where many cities are also trying more progressive, reform-based approaches to policing and charging criminals.

In case it needs to be said: the alternative to releasing people before their trial is indefinite detention (indefinite because the courts cannot guarantee that the trial begins immediately after arrest). A free society doesn't lock people up indefinitely without trial, even if all evidence points to them being a petty thief.

To a first approximation, people (especially indigent people) don't steal things for "kicks." Eliminate the cause of the stealing, and you eliminate the crime. Fail to eliminate the cause, and you the worst of both worlds: crime and indefinite detention.

> You're seeing this everywhere. Chicago, Philadelphia, and so on - although the problem may be worse in San Francisco

I don't think this is true at all? Where are you getting this statistic?

San Francisco (and a few other west coast cities) are the only ones in the country I've been to that feel _dramatically_ worse with each passing year.

Feelings are influenced by political media coverage. Let's see data. Maybe it's true, but I'm not advocating for policy change based on how one person feels.

https://www.axios.com/local/philadelphia/2023/03/28/philadel...

Philly violent crime is down against last year but still ranks in recent highs

Philly is a literally a city of zombies that will stab you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl0fDm7HSQ0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi1Kf-1qd6Y

Kensington is hardly an example of the city, it was a mess before the pandemic. Drug epidemic is bad but that's all cherry picked, dude even said it https://youtu.be/nl0fDm7HSQ0?t=169 "one block is clean, the next isn't"

As someone who lives in Olde Kensington, that means half the blocks are bad. There are drug addicts, stick up kids, and insane people wandering every block throughout most of the city. The fact that I have to walk a few blocks to see 1000 zombies pass by doesn't mean it's not a problem that affects me. Go onto any of the main thoroughfares in Philly, even in upscale center city, and you'll see lots of addicts.

It is not overblown, if anything it's underplayed. Those videos don't capture the scale. It's like an entire stadium of addicts on Kensington Ave every day. And that many again wandering throughout the city and on the trains.

I live in Philly too been here ~10+ years at this point. Not in Kensington though

>There are drug addicts, stick up kids, and insane people wandering every block throughout most of the city

Simply not true. Common its not that bad. Does it happen? Yes. Pervasive and constant through the city? No.

It is overblown in the sense that the rest of the city does not look like that, or present the same risk.

I was downtown for 5 minutes around 19th and Market the other day, waiting at a truck for some halal food, and saw both the notorious screaming woman (who releases a bloodcurdling scream every 30 seconds or so that can be heard for blocks around) and a woman who had painted herself in her own feces.

At every major intersection near me there are 1 to 5 heroin addicts asking for money from cars passing by on a daily basis. Go drive down Delaware Ave. Drive up Aramingo. Drive up Market. Drive up University Ave. Drive up Girard. You'll see them on every major street, right now. I'm a few blocks away form the Girard L stop and another methadone clinic. In either direction on Girard, I'll see not only half a dozen wandering addicts at any given time, but a group of 20-30 at Girard and Front is there basically all day every day, another dozen hang out by the clinic at 8th, there's usually more intermittently around the health clinic on Girard. To get to these gathering points, they naturally walk through other residential areas. I find the occasional addict passed out on bench-like structures throughout my neighborhood on a regular basis.

I walked with some friends to dinner last night (about a 10 minute walk on Girard and in Nolibs) and we saw multiple heroin addicts and someone especially eccentric camping outside the restaurant we went to. I consider multiple addicts and insane people on any short walk through any major thoroughfare to be a pervasive problem.

My experience with Philadelphia since the pandemic is that its public transit is now riddled with crime and heroin users, whereas before that was not the case

Definitely have been seeing this in Portland for a while now. The interesting effect is that it seems to be moving people who were quite progressive in the "time to get tough on crime" direction, ie. to the right. That's natural, I suppose, what I find interesting is the effect it's starting to have on local politics. I think we could see some rather large swings to the right at least in terms of policing and getting a DA that's going to actually prosecute people who commit property crimes.

Portland was the poster-child for giving people 2nd and 3rd chances and "We just need to empathize with their situation." Well, people are done with empathizing with other people essentially camping in their front yard, using drugs, and stealing everything that isn't nailed down.

It's rare that cops anywhere are motivated to track down stolen skis, bicycles and similar objects. See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pee-wee%27s_Big_Adventure

"You're seeing this everywhere. Chicago, Philadelphia, and so on - although the problem may be worse in San Francisco." I'm not sure about that. There were 53 shootings in Chicago last weekend alone.

It's an apples to oranges comparison - those cities may have worse problems with violent crime, but SF's issues with property/petty crime and drug use are off the charts.

You won't get "briefly detained and released the next day" if you're caught doing the same thing every other night. And the sentence you receive in the end will be far more severe than if you only committed the one initial offense. Penalties and fines will likely erase any money you made on other nights. And oh maybe an investigation is opened to find out who has taken all these scooters, now that 50% of the time you don't get caught in the act means little seeing that you're just getting caught after the fact.

*spelling edits

Assuming the police care -- which is unlikely unless you're important. More and more, it feels like police largely care about crimes that generate revenue for them, so drug & (select) traffic enforcement. And the odd harassing people if a venue hires them for "security" at $250/hr.

Letting "real" crime go is apparently a good way to get more funding for the department. Every time I go to vote there's another measure to increase local police funding, last time it was an off-cycle vote where that was the only issue (and the voting machine I put my ballot into showed 25 votes by 7pm).

Agreed. PDs are rackets, and there is far too little interest paid to local government matters. But selective policing is on the police, not the prosecutors.

I don't think the cost of living has anything to do with it. There was a huge boom in delivery services during the pandemic, and rapid transition from bicycles to far more valuable electric scooters. There's just far more opportunity for theft.

It's a lot easier to steal a scooter than a car, and yet harder to put the scooter into your apartment than a bike.

I live in San Jose, not San Francisco, but I really don't notice its any less pleasant to visit the city now compared to 2008 when I moved to California. And while things do get stolen in San Jose, it feels a lot less crimey than 1990s East Coast cities that I lived in back then (I left a bike on the VTA once, and did not get it back; I've had bikes I left in my front driveway unlocked for overnight and had them stolen). Beater bikes that are locked, for example, are mostly safe. And just don't buy a multi-thousand dollar bike in a culture with rampant inequality, it is impolite. It's like making out with your partner in front of someone that's just lost the love of their life.

You're making the mistake that everyone does, which is confusing progressive policies with being lax on crime. The former "progressive" DA actually pushed pretty hard on organized crime like this - and you won't find any progressives pushing against prosecution of organized criminals.

What you will find is that progressives are pushing against harming (including by jailing) people for being poor - which is what DA Jenkins and the mayor Breed are doing. You'll notice for example that Jenkins won't prosecute the daylight murder of Banko Brown, because Brown was homeless.

> Cities are struggling in the post-pandemic era as the rising cost of living due to inflation in food and other essentials has driven more criminal activity, mostly around theft.

This I would say is an outreach. Sure some petty theft is related to high cost of living, but a lot of crime in San Francisco is less driven by necessity and more by opportunity. Organized crime is leveraging liberal policies to make money with no consequences. And outside of organized crime, there are just some very twisted individuals who commit crime repeatedly for no reason.

1. Kids arrested for 35 robberies: https://abc7news.com/amp/oakland-robberies-children-arrested...

2. Organized retail theft targeting Apple: https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2023/02/09/eight-charged-with-f...

3. Statewide retail theft ring: https://abc7news.com/amp/organized-retail-theft-california-r...

4. Multi state retail theft ring: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2023/02/09/california-takes-down-coor...

5. Another retail theft ring: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Bay-Area-retail-th...

6. Car theft rings: https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/01/26/inside-a-multi-millio...

7. Organized crime for luxury item thefts: https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/organized-crime-rings-...

There’s many more but you get the idea.

> Cities are struggling in the post-pandemic era as the rising cost of living due to inflation in food and other essentials has driven more criminal activity

Wouldn't it make more sense and be potentially more cost effective if the focus was on giving people food and other essentials so they could survive without having to steal scooters? Police and prison are super expensive. You're going to be paying for the food, lodging and industrial grade military complex vs food, lodging and maybe some green spaces and public works projects.

I don't know if you've met a lot of criminals, but many are not committing crimes purely for survival. They want phones, TV's, cars etc. Crime is a way to get those things. If there is no disincentive (i.e. punishment) for committing crime, then many will still do the crime.

What share of the crime is to get money for drugs?

I have, and to an instance they come from impoverished and damaged home lives. Often their parents were in prison or extremely poor. People living with dignity will lower crime and make them less antagonistic to those who aren't suffering often generational damage.

Right, but the newer generations that wouldn't be the subject of this under social programs will come under the predation and oppression of those who took on the path of violence if you don't offer them protection; you can't just picture this as poor people stealing luxury goods from tech bros, there's a reason why people who are subject to these things are often friendly to tough-on-crime policies.

I disagree, it was tough-on-crime policies, specifically the war on drugs and discriminatory policing that caused the problems we have today. Continuing these policies will only compound the issues.

I'm not saying that tough-on-crime policies are the right answer, I'm saying that things like the three-strikes-law enjoyed support from communities afflicted by crime because they are the primary victims of criminals. They will want solace from criminals who are threatening them today, not mere promises that their communities will be safer 20 years from now.

Providing security is one of the State's most basic functions and people will demand it.

> They will want solace from criminals who are threatening them today, not mere promises that their communities will be safer 20 years from now.

Tough on crime polices mean that all of our communities will be less safe 20 years from now, we know this because we can look back 20 years, 20 years before that and so on.

The only real way out of this is to address the structural inequalities that we have in the US, but that sadly seems unlikely to happen since the existing system is designed to put a stop to it.

Being "tough on crime" is like drinking booze to cure depression. It's only going to make things worse. It doesn't address any of the root causes of the issues at hand.

There's a lot of people imagining this crime to be Jean Val Jean stealing a loaf of bread to eat. It isn't; much of the crime is committed via organized retail theft. A relatively small handful are disproportionately abusing the system.

The NYPD released some stats awhile back- one of the highest rates of recidivism for an individual in NYC was an offender with 101 arrests, 88 of which were since 2020. Another farther down the list was with 87 total arrests, 25 since 2020, 9 of which include a robbery charge.

Those are just the numbers for two individuals who happen to actually get caught. Most retail theft doesn't end in an arrest. So long as it is profitable to do, and easier than working a job, people will keep doing it. Building more "projects" isn't going to change that.

People steal from retail because "playing by the rules" nets them nothing. The choice isn't between "work hard and succeed" and "steal and live an easy life". The reality is there is no option for success or living an even dignified existence under the current system. That is the root issue, not people stealing razors from Walgreens.

What would be stopping people from taking the aid and stealing the scooters anyway? You can only rely so much on the inherent goodness of humans.

Add organized crime into the mix and you run into the problem that might makes right for plenty of people, specially if there's easy money and "respect" involved.

What is driving people to steal the scooters if not the need to pay for food and housing?

Money? Plenty of people exist that lack any sort of empathy, and theft is just a risk vs reward calculation. If there's no punishment for getting caught, and reward for not getting caught, then you should always take that gamble. When you completely eliminate all social trust in a society, all empathy is lost and theft just becomes a mathematical equation of risk and reward.

> When you completely eliminate all social trust in a society, all empathy is lost and theft just becomes a mathematical equation of risk and reward.

Almost exactly like how corporations operate. If the profit for doing XYZ is greater than the probability of getting caught times the expected penalty, you do XYZ.

A desire for luxuries, and a disregard for other people.

Greed and selfishness are common human flaws, and that's just thinking of individual petty thieves; ambitious, enterprising and ruthless criminals are apt to see business and power they can secure if they are unopposed.

let me quote from a pickpocket i met in Barcelona: "i sleep all day and at night i go out to steal. by morning i have a big stash of cash, life is good". he was not motivated by hunger or poverty, just having a good time, and what he perceived as a good life

Are police & prison super expensive or are they massive income generators? They provide a large funnel of fines and slave labor.

It seems to be an unfortunate truth that private, for-profit prisons are the opposite of expensive.

Are there any publicly traded pure-play prison companies? Not interested in investing, but would be fascinated to read their 10-Ks. Do they get significant revenue from anywhere other than taxpayers? I know they sell labor and charge for phone calls, but that can't add up to terribly much more than their food + supply costs.

How do you mean? Are you supposing they are more cost-effective that public run prisons?

I am observing that many prisons in the US are run privately by corporations for the sake of making a profit. The incarcerated people in such establishments are often given shorter sentences if they agree to perform manual labor for little to no pay. Even if the prisons are getting subsidies which make them profitable, I suspect the owners consider it to be an asset more than a liability.

Would I see this in cities outside of the United States? Everywhere is not just Memphis Baltimore and Chicago....

There is no evidence that economic conditions are driving criminal activity.

It may be the case. But it could have other casual factors such as the change in policing or any of a number of other factors.

Poverty and violent/property crime do correlate. But the arrow of causation between them, or whether they can be both products of some other factor, is not clear and heavily debated.

> And yet, San Francisco, like other great cities worldwide, has its unique charm and a sense of elitist smugness, a conviction that living here is a coveted opportunity. As a fellow lover of big cities, I respect this attitude.

That's quite introspective, and might explain a lot of the commentary on hacker news when urban/suburban/rural discussions come up.

I wouldn't put SF in the great cities list. Maybe it had something back in the 80's or 90's - it's own charm or soul. But for the past 15 year's it's slowly turned into a soulless, charmless, no character city where everyone is in tech and thinks the same.

I may be in the miniority on this site - but frankly I think it's sucked for a while now. I've had much better times in other big cities worldwide.

The minority you point out is an ever shrinking one.

I remember coming close to a decade ago when I'd be chastised for suggesting that SF is dumpy because there's human poop, bins overflowing with rotten food waste, large packs of rats, and junkies sniffing lines in broad daylight all over the place there, but today few here will deny this anymore.

I want to love SF, and I'm not just saying that. Yet, every time I visit, it's visibly worse and I often end up in some bizarre verbal altercation with a BART employee or resident of the streets. Los Angeles, the city where I live today, has its own issues, some of which dwarf that of SF, but not nearly as often do I arrive home at night with a story to tell. And somehow we manage to have less poop.

The poop is just spread out so you don't notice it any given place you happen to be, because LA is bigger. Much bigger.

Aside from how SF stacks up in the "great cities" list, many people like myself have a lifelong attraction to the bay area for entirely geographical reasons. It's absolutely gorgeous. The land, the water, the mountains, everything about that region is physically incredible. And those aspects are rather immutable and special.

You can close your eyes and just drive to some random place, a 7-11 or whatever, and it is so beautiful that it would be a state park in Maryland. And the weather is so nice you can leave your tiny overpriced house and go visit the beauty every day.

All those people living on the street are not in tech. Nor are the people making the coffee and serving the food. Or sweeping the streets or cleaning the houses.

People move to a city because they want to be more like the people who already live there.

But if too many move in too fast, the city instead becomes like them.

No, most people move to a city for a job - not because they think the average person that lives there is some aspirational target.

SF had an abundance of jobs that paid a boat load of money, and people moved there to take those jobs.

Not because it's close to Muir Woods and has the best weather in the world, and the people at cafes wear cool t-shirts (although nearly everyone who moves to SF tries their hardest to convince themselves this is the real reason, not the job and the money).

Problem is a lot of people already in SF where not there for tech jobs, but beauty, art, banking, social movements, good industrial work, fishing/canning jobs, all that sort of thing. The unusually high software/tech related salaries have somewhat diminished the ability of the other folks to enjoy the lifestyles they previously enjoyed.

> The unusually high software/tech related salaries have somewhat diminished the ability of the other folks to enjoy the lifestyles they previously enjoyed.

Absolutely false.

The refusal of NIMBYists to allow anything to get built which pushed housing costs to infinity is what pushed everyone out w/o a top-1% paying job.

Not that the Bay created a bunch of high paying jobs.

I moved here because of the location, not the jobs. I could care less about standing about in an open office with noise canceling headphones all day. If you want a walkable place to live that is near some of the most wonderful cycling in the entire world, it is hard to beat.

What?

I know we're talking about SF but the LA example is much more obviously clear: so everyone in LA _is actually in entertainment_ when they move? The servers and baristas went there "for the job" as a server and barista, but also acting, of which they already have well paying jobs in? I'm not even making sense to myself. Point is, absolutely... there's an aspirational part to moving to a big city, and yes they move for the weather, and yes they move to be closer to nature.

There are probably a hundred thousand places in California alone where you can be "closer to nature" than San Francisco.

Agreed. Going for the $$$ is a completely different and valid reason. But to say it's in the top 10 most fun and cultural cities is a giant reach.

SF also refused to adapt. Poor public transportation, extremely low building height.

Not true at all. Everyone is not the same in great cities.

People are in denial about aging out of city living.

Why would you age out of having amenities closer to you? If anything, as you get older things should be even closer.

Many of those amenities are not as relevant when you're older. Easy access to bars, restaurants, and clubs is not as important as a larger home and good school districts when you're a parent, for example. Access to things like healthcare, grocery stores, and target are not any more difficult and often easier to access in suburbs.

Basically, people's priorities change and the optimal living situation changes accordingly. On average, that is, I'm sure some people prefer city life into later adulthood, and some young people like suburbs.

"good school districts"

This point seems to be mostly American and a result of how schools get financed in the US and not inherent to cities. Schools being financed by very small areas they are located in is exacerbating the divide between poor and wealthy neighborhoods for no real reason. In contrast, when I grew up in Germany, kids had to commute from the suburbs and villages to the city to attend a really good school.

Parent engagement has a huge impact on how good a school district is. It isn't the funding. Poorly performing schools often get more funding.

Kids. You will value space much more than you value proximity to restaurants.

Also, the amenities available in a city are quite limited as you age out of your 20s. Food and necessities become a much smaller share of what you are purchasing. Eventually you want access to tools and hobby supplies and home goods - stuff that is logistically not hauled into big cities but dropped off in the suburbs.

One reason is that you have kids and you want to have more space. Also, your cost of living goes up because you need more resources for a larger family. You might spend more on education, food, vacations, and so want to reduce rents or mortgages. You can do all that stuff in any big city, many do. But kids are common reason to move out of a city center.

I would agree in principle, but from experience it seems people are less interested in the energy of the city as they age and acquire more things, and prioritize building their own space around them instead of utilizing the city around them.

Bingo. To someone like me, the "energy of the city" is a severe down-side. I don't want "energy" in my life. I don't care about "amenities". I don't want to hear my neighbors music, or smell their cooking, or deal with their drama. Where I live now, working from home, I could go an entire week without seeing another living soul, and it's wonderful. I value the ability to sit on my porch with a beer, hear nothing but birds and crickets and the stream behind my property gurgling away, smell nothing but the trees, and see nothing but the sunset.

Because the amenities you value change over time. There’s very little I want or need in the city any more. Plus these days, lots of amenities will come to you.

If the car companies manage to get level 5 self driving working well, I’ll move even further out of the city.

People don't value all amenities equally, and as people age, their personal amenity-valuations change, often in stepwise ways. For example, prior to having a school-aged child, an individual might value good-elementary-school-access very little, but if they have a child, their valuation of that amenity will likely rise sharply within a few time-needed-to-move units of their kid being school-aged.

You age out of all living eventually

I think some people are more comfortable with death than changing priorities.

Maybe in America, but I don't think this trend is true elsewhere. Cities are very convenient (and safe) for families and elders in many countries.

To add to your point: The way we push people into the suburbs in the US leads to more loneliness for adults. If I want to meet up with friends, we usually all have to drive, regardless where we meet because nobody has a pub or restaurant or place where we could do any activity together near their homes. The only exception is one friend who lives in the city proper, but he lives across town, so everyone else has to drive extra far. In contrast, my friends in European cities seem quite happy living in the city proper, sometimes with kids, and they'll just meet with friends and family for brunch on the weekends and can walk or take public transit.

Hard to imagine aging into living in a place with less access to healthcare and amenities accessible to people who don't drive.

> The Tenderloin is bad, and I had my scooter stolen

Is there anything worth blogging about here? The linked article is more interesting.

This person spent a few weekends in SF a decade ago and doesn't recognize their "once-beloved city".

This is entirely how I remember SF being 10 years ago as well. I don’t doubt that the pandemic has been hard on all cities, but I agree that the author is making a big assumption based on a tiny sample.

SF is so much worse than it was 10 years ago. 10 years ago you could still find people that haven't had their car windows smashed. These days I doubt you'll find someone that hasn't had their car windows smashed less than several times.

> 10 years ago you could still find people that haven't had their car windows smashed.

10 years ago, everyone I knew had had their car windows smashed. I’m not sure this is true.

I was born in San Francisco. There are some parts of the city-- downtown parts in particular-- that have demonstrably worse homeless problems then they used to for reasons people will disagree about. However, in the eighties the city was also unsafe in many places that are completely gentrified now. There are parts of the city where you would get robbed walking though that are now completely nice and safe, or you would maybe see a mentally ill homeless person as opposed to a crime inclined teen, perhaps armed. The idea that there was a time when the town did not have crime problems seems strange to me.

This article doesn't make much sense to me. How are people who respond to your anecdote about being robbed with powerless indifference "ignoring" the problem? Are they supposed to suit up and go out on a caper to find your stolen item? They literally acknowledge that it happened to you and it's chalked up to ignorance, how?

It could well be that the only difference between the author and the people who "accept" crime is a few months. Is the author going to do anything about the problem other than restate it? If not, he might also shrug when someone arrives in town and states what everyone knows.

What I see in SF is not a direct acceptance of crime.

Instead the majority seem to believe that locking up criminals is not the best way to deal with crime. Instead there need to be social programs, community service, a focus on rehabilitation and reintegration into society rather than punishment.

The intentions are good but unfortunately these policies don't seem to be working. Criminals are quickly realizing there is very little repercussion for certain crimes.

There's certainly an elitist bubble ignoring a crime epidemic. But its all around us.

The number of mass shootings in the south has risen exponentially. I'm talking Oklahoma, Florida, Texas. But they wanna distract from their own issues and blame the cities.

I think the cities, for all of their faults, publish and are open about the crimes that occur on their streets. But crime is up all around the country. Its unfair to pretend that its just the cities that are dealing with this.

---------

Case in point: everyone was quick to pretend it was a homeless guy who killed Bob Lee. But when the facts came in, it was Nima Momeni who was within Bob Lee's social circle.

When the facts come down, murderers almost always know their victims personally. Crime is 60+% a self-served justice problem, when people grow untrusting of the local criminal defense system and decide to take things into their own hands (rightfully, or wrongfully). And we can see the growing number of people who want to take things into their own hands by simply watching gun-purchases over the past couple of years.

I'm in the East Bay where the voters elected a repeat of Chesa Boudin, incarnated in Pamela Price. I must say that while I respect the counter-intuitive idea that a fresh "progressive" means of justice might solve the problem at the root, I really question the idea of leniency and non-enforcement of justice. I'm open to imaginative and counter-intuitive approaches, but I'm just not seeing this work out well.

It appears that the strategy is to avoid enforcing or prosecuting minor crimes and letting people go with little consequences. But if I think about how this would work out, if I raised my kids like this, I quickly conclude that my kids would become awful people.

Say that your kid does minor stuff like lying, swearing, refusing to apologize, breaking things on purpose. And you decide "I won't discipline my kid, because this isn't serious enough". It's pretty obvious that the kid is going to turn bad, since there's a missing feedback mechanism. They test the boundaries, and the boundaries are way far into unacceptable territory. Many would say you do a great disservice to your kid in not teaching them what is acceptable and what isn't, and letting them go feral without any notion that the minor stuff is also not acceptable.

Now you might say that the justice system isn't a parent and residents aren't kids. But I think actually the analogy is appropriate. Our society needs to educate and shape public behavior to maintain harmony and fairness for all. To some extent, where parents have a duty to educate their kids, the government has a mandate to educate and police civil society. And yet the county is apparently shying away from fulfilling their role of educator and enforcer. Where's the feedback mechanism? It seems to me that the component of civility education is lacking in the general public, but we can't make up for this by relaxing the rules of society.

Applying this entire "vibe" to myself: why should I respect speed limits, stop signs, or any "minor" thing when I know it goes unenforced. I was told my entire life that "driving is a privilege, not a right" and yet people drive with expired plates, or no plate at all, and nothing gets done about it on the basis that the needy would be worse off without their cars.

Happening in cities across the country. Philadelphia just rejected the more "woke" candidates in our mayoral primary (de facto winner, Dems outnumber Republicans 8+ to 1 here) in favor of a black woman who plans on being tough on crime: https://www.cherelleparker.com/244-2/

Similar to SF, we have elitists / idealists (mostly white people) who want to experiment with ideas like abolishing the police, a hands off approach to crime, and diversionary programs. Our current mayor and DA have been a disaster. We've been ignoring the world's largest open air drug market (Philly leads the nation in drug OD deaths... one spot ahead of SF). You can see a bunch of interviews with some of the addicts/dealers on youtube at this channel (amongst others): https://www.youtube.com/@alltimemedia .

It's not been going well for us. I myself had a neighbor who, despite being caught multiple times with drugs (he was a heroin and meth user and dealer), illegal weapons possession, threatening his partner with a gun in her face, caught on camera constantly stealing packages from neighbors, and committing other crimes, was consistently released with charges withdrawn. Or we were told by police that they couldn't do anything. Absurd.

It's easy to be an idealist when you don't have to live with the consequences because it's not affecting you. But for those who are affected, who are building things for ourselves, building communities, just trying to live in peace, it matters. We can't have peace with addicts stealing everything that isn't tied down, people speeding through red lights next to the local daycare and park, blasting music as they ride dirt bikes at 2am and pulling guns on people, with used needles everywhere waiting for a toe or child to prick, people stealing your car at gunpoint, and with mentally unhinged people threatening you with violence just for being within screaming range.

Off-topic, but these kind of conversations based on anec-data pop up here and in my social circles quite a bit, but it seems like they're often pretty sparse as far as the quantitative side of things are concerned.

Does anyone know what the actual data suggests here? Are there any projects that make this data more discoverable and consumable for regular people, so that we can all have more well-informed discussions (assuming the data is as unbiased as possible) about what the real problems are, how bad they've gotten, and how bad they are relative to other things?

The actual data is that SF has unusually higher rates of property crime compared to other major cities. https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/fixing-san-francis...

Thanks for this! This has been really great to look through. Homelessness in the city consistently increasing definitely matches my perception. Interesting that motor vehicle theft in the city continued to stay so high even after the first wave of the pandemic.

For quantitative data, I think we should be looking at store closures.

How many stores closed in a city in a given time period? Is it more or less than other comparable cities? You have to normalize this data by population.

I think individual thefts are just that - anecdata, which sways one way or another too far in any given time period. But something like stores/pharmacies, where systematic theft can occur would be a better indicator

So long as SF continues to criminalize homelessness instead of actual crime, the city will never get out of this.

The problem San Francisco faces is that the various parties cannot agree what crime is. In particular, the folks in charge (Mayor, SFPD, and DA) are spending their time persecuting and criminalizing homelessness and drug addiction. We might generously say this is because it is visible, and also because of the fact that when middle class folks see visible poverty they think crime is high.

But what we see here is an organized group breaking in and leisurely stealing valuable stuff. It has been studied and it is well known that organized crime gangs are doing the bulk of theft in SF, with the last DA (who was recalled for being "too soft on crime") managing to break up an organized gang of laptop thieves who got them from breaking in to cars. Though, naturally, the good people of SF had been blaming car thefts on the homeless.

And the new DA won't even file charges against a broad-daylight murder, because the victim was homeless. Absolutely incredible the hoops they'll jump through to avoid prosecuting and stopping real crime, when there are homeless people they can fuck with instead.

I lived in SF in the late '90s and saw many of the same things people have been posting about here lately .

Tweakers on every corner in the Tenderloin, intense/overwhelming-at-times homeless presence in the blocks near Mission and lower Market ... latino gangs operating in the blocks south of 14th ...

I heard gunshots fired in my neighborhood (24th street) on two occasions.

Anybody here experienced SF then and now? Is it really worse now?

Born and raised here. It is different (of course no city stays exactly the same over three decades). It feels like it is more concentrated now. Back then, there were a lot more areas in the city (and in the Bay) where one would be a little on guard. A lot of those places have gentrified to the point where they are much nicer than they used to be. But the hotspots have gotten a lot worse. On balance, I think more of the bay area population is safer and has a higher quality of life than in the 90s. But if you are near those hotspots, it seems like things are a lot worse than they use to be. This is probably why this topic is so muddy. It is pretty easy to generate a click bait headline about how bad things are by focusing on those few hotspots, but it is a lot harder to convey the more broad QOL improvements that the average resident is likely experiencing. This also explains why there hasn't been some sort of massive exodus, because most residents are not impacted by these issues.

Spot on, this is my experience as well. A lot of the once-sketchy parts of Berkeley, Oakland, East Palo Alto, etc. have gentrified and become safer since the 70s and 80s. Part of that has been big shifts in racial makeup and socioeconomics. Starting in the mid-late 90s tech began to really dominate Bay Area employment, bringing in a lot of new (well-paid) people and forcing out many others.

i visited a lot in the 90s, lived there from 2006-2008 in pac heights/fillmore, and still visit frequently.

i think the difference now is that it's creeping into the 'nice' areas like pac heights, financial district, and russian hill, knob hill, north beach, etc.

like, seeing shattered glass all over downtown is new. massive tent cities is new.

Ignoring? I live 6,000km away and I still see people online complaining about the crime in SF all the time.

I have lived in NYC for almost 30 years and I see all sorts of complaints online and in the news, but almost never hear from anyone who actually lives here. Crime was so much worse when I fist moved here and I still mostly ignored it. There's crazy people and homeless and whatever. I let my kids walk around by themselves. I'm far more worried about them getting hit by a car than anything else.

One of Ben Horowitz's books spends some time arguing that they set up Andreeson Horowitz in San Francisco specifically because they think it's the coolest city in the world - and they will naturally get access to the best talent because of it.

Regardless of how you feel about SF now or then, it's hard to argue that it's actually "cool" enough today that it's drawing any talent on its own. People moved to SF to pursue the rat race of chasing after good software jobs - not the other way around.

So yeah, I definitely believe that there is an elitist bubble where Horowitz and Benioff and other prominent SFians kind of delude themselves to believe that SF is actually a better place to start a software business rather than, say, Omaha or St Louis or even Sacramento.

After living in the Bay Area for a while, I realized there's a class of people who don't really interact with the city the same way "normal" people do. They drive from their private garage or gated community to a parking garage where they work. They rarely touch the sidewalks, and never ride BART or any public transportation.

They exist in this kind of fancy bubble that's separate from the harsh reality of city life.

And then this class decides policy

I find this blog odd because I think people in SF are very aware of the property crime problem? But like...because there's a property crime problem no one is shocked that you experienced property crime?

I think part of this is that there is a parallel discourse about crime "in general" shooting up in SF which is not supported by any data. But the bay has long had unusually bad crime of this kind - which is to say car break ins, motorcycle and bike theft, etc. So if you complain "about crime" sometimes people think you're new and don't know about this long standing problem that seems hard to fix (which is obviously bad but also kind of old news) - or they think you're talking about this other supposed trend that the data doesn't really back up.

Now consider that these people are also the ones who have created the rules and policies of online discourse

Now apply the fact that talking is how we think and formulate thoughts

Explains a lot in the last 20 years wrt politics and social movements… a very small elite who isn’t affected by the dangerous decisions they make

Theres an issue with the jail reform community, mainly that they do not have an alternative. Keeping people out of jail is good - but releasing them to continue to commit crime seems odd. I dont hear the alternative "reform" solution.

Outrage over current circumstances is pervasive in the City. Had this guy not been so buried in his work then he probably would have noticed that. This situation is not something trivial, but took an accumulation of factors over a long period of time to bring about. The pandemic had a huge impact on areas and demographics that were already under major stress.

People encountering this problem seem to think that simply cranking up enforcement and making the justice system more consistent will fix all of this. Many often conveniently forget the long history of tension between enforcement and minorities in the city. The White Night riots of 1979 were less than fifty years ago and violent sweeps of the Castro happened as recently as 1989. People want enforcement and justice but historically that has meant occasionally getting your streets closed and your face bashed in by cops with zero accountability.

Maybe there is some middle ground? People seem anxious to make something work. And there is a potentially interesting example in San Mateo County just to the south. Social circumstances there are not that far off from San Francisco and there is also a big homeless population, but the rampant extremes have not erupted in the same way. But real progress will probably take something more than lashing out over a stolen scooter. It is interesting how many people are upset about these issues but wouldn't even consider attending a local council meeting let alone running for local office themselves. No matter how much you desire justice, it probably isn't going to be quickly delivered to your door for a modest fee like it is a meal or something.

If you prefer data to anecdotes:

https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...

Some hard numbers from the FBI on historical crime #'s in SF:

https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/us/ca/san-francisco/prope...

TL;DR most categories show significant drop between 2000 and 2018, including violent crime, and, to the the point of the article, motor vehicle theft.

(edit: looks like there has been a significant rise in motor vehicle thefts in particular since 2018, but that is not specific to SF (TikTok to blame??) https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/san-francisco-crime-r.... )

Anyone have the text? Don't have or desire a Medium account.

https://archive.is/YEBSa

i was hoping there would be at least some stats/data in the article. Crime has been a problem in Sf. and other big cities for a long time. Nope,..no stats...just a long personal anecdote. But other data such as by Pinker shows crime has been in decline for decades after peaking in 1990. this includes all types of crime in many metro areas.

Flagged for unpopularity and truth?

this is an overreaction from suburban midwestern types. the people that have lived in the bay area and been priced out of sf will keep the region going. the rest will either fit in or move out of the area after publishing an out of touch medium blog post about their experiences

> Anyone who disagrees with me is from the flyovers

Well, at least the culture of San Francisco is still alive.

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

Despite California's current reputation, check out 1952-1988 . IMO that was a golden era of California, and the fertile grounds under which many of the boomers generation got their start

A great history professor I had at university was very interested in California politics. His take after years of research was that the thing holding California back is Prop 13, which has to do with taxation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

Dear HNers, please note: I understand Prop 13 is hugely controversial and the "third rail" of California politics. I don't have a dog in this fight, I'm just sharing information.

If you're a new California homeowner, I recommend you never look up what others on your street pay in property tax.

I wonder how many of the non business properties are still under Prop 13? I can't imagine it would be that many at this point. Business property can probably be held in some sort of trust so it appears to never have changed hands over the years.

A huge number of residential properties are receiving massive prop 13 subsidies. Open up https://www.taxfairnessproject.org/map and go poke around a random neighborhood in Palo Alto. Blue means the assessed valuation is close to the market price, while red means the assessed valuation is a tiny fraction of the market price.

Lots. You can inherit prop 13 rates from your parents or grandparents.

It’s a completely sick system that is literally creating a landed gentry

Is the argument basically just "arg if only we could collect even more taxes we could use the money to fix all our problems"?

California already has super high taxes that are skewed towards taxing the rich more.

Seems like a joke at this point saying that they need even higher taxes.

Also California's system of propositions is one of the closest forms of direct democracy available anywhere, if you like democracy then you should like this system. It is sort of inconvenient that the system was used to stop tax increases for home owners, but these are exactly the reasons why the system was created in the first place, to give people power over their own lives.

A better argument is "distributing the tax burden based on how long somebody's family has owned property in the same place has a large number of negative effects."

One (of many) serious problem(s) with Prop 13 is that it removes an important feedback mechanism whereby inflating property values result in higher taxes which gives even those who currently own property a financial incentive to support policies that keep housing prices in check. With that feedback mechanism removed, a property-owning homo economicus's rational move is to support policies that drive property values sky high (e.g. very restrictive residential zoning to limit competition while simultaneously seeking intense commercial growth to boost demand) at the expense of other members of the community (e.g. renters and future generations), and that's exactly what has happened in California over the last several decades.

It's not just more taxes. It's that Prop 13 effectively means your taxes go down over time. This encourages people to stay in housing units as long as possible. It also creates a big divide between people who bought early and those actually supporting the government through up-to-date tax rates. Most sickeningly is that privileged tax status can be passed parents and children, effectively creating a separate caste of people with lower taxes.

> Most sickeningly is that privileged tax status can be passed parents and children, effectively creating a separate caste of people with lower taxes.

Thankfully this was significantly curtailed by 2020's Proposition 19.

The taxes are skewed towards the rich, but also towards people who want to move for work. It's a wealth transfer towards the asset rich and immobile from the workers and the mobile. It's the economic distortion that's the problem as much as the lower taxation, but certainly part of it is shifting the taxes even more heavily onto the high income earners.

So the thing holding back California is that they don't get enough taxes? There must be something more nuanced i'm missing, but it almost feels like a comedy sketch thinking of a California college professor explaining to people that California not taxing it's citizens enough is the thing holding it back.

The nuance is that with restrictions on property tax there is absolutely no disincentive for citizens to support local policies that restrict housing development. You are incentivized to keep the housing supply as low as you can possibly get it, because raising the price of your own property has zero downsides. This creates homelessness due to a restricted supply of housing.

>support local policies that restrict housing development

You are absolutely correct that this is the problem. But the solution is not to disincentivize home ownership with a tax, it is to fix zoning itself. Homeowners will still have an incentive to restrict housing supply even with a tax.

However if you restricted the power of local zoning boards to tell people what they are allowed to build on their own land, then you would fix the housing crisis virtually overnight. There is a strong incentive for developers to build as densely as possible because they can make more money per acre, but the problem is that local zoning boards stop most development.

https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2023/02/01/atherton-guts-mo...

>The council removed multifamily housing plans that were met with ire by residents, and softened changes to a lot on Oakwood Boulevard in Golden State Warriors' star Steph Curry's neighborhood

^ that is just one of a million examples of what I'm talking about. This has been going on for decades and the housing crisis we have now is the result.

Asking to change policy without changing the incentives that led to said policy is a fool's errand. You have to change what people are incentivized to do to actually change anything because people respond to incentives, not ideas. The way you fix zoning itself is by incentivizing people do to so.

Plus, that's not the only supply problem that comes from Prop 13. People don't want to ever sell their houses because that means their property tax will be reassessed when they move. That's another huge problem caused by Prop 13.

I completely agree with you about incentives.

I'm saying there is already an incentive to build densely, developers already want to do this because they make more money by doing so. They are literally not allowed to build anything other than single family homes though, the local homeowners actually control what is allowed to be built. That is to say: the people who have an incentive to keep housing supply low are the ones deciding what is allowed to be constructed in their town.

If I go buy a piece of land in Cupertino and I want to build an apartment complex, I have to go apply for permits and get approval from the city of Cupertino zoning board. The people on that board are all people who live in Cupertino that own single family homes, they have a strong incentive to deny my application if I am building my apartment complex anywhere near their neighborhood.

Basically every single city in California has zoning laws that prohibit you from building anything other than suburban single family homes in most of the town.

What I'm saying is that you can fix the housing crisis by passing a law that limits the power of the zoning board to deny permits for these types of housing.

Take a look at the Cupertino zoning map: https://map.gridics.com/us/ca/cupertino#11.67/37.3159/-122.0...

if you click layers -> planning -> zoning you can see an overlay of the zoning for the whole city. The light beige color is "single family" zoned, meaning that nobody is allowed to build anything other than low-density homes. Notice how _most_ of the city is designated "single family". This is the cause of the entire problem. Nobody is allowed to build anything more dense than the single family homes that are already there.

Not-so-coincidentally, Cupertino is one of the most expensive places to live in the US.

Look at Houston, TX. They have no zoning laws (it's not perfect they still have deed restrictions which sometimes act similarly to zoning laws), and it is a massive city. The median house price is ~340k, something that most normal people can afford. There is a clear correlation between reduced zoning restrictions and lower housing costs.

Considering that lots of Californians pay practically no property tax... yes! Absolutely tax more!

The current system is extremely conservative. Any time a piece of property changes ownership, it gets hosed by the assessors. If you move to California you will be paying insane sums in property tax while living next to people who are paying almost nothing. This is an effective subsidization of people who hold property for a long time, which creates market distortions.

For example, people normally sell their house and move when they retire, because they don't need as much housing and can save money by downsizing. This means more houses on the market, which pushes down prices and keeps people from living in their cars. But not in California, because a lot of people are getting the best property tax deal available in the country there.

Hi, welcome to the conversation, I can tell this is the first time you've engaged with this topic, so I'd love to introduce you to the economic dynamics at play.

When property taxes don't rise, people are disincentivized from selling their home because if they buy a new home they must pay property taxes at the new rate, not the grandfathered one. This creates a bottlenecked supply of housing because no one sells. Growth stagnates and then you get these wild fights about who's allowed to build where, how much they're allowed to build, and what kinds of undesirables might move in and "change the community". It's really a clever ploy to use people's conservative instincts to juice the real estate market since scarcity brings about insanely high costs. Now those with Prop 13 homes are even less incentivized to move because their house's worth just keeps rising. They can use that and borrow against it to play financial games and make their money make money. All because they happened to have bought a home before this law passed: entirely luck, nothing to do with merit or skill.

Do a little research. If you move in CA and you're over 55, you can now keep your property tax bill. Previously it was only certain counties that honored that; now it's all of them.

https://www.financialplannerla.com/transfer-california-prope...

> All because they happened to have bought a home before this law passed.

Again, do some research. Prop 13 passed in 1978, 45 years ago. The number of current homeowners who bought before then is vanishingly small. House prices were escalating before 13 passed, and the jumps in property taxes were in fact a prime reason why it passed.

> they can use that and borrow against it to play financial games and make their money make money

Do you have any data at all to support that assertion?

> This creates a bottlenecked supply of housing

there are all kinds of reasons why there's too little building. Grandfathered house values are only one of them. Regulations and high costs are much more important.

27% of Californians are over 55. That means the majority do not get to have the benefit of keeping their tax bill when they move. To compound that, the most dynamic economic growth probably comes from under-55s moving, not over-55s -- new jobs, new opportunities, start a family, etc. Obviously it's good if it's easy for old people to move, but the economic value of a young family being able to move closer to a high paying job is probably many multiples more from a "net good for society" standpoint.

Prop 13 freezes your tax rate when you purchase the property. So the subsidy isn't given only to those who buy before the bill was passed -- it is given to anyone who buys before housing goes up, at any time while the law is in place.

It's extremely common for people to borrow against the equity of their home (even moreso if you are very wealthy). I think the parent is arguing that those who own property are borrowing against the value of their (subsidized) asset. Another thing to consider is that a yearly tax on an asset can significantly affect the valuation of that asset, far in excess of the amount of the tax itself.

Of course there's many reasons for the embarrassing lack of ability to solve the housing problem. Prop 13 is a big reason, certainly one worth looking at when considering solutions to this problem.

It's also just unfair. Most people who are subsidized by prop 13 are subsidized for no reason at all, just market timing. And there's another layer to it, which is that the earlier you have bought, the more you are subsidized. Guess what was more difficult for minorities to do 30 years ago? That introduces an additional dimension of racial unfairness to this. Not to mention, it's a subsidy for the rich (homeowners) paid for by the poor (everyone else).

Prop 13 is an anchor around our neck. It's kind of like that excruciatingly painful disease that causes your bones to fuse together, except for growth and prosperity in the state of California.

Why don't you let him defend his own statements, which have little to no foundation at all?

The only thing that would happen if Prop 13 were repealed is: all other taxes would stay the same, but that one would rise, and so would spending. That's why your arguments get no traction at all in CA.

Hi Bob, you'd rather argue with a username you recognize rather than get to the truth? Here we are, closer to the truth than before, and you're maligning others for cutting you off from a witty gotcha on a person whom you seem to hold some grudge against.

> Prop 13 freezes your tax rate when you purchase the property.

Factually wrong. Prop 13 limits your tax increase to 2% per year.

OK. Perhaps freezes is the wrong word.

Turns it into molasses? Coagulates it? Congeals it?

Property tax on a 10 year home might be half of what it should be. Property tax on a 20 year home might be a quarter. I sure would love a 75% discount on my income taxes!

You'll have one in 20 years!

> Do a little research. If you move in CA and you're over 55, you can now keep your property tax bill. Previously it was only certain counties that honored that; now it's all of them.

This is incorrect, there are still county restrictions. Counties must opt-in to the tax transfers, and the purchased home must be of equal or lesser value. 10 of California's 58 counties permit it, most do not because they don't want to miss on tax revenue.

> Again, do some research. Prop 13 passed in 1978, 45 years ago. The number of current homeowners who bought before then is vanishingly small. House prices were escalating before 13 passed, and the jumps in property taxes were in fact a prime reason why it passed.

This is not relevant at all. The point is that people's effective property tax goes down over time, regardless of whether they bought before or after prop 13 was passed. Someone who bought a house in 1990 is probably paying less than a third of the normal property tax.

> there are all kinds of reasons why there's too little building. Grandfathered house values are only one of them. Regulations and high costs are much more important.

Great, we should eliminate restrictive regulations and Prop 13!

We bought our house 9 years ago. Current homebuyers on our street are paying 2 to 3 times what we are in taxes for similar homes. Add in our extremely low interest rate and we have no plans to sell the home even if we buy another.

I'm confused why you would request data that explains that if people have assets they will borrow against them and invest to make more money. I'm not sure what data would satisfy your request because this just seems blindingly obvious to anyone who can reason about personal finance.

> all kinds of reasons why there's too little building

And you think that providing incentives for people to move houses has no effect on any of the other components? Come on.

The other commenter laid out the other reasons well enough so I won't repeat them.

Do you have data to support this claim? It doesn't appear to play out like this in practice. Compare CA vs a state like NJ and home sales seem on par per capita.

https://journal.firsttuesday.us/home-sales-volume-and-price-...

https://njar-public.stats.10kresearch.com/docs/lmu/x/EntireS...

Would assume this is due to the constant inflow of high income tech workers to california

Why do all these sites only consider from 2010 onward? Prop 13 was passed in 1978.

The only ones who get upset when you point this out are people who thought they could get away with and benefit from such a loophole. They see no problem with excluding others from the possibility of enjoying the same benefit as long as they already have it.

Climbing a ladder and then pulling it up after you is anti-social and shameful.

What are you talking about? Prop 13 applies to every homeowner.

The increasingly bad management of California (and SF/LA etc) is not about taxes, its about managing based on ideology rather than the common-sense well-being of the citizens. Hence the citizens leave to more favorable places. If prop 13 had anything to do with it, we would have had people escaping the state back then instead of only in recent years.

Republicans are the paragons of "boom now, bust later", alternatively "screw those who come after because I got mine". You're making a good point but don't seem to get it yourself.

Unpopular opinion. Prisons Should really have at least twice as many occupants. If people are unable to live in a polite society and follow the rules they should be removed until they are willing to.

How many times do we read about someone that killed/ raped/ assaulted someone and it's revealed they have dozens of prior arrests?

Putting them back on the street constantly can only lead to their death or crimes against innocents.

What has happened to crime and specifically the homicide rate since police were demonized? 28% increase in 2020 over 2019. A record increase. This is what happens when you remove police.

No one should have to live in fear when getting on the train or walking down the street. Or have to constantly repair their property due to a smash and grab. Remove these people and house them somewhere they can no longer cause harm.

"How many times do we read"

It's a known principle that crime reporting has increased far faster than actual crime. And I mean, seriously you look at 2020 and think the major story was the police had bad PR? I'm pretty sure something else pretty big happened that year.

Yes, George Floyd was killed. BLM happened. People rioted. Police stepped back as calls to defund the police began. African Americans began dying due to homicide in massively increased numbers. Did I miss anything?

Rather than answer with something overly sarcastic or assume you're being deliberately obtuse, I'm just going to answer earnestly and mention that there was global pandemic.

There was indeed a pandemic. Are you saying that is what caused homicide rates to spike amongst African Americans and not Caucasians? Has the homicide rate gone down since then? I would posit that police withdrew from high crime / predominantly African American areas and in the void that was created, violence increased. Logically if there is a high crime area and you remove police enforcement from it, then crime will increase. My focus is not on the African American murder rate though, that is just a pertinent example of my overall point which stating that if you remove law enforcement or otherwise cripple them, then crime will increase as is happening in SF which was described in the original article.

That's both speculative and illogical. Police don't prevent crime. They can only arrest after the fact. And that's only if they catch them. And police did not withdraw from anywhere. No city defunded police. The defund movement was predicated on the fact that police are ineffective at preventing crime. That economics plays a much bigger role. Employment in places like NYC took much longer to recover because so many jobs depended on offices being full. And the homicide rate has, in fact, been dropping the last two years. The pandemic peak was less than 1/4 the 1990s peak.

Police and empowered prosecutors prevent crime. Remove a criminal from society and they will not commit a crime again.

The broken window theory is true, arrest and prosecute minor crimes to prevent larger ones.

Perfect example is Jordan Neely who was killed in NYC. He was arrested 40+ times for assault and the prosecutor kept letting him out to continue to terrorize the population. Eventually it ended the only way it could; with his death. Removing him from society would have kept him alive and resulted in a child not being traumatized after an attempted kidnapping and an old lady would not have had her face broken. Daniel Penny was simply the end result of ineffective criminal justice policies.

Cops are an important part of the solution but they can only do so much without a DA willing to prosecute and incarcerate.

You're piling speculation on speculation. Broken Windows has never held up to scrutiny. Neely served jail time for his assault charges and was known to be severely mentally ill. Witnesses also all confirmed he did not attack anyone on the train. DAs and police do their jobs appropriately. You sound like a conservative media bubble denizen who has never been near a city.

"You sound like a conservative media bubble denizen who has never been near a city." :)

voted Dem my entire life (mid 40s) Just realized it doesn't make sense to do so anymore so switched sides a couple years ago. I've lived and worked downtown in a large city for a decade. Drive past addicts every day collapsed in the street that should be in jail for their own benefit and that of others.

You wont admit it but if they took 1% of society and put them in prison we would live in a utopia.

Honestly I just don't believe you. American Republicans have absolutely no answers for anything and are unequivocally harming society in lots of measurable ways. We can stamp out crime tomorrow, but we're approaching a climate apocalypse and they are cheering it on. Putting addicts in jail is less effective than treatment. Every country in the civilized world has less crime than we do and they did it with more socialism, not more libertarianism. Putting the Sacklers in jail is something I'd be on board with. That and banning any and all private gun ownership.

Cool :) Every single one of those countries is a vassal to the united states, free to experiment because they are kept safe under our umbrella. Even Finland and Sweden are desperate for our protection.

As far as climate change, unless you have a way to force China and all emerging economies to sabotage their own economic development then any changes you make is a puppet show.

Addicts? Whatever happened to personal responsibility? It's not my job to give second chances to violent addicts that can't help themselves.

As far as gun control you can't even get illegal guns away from criminals, confiscating firearms from legal owners would just leave them vulnerable.

All cities with the highest homicide rates have Dem mayors. How's that working out for them?

You are missing a bunch of things, but the truth cannot be spoken on this site.

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