San Francisco's Pain Worsens as Workers, Visitors, and Shoppers Leave
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I am sure it starts from a empathetic place but leads to bad policy (eg: not prosecuting crimes out of empathy or to correct historical ethnic wrongdoing etc.) The problem is that these policies cause a real decline in the quality of life for everyone. Then folks who can afford to leave, leave - which happens to be the people who work, pay for everything for everyone and keep the place going. Their departure kicks off a spiral that keeps going until those stuck behind had enough.
An example of that turnaround is the Giuliani/ Bloomberg years in NYC - folks who ran on platforms of reducing crime and actually making life better for those who keep the place going.
From that limited perspective, I am going to be "short" San Francisco until the rhetoric changes.
Absolutely a big difference between SF and NYC is in governance. In NYC, the city government gets shit done. It does it’s job pretty effectively and efficiently: it’s a city that has nearly 10M people from every corner of the world.
The lack of a tech monoculture is a key differentiator. The bay, and CA to a large extent, suffers from being a cultural one-trick pony: the gold rush. It’s important to never forget about history and how it informs the present. After Spanish, then American, colonization, SF rose to prominence only because of it’s usefulness as a port city for the desperate folks looking to find their payday.
NYC has a subculture that is as greedy and obsessed with money and influence as SF: finance. But it’s only a small part of the overall magnificent NYC cultural fabric. You can go down to wall Street and participate if you want. But you can also make your way and thrive in the city a thousand different ways, with a thousand different groups of people.
SF is just a big little city :-/ It’s got it’s amazing pockets and so much potential. But you’re right: the sane thing to do is short SF until it grows up.
Fine I guess if you work for a large corporation.
I disagree with you on the finance folks angle. Full disclosure, almost 20 years in finance, now at a faang due to non compete. Most folks I know in finance are in the "hard working career builder" camp - invested in their families and communities for the long term. That's who takes the 7am train from Westchester to operate the index funds in your 401k.
Sorry to offend you on the finance culture assessment. But, unlike SF, I’ll choose to be kind here rather than be nice. You may choose to talk about the family man in finance that works toward a career vs getting rich. And I’m not going to say that doesn’t exist: of course it does! Being able to talk about patterns doesn’t mean that individual exceptions aren’t possible.
However, you have to admit that your ”hard working career builder” statement was designed to somehow liken this character to someone who actually labors for their money. I have to ask…why not work hard building a different career? The draw of money is the entire point. It’s not like you or I actually provide real, substantial, critical economic value. We work in jobs that can only exist because other folks are taking care of the essentials.
So my point is: at some point, it’s not about any sort of perceived attitude working in the industry.(1) Having a city that only caters to eg finance or tech is what is problematic. It drives wealth inequality, it drives prices upwards, it makes homes and rents unaffordable. Ultimately leading to everyone else being forced out of their homes, desperately trying to find someone cheap enough to live while enduring ever longer commutes.
This process is what destroyed the SF bay. Even pre pandemic, it was common for working class folks to have 90m commutes into SF to work. It’s why things close at 9, 10p in SF: if you’re closing, you’re getting home at midnight.
It didn’t destroy NYC because NYC has a superior functioning government. NYCHA and actually enforced rent control does wonders as a counter force to gentrification. Building in NYC is lightning fast compared to SF, where it takes more than half a decade to build what NYC does in less than a year.
And we see this result in the culture. To my first point, NYC came back from the pandemic while SF did not because it’s multiple cultures is robust, resilient, and adaptable. SF’s tech scene scattered in 2020 and the majority isn’t coming back.
(1) it’s a little subtle, because I think it’s 2 things. The cultural / attitude mindset helps. But that’s not enough on its own. If the city embraces the rich folks and ignores the poor folks, it’s going to look exactly like SF when the good times go away.
The thing you are assuming / missing is that for many of us working in finance is well connected to meaningful impact on the world.
To give you a very simple example - one of my typical clients a few jobs back were state teachers and police retirement funds. The folks who run those funds directly impact the quality of life in retirement of these civic employees - and the entire financial industry (brokers, vendors, etc) exist to cater to them.
So, the fund manager works to deliver best returns for the retirees. The broker works to provide the manager with superior execution. The trading platform vendor works to provide the broker with reliability and efficiency this requires, etc.
The "deeper" into finance you are, the more you recognize the connection between things like farming, energy generations, business formation, etc being enabled through our work.
So yeah plenty of guys chose finance because it's a good way to take care of their family AND they see meaning in their work.
Giuliani was elected NYC mayor in 1993 and reelected in 1997 (two-term limit). It is not an exaggeration to say that the typical Upper West Side or Park Slope liberal on election day 1997 spent the morning denouncing Giuliani as a proto-fascist who led a fascist police force, voted for his reelection in the secrecy of the ballot box (he won by 13% although Democrats that year had a 5X registration advantage <http://www.elections.ny.gov/NYSBOE/enrollment/county/county_...>), then spent the evening bemoaning his reelection and confidently predicting to their friends that the administration would of course kill or exile yet more homeless.
When I was flying to Sweden in summer 2021, I had a six-hour layover in SF, so I decided to take the BART up to the city to take a look, since I had previously lived there, and I almost didn't recognize the place. Half the shops around Union Square were boarded up and closed, it looked like a warzone. It was always a dirty shithole, but at the same time a vibrant, cool city. In 2021 all the good things were gone, and only the crap - literally - remained.
If you forcibly close all the things that make a city worth living in, for over a year, you don't get to act surprised when people stop wanting to pay for the high cost of living and move out of the city. SF is in a death spiral, as all the high-income workers leave the city, companies start leaving, foot traffic lessens, stores and restaurants start closing because they can't make it or because they're overwhelmed by shoplifters or homeless, ther city becomes less desireable, more workers leave the city, more stores and restaurants close, and with no-one filling the gap, you get a ghost town. Property values plummet, commercial real estate plummets, and it becomes a service and retail desert.
All because of their own choices. None of this was inevitable. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and there's no better illustration of that than what's happened to SF.
Hope you make plenty of money with that superpower.
Of course, those of us who have lived here during that time know that Union Square has been on the decline with empty storefronts since 2012 - but it's fascinating to watch people building and tilting at strawmen in real time.
Before, the gentrification and influx of tech money caused a positive spiral, more offices, more office workers, higher income office workers, higher end restaurants, all of that pushed against the unsavory elements of the city, keeping it pretty much confined to the Tenderloin. Hell, when I left in 2016, Market Street was in better shape than ever.
But the forced closures of stores and restaurants for far too long, shifted this equilibirum, rapidly, quickly, and much further than anyone anticipated. That was the proverbial straw.
We stayed on the edge of the tenderloin and walked to the mission to get calibrated socially. Yes, there were people living on the street, and def having mental health issues. But on the whole the city felt like a very active and enjoyable (albeit expensive) place to live.
I don’t mean to discount individual experiences of crime, only to say I really enjoyed our stay and it seems still to be a vivacious place.
Your entire comment is littered with assertions that say you felt safe/fine, but at the same time you note your behavior was fairly cautious.
1. You didn't go out at night.
2. You stayed away from the TL
3. Something you witnessed gave you pause.
Then you also have to consider that you weren't really living there. You worked most of the week and toured the rest of your time.
>I don’t mean to discount individual experiences of crime, only to say I really enjoyed our stay and it seems still to be a vivacious place.
You put the idea that negative experiences are individual and not systemic. As if being a victim of a crime is an "individual experience" and not a pervasive element of the area.
I tried to make it clear that I specifically did walk around/through the tenderloin.
And yes, there was one street—in the week we spent there commuting, going out, visiting w/ friends—that I noted I’d avoid in future.
I didn’t mean to assert that crime in SF is a small set of isolated incidents. My hope was to share my own positive experience but avoid sounding dismissive of the real pains experienced by individuals.
I could list fifty highly positive experiences but the current narrative seems to focus on being negative.
I like the quote from Paul Kantner (of Jefferson Airplane): "San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality."
You can totally leave your bag in the car and it'll most likely be fine in Santa Barbara, Pleasanton, Livermore, Truckee, ... (outside tourist areas).
As others said, it's about social cohesion of which there is little, especially in large cities but more and more small towns as well.
Eventually owners squeezed all the blood from the stone there was and… people fuck off and leave. And there’s nothing left.
There’s not a marginal adjustment that’s going to bring back everything, this is a crash. SF is going to plummet until prices and conditions significantly improve but given people will likely try to hold on to the dream of the previous status quo it will have a long way to fall.
Density and failed dreams of no law enforcement being an improvement lead to those desolation and I really wish the people who drove this to happening would learn their lesson but they won’t. Lots of people made plenty of money in this game and the cost is being seen with plenty of bag holders on display.
??? they recalled their DA and voted in her "tough-on-crime" opponent almost a year ago now. Are you so blindly committed to your ideology that you just assume the evidence supports your position?