SF streets were clean for APEC, here's what Tenderloin and SoMa look like now | Hacker News Reader

SF streets were clean for APEC, here's what Tenderloin and SoMa look like now

sfchronicle.com

38 pointsAnhTho_FR68 comments

There is a large degree of “this is normal” that creeps into your mind. You begin to assume that all cities are exactly like it. You can’t comprehend it being otherwise. As a native San Franciscan who moved to DFW TX area, I vividly remember walking into a TX Walgreens for the first time and being flabbergasted by how nice it was: orderly, minimally locked shelves, etc. It almost seemed like it was a fake store in some hidden camera prank or something, no way a Walgreens could be like that based on all my time in Walgreens in SF. It was normal, like a commercial or something.

I have family that live in SF proper. I remember talking with them about the demeanor of BART's riders a few years back. They had mentioned that they had to move cars earlier that day because someone was smoking a very large joint and it was fouling the air in their car quite badly. They concluded the anecdote with something along the lines of " you know, it's just like every other metro system, nothing you can really do". I was like, no way. No other metro system is like that. I literally know of no other metro system where people are smoking in the cars, let alone pot, let alone to the point where the air is foul, let alone that you just think that's a normal thing, let alone that they aren't thrown off the car by law enforcement, let alone by the other passengers. My family members thought I was joking, that this kind of thing must happen all the time in nearly every other metro system, at least a once a day occurrence. The disconnect was just flabbergasting to me.

It's even more extreme outside the US. One of my most surreal experiences was eating at a food court in Bangkok in a businessy, but not especially ritzy, area. It was extremely crowded and tables were limited, so people were claiming tables - by leaving things like their purse on the table! Or in the Taiwan subway going up/down escalators there is this extreme discipline where literally everybody stands to the right, leaving the left side open in case somebody happens to be in a rush. Here's [1] an image of that.

[1] - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Escalator_to_Bannan_...

That used to be true even in Toronto, not too long ago. Folks would just leave expensive laptops at their seat in Starbucks/Timmies in order to reserve it while they wait in line.

People have been doing that on public transport in London for 100 years

https://web.archive.org/web/20110615070709/http://entertainm...

Yeah it’s definitely not normal. I’m in Seattle and visited Chicago and Boston over Christmas and it was night and day. Sure those cities have bad neighborhoods, but the downtown area actually seemed to enforce laws and there wasn’t people screaming on every block or encampments. Stores didn’t have intimidating security guards at the front door etc

The US is interesting in that regard as you can sample high trust & low trust micro-societies within an hour of each other.

A lot of "NY/SF or nowhere" types have forgotten their prior lives, or simply never lived outside their bubble. I have many friends like this in NY and I find the "global citizen but only leave my city when I take a jet to another country" demographic fascinating.

Living in NYC or SF is great, but you know there's more to the world than your downtown condo & the same dozen European/Asian cities and tropical resorts you fly to 1-3 times/year.

You may find that the surrounding "nowhere", "flyover country" and "the burbs" you frown upon do bring something to the table and at least are worth experiencing from time to time. You may find it does almost feel like another country in some respects.

You just reminded me of a girlfriend I had in NYC when I lived in NJ. I remember the first time she came to see me. She had never left the city by ground transportation & didn't know how to use NJ Transit lines.

This isn't unusual and is part of the appeal of living in a big, self-contained city. When I've lived in NYC I rarely had much need or desire to go anywhere else and if I did it was something vastly different and via plane.

When I moved here from California I was confused by the “pump before you pay” gas stations. Hadn’t seen them in 30 years.

I live in Florida and have traveled all over this country the last few years and haven't seen these in decades. These still exist in Texas?

They do not exist in Texas. I'm a Texas Parks enthusiast which has me driving throughout the state.

You pay at the pump.

Texans aren't somehow morally superior to everyone else, despite wearing crosses on their sleeves.

Our ancestors stole this land from Mexico, and Texans will absolutely steal fuel from you if they think they won't get shot.

Not in Texas, but they still exist (around here they switched just last year, but if you go further and further from "the city" you still find them).

You also find "pumps open 24 hours" even when the station is closed, but those are credit card only, of course.

The state of SF is sad to see. I remember as a child when it was so much nicer. Today it’s just depressing to see how bad it’s gotten. We’re not used to seeing nice cities become not nice cities. In my lifetime in other parts of the country the norm has been seeing not nice areas becoming nice areas.

New York City was widely considered to be a lost case in the early 1970s. (The era of the famous headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead”)

For famous cities, urban decline is often an ebb and flow. If SF loses the tech crowd, it will attract new kinds of people who previously couldn’t afford to live there.

It is not automatic though.

You need to have political will (and voter support) for policies that will get you there.

I grew up in Michigan during the rust belt era. Nice cities don't always get better, they can get far worse. What turns them around is 1) a commitment from the community to do something about it 2) artists and grass roots efforts transforming blighted assets 3) Financial resources 4) Frankly, the incumbents who put strangleholds on development moving out or dying and 5) visionary business leaders following the artists and seeing opportunity where others see blight. SF has all of the right ingredients, but as someone who visits often, I think the missing piece is community "roots". The people walking through the tenderloin and shaking their heads in disgust just leave. They don't live and work in these communities and so it becomes a constant gripe rather than a problem. SF will get better when people who don't want to invest in it anymore move out and people who are building for generations to come move in. I'd look to immigrants as a class of people who would kill to have a place in the tenderloin they can develop and build wealth on top of. The mental health piece is a big part of it, the "housing first" approach makes the most sense to me but is not without significant challenges. For a city that is filled with people good at building systems, it feels like inward focus and community involvement from our brightest minds outside of government would be a big step in the right direction.

My observation from NY is that a lot of people who only lived in rich coastal cities on the long upward trajectory from the 70s~90s bottom think it's an automatic force of nature.

There is also an attitude from people who moved in at the early end of this trend saying "well it was worse when I moved here". Sure, but you got to buy your condo at 1/10th to 1/4th todays prices, and everything around you got better for the last ~25 years, which is probably why you've stayed.

No one deserves to be a victim of a crime. When the value proposition you offer to new residents is "your apartment will cost you $3M, but you still won't feel comfortable in your own neighborhood" then those people with money will make other choices.

My observation is that only now are we starting to see some the loud "theres no problem" voices die down so maybe we are on the way to rationally tackling some of the challenges. Ironically 2023 was the year that the 2020->2022 crime wave at least in NY started to die down, so sentiment really is lagging.

That area has always been a slum. Always. For as long as SF has been a city. Not sure what memories you're conflating, but mid/lower Market St and the Tenderloin were a ghetto well before you were born. SoMarket was an industrial mess full of crime. SF is so much cleaner and safer than at any point in your life. No one would be caught down there after dark 30,50,75 years ago.

I can't speak to 30 years ago, but from 20 years ago to 4 years ago, SoMa and Market were definitely much better than they are today. I've been physically attacked twice since 2020 in SoMa.

I agree that people have invented some version of SF that probably hasn't existed for a very long time, if ever. At least not in my lifetime.

But I can't deny there have been periods where it's been palpably worse than normal.

Just for perspective. The Tenderloin has been a slum for as long as SF has existed. About every 25-30 years, SF goes through a boom / bust cycle. This has been happening as long as people have called it San Francisco and will likely happen as long as it remains a city.

In the late 90's early 00's Market St was a porn hub. Before Twitter was gifted their headquarters, that part of the city was a dump full of porn shops, abandoned buildings and bums. In the 70's it was a dangerous heroin invested place with open air prostitution and lots of crime.

The greatness of SF is its ability to not only reinvent itself, but with it reinventing how the US and the world at large function. SF will emerge from this slump in a new and better form. This is just a part of that process. In other words: Same as its ever been...

And pre-Rudy/Disney/etc, Times Square NY was full of peep shows. Before SoHo was a designer shopping hub and celebrity loft neighborhood, it was nearly torn down for a highway since it was disused commercial lofts after businesses left.

You have to want things to get better for them to get better. It is not an automatic force of nature. "Shrug, it's always been like this" is not how society moves forwards.

APEC proved that the laws on the books can be enforced, whereas for residents the powers that be elect when to enforce laws and not. They usually fret saying they don’t have the power to [clean up]. It also proved that they know the state of the city is not normal.

Basically it proves they can clean up for superficial appearances, but when it matters to everyday residents they are incapable of acting.

Breaking news: temporarily solving a systemic problem is a lot easier than permanently solving it

This is pretty much a guaranteed characteristic of a systemic problem.

Keep on doing the temporary solution and you have a permanent one. Perhaps it costs more, but I'm more than happy to pay taxes to ensure public order and cleanliness are maintained.

The problem being public safety, not the national homelessness crisis. Although I'd love to solve the latter, it's a separate problem that San Francisco clearly is not capable of solving on its own. The former problem, on the other hand, it can.

> Perhaps it costs more, but I'm more than happy to pay taxes to ensure public order and cleanliness are maintained.

This event apparently cost "$11.3 million in overtime", for an event one week long, so I'm going to just approximate that as $587m for a whole year, or $720/person/year (more per tax payer, but I don't know how many tax payers there are in SF).

This may be OK for you, especially as that's out of a total budget of $14.6bn[0], so your total taxes would only go up in this case by x1.04.

But that was funded by the expectation that the event itself would bring in about x5 as much extra economic activity as the increased costs. If you do this all year, perhaps it would also boost the economy, which would be good; or perhaps it will only displace the people with the issues, which would be bad, because where exactly the people are is a zero-sum game for your nation, while actually moving those people costs money… and your city government has to deal with the surrounding cities all deciding to respond in kind, which could make the cost of such displacement arbitrarily high, not bounded to just $720/person/year.

[0] https://missionlocal.org/2023/08/explore-san-francisco-budge...

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-apec-budget-overti...

I don't think that's a good extrapolation.

It cost a lot because of the momentum of the current status quo. If they changed the status quo and set different expectations of what will be permissible and not, it would not cost so much to maintain.

It's like comparing refactoring vs rewriting. One is a semi continuous process the other is a periodic thing that takes a lot of work.

Much of that displacement was internal to San Francisco, and the movement of a constant number of homeless people from one area to another can still be net positive, if the area displaced from is denser and more economically productive.

External areas would respond in kind. However, they will balance two possible responses: "anti-displacement" and provision of homeless services, depending on what's most effective. The latter does more than shuffle people around.

In fact, that dynamic in reverse is how we got to the status quo: other areas have essentially no homeless services but plenty of appetite for displacing to places that do have homeless services, like SF.

Curious what you think the temporary solution to public safety that’s repeatable with more money actually is?

Usually it’s not lack of funding that prevents good solutions to public safety issues, but rather people’s individual rights (very strong in the US) rubbing up against the commons’ rights (very weak in the US).

The US and its various states have plenty of laws that prevent anti-social behavior in public. Many of them are simply not enforced, loitering, public intoxication, vagrancy, indecent exposure, public nuisance, and many more. The activities of homeless people, drug addicts, and criminals that everyone is sick of aren't protected by the constitution.

The solution San Francisco implemented during APEC is an existence proof that such a solution actually exists.

Primarily by moving them to other, less visible parts of the city? I don’t see how that’s a lasting solution. The same forces that cause congregation of homeless folks and drug users in every city in every era will do it again. As is evidenced by the article.

Start by making sure the densest and most economically productive parts of the city are clean and safe. Recover its tax base. Then start extending the same solution to improve the situation in more marginal neighborhoods.

Are you cool with these folks getting relocated to your doorstep every other week or so?

And more breaking news: solving a systemic problem makes it impossible to get votes from it.

That is a bit more cynical than your take, but it is possibly the more realistic one given that the people in power are there because they want power.

Of course the laws on the books can be enforced! The question is just, how well, how often, and what else would you rather do with the resources spent on that enforcement.

For example, if you tried to fully enforce all the traffic laws, you may find that very quickly everyone's banned from driving (including the police). Perfect enforcement of copyright law would probably destroy all of the Hollywood studios and newspapers, for all of the newsworthy examples of the MPAA and newspapers suing individual pirates for copyright infringement.

But in each case, while you're doing that, you get some combination of all the other crimes go unresolved and/or the costs go up massively, e.g. if the UK were to fully enforce the UK prohibition on heroin[0], it would need to triple the nationwide number of prison cells even if literally every other crime was ignored.

[0] which I choose as an example of things nobody even wants to defend, not even if they otherwise think drugs are cool

Laws are there but prosecutors are sometimes loath to enforce them. To wit, Ross Mirkarimi had to draw up a new sit-lie law to address the nuisance of intoxicated kids blocking access to businesses and housing. But we had plenty of laws already! It wasn't a problem in the 60s and 70s, or even 80s. But come the 90s, oh noes, we can't enforce them... so we have to draw up new ones...

I recall reading that having a lot of strict laws on the books that are very selectively enforced is the standard playbook of authoritarian regimes.

It's everyone's playbook. One of the reasons I use heroin as a go-to example of "you can't fully enforce laws even if you want to" is that it's so widely understood to be bad, and yet the UK is economically incapable of fully enforcing just that one rule even at the expense of all the others.

Occasionally, I'm reminded of a star trek DS9 episode with a time-travel plot that put characters in 2024 in San Francisco. While SF isn't exactly at the dystopia described, it's not that far off.

- Poor, mentally ill or unhoused people are corralled into a lawless district. Though the district was perhaps set up with some justification about helping people, it mostly just segregates the very poor from being seen

- The society has extreme wealth inequality; Dax meets/befriends a tech entrepreneur in BART

- We even meet a low-level administrator who knows that the system isn't working but says something like "I need this job"

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots

Was this a case of city workers (including police) pulling a lot of overtime prior to APEC, and that can only go on for a little while? Is there a labor shortage in SF for this kind of work at least?

I am especially interested in hearing actual current SF residents comment on whether or not this article is roughly speaking accurate.

no, this is just instructions coming down from the tippy top to do something. The reality is that politicians do not want to ever risk a cataclysmic incident happening under their guard with a disenfranchised population, I guess especially in more conscionable regions where voters won't react. The same thing happens even in DC a lot (high aesthetics budget to keep it clean) - The crux is that they know it will go back to the way it was so if you're not going to solve it doesn't seem like a good use of resources, although I'm sure residents might disagree. The only other thing that can propel it is an incident such as what happened in Seattle shooting and such then they go in as well.

https://archive.is/GNyAB

Why do people still live in big, liberal cities? They're clearly trying to drive people out. Just sell up before your property values tank and move somewhere nice. Learn to entertain yourself, cook, etc. and pretty soon you won't need the amenities.

The good jobs are there. And if you have a good job you can live in a nice neighbourhood that doesn't have to worry about this stuff while benefiting from all the cheap labour that comes from having lots of poor people around – cheap restaurants, affordable delivery services, cheap taxis, etc.

It's win win if you avoid the bad areas and the bad areas don't grow too large. SF failed because its underclass grew too large and they stopped arresting the criminals among them. Now the people with the nice jobs in the nice houses don't want to live there because they increasingly need to live among the poor.

You're forgetting that the majority of the people there are voting for the issues that cause the problems - so presumably they aren't as bothered as you might be.

There's a decent chunk of people living in SF that think it's the best place to live in the world BY FAR.

> property values tank

The idea that SF property values are going to tank is, well, completely disconnected from reality.

If property values did tank, there would be a far better chance of solving SF's problems, but the root problem is that about 1.5x-5x people want to live in SF than they allow for homes to be built, creating massive inequality and misery.

The revulsion you feel at living in SF is quite similar to the feeling many have about not living in SF.

Happened in Baltimore, Detroit, formerly nice places in Minneapolis, Chicago, New Orleans...

It's not "if" but "when."

If you have money you can get isolated from most of those problems. You can have an almost idilic life even in third world big cities if you have money enough actually.

And big liberal cities are the places where you can get money.

Mostly because that is where the high paying jobs are concentrated, after that I would guess family/familiarity. Politics would be lower on the list.

WFH showed us that if you give people options, they will take them.

>get high paying job

>spend all your money on housing and property taxes and etc.

If you get a job that pays 3X but your cost of living is also 3X, just remember that your disposable income is 3X as well. You are still economically out competing your Texan or Midwest colleagues.

If you can’t get that kind of job in SF, but still live in SF, things are really tough, leaving is a good option.

Is this true though?

Not entirely.

Let's say my salary is $100k/year, and my expenses are $90k/year. I have $10k/year to save (or blow). If I move to somewhere with 3x salary and 3x costs, then my salary goes to $300k/year and my expenses go to $270k/year, and so I now have $30k/year left over.

But it's not that simple, because of progressive tax rates. The federal income tax on $300k/year is more than 3x the tax on $100k/year. Or, to put it a different way, you get 3x the salary, but not 3x the take home pay. Out of that less-than-3x take home pay, you now get to pay the 3x expenses.

Now, it could be that when people say "3x the expenses", they're taking that into account. But I suspect they're not. I suspect they're looking at COL numbers, and I suspect that the published COL numbers are just housing, food, medical, and the like.

Your taxes go up a bit because, yes, taxes are graduated. But it’s not as big a deal, and your SS is capped. A house hold making $450k/year in a high COL is still going to be doing much better than 200k in a low COL.

Lots of costs aren’t indexed to the area you live in. Computer, phones, trips to Mexico, and to some extent cars cost similar in SF as they do in Mississippi. Food prices don’t vary as much either, their might be a 20% difference, but not 3X, same with medical (really, housing is the main thing that is very much more expensive, everything else is slightly more expensive to the same price).

Your retirement savings include your house, so you have a career in SF and then retire to New Mexico, the locals will hate you and your crazy home equity you bring with you.

Yup I saw this with a lot of friends who chose to retire in their 20s to Portland. They could live remarkably comfortably working simple hourly retail jobs while I was busting my hump at competitive big corporate jobs NYC to live in less comfortable circumstances. Their "Portland dollars" income went very far on "Portland dollars" denominated goods&services like their rent, food trucks, entertainment, etc.

However our disposable income was dramatically different. So anything in "US dollars" like airplane tickets, smartphones, etc were out of reach to them.

And if you are happy with the deal, what’s the problem? Enough people seem to be that it keeps going…

Why do people want to live in places that allow them to be free? Where freedom to live your life as you want as you choose, reigns? Instead of in places that not only attack one's rights to exist, they actively push their narrow and ignorant political and theological views onto people to control them?

Gee, I wonder...

Liberal literally means freedom.

Most cities are not as bad at this as SF. NYC has 10x as many homeless people but they are given shelter. Also NYC can build buildings over 4 stories tall.

Cities are more nuanced. Good parts/bad parts. Pacific Heights is pretty nice. Cities are fun when you are young, but I admit get less and less fun the older you get. Also, aren't all US cities liberal?

ThE FoOd ChOicEs BrO!

The only solution is to dispense pharma produced drugs freely to anyone who can't afford them.

Poor people would no longer need to steal for their daily dose, all would be provided by the state. The illegal market would disappear since you can't compete with $0 price.

You would have hard drugs vending machines on street corners, that you can access with your government provided drug card.

That is the worst possible way to implement a liberalization of drug laws. I'm in favor of decriminalizing practically all drugs but this is just insane. They need to be treated like the currently legal drugs in some cases and more tightly regulated in others where the substance is more dangerous to the user. There needs to be a spectrum from dispensaries where the cashier is some college kid and pharmacies where your access and education is handled by a pharmacist or doctor. Physical addiction, while complicated by several factors, is still a real phenomenon that must be identified and treated in order to avoid ruining lives.

Would they still be sleeping on the street and committing crime to afford food, clothing, etc?

IMHO, if a person is prepared to habitually commit crime to fund their habit, it's time to get them off the drugs, by force if necessary.

Develop 'rehab jails' for addicts, where they can be kept off the streets, tapered off the drugs, and given decent treatment for underlying mental health issues.

I honestly can’t tell if you’re serious or not, but this is in no way an actual solution.

It's incomplete, let's say.

You would probably still need to get these people into treatment, and prevent them from selling the drugs onwards, and prevent new people from getting on drugs.

The invisible hand of the market could be a powerful ally in all of these, but we prefer as a society to do things in a difficult way that has never worked.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36846754

You forgot the </sarcasm>

Reply on news.ycombinator.com