How San Francisco staged a comeback
economist.com
economist.com
and would also conveniently be number 2 or 3 in buzzfeed listicles, but that wasn’t really for humans
never number 1, we would put our competitors at number 1 and assume their google alerts or network picked it up. then congratulate them for winding up in the same article, and use that coincidence with conference organizers to have us or our publicist invite them to be on the same fireside chats on stage. that was for humans.
our Google results look impeccable
great for our other assumption that our dates would cyberstalk us, I mean investors
I dont pay the publicist anymore but all those assumptions were true and still pay dividends
To be surprised, you'd have to believe the media and propaganda more than your own eyes and ears.
it's in the interest of the right-wing media to push the narrative that san fran is failing due to the left's "interference".
there was a real problem. the city as a whole thought it and voted to recall their district attorney for his policies of not prosecuting crimes
I used to live there and now I don't.
The homeless situation really did get out of control after 2015 or so. I hear it's only gotten worse.
Maybe owning a home shouldn't take longer than a SWE's working lifespan.
If you're very wealthy and can afford to be isolated in SF, it's probably still a lovely experience.
Pardon my poor English.
All my friends moved away over a span of about three years. I held on as long as I could but I finally threw in the towel too.
What part of sf do you still enjoy?
You can enjoy Pac Heights, Noe, the Dogpatch, the Sunset, the Richmond, North Beach etc. etc. just fine without ever making contact with downtown, the same way most people don't hang out on 5th and San Pedro in LA and can still enjoy Silver Lake. You can pretend it doesn't exist and never cross paths, unless you really insist on spending quality time on 6th and Mission and other fine intersections.
Would I like it better if the Tenderloin was more Fifth Avenue and less World War Z? Sure, but that's not happening with the way SF politics work, so I might as well live with the cards we were dealt.
All the tourist attractions are in different, older parts of the city (Powell St, Embarcadero, etc). I don't see a reason a tourist would want to go to downtown (aka SoMa or FiDi).
The city is what, 5 miles by 5 miles? This isn't LA where you just skip the bad parts your whole life.
I was harassed at the SF Public Library in the Civic Center so I do avoid the library. I drive through the Tenderloin although I try not to walk there.
Its more insightful to ask about the parts of San Francisco that you don't enjoy. Oh, yes, there's one such area. It's one of the smallest in terms of geography but receives the most media attention.
You do bring up a good point though that a lot needs to get fixed even though the city is enjoyable, high up on my list.
1. Crime 2. Education 3. Cleanliness 4. Illogical supervisors who harm not help the city 5. Dirt bikers riding in city illegally for the sole purpose of harassing others
And the real reason cops went after him (to the extent of refusing to participate in a raid on a shop used for fencing stolen goods: https://sfist.com/2022/05/23/report-sfpd-refused-to-particip...) was that he wanted to hold corrupt cops accountable. Now that he's gone, police have what they want and they went back to doing nothing.
So basically, you'd have to be any human. We parrot propaganda all the time. Rarely is any of it fact based.
You don't need facts to get people to buy into your narrative. You just need a story that fits your world view. Truth or falsehood is largely irrelevant.
Real question here, is there a city who's residents don't say this?
We definitely have what we like to call an 'opioid' problem here.
I lived in Houston from Rita to Harvey. Also had serious drug problems. Needles and all. There is no way other people living in Houston could not have noticed these issues. Homelessness, drugs, rampant crime.
For San Fran to be different from Houston, there would need to be something more.
Let me copy a piece of my comment I already wrote as a reply to a different comment deeper in this thread:
> Homelessness, drugs, expensive housing, traffic, car break-ins, theft in broad daylight (you can steal up to I think $800 worth of stuff and not get punished), underground street racing gangs (they block intersections in broad daylight to do donuts and cops just stand there and watch unable to do anything about them), red light traffic cameras everywhere, paid freeway lanes, gender politics is being forced on elementary/middle school kids while science like math is being simplified (instead of encouraging smart kids to study harder material they bring curriculum to a lower level to match the level of kids who struggle with math).
So no, it’s not just “media fabrication”. San Francisco is in a state of chaos and lawlessness and it is getting worse.
> but the idea that it's a "failed city" was always a media fabrication.
And you mention:
> Homelessness, drugs, expensive housing, traffic, car break-ins, theft in broad daylight (you can steal up to I think $800 worth of stuff and not get punished), underground street racing gangs (they block intersections in broad daylight to do donuts and cops just stand there and watch unable to do anything about them), red light traffic cameras everywhere, paid freeway lanes, gender politics is being forced on elementary/middle school kids while science like math is being simplified (instead of encouraging smart kids to study harder material they bring curriculum to a lower level to match the level of kids who struggle with math).
"Things I don't like" does not make SF a failed city, it doesn't mean property values will fall (let alone go to zero) as everyone flees. It does mean that SF will continue being a city not for everyone.
> So no, it’s not just “media fabrication”. San Francisco is in a state of chaos and lawlessness and it is getting worse.
Again, that's really just your opinion and outlook, you don't have to live in SF, you probably don't.
TLDR
The GDP of the city is way up. Everything else still sucks.
Don't travel to San Francisco, your car will be vandalized and robbed, got it.
I mean, why is that the standard? Nowhere I go do I ever have to worry about something like that.
What you are seeing are the effects of ignoring widespread calls for reform and the doubling down on funding of a broken institution.
If you are driving in a snowy area, go slow. Bring warm clothes in case your car gets stuck.
Sometimes you have to modify your behavior based on your environment.
My conclusion was that SF does not care about law abiding, rent paying citizens, while at the same time the people there have something like Stockholm syndrome and will never admit they have a huge problem.
Either way I don't care, I will never go near it again.
You have got to be shitting me. SF crime is third world level, obvious to anyone within first 30m of visit. My two previous employers instituted buddy system bc female employees got jumped on the street repeatedly. Stores are closing bc of high crime, etc. i mean ffs
SF does everything in its power to not grow, to restrict access. The city population grew barely 20% over the last 70 years, while places like Austin TX went up by 830% during the same time period. Might as well be on different planets.
It's the core problem of pretty much every issue it has.
Instead of building a city on exclusion, it needs to be accepting again, become a city that wants to welcome every human.
But the high rents come from locals explicitly deciding that they don't want more people, and blocking housing. And that leads to lots of scapegoating of particular classes of people based on group characteristics, in order to justify the exclusion. Whether it's people moving from the Midwest, or people in tech, or (when my wife lived in the inner subset) all those people at UCSF.
There's a huge amount of "othering" in SF that people use to justify their need to keep people out. And I would say that it's far more prevalent and accepted than anti-immigrant bias in the Midwest, for example.
There are way too many people in SF that try to be "cool" by distancing themselves from all those people that arrived in the city after them. The core problem is the idea that a city is for the people that were born there, rather than cities are for everyone.
As the city then develops, it could use the increased tax levels to build subways to replace bus lines. It could start making more effective use of its streets, banning storage of personal vehicles that obstruct traffic, for example.
Greater population and better transit need to happen at the same time, not one before the other.
Not everyone can live in SF, obviously.
> SF is very dense because Paris and Tokyo are considered much larger jurisdictions.
I can't fully parse what you mean here, but it seems that the reality is exactly the opposite of what you intend, given the rest of you comment.
> I can't fully parse what you mean here, but it seems that the reality is exactly the opposite of what you intend, given the rest of you comment.
Both Paris and Tokyo are large municipalities that cover as much area as the Bay Area, not the smaller area city of SF which is only the second most populous city in that area. Tokyo has 847 sqm compared to SF’s 47 sqm, they aren’t comparable. Paris is 1000 sqm.
Interesting. That would be considered cheap for Manhattan depending on some factors: south of 90th St, 5 mins walk from a subway station and ~1250 sq ft.
* That price (8K? Jesus Fucking Christ.)
* The fact that a "two bedroom" would be called "one bedroom a living room, a bathroom, and a kitchen" anywhere that's civilized, so I expect you're getting maybe 800 square feet.
in a pretty crummy location (which is even worse now with the collapse of Downtown and FiDi).
Fake Edit: Actually, bullet point #2 is totally incorrect. The two-bedrooms that are currently (or soon) available are actually "two bedroom, living room, kitchen, and at least one bathroom" at ~1300 sq ft. I'm fucking shocked.
The building is _still_ in a pretty crummy location, though.