San Francisco can't point to progress on many of the social issues it spends liberally to tackle
Oh really? Maybe you should take a look at the healthy San Francisco program, which basically arranges medical insurance for the indigent. That works. I like to grumble about Muni, the public transit system, but the fact is that it covers the entire city, is (mostly) available around the clock, and every vehicle is GPS tracked so you can find out when the next one is coming. I've called in problems on a bus by phone before and had an inspector board the bus a few stops later to resolve the issue.
Although many of the criticisms in the article are individually valid, many of them are divorced from context, eg not considering the facts of state politics. There are a bunch of things that need reforming in San Francisco, but this article is hit piece rather than serious journalism.
There are two free weekly newspapers in San Francisco. For years the Bay Guardian has been the standard bearer for grumpy hippy activism (and by 'grumpy' I mean an interest in basic fiscal rectitude). The SF Weekly, by contrast, has done much better out of promoting entertainment and lifestyle with some human-interest stories sprinkled in as news; indeed, for several years they've had a policies of not even offering endorsements at election time or putting any resources into election coverage. Now both papers have seen a calamitous drop in advertising, both classified and display, and have shrunk from tabloid to magazine size. And the SF weekly is desperately churning out what it regards as hard-hitting journalism in a bid to stay relevant, after years of coverage that amounted to little more than 'LOL politics'.