- Homeless issues. Mentally ill people pissing and defecating on the sidewalks in every significant public space.
- Vehicle vandalism is extremely common and unchecked by police.
- Extremely high income taxes with no perceivable difference in government-provided services.
- Property tax law that advantages long-term owners over young people trying to buy at today's inflated prices.
COVID added some new ones:
- Extremely high pre-COVID rents meant many adults were living in roommate situations that seem a lot less acceptable when your health is tied to the willingness of everyone in your unit to behave responsibly.
- Bars and restaurants that made the city attractive for many are now closed
- Public transit in crisis and may no longer meet your needs
> Vehicle vandalism is extremely common and unchecked by police.
I believe the problem is more nuanced. I spoke with a retired police officer, and he said, "we can only give them a citation, and they [the vandals] know that, that they're gonna be out the same day."
In other words, the law is the problem, not the police.
"We can only give them a citation"? I think a big part of the issue is that the police almost never even do that much. They do zero. If you try to call this stuff in, they laugh at you.
I've called 3 times for 3 different broken windows on my car (a 2010 jeep - nothing special) and they literally just send you to an online form that automatically generates a generic police report. Insurance fraud here also has to be off the charts.
Because it would be a complete waste of time. The people have voted to decriminalize vehicle break-ins. Making the police to go through the motions when nothing's going to happen to the perpetrator would just be a waste of your own tax money.
Exactly. You can see loads of videos online of 5, 10 people, entering a regular Whole Foods or 7-Eleven and simply looting the place and leaving without pay. This kind of thing doesn't even happen in 3rd world countries like where I live, its's baffling to see what a huge american metropolis is allowing to happen in the name of political correctness.
This is actually really interesting. I don't think this is a problem with policing or political correctness. This is something I always think of when looting is mentioned: Most people reading this could walk into any grocery store (or Target, or auto parts store) and just purchase whatever they wanted without even thinking about the cost. For all practical purposes, in a software engineer's budget, expenses like that are a rounding error. My point is that the problems and solutions are usually a lot more complicated than they seem. The various social forces at work in SF are kinda crazy when you think about them.
People brazenly come into my Starbucks all the time and openly announce they are shoplifting, because they know that the police won't show up to take a report for at least an hour.
Once we do have the report, even if they do get caught, nothing happens. Many months of reports and multiple trips to the courthouse and we can MAYBE get a stay away order. Usually before that point, the store management has shuffled around enough that the person handling the legal legwork has moved on.
This economical view on Justice - ignore petty stuff because it is too expensive for the system to deal with it - destroys the goodwill on people and on State.
Public transit is a huge problem. Even if, say, my coworkers were willing to ride public transit, I'm not sure I'd be willing to be in the same room as them.
And to add to the roommate problem, I think a lot of people in sf led lives predicated on not spending that much time in their tiny housing. All of a sudden with everyone all home all the time... oof. You really need a separate office for each person so you're not spending 95% of your life in your bedroom. That's pretty unaffordable for most of the city.
My company bit the bullet and allowed permanent remote. Fifteen percent of our employees have already left sf. I suspect this will accelerate as leases expire.
Also, the stunning incompetence of sf government has led to property prices that are just stunning. A coworker bought a nice condo -- obviously elsewhere -- for less money than he was paying to have two roommates in sf. Getting out from under the ridiculous cost of living here leads to such a stark change in quality of life elsewhere.
The property prices are due to "stunning incompetence of SF government"? I'm not buying that. Public officials are not in charge of—nor do they have any real control over—property values. Your co-worker who bought property elsewhere wasn't able to do so because the mayor of that town was incredibly competent. That had absolutely nothing to do with it.
The board of supervisors routinely rejects housing projects, or puts them up for an absurd review process that involve things like banning buildings if they cast a sliver of shadow on a park (which would on the other hand be tremendously welcome these days). Several supervisors are landlords who are personally invested in keeping the supply low so that prices keep rising.
By contrast, Seattle has been building to keep up with demand and has been able to manage prices much more effectively. We could have had a Tokyo of the West. Instead, we're left with an emptying shell of a self-agrandizing suburb.
And who do you think effectively controls the BoS and planning commission? Voters. Landowning voters. Because by and large, they want to maintain the status quo.
(Full disclosure: I also own property in SF, but am in faor of all sorts of new housing, even that which will lower my home's value.)
Yes, especially in local elections, where participation is often ridiculously low, the electorate skews heavily toward long time, older residents, and more on the homeowner than the renter front. So the incentives are clear against new developments.
Edit: Thanks for supporting housing even against your financial interests. I’m on the same boat (across the bay). In my case I just want to live somewhere walkable without breaking the bank.
There is enough new housing here that apt buildings went down in monthly cost last summer. People keep moving here so house prices have been stubbornly resilient.
The SF Board of Supervisors has a lot of control over the supply and has used it to make it very hard to build anything. High prices are a direct result of low supply.
I'm not sure I'd call it incompetence though, they are very motivated to keep existing landowners happy. Higher prices and fewer neighbors to deal with is an easy way to do that.
It's not incompetence, though thats what the BoS would like you believe of them. It's corruption, plain and simple, and it'll cost you a $50,000 bribe to start getting the permits. The latest expose is against Mohammed Nuru but look back across the decades and realize it's a recurring theme.
Example: Hillary Ronin is the supervisor for the mission. An area that was historically lower income minorities, now being displaced, in part due to a lack of housing units. She has fought for years to stop the construction of buildings that would add both affordable units and market rate units.
"Ronen fought to prevent the construction of a 75-unit building on the site of a laundromat. She argued that an environmental review of the building did not consider the impact of a shadow on a nearby schoolyard, even though an environmental review conducted by officials at the San Francisco Planning Department showed that the new construction, including its shadow, would not have an adverse impact on children at the schoolyard.]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Ronen
SF city “leadership” had failed the city miserably. What we’ve witnessed is that the city was actually really, really hard to destroy with A LOT going on for it. The pandemic just accelerated the demise - no other city even in CA has exodus quite like SF. This is all very sad as SF was such a beautiful city.
Why would anyone vote for the incumbents in SF’s next elections is beyond me.
If you are talking about the board of supervisors, I agree. They are to blame for many of the city’s problems, mostly because their most politically active constituents and donors are angry homeowners who block everything.
The current mayor London Breed has been doing good work, her handling of the covid-19 crisis in particular has been excellent. The problem is that most supervisors hate her and block her every step of the way.
Extremely high pre-COVID rents meant many adults were living in roommate situations that seem a lot less acceptable when your health is tied to the willingness of everyone in your unit to behave responsibly.
Unless you're practically retired, this is not a real issue given the COVID mortality profile. The sort of people who have flatmates tend to be younger, so the idea that COVID means nobody can or should have flatmates anymore isn't backed by any sort of medical reality.
But there does seem to be an issue here with the type of people who live in SF not seeming to perceive the risks around COVID correctly. Why is Google keeping their offices closed until 2021? All you have to do is look at the stats or the history of epidemics to realise that this doesn't make sense, especially for a workforce as famously young as Google's.
If you could establish an impregnable firewall between young healthy people and vulnerable people, and you ignore the rare deaths of healthy young people and side-effects of infection, the infection rate among young healthy people would be less important.
But establishing an impregnable firewall is impossible, and long as the boundary between groups is porous, a higher infection rate among the young and healthy will increase the infection rate among the vulnerable, and hence the death rate.
SF has an extreme homelessness problem, there are places where you can walk two blocks from posh shops to tent lined streets and open air drug markets. Working at a previous gig had me looking at the ground carefully to avoid stepping on needles, feces, and humans, all of which were nearly daily obstacles.
Because of the mild weather and culture, SF is somewhat of a destination for the homeless which is less of an issue, but it wasn’t clear that the city was doing nearly enough to address the filth and human tragedy plaguing the streets.
It is also so expensive that bars and restaurants (before covid) had a hard time hiring because working at an SF restaurant meant either living in squalor packed in somewhere or living extremely far away and commuting. Thus everything opened late and closed early. The food scene was overrated, most of the artists left for the east bay or LA, and the charming things about the city seemed like they were only still there because of fantasy or stubborn inertia.
Other cities have room and willingness to build or the courage to restrict business growth if not willing to expand residential growth. People and businesses are much more willing to leave other cities, and that supply/demand elasticity makes problems fix themselves, but other cities don’t have the romanticism/reality disconnect in nearly the same way.
That you have an affluent area on one block and a poor area on the next is not new at all. it was like that back in the 80s. And it's probably a good thing, in terms of making it easy to climb the ladder. If you live in a wasteland of poor people you'll never be able to sell any services at all, or make any money, or climb the ladder.
I agree, but it seems like "poor area" means something different in SF. Most cities don't have any areas where the sidewalks are littered with needles and human feces.
What are these quality of life issues, and how have other cities avoided them?
They haven't. But other cities have handled some quality of life issues differently, or better, or in some cases worse.
It's all cyclical. New York was a great place to be in the 60's, largely due to quality of life. New York in the 70's was a hellhole, largely due to quality of life. These things ebb and flow in every city. It's just SFO's turn to be on the fuzzy end of the lollipop. It'll come back.
Uhh, maybe US cities haven’t, but here in Tokyo I never smell feces, step on needles, nor are there hordes of homeless people in every major part of the neighborhood, in a city that has affordable housing, a truly phenomenal public transit network, streets that pretty much never have potholes, and endless cultural and culinary amenities, in a place with GDP per capita far lower than SF. And it similarly was the case for pretty much every city I’ve been to in East Asia, so it’s not even just a Tokyo thing.
I was active in SF housing politics when I lived there for 8 years, and my conclusion is that SF and most other US cities incompetent local governments (SF’s especially) are stuck in a mindset where they still repeatedly declare that they’re “great!” despite their blatantly subpar infrastructure and the rampant, systematic trampling of their own citizens human rights. Perhaps it is great for the elderly voters who never leave their homes in the burbs and see the “undesirables”.
They make excuses about how US culture makes tried and true solutions in other cities impossible to implement (So... are they saying US culture is just inferior?), and that things will get better just around the corner (when it costs 10x more and takes 10x longer to make any updates to the built infrastructure in US cities than anywhere else, and SF itself has built virtually nothing in the last 40 years).
Maybe it will, but I decided for myself that I’m not willing to wait around for it, and chose one of the countless
cities in the world that in fact does do better.
I don't think you are reading the parent poster. Tokyo was probably rubble in 1945 then it re-invented itself into a world-class city.
Hong Kong was (probably still is for now) a world class city for the rich and the free and now is on path to become a hell-hole for both.
Cities swing through a pendulum of up and down. SF might be going to ruins but it'll be back. It might have to reach rock-bottom first before re-inventing itself though.
That said, the city does not have visible homeless or crime problems of most large US cities, partly because you can legally get a coffin for $300/month.
Hong Kong has an imperfect but subsistence-level dole system (CSSA), coffin house style bad but cheap housing (notably absent in SF), less of a drug problem, and a more functional system for taking care of the mentally ill.
You kidding me? Physical infrastructure is absolutely central to the issue. Demand to live in SF skyrocketed but the city responded by resisting any expansion of its housing stock. To claim that doesn’t have an impact on the affordability in the city, which in turn affects whether or not people can afford to live in a home there, is madness.
> Tokyo could be the rare example of a once expensive city that successfully managed the difficult political process of removing planning restrictions in order to achieve affordable housing.
They didn't achieve affordable housing as a result of a clean slate. In fact housing in Tokyo was insanely expensive during the 80s. It wasn't until zoning restrictions were changed in the 90s that prices came back down. It's about the laws, not about having to contend with old buildings.
How did you make the move? Are you Japanese or Asian? I would love to move to Tokyo or similar but feel I would be discriminated against for being a dark skinned Indian male.
I’m half southeast Asian, which is different enough people can tell if they get close, but close enough that I can blend in in a crowd. It depends where in Japan you’re moving to as well - but being in Tokyo it’s definitely global and people are generally used to foreigners. Your mileage may vary being more visibly “different”, as well as you motivation to learn Japanese/local customs (I’m pretty conversational, which took a lot of work), and your sensitivity to being treated differently - though for me I mostly don’t take it personally.
Thanks for the response. I think I wouldn't be too sensitive regarding being treated different but I would feel more sensitive to how my wife and kids experience it. It's the same issue keeping me away from places in the US like Idaho and Montana.
Oh, I didn't answer the how - I had been to Japan a lot, so I already had friends here. When I made the move permanent, I had cofounded a company with a few friends, piloted doing remote work from here a couple times before actually moving to convince the team that it can work. Once we were all onboard with it, I crashed at my friend's apartment while going apartment hunting with my Japanese then-girlfriend (now-wife). When I first arrived permanently I was on a tourist visa waiver, but then switched to a student visa studying Japanese (since I was planning to anyway). It was 6 months of full time school + full time job which was exhausting, but after we got married then I switched to a spouse visa and life calmed down since.
I don't know what your profession or situation is, but if you can line up a job you can pretty easily get a work visa (it's much less binding than US work visas). Japanese corporations are known to have pretty brutal work culture so that's something you ought to be aware of when searching, if you seriously pursue it. Hope it's interesting food for thought :)
You should probably consider if your own fears are biased. There seems to be a tendency to assume that racism is more prevalent than reality in many areas of the country, fueled by the internet and the media. I live in a suburban, Midwestern area that is absolutely more diverse and welcoming than those on the coasts seem to think. Of the 6 households nearest to mine, 3 are white. The other 3 are Indian (first generation immigrant), Chinese (second generation), and Eastern European (first generation). I work at a smaller startup now, but at my previous job, my team was white-minority. Most people on my team were East or South Asian, including my boss.
I have no doubt there are racists here, especially in the rural areas. But I also have no doubt that the same holds true for places like California and Washington. You may be keeping yourself from experiencing areas of the country that you may love and would love you back.
I hope US cities wake up, become humble, and actually try to fix the deep hole of social issues they’ve dug themselves into. Best I can say is be active and vocal in your local government, since that’s where these messed up policies come from and you have a lot more power to impact your city than you do the federal government.
What about the fact that, nation-wide, many Americans don't have access to good jobs? Especially people without college degrees, but not even limited to that. This is an economy-wide problem. The federal government could probably do something to better address that than a city government.
How about that we generally fail at mental health care, or health care in general? The former is clearly applicable to many homeless folks who are visibly suffering. The latter is a huge cost for many people, drives many personal bankruptcies, etc.
I do believe city governments play an enormous role in these issues; the most obvious is the ridiculous and convoluted process for housing approvals in SF that has made it impossible for the city to come even close to providing adequate housing supply for the people that wish to live there, driving housing costs through the roof; coupled with the incessant stonewalling of any housing and transportation construction by municipalities across the Bay. Plus the fact that people dedicated to perpetuating this atrocious system keep getting elected to the the SF Board of Supervisors, no thanks to young people who would benefit from competition failing to show up to the elections.
But I also place a lot of blame on state policies too - CA Prop 13 is a cancer on the whole state, incentivizing land owners to fight tooth and nail to prevent progress. I'm glad that Scott Wiener got elected, though, as he's been making solid progress at the state level to rectify these issues.
The roots of these problems are not broadly federal in my opinion and, while they certainly can help, there's a lot of work to do at the city and state level that are achievable with a small number of dedicated people - if only they cared.
Neither would I just blame the sorry state of US cities on inadequate mental health care - while healthcare broadly certainly should be better, I'm in Japan where mental health awareness is relatively speaking in the stone age compared to SF, and that hasn't resulted in the level of human tragedy you experience viscerally by existing for 5 minutes in any of the US's major metropolises. Part of the reason for that is I can get my own apartment without roommates 15 minutes from the center of Tokyo for $600/mo, largely because the local government here actually does things to make it livable (and it's not just here, it's practically everywhere besides US cities).
With unemployment rising and poor benefits, civil unrest, and shitty containment policies; I’m thinking about riding the rest of this out back in Canada so we don’t get robbed/assaulted.
"While the border closure has had significant economic and personal repercussions for the millions of people that live along it or have loved ones on the other side, the vast majority of Canadians want it to stay shut."
>>When entering Newfoundland and Labrador, visitors will be required to produce two pieces of government issued identification to verify that they are a permanent resident in one of the Atlantic Provinces. One piece of identification must include a home address.
The Right of Return is an international law that allows citizens to return to their country of citizenship, and while some may have doubts about the willingness of the USA to follow the Geneva Convention, I'm pretty sure Canada still adheres to it.
Not as much as it was. De Blasio has been an unmitigated disaster, and NYC is rapidly approaching 90s-level (if not 70s-level) squalor. Only time will tell if the voters will throw him out and elect someone who can effectively manage the city government, or double down on failure.
At a guess: everything is shut down because of the pandemic.
That's true in other cities too. But if you can't take advantage of the facilities a city has to offer, why pay $4,000/month rent to live there during the pandemic when you could pay less than half of that somewhere else?
- Homeless issues. Mentally ill people pissing and defecating on the sidewalks in every significant public space.
- Vehicle vandalism is extremely common and unchecked by police.
- Extremely high income taxes with no perceivable difference in government-provided services.
- Property tax law that advantages long-term owners over young people trying to buy at today's inflated prices.
COVID added some new ones:
- Extremely high pre-COVID rents meant many adults were living in roommate situations that seem a lot less acceptable when your health is tied to the willingness of everyone in your unit to behave responsibly.
- Bars and restaurants that made the city attractive for many are now closed
- Public transit in crisis and may no longer meet your needs