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by woodruffw 1705 days ago
> It never occurred to anyone to put together organized retail crime gangs and endlessly plunder local stores until they were all forced to close.

I'm not particularly invested in defending SF, but comparing shoplifting in a dense urban center to one of the least densely populated regions of the Eastern US doesn't make a ton of sense. It occurs to me that Appalachia has plenty of entrenched and even organized crime (moonshining being the historical one that comes to mind), but most of it doesn't involve hitting up the store you live a block from.
1 comments
happytoexplain 1705 days ago
>I'm not particularly invested in defending SF

It's depressing that we need prefaces like this.

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woodruffw 1705 days ago
It was a little clumsy of me, but I was trying to hedge between the normal reactionary critiques of SF and something more constructive. NYC has plenty of problems, some of which are a lot worse than SF's, but we don't have anything really resembling this.

Why? Probably a lot of reasons. But it certainly doesn't hurt that we have a (mostly court-backed) housing mandate, and the country's largest youth employment program[1].

[1]: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/dycd/services/jobs-internships/abo...

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