Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/05/25/downtown-san-francisco-is-at-a-tipping-point

by martincmartin • 3 years ago

80 189 3 years ago

economist.com

xyzzy4747• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/IkYHB

23B1• 3 years ago

Let it die. It's the only way for it to be cool again.

sien• 3 years ago

See also the article in the Financial Times "What if San Francisco never pulls out of its ‘doom loop’?"

https://www.ft.com/content/71d8013d-9d94-441e-b2d1-3039c0439...

SamoyedFurFluff• 3 years ago

Isn’t San Francisco a boom and best town all the way back to the gold rush?

paxys3• 3 years ago

Same problem with any region where people don't have roots but rather come for the opportunity. Turns out it's as easy to leave once the opportunity no longer exists.

jimsimmons• 3 years ago

Hotel California

VWWHFSfQ3• 3 years ago

San Francisco and Oakland are facing combined close to $500 million budget shortfall and are requesting a federal tax payer bailout. The second major federal bailout in eight years. Oakland has one of the highest violent crime rates in the entire country and they just cut more public safety and health jobs. I can't see how anyone can look at the situation in the Bay area and not anticipate anything other than continued decline.

bombcar7• 3 years ago

Sounds like someone needs the suburbs to subsidize them.

onos• 3 years ago

Oakland is already gigantic.

golemotron• 3 years ago

This is why one party rule is bad.

RhodesianHunter7• 3 years ago

Just look at the bottom ten states for any measurable statistic people care about.

Healthcare outcomes, standard of living, GDP per Capita, poverty, educational attainment, obesity, etc.

All deep dark red.

asmithmd1• 3 years ago

I agree mixed government wins. I moved to Massachusetts almost 20 years ago and I don't understand why it isn't held up as an example for other states. Everyone thinks MA is deep blue, and it is on social issues. It was the first state to allow same sex marriage. It has the toughest gun law enforcement in the US (break the law and you are going to jail for 2 years) and consequently has the lowest gun death rate in the US - 80% lower than many red states!

But MA also elects Republican governors on the regular. Mitt Romney was Governor from 2002-2006. Republican Charlie Baker ran the state so well that by the end of his second term the state's "rainy day" fund hit the legal max of 15% of the state's annual budget, so last fall every taxpayer in MA got a check for 13% of their previous years state taxes! And state income taxes are not high, basically a 5% flat tax. I would argue this frequent election of people who have run businesses is what also keeps the state at the top of the list of states in per capita GDP.

inferiorhuman5• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

As of 2019, the stats show Oakland around the middle at 1,300 violent crimes per 100,000 people and San Francisco towards the bottom at around 700 per 100,000. The worst were around 2,100 violent crimes per 100,000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rat...

Puts Oakland towards the middle internationally (and domestically).

  The second major federal bailout in eight years.

No idea what you're talking about here, but hacker news sure has a gigantic hardon for Bay Area and California doomporn.

onetimeusename3• 3 years ago

It's unfortunate this is legal. It's contrary to the whole notion of anti-federalism that experiments gone wrong in one location can receive investments to continue from the federal government. I'm sure someone will rebut this by saying that the federal government bails out everyone everywhere but that is missing my point. Not every city is suffering a budget shortfall.

ProfessorLayton2• 3 years ago

While I think SF should be able to function on a much leaner budget (There's so much waste and corruption in the city), this isn't a great take.

Investing in one of the most important cities in one of the most important states in the USA is in everyone's interest.

SF contributes 6.5% of California's GDP, a state that alone would rank as the world's 5th largest economy. SF's economy is higher than several other states put together [1]. Additionally, Californians pay significantly more federal taxes than they receive in return, so they are the ones subsidizing other states' budgets.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

papito2• 3 years ago

What amazes me is that the Valley gazillionaires are not spending their fortunes to fix their own habitat. They can just BUY the city government they want.

Instead, they are shoving mountains of cash to turn the United States into some perverted libertarian fantasy, where the government is weak, paralyzed, ineffectual, and out of their way OH WAIT.

paxys3• 3 years ago

Do you think any "valley gazillionaires" are living in the tenderloin?

papito2• 3 years ago

Of course not, I was going to say that, actually - they live on protected, isolated compounds. Logically they should not care about what is happening elsewhere, right? But they do, just not the stuff in their backyard. There are woke people in New York, you see! And they are the real concern.

dopidopHN• 3 years ago

What politicien in this country want a strong, in your face government ? I would like to vote for that person.

Because all I saw so far, including far away from CA, is what you are describing as a valley phénomène.

capableweb• 3 years ago

What amazes me is that the Valley gazillionaires are not spending their fortunes to fix their own habitat

The habitat of the gazillionaires is not the same as the habitat of the people experiencing the issues facing the city. In order to become a gazillionaire, you need to be at least a bit selfish, so if you're selfish, why would you spend your money fixing other peoples habitat?

throwaway67344• 3 years ago

They can't buy the government they want. They'd dump tons of money into candidates that would get crushed due to the insane progressive tilt of most SF voters or they'd get in for a term or two, which is not enough time

flangola74• 3 years ago

Why would progressives not vote for policies that expand housing and provide direct assistance and funding to the homeless?

ihaveajob2• 3 years ago

Mr "It's time to build" and spouse went out of their way to lobby their city against a proposed multi-family housing project. That says it all.

jl2718• 3 years ago

Such statements confuse me. Let’s go point by point on this:

1. How does one “buy” a government? With bond purchases? With campaign contributions? With voter fraud? And in the chosen case, what powers would they gain to “fix their habitat”?

2. Which valley “gazillionaire” is actively spending money in any way that doesn’t align with progressive politics and larger stronger less-accountable government? For the purposes of this question, anybody invested in Palantir is ineligible.

3. What “their way” would a strong government be “in”? What specific harm to whom are you suggesting?

4. If they have infinite power over government, why do you think they would be happy to have it “out of their way” versus active assistance?

5. If we observe that “the government” is quite powerful at the present moment, then how do you resolve the contradiction. Are they wasting their money?

pandaman• 3 years ago

What makes you think they have not done that already and what we are seeing is not their desired state of affairs? It's not that Zuckerberg or Brin, for example, take BART or need to fend off the deranged junkie who camps in the entrance to their apartment every night.

zulban• 3 years ago

I wish I could pay 2$ to read the article by clicking a button on an independent service, instead of giving all my info and signing up to a subscription which is probably a nightmare to cancel. Sigh.

etothepii• 3 years ago

This is exactly what the 402 HTTP code is for. Such a shame.

lucaslin• 3 years ago

Why do you think newspapers/magazines don’t allow people to pay per article (obviously at a steep markup to subscription)? Do you think it’s because they’re afraid of cannibalizing their revenue?

bombcar7• 3 years ago

My personal theory is that it's a cross of two or three things:

1. They don't want to know or admit the articles that are "worth paying for"

2. They know that hardly anyone would pay

3. Advertisers only care about subscription numbers

bombcar7• 3 years ago

It seems such a perfect use of Apple Pay online - click a button, pay $1-2, the newspaper gets $0.50-$1 or so (way more than an ad impression) and they get the chance to convince someone to subscribe.

contrarian1234• 3 years ago

Every time I got to SF I'm surprised how far along they've gone in making the city look like Johnny Mnemonic. Just need to neurolink a dolphin to an LLM...

SirLJ• 3 years ago

This is good one, thank you for the smile!

MontyCarloHall• 3 years ago

There are expensive challenges with converting office buildings to apartments that historically made it non-cost effective, since commercial demand was always high enough that building owners could always make a bigger profit leasing to commercial tenants versus converting their buildings to residential.

But if remote work has permanently emptied SF’s downtown office buildings, pushing commercial demand to near zero, but demand for housing in the Bay Area is still red-hot, perhaps large-scale conversions will become cost-effective as commercial leases begin to expire, since the alternative for building owners is to just let them rot empty.

mindvirus• 3 years ago

Look at Detroit. The city hollowed out, but the suburbs are still among the wealthiest in the country.

franklampard• 3 years ago

The amount of tax revenue and budget is still insanely high.

Need to be more efficient

paxys3• 3 years ago

San Francisco spends more on homeless services than most cities its size spend on everything. And the homeless problem is getting worse every year.

idlewords6• 3 years ago

At the same time, there is a large municipality right next to San Francisco (Colma) that consists entirely of graveyards. Homelessness in SF is not just a housing problem, but the housing crisis amplifies it and could be instantly ameliorated by just building the hell out of things.

brightball• 3 years ago

That in itself might be a contributor.

0xy2• 3 years ago

It's all embezzled and frauded away. [1] [2]

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/CEO-of-S-F-nonprofit-...

[2] https://sfist.com/2023/02/11/saturday-links-lawsuit-alleges-...

Pigalowda• 3 years ago

Well it’s an expensive place to live so of course you have to hire experts and social workers at $400k/y! Then they make powerpoints and present them to each other. It’s probably the police department’s fault so they better be defunded and that money should be rolled into the homeless social services program so they can hire more people.

marklubi• 3 years ago

It's the Homeless Industrial Complex

raverbashing2• 3 years ago

Aided in no small part by the NIMBYs

Mistletoe• 3 years ago

I feel bad for the poor people that moved there for the service industry that supported the startup zero interest rate gold rush. They can’t leave. They didn’t use their stock options to buy a house in the Hamptons or Aspen. They are waiting tables in an empty restaurant and have to make rent and can’t afford to move. The home prices look like this-

https://paragonpublic.blob.core.windows.net/dash-v2-blog-ima...

twelve402• 3 years ago

I'm not saying they should, but why can't they leave? even Sacramento a little over an hour's drive away is already much more affordable, let alone other cities and towns in the Central Valley and it only gets cheaper the further you go East. https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/budget-map/

idlewords6• 3 years ago

Sadly at this point geology is the last, best hope for West Coast urbanism. Something like BART could not be built today unless the Bay Area was a pile of rubble. Reconstruction is the only way to get Japan-like high density housing and transit infrastructure.

spaniard892777• 3 years ago

Make housing affordable with denser mixed-use zoning: You solved 50% of the problem.

Make public transport convenient. You solved another 30%.

People needs to be able to stay frugal in rough times and socialize. It feels to me that many US cities make this impossible.

If you had Spain levels of unemployment I have no idea how would you do.

Mizoguchi• 3 years ago

Let's ignore that almost 100% of the homeless population in America is addicted to drugs. Having experienced drug abuse myself I know for a fact affordable housing is not going to do anything for these folks. They need treatment, and that unfortunately doesn't happen voluntarily when you are sick.

spaniard892777• 3 years ago

Were you born addicted to drugs?

People needs treatment and a path to become useful members of society again.

Affordable housing makes a lot of poor people able to save money and help their peers.

bombcar7• 3 years ago

I wonder what the total cost of building drug cities in the middle of nowhere and just paying to have the hopelessly drugged far away.

OrvalWintermute• 3 years ago

Baizuo white glove treatment of druggie homeless and homeless handouts are the bane of SF

ihaveajob2• 3 years ago

"According to SAMHSA, 38% of homeless people abused alcohol while 26% abused other drugs." [1]

The vast majority of homeless people do not look like what's on display near Civic Center in SF. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

[1] https://americanaddictioncenters.org/rehab-guide/homeless

raverbashing2• 3 years ago

Cause and consequence. A lot of people become addicts after becoming homeless

yalogin• 3 years ago

Let’s try not to create more homeless population. That will be a great start. Yes existing population may have problems and they need help beyond just housing, but not adding to that list is a great way to even start helping the existing homeless population

Barrin92• 3 years ago

Yep. As the article points out in SF this is most concentrated but honestly the US overall seems to have largely abandoned institutionalizing the mentally ill or drug addicts.

Rates of drug use or mental illness among the homeless can be as high as 30-50% depending on where and how you measure it, and anyone who has ever met people in that state knows they need to be in professional treatment, by force if necessary.

Hydraulix989• 3 years ago

Did you ever experience homelessness though?

panarchy3• 3 years ago

That's why the goal of many "affordable housing" and "housing first" initiatives is to provide a space with easy (often mandated) access to social workers, occupational therapists, and addiction therapists in addition to a place where people can sleep without being harassed and have a shower.

seanmcdirmid10• 3 years ago

100% of the visible homeless problem maybe, but there is also a homelessness problem that involve people who lack homes but aren’t ranting and pooping in the street, so they aren’t noticed (you might not even realize they are homeless if you see them in person).

But this is an important point: there is a real homelessness problem in the USA, but there is also a mental illness/drug addiction problem that often co-exists with homelessness (some say that being homeless causes one to become an addict eventually, but that is controversial).

agumonkey3• 3 years ago

If I read you correctly, the social fabric in spain (urban planning, gatherings) makes difficult times bearable ?

I'm quite interested in this because I anticipate we'll all need this when climate becomes too dire.

spaniard892777• 3 years ago

IMO urbanism plays a key role. Spanish cities are very dense, and until recently provided cheap housing with a mix of public-private developments.

This isn't the case anymore (price wisw, still dense) and it's having effects on the social fabric.

ioseph• 3 years ago

Density works but isn't it just kicking the can down the road until population growth and inflation drives prices up again?

civilized• 3 years ago

Is there supposed to be a one-time eternal solution, a solution that isn't just kicking a can down a road?

The only way to keep housing affordable without building more, and have some semblance of fairness, would be to stop new building, impose a price/rent cap, then have a lottery to determine who gets the limited supply of houses.

That is a one-time eternal solution that satisfies degrowth ideology, so long as you're willing to ignore the unlucky folks in the lottery.

spaniard892777• 3 years ago

Im on mobile, so much comments. Yes, but no. The root of the problem is that you cant build land and that's an impossible problem to solve.

Supply solutions provide enough time window to think on demand solutions.

It is possible, don't get paralized because you'll have a different set of problems in the future.

api• 3 years ago

You think driving prices up in SF would help?

PaulHoule3• 3 years ago

A cure for schizophrenia is another 80% of the problem.

truckerbill5• 3 years ago

Housing shouldn't be an investment vehicle. It seems pretty obvious but no-one wants to give up their imaginary number. (Imaginary because most people have 1 or fewer houses and will always need to live somewhere, so they can't spend the paper value of their home).

The cost of rent feeds into everything, its such a clear drain on everyone's resources (apart from landlords). If you have time to give, please think about how to change things. Though I'm an internet rando so ymmv

riffraff• 3 years ago

The number is not imaginary if you have kids, the idea of leaving your children some of your wealth is dear to many people, and most often they will have acquired their own place by the time you die.

It is arguable that inheritance taxes should prevent accumulation of wealth, but point is, real estate survives you.

inferiorhuman5• 3 years ago

  real estate survives you

In California the real estate value survives you. Your children inherit your Prop 13 tax assessment which means your children inherit a tax bill that's a fraction of what it would otherwise be. That's a pretty strong incentive to drive values up and not sell.

rhaway847733• 3 years ago

Almost every investment survives you. Bonus, most other safe investments cannot be destroyed by a fire, floods, storm, etc.

truckerbill5• 3 years ago

The point is they would need less wealth if they also weren't spending the second half of your life saving up for a house... And you can still give them the money

Still makes no sense to me

thriftwy• 3 years ago

Perhaps housing was always an investment vehicle. St. Petersburg is full of 4-5 storey buildings, initially with apartments for rent, most of whose were built to provide {Surname} with a stable income in the old age.

maxerickson• 3 years ago

Short of going all the way to banning private ownership of housing, there will always be an investment aspect to a significant financial asset like a house.

So if you are going to have private ownership of housing, the question is more about how policies should be structured. Should policy favor home ownership, should policy focus on housing affordability, etc.

People complaining about treating housing as an investment vehicle are often referring to policy choices in the US that treat home ownership as a good result in itself, regardless of the impact on affordability. So we have things like long term mortgages backed by quasi-government entities or local policy choices that focus on maintaining real estate prices (vs things like quality, availability and affordability).

truckerbill5• 3 years ago

It's really since the Reagan years that it shot through the roof. Look at the data

mattigames3• 3 years ago

Wealth concentration has only increased and everyone else just have less and less, at some point the situation will be dire enough that the only resource left for the majority will be violence, nothing makes a house affordable like burning it down and located in a neighborhood known for its need of firemen; landlords will say the attacks are a work of savages, but when you make it hard for people to barely survive in your civilization (aka City) it's is you and only you who are making your civilization less civilized.

truckerbill5• 3 years ago

burning houses = less houses. Start by doing real politics not a junta

naillo2• 3 years ago

[deleted]

inferiorhuman5• 3 years ago

* Cue

shrimp_emoji• 3 years ago

inhumane*

kakapo88• 3 years ago

SF Techie here. Lived and worked here, for many years.

Every day I literally step over bodies to get to work. Drugs are openly dealt and consumed. Mentally ill people roam the streets, screaming. People openly use the sidewalks as a toilet. Crime is rampant. And if anyone doubts it's that bad, I invite you to come and look for yourself.

Almost all of these people come from elsewhere in the country. They aren't "priced out" local citizens, they're junkies and mentally unwell who come here because they know they will get services and be tolerated.

By its own accounting, the city spends over $1b per year on homeless services, for supposedly < 10k "homeless". You do the per capita math. Notice anything strange there? $100k per homeless. Something is off - way off.

Meanwhile these people suffer. Even if they have city housing, they are on the streets anyway, because they need drugs, plus they are driven by their mental issues. It's horrific and uncivilized, and it's a creation of a culture that says "all they need is housing", and then enables them in their drug addiction and psychosis. That's go on for years and years, steadily getting worse. Every year more of them come to SF. And every year more of them die, and the city declines further.

The solution is obvious: mandatory treatment for drug addiction and mental illness. No more tolerance for crime and drugs. Enforce basic city codes.

But somehow, this is "inhumane" to the extreme left that runs SF. They'd rather keep the status quo, and let people suffer and die, while the city falls further into ruin.

hotpotamus4• 3 years ago

mandatory treatment for drug addiction and mental illness

I hope these homeless people have better health insurance than I do.

naillo2• 3 years ago

Mandatory treatment for mental illness is incredibly cruel in my opinion

inferiorhuman5• 3 years ago

  But somehow, this is "inhumane" to the extreme left that runs SF.

It's inhumane to the voters of California, nothing to do with San Francisco.

quickthrower22• 3 years ago

Hoping for an earthquake and “moving them on” (presumably not to a home) are mentioned but other than that nothing too nasty.

elif3• 3 years ago

Maybe it's because the friends i used to visit live in the tenderloin but to me San Franskidro tipped a decade ago. I live in the south side of Atlanta and there is constant gun crime, car theft, gang violence, etc. but to me that is wholely different than being harassed in a targeted manner on the streets for being in a perceived "class." There may be an occasional clash of culture in ATL for sure, but not an outright culture war. Oh and no one poops in the street here. That is nice to have.

rhaway847733• 3 years ago

No one <anything> in the streets in Atlanta.

Because no one uses the streets in Atlanta outside a car.

Atlanta has 930 violent crimes per 100k vs SF’s 715 or so.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...

Atlanta is the ultimate out of sight out of mind city.

colpabar• 3 years ago

It must be all those damn republican mayors they’ve had over the years :^)

elif3• 3 years ago

You could be onto something. Maybe infrastructure which supports affordable car ownership would help SF.

elif3• 3 years ago

thank you for sharing the wikipedia page. it looks like the only category of crime more prevalent in atlanta than san francisco is aggravated assault. simple assault is not included in violent crime statistics in this chart for whatever reason.

I would imagine that this has something to do with atlanta being in an open carry state with no restrictions on gun ownership, and thus more crimes committed involve a gun and would explain why violent crime is statistically higher even though san francisco has 19% more crime overall.

you know, out of chart, out of mind.

PaulHoule3• 3 years ago

As anathema as it may seem to some people I think the real answer has to involve dispersing the homeless population in SF.

The SF chronicle did a series on the efforts to house people in shelters and one major problems was that a person who wanted to get clean from opioids is just surrounded by temptation and is just one dose of Fentanyl away from death.

Thus these people are more dangerous to each other than they are to anyone else. Not only is there the paradox of warehousing the poor in the most expensive place in America but also that of warehousing them in the most dangerous place in America insofar as fentanyl is concerned.

mschuster912• 3 years ago

The problem is that the entire US has zero idea what to do with homeless and mentally ill people, other than "dispersing" them or locking them up. As a result, some (particulary Republican) regions give them one way bus tickets to other (particularly Democrat) regions or deport them outright in sometimes very public stunts - out of sight, out of mind and if it deters others all the better, seems to be the general consensus. Others go where the survival chances are the best on their own, which means somewhere sunny with low rain and snow.

The problem is, the very few regions where both conditions match end up overrun - even though no one can seriously expect these regions to solve the homeless problem of an entire continent-spanning country with 330-340M people.

PaulHoule3• 3 years ago

We've got zero idea how to repair broken brains.

People with severe mental illness are hard to live with. When I was growing up there was a homeless man who spent all day at the public library that people called "The Professor" who was said to be unable to live indoors because he'd wake up screaming every night. We took in a friend who I think had schizoaffective disorder in and she threatened my wife with a knife after she'd lived at our place for 18 months. Schizophrenics are more likely to be the victims of crime than the perpetrators but every so often they do something that is "batshit crazy"

https://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/2017/11/look_back_thanks...

"Housing first" is an improvement over the status quo but people with severe problems are going to make that kind of environment hard to run. "Dispersal" may very well make it possible because that kind of behavior randomly scattered won't break people's ability to cope with it down, whereas concentrating it in one place certainly does. I can't see how anybody who has any moral sensibility at all could stand to go to SF, never mind live there. Just as the rationalists try to break down our moral sensitivities by spamming us with trolley problems, exposure to that filters for a population of people who just don't care.

BTW, the one way bus ticket was tried in SF long ago, just like they've tried the other obvious non-solutions, but they came to the conclusion that the offer of bus tickets away just made it more attractive to go there.

VWWHFSfQ3• 3 years ago

As a result, some (particulary Republican) regions give them one way bus tickets to other (particularly Democrat) regions

Seattle, Portland, Denver, San Francisco and many other "blue" cities all have "Homeward Bound" one-way bus ticket programs to incentivize homeless people to leave their city. In fact, the City of San Francisco invented the entire concept 15 years ago. This is a primarily liberal strategy to deal with the overwhelming collapse of their public welfare systems.

ajross2• 3 years ago

I think the real answer has to involve dispersing the homeless population in SF.

Does it? As the article points out, the homeless population is actually down since 2019. Homelessness is bad, and a hard problem to solve[1], but it's not The Reason Everything Is Wrong, because if it was (1) everything would have been wrong before, when we agree everything was great and (2) other places would be worse, and we all agree they aren't.

Really this article is just like all the others on this subject. It's completely innumerate. It takes crisis and calamity as a prior and writes about it, while having to nod repeatedly that the actual measurements don't hold up the hypothesis.

It's just shocking to me the extent to which this meme has permeated the tech community. Urban homelessness is just not a new phenomenon, it's not a changed phenomenon, and it's not even a new phenomenon to San Francisco!

[1] Largely because it's unsolvable inherently. We've always had a homeless population in our cities going back to the invention of the city. Some people won't/can't/don't-wanna live within the rules of typical society and view street living as acceptable vs. the alternatives. So to that population, attempts to assist them just have the marginal effect of making homelessness more desirable. And... that's just not something that public policy[2] is going to fix.

[2] Well, tolerable public policy. Some of our ancestors deployed asylums and other kinds of para-prisons to control this. But even that works only poorly.

rhaway847733• 3 years ago

Re: 1]

I just visited several cities in Europe. I did not see homeless people just strewn all over the place like one does in SF, in countries which are both equivalent and far poorer than the U.S., and in countries which statistically have significantly lower and higher homeless per capita than the U.S.

It’s almost like if the govt provides basic services that allow even the poorest then even the homeless will choose to live with some dignity.

carapace2• 3 years ago

I've lived in SF for about half a century. I've also read up on the history of SF.

What you're saying about "Urban homelessness is ... not even a new phenomenon to San Francisco!" is very much true, at least since the Gold Rush. I believe our Emperor Norton III was, technically, by modern standards, homeless, although the city was his palace.

What changed was the influx of more-or-less normal people. San Francisco has served as a kind of "drain" for the crazies of the rest of the nation since 1849 right up until the late 90's and the "Dot Com boom". Then e.g. Twitter was tricked into opening their office in the middle of skid row and techie culture and "the street" got to rub shoulders daily and it was not so great, eh?

I've come to believe that OP has got the right idea: Civic Center and the Tenderloin should be condemned and razed, just like Kowloon. The issue is what to do with the people living there now?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

(BTW there have been cities w/o homelessness but they are rare. "We've always had a homeless population in our cities going back to the invention of the city." this is another meme that needs to die, eh?)

ninjagoo• 3 years ago

SF City had a 2021 GDP of $230 Billion [1]. The City had a budget of $6B in 2007. [2]

What do folks on here think - if the City could cut the homeless population in half for $100 Million per year, would it be worth it? How about $50 Million per year to cut it by 25%, would that be worth it? [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_San_Francisco [3] 7800 homeless [4]. $2k rent per month. [4] https://archive.is/IkYHB

TMWNN• 3 years ago

The city of San Francisco already spends $70,000 annually per homeless person! <https://abc7news.com/sf-homeless-plan-housing-all-san-franci...> More money for the Homeless-Industrial Complex is not needed. The homeless there are homeless because severe mental and addiction issues cause them to reject help, not because resources aren't available.

doo_daa• 3 years ago

Ok... I'm travelling to SF (I live in the UK) for a few days for work this August. I was looking forward to it but now I'm mainly scared! Is it still good to visit but just not to live in? The last time I was there was 2007. I've got a couple of days to myself whilst I'm there. What should I do?

rsync• 3 years ago

I think you will do just fine.

I live in the SFBA and I continue to go there weekly and bring my family and children there, etc.

I would recommend Jackson square (Cotogna, Blue Bottle, Maison Nico) as a hangout spot, perhaps venturing uphill from there to the Grace Cathedral on the peak of Nob Hill[1] (remember: crime doesn't climb).

I would also highly recommend walking the top of the new transit center which is basically a High Line of the west[2] and is well worth your time and trouble.

If you want to glimpse, but not immerse yourself, in the angst and tension of post-pandemic SF, you can walk to Union Square.

Finally, get yourself to Hayes Valley without crossing through the Tenderloin as that is, without question, ground zero for all of the disturbing headlines.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Cathedral,_San_Francisco

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transbay_Transit_Center

avree• 3 years ago

“San Francisco has had what felt like an endless, year-after-year boom,” says Aaron Peskin, president of the Board of Supervisors, the city council. “And now the bubble really burst.”

Years of policies that hurt honest people, entrenched landlords and those already here, and made it difficult for new families and groups to come to the city are why the good times are ending. People like Peskin burst the bubble.

jscipione4• 3 years ago

Vote Republican to solve the problem, or vote Democrat to make it worse.

Gunnerhead• 3 years ago

I have no dog in this fight, but curious what policies or plans do Republicans have to fix an issue like this?

jscipione4• 3 years ago

Lower taxes, lower regulations especially for home builders, reduce immigration, mass deportation of illegals saving trillions of dollars in education and other costs, end bail reform, end reparations, allocate funds to cleanup homeless encampments, create new job opportunities, grant liability protections for police so they can do their jobs, crack down on crime by empowering judges and district attorneys, end the green energy initiatives that are costing the state billions, do a full audit.

jdkee• 3 years ago

Why is this flagged?

Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point

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