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Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

latimes.com

391–400 of 488 posts

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#391
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over-dependency on a single industry, unwillingness to diversify, and an arrogant assumption that the same work could never be done elsewhere. Add in highways, commuting, and an infrastructure maintenance death spiral as domestic car production lost its major advantages. Rising crime added to the death spiral, as people who could moved out and the general deprivation of Detroit grew. Many of the suburbs developed the…

" Over-dependency on a single industry, unwillingness to diversify, and an arrogant assumption that the same work could never be done elsewhere. " Like San Francisco?

Car manufacturing needs lots of downstream suppliers that usually have expertise in nothing but automotive parts. The end result is cars and nothing else.

You can build tech for car manufacturers, you can build tech for taxi companies, you can build tech for restaurants, you can build tech for any industry.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#392

I’ve lived in San Francisco for about ten years and I’ve never been more excited about the future of this city. We have an incredible opportunity to build a city that works for everyone and not just a glorified dorm room complex for young tech workers. The next few years are looking very good!

I hope you can spread your optimism. You guys are sitting on a gold mine and you just need to dig the gold out.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that things are going to change? I don't live in SF, but things look like they are getting worse.

What happens when the only people left in a city are the ones who truly love it and want it to be as good as it can be?

Are you betting on "boomers" dying? The worst people are those who own their house and insist that things shouldn't change, ever. They will not leave until they die. They can have their house. All they have to accept is that their neighborhood will change slowly, because all neighborhoods change.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cut off services and have them go where? Also, how do you ban someone from a city? This is just a purely NIMBY response and not in any way realistic or helpful. You just really don't like it in your backyard and want it in someone else's backyard. I feel like your next suggestion is euthanasia.

(1) Offer rehabilitation (many homeless don't willingly take advantage of this). (2) Regularly push them out of where they are staying with officers. If necessary, use hoses or w.e. People will either leave because they can't stay there or they attempt to rehabilitate. This is what they do most places outside of California. This method often leads to rehabilitation, because they don't really have a choice. Those who…

Homelessness is an incredibly stressful situation. As the richest country on Earth, and a very rich city, we can do better than hosing/kicking out with police for people who are already in a crisis situation. The added stress and suffering doesn't seem constructive. I agree that you can't help someone unless they want help. But there hasn't been enough help offered to say that these people don't want help. Shelters have a lot of issues like theft. It's a vicious cycle. I'm sure the vast majority of the homeless are really suffering and don't want to be homeless. A great read based on research, w citations: https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/proven-solutions/ I agree we need to hold each other accountable. But we should also take care of each other because it could've been you. If the people who are homeless grew up the way I did and got to go to good public schools, and didn't have the stress of poverty growing up, maybe they wouldn't have fallen into drugs or developed mental illnesses. We need to give people a chance. Leaving a town that you are familiar with must be really stressful and scary. Living in the woods seems impossible nowadays (I certainly wouldn't know how). I'm afraid that if we push the homeless out of society, they would die. And that seems very unacceptable to me.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#395
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not intentionally. I corrected the post before you posted.

But did that sound correct that they’d allow any robbery? Using that logic, Texas allows any robbery under $2500: Texas Penal Code § 31.03 (3) a Class A misdemeanor if the value of the property stolen is $750 or more but less than $2,500; (4) a state jail felony if: (A) the value of the property stolen is $2,500 or more but less than $30,000, or the property is less than 10 head of sheep, swine, or goats or any part…

Texas also has extremely high gun ownership rates, and is one of the few states (maybe the only) that allows the use of deadly force just to protect property.

"There's a good chance you get shot to death" is probably a better deterrent than even a felony, though it's a little morally concerning.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#396
post #6

I'm leaving San Francisco next month also. I just see no reason to continue living here. The weather is nice in California, but the city is so mismanaged it's a joke. The homelessness has been an issue for decades now and local politicians always talk about it, but what do they actually do to help? I genuinely have no clue where the high taxes go. I just find it so ironic that San Francisco is a bastion of liberalism…

It’s pretty fascinating how in a country “by of, for the people” they’ve chosen to sit on social media, complain about wanting freedom from social ills, but also the freedom to optimize their time to avoid dealing with it.

Y’all want to disrupt something? Extreme ownership models really seem like the last social structure to disrupt.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#397
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF is over 5x denser than Dallas, which is the densest major city in Texas. The problem with homelessness is people can't afford to live in homes. It is a lot easier to avoid homelessness when you have essentially endless space to build housing.

If you and fellow San Franciscans were willing to think in 3 dimensions, you'd realize you've got essentially endless space as well.

SF has additional earthquake protection laws that kick for buildings taller than 8 or 9 stories iirc. I think they're expensive to do, because a lot of buildings stop at that height.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#398
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13 Basically, home value for property taxes gets assessed once, when you buy the property, and it can only go up by inflation after that.

Just replace them with land value taxes that are assessed for each block or maybe the entire neighborhood. Then split the tax bill based on the area of land owned so that you get a fixed rate per square foot.

The "just replace them" requires rewriting/amending the state constitution again.

As long as property values are going up across the state, as a whole (of which SF is only a part of), voters tend to have a disincentive to do so.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to add some colour to this: This. I moved outside of Portland a few months ago after three serious incidents on my property involving violent vagrants. In all three cases the police took over an hour to show up and did absolutely nothing. I had a man trying to break in to my backdoor. When I confronted him and demanded that he leave, he began swinging punches and pulled out a knife. I managed to restrain him and…

Next time, say there is a dead body and you heard gun fire. In the UK you'd get every cop for miles and the TV news.

Don't be surprised if it backfires and puts you in legal hot water over making false statements to police.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#400

I’ve thought about this quite carefully, and I’m convinced we need to kick California out of the union. There is too big of an impedance mismatch with the rest of the country, and it creates and exports too much economic inequality. The usual retort to this is “what will you do without California’s economic engine?” And that’s a fair point—America without California will be less wealthy. But that will be fine; and in…

>I’ve thought about this quite carefully, and I’m convinced we need to kick California out of the union. There is too big of an impedance mismatch with the rest of the country, and it creates and exports too much economic inequality.

I agree about one thing. California actively drives economic inequality.

Here's my theory about the entire economy of the US transforming since 2000.

Thanks to globalization manufacturing jobs went to China and other countries. This caused a decline in rural communities where a handful of companies were exporting manufactured goods to the rest of the US and some of them exported to foreign countries. However, sales within USA were the primary driver of revenue. The internet makes centralization easier. This means you can set up a headquarter anywhere and reach the rest of the USA. Similar events happened with industries starting to consolidate. Think of Walmart eating local companies. Centralization shifts profits to corporate headquarters. More money is leaving the local town than is coming in. This causes a death spiral, especially when the city has over leveraged itself on infrastructure which is a common problem for small towns. The new winners are the headquarter cities. Lots of money is leaving from small places and entering big places. Big cities have more headquarters so they are benefiting massively. This drives urbanism a shift from rural places to urban places.

Automation increases productivity at the expense of obsoleting skills. This causes a shift to low skill jobs of which there aren't many as the manufacturing jobs have moved to China and the high skilled jobs moved to cities. So now the country is suffering from a labor surplus. Low skill labor sees immigrants as competition. So the cycle of right wing activism starts.

The chasm between skilled and unskilled is now so great that the best answer is to retrain people. America has collectively decided that employers do not have to train their employees. Instead everyone gets access to student loans and must fund their own education through future income. In principle this is okay if you make sure people don't over leverage themselves on a degree that cannot bring in the required income, something that is very common when there is a low skill labor glut. Okay, but the loan program enabled millions of students to enroll, surely a two digit percentage of them did get a high skill job in the end? This is where there story starts involving California.

California is massively benefiting from urbanization, globalization and automation. It's the ultimate place to go after your got your fancy STEM degree. The desire to prevent new housing and discourage people from coming to California is absolutely egoistical from this perspective. SF is supposed to be an economic power house for millions of people who are forced to leave their hometown because of economic decline. Yes, they will be rich, but only after they spent years working in SF. From that perspective California is sabotaging the success of the entirety of the US by running a dysfunctional state.

>It will simply create a large contingent of people who can now outbid them on access to fixed resources, which will make their lives worse.

Land is fixed, housing isn't. You can always build more.

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