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Why San Francisco’s city government is so dysfunctional

economist.com

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Re: Why San Francisco’s city government is so dysfunctional

#71

Post by manderley »

babesh wrote: post #30
TMWNN wrote: post #4

>As it is, the city has been safely Democratic for 40 years and seems allergic to choosing a Bloomberg-type figure from one of the big tech companies to try something different. San Francisco is what New York City would be like if it only had the UWS, Village, and Wall Street/Midtown. To put another way, if the Bay area had been unified a century ago as "San Francisco" including the Peninsula and East Bay, things wou…

The Peninsula is generally much better run than SF. It kind of helps that it isn't one big city. It forces the cities to compete and makes the democracy more direct and participatory. It also limits the blast radius of bad decisions. Also, because of the greater percentage of kids, the parents often vote based on what is best for their kids. The issues are much more mundane. Better roads, funding for schools, etc...

The housing crisis is perpetuated by a lack of coherent planning. It's also why transit is suboptimal. It definitely doesn't help that it isn't one big city, it's actively detrimental.

Re: Why San Francisco’s city government is so dysfunctional

#72

Post by systemvoltage »

manderley wrote: post #63
systemvoltage wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing this. Do you have any citations for "America's dumping ground". How many homeless are migrating to California? > As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians. > Less than a fifth (18 percent) said they had lived out of state before becoming homeless. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.ht... Everytime this argument ha…

You're linking an article lacking in data.

I'd expect the claimant to provide the data to support their assertion.

Re: Why San Francisco’s city government is so dysfunctional

#73

Post by babesh »

gsnedders wrote: post #27
TMWNN wrote: post #4

>As it is, the city has been safely Democratic for 40 years and seems allergic to choosing a Bloomberg-type figure from one of the big tech companies to try something different. San Francisco is what New York City would be like if it only had the UWS, Village, and Wall Street/Midtown. To put another way, if the Bay area had been unified a century ago as "San Francisco" including the Peninsula and East Bay, things wou…

There's definitely dysfunction caused by lack of planning at a metro level; many of the problems are arguably burdensome for any one county to address, but aren't high enough priority to attract attention to force coordination at a state level. Merging all the counties into one is certainly one approach to solving it, and would make the governance more addressable to a larger number of people who work in the area, ve…

No city on the Peninsula in their right mind would want to merge with SF. SF has close to 10x the crime, worse schools, etc... What is there to gain?

Re: Why San Francisco’s city government is so dysfunctional

#74

Post by bubersson »

metalforever wrote: post #48
ithinkso wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are willing to put up with a lot if it means they don't give anything to someone that doesn't deserve it. 'I will walk through a pile of shit before my money is used for you to shit somewhere else you lazy fuck'

You don't actually live in SF or you would know that there's not actually literal piles of shit everywhere.

It's not the first time that you see a man defecate on the street that gets you. It's the second time.

Speaking from experience of daily driving through Tenderloin.

Re: Why San Francisco’s city government is so dysfunctional

#75

Post by lostdog »

runarberg wrote: post #15

What is the point of this article? The bulk of it is explaining that things are bad in SF, and that the city government is to blame. Sure I’ll buy that. But then it makes a leap of logic by claiming—or rather insinuating—that the reason for why they don’t fix those issues is because they are dysfunctional. As for why it is dysfunctional. Well: > As it is, the city has been safely Democratic for 40 years and seems all…

Yeah, the article completely ignores that the voters are prioritizing other things.

SF voters don't want to send so many people to prison. Yes, that means that criminals and the homeless have more freedom than in other cities. But SF voters feel that the US prison and "justice" systems are too immoral to implement in SF.

SF voters also want to keep low-rise housing and prevent making it easier to change neighborhoods by adding housing. Of course, this also has the bad tradeoff of over-constraining supply, leading to ridiculous housing costs. But this tradeoff is a response to plowing highways through and dumping toxic waste in poor neighborhood.

So yeah, if you hate these tradeoffs, then you'll also feel that SF is dysfunctional. Thanks Economist for your un-insightful article.

Re: Why San Francisco’s city government is so dysfunctional

#76

Post by lindseymysse »

grillvogel wrote: post #31
kernoble wrote: post #18

Reminds me of a Star Trek DS9 episode that takes place in an SF of the near future. "By the 2020s, those without employment, as well as those with mental problems, were moved into the Sanctuary Districts, which would later become no better than slums." https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Past_Tense https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots

Soylent Green also presents an exaggerated but somewhat plausible view of the cities of the slightly distant future(stepping over piles of homeless people to get out of apartments, not the eating people)

Oh, we've got ecological collapse too, so the eating people thing seems plausible enough for me.

Re: Why San Francisco’s city government is so dysfunctional

#77

Post by pkdpic »

rpmcmurdo wrote: post #17

27 year San Francisco resident here. The government here is dysfunctional because that's what people voted for. The fact that people pay so much to live here says that people are willing to put up with a lot in exchange for living in a diverse and beautiful city.

I grew up in SF and still have family sticking it out there. I don't completely disagree with the sentiment here but last I heard I thought SF had a pretty serious diversity problem. Is that no longer the case?

Re: Why San Francisco’s city government is so dysfunctional

#78

Post by nverno »

flyinglizard wrote: post #43
rpmcmurdo wrote: post #17

27 year San Francisco resident here. The government here is dysfunctional because that's what people voted for. The fact that people pay so much to live here says that people are willing to put up with a lot in exchange for living in a diverse and beautiful city.

Not sure I’d call a city which had one ruling party for forty years “diverse”.

in this social respect though, one party actively promotes 'diverse' lifestyles while the other just accepts them. I don't think SF would have come to be under the latter, nor could the latter exist in SF

Re: Why San Francisco’s city government is so dysfunctional

#79

Post by Jackpillar »

hn8788 wrote: post #52
redm wrote: post #23

"Nor are the police blameless. In the fourth quarter of last year, the “clearance” rate for robbery (which measures the share of reported crimes that result in an arrest) was half that of New York City. The police are notoriously unresponsive." This. Not only do I RARELY see a police officer in SF, but when I do, they look "beat down" or ambivalent. I'm sure years of police being the political "whipping boy" has take…

I was watching a twitch streamer who lives in SF, and he told a story about a time he was walking down the sidewalk at night and saw a homeless person peeing on someone's car. He said there was a cop nearby that saw him doing it, but he told the streamer that the homeless guy looked gross and he didn't feel like dealing with him, so the homeless guy just walked away when he was finished.

You want a cop to physically detain a homeless person which will just result in sending him through a pointlessly cruel and expensive criminal justice system where he'll pop-out the other side with nothing but unpayable debts that'll drive him through the same cycle again - all because he urinated on a car of someone who won't even realize it happened?

Re: Why San Francisco’s city government is so dysfunctional

#80

Post by TaylorAlexander »

metalforever wrote: post #48
ithinkso wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are willing to put up with a lot if it means they don't give anything to someone that doesn't deserve it. 'I will walk through a pile of shit before my money is used for you to shit somewhere else you lazy fuck'

You don't actually live in SF or you would know that there's not actually literal piles of shit everywhere.

IMO there’s kind of a lot. I live a few minutes south of SF on the peninsula and last weekend I walked around the waterfront and the mission with friends. I was struck that I encountered visible piles and marks as well as smells pretty much everywhere we walked. Like, it’s really a lot of public shit compared to any town a few minutes south of the city.

FWIW I blame systemic problems not the individuals responsible. But the problem was viscerally apparent to me.

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