51–60 of 465 posts
I went to SF over last weekend and thought of stopping by Walgreens (Pharmacy) to pick up eye drops. I had to call the associate to unlock the cabinet doors to pick them up. Took 5-10 mins to just get hold of someone with a key ring the size of a coconut. Every cabinet was locked from toothpaste to tampons. This is at the Walgreens near Union Square which is still better than other areas. People are leaving because o…
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I'd say it's the opposite. The city has a few bad spots, but overall it's quite nice. The big problem is the lack of housing, which is arguably driven by the way that Prop 13 warps economic incentives.
Prop 13 is part of the problem, but there are lots of confounding factors. FWIW, the lack of housing is largely artificial: there are lots of empty units, they are just priced out of reach of the folks who really need them. I live in Park Merced, on my block there are at least a dozen empty homes, yet a few blocks away there are families living in RV's parked around Lake Merced. The corporation that owns PM won't lower the rents. I don't know why, but I suspect that doing so would mess with things like the appraisal value of the property?
Last month a group of squatters moved into the townhouse across the street from my house. We thought new tenants had moved in, but a couple of days later the staff were there throwing them out. (The squatters had changed the lock on the front door!) A staff member told me that this same group has been breaking into units all over the property. The police were called, but they never showed up.
Last week a van parked in the garage here was broken into and items were stolen. We've been here a quarter of a century and that has never happened before. There are video cameras in the garage, but again, the police did nothing.
That's before you get to the tent camps, the rampant and open drug abuse (literally folks shooting up on the sidewalk), the raw lawless anarchy that the Tenderloin has become, etc.
Unless you have a shit-ton of money and can afford to live in one of the nice enclaves SF is a shitty town. It breaks my heart to admit it, I grew up here and I (used to) really love it here, but the city that SF has become is sad and dangerous.
I think remote work is often understated in reasons people move away. When you go into the office every day, it's pretty obvious that you have to live in whatever city you live in. But with remote work, the question becomes "if I don't have to live here, do I want to keep living here". For many (including myself), the answer was a definitive NO. Sure many headlines and news segments make it seem that it's the crime,…
If SF was attractive, then people would want to remotely work from SF. But it isn't. So, they're leaving. On the other hand San Diego seems to be blowing up.
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20-30 years ago San Francisco was considered... a nightmarish hellscape. Until the first dotcom boom the city was in decline, or at least that's how the story goes. My understanding is that at that time it also had a booming art scene and was going through an awesome counter culture phase that birthed Burning Man. Maybe that's what's ahead now that everyone is leaving? Videos showing the drug problem are terrifying t…
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I think remote work is often understated in reasons people move away. When you go into the office every day, it's pretty obvious that you have to live in whatever city you live in. But with remote work, the question becomes "if I don't have to live here, do I want to keep living here". For many (including myself), the answer was a definitive NO. Sure many headlines and news segments make it seem that it's the crime,…
If SF was attractive, then people would want to remotely work from SF. But it isn't. So, they're leaving. On the other hand San Diego seems to be blowing up.
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What is the conservative solution to this issue?
Some former addicts attest that, when they were addicted, it was only the threat of prison time that could force them into rehab, because at the time they were not fully in control of their own decision making. They say the 'stick' helps motivate them to choose rehab instead, and it ultimately helped them out of a bad situation.
Sam Quinones' book, The Least of Us, documents some of this and is well-researched.
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As a side note, I've been reading a lot of comments like the one below describing SF as a "nightmarish hellscape" and I just want to caution people to not read into things too much. I've spent a lot of time in both SF and Seattle, and while there's specific streets you want to avoid, and you can (rarely) run into weird or disturbed people in other areas (like most major cities) overall they're lovely places if you can afford them.