Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

San Francisco: An Elitist Bubble Ignoring a Crime Epidemic?

dustin-godevais.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 229 posts

Re: San Francisco: An Elitist Bubble Ignoring a Crime Epidemic?

#161

Post by ajmurmann »

Dig1t wrote: post #60
bluefishinit wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cities are struggling in the post-pandemic era as the rising cost of living due to inflation in food and other essentials has driven more criminal activity Wouldn't it make more sense and be potentially more cost effective if the focus was on giving people food and other essentials so they could survive without having to steal scooters? Police and prison are super expensive. You're going to be paying for the food,…

I don't know if you've met a lot of criminals, but many are not committing crimes purely for survival. They want phones, TV's, cars etc. Crime is a way to get those things. If there is no disincentive (i.e. punishment) for committing crime, then many will still do the crime.

What share of the crime is to get money for drugs?

Re: San Francisco: An Elitist Bubble Ignoring a Crime Epidemic?

#162

Post by Aunche »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #131
Aunche wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting how you're characterizing enforcement of property crime as "beatings", and not stealing things as "morale".

The OP assumes people are stealing to alleviate financial duress caused by inflation. If that's accurate, then giving people relief in a way that doesn't encourage them to intentionally be failures and doesn't make it someone else's responsibility to pay for their needs is the optimal solution.

Stealing alleviates one's personal duress at the expense of someone else's. If they instead worked a real job, they would at least be providing at $18/hr, SF's minimum wage, of services to their community.

SF already spent over a billion dollars on housing alone. People should ensure that is prudently spent rather than asking for even more.

Re: San Francisco: An Elitist Bubble Ignoring a Crime Epidemic?

#163

Post by DoreenMichele »

Aunche wrote: post #162
DoreenMichele wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP assumes people are stealing to alleviate financial duress caused by inflation. If that's accurate, then giving people relief in a way that doesn't encourage them to intentionally be failures and doesn't make it someone else's responsibility to pay for their needs is the optimal solution.

Stealing alleviates one's personal duress at the expense of someone else's. If they instead worked a real job, they would at least be providing at $18/hr, SF's minimum wage, of services to their community. SF already spent over a billion dollars on housing alone. People should ensure that is prudently spent rather than asking for even more.

Years ago, I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. At that time, working a full-time minimum wage job wouldn't cover rent in the cheapest dive I could find listed for San Francisco. At that time, a room in an SRO was like a thousand dollars a month in SF.

I've said many time that I believe California is the dumping ground for homeless people across the nation. California has something like 12 percent of the US population and 25 percent of the US homeless population and a high percentage of chronically homeless.

I was responding to a comment that opens with You're seeing this everywhere. Chicago, Philadelphia, and so on - although the problem may be worse in San Francisco.

The comment wasn't about San Francisco per se and my reply was not about San Francisco per se.

The nation as a whole needs to address certain things. San Francisco likely cannot solve this alone, no matter how draconian they are willing to be.

People go there for the weather, among other things. That's not a factor policy can resolve.

Re: San Francisco: An Elitist Bubble Ignoring a Crime Epidemic?

#164

Post by floren »

calibas wrote: post #103

After living in the Bay Area for a while, I realized there's a class of people who don't really interact with the city the same way "normal" people do. They drive from their private garage or gated community to a parking garage where they work. They rarely touch the sidewalks, and never ride BART or any public transportation. They exist in this kind of fancy bubble that's separate from the harsh reality of city life.

And then this class decides policy

Re: San Francisco: An Elitist Bubble Ignoring a Crime Epidemic?

#165

Post by secstate »

vasco wrote: post #105
DoreenMichele wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of city residents need to come to terms with the fact that some of these progressive criminal justice reforms may need to be adjusted a bit, given that we now have years of evidence of their effects. And/or: We need to make affordable housing available, make a car-optional lifestyle more viable, etc. "The beatings shall continue until morale improves" isn't an effective approach to anything, especially since if…

> The beatings shall continue until morale improves Sure beatings don't improve morale, but since we're not talking about improving the morale of thieves, but rather about making theft a losing proposition, I think the point is not as invalid as you frame it. Unless your point is that there's no advantage in creating consequences for crime because you don't think negative consequences have a deterring effect, which i…

Not sure if you either remember being a kid and/or have kids of your own, but negative consequences are almost always inferior to positive consequences, or simple reframing. That doesn't mean there should be no negative consequences ever, life is hardly so black and white. But a discipline system built primarily on negative consequences has troubling relationship costs that only become obvious much later down the line.

Parenting via negative consequences is actually very similar to industrial externalities. Sure, there are results right now, but the cost of those results will devastate the environment 10, 20, 100 years from now.

Re: San Francisco: An Elitist Bubble Ignoring a Crime Epidemic?

#166

Post by swalling »

tbrockman wrote: post #152

Off-topic, but these kind of conversations based on anec-data pop up here and in my social circles quite a bit, but it seems like they're often pretty sparse as far as the quantitative side of things are concerned. Does anyone know what the actual data suggests here? Are there any projects that make this data more discoverable and consumable for regular people, so that we can all have more well-informed discussions (…

The actual data is that SF has unusually higher rates of property crime compared to other major cities. https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/fixing-san-francis...

Re: San Francisco: An Elitist Bubble Ignoring a Crime Epidemic?

#167

Post by jscipione »

wonderwonder wrote: post #147
tootie wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How many times do we read" It's a known principle that crime reporting has increased far faster than actual crime. And I mean, seriously you look at 2020 and think the major story was the police had bad PR? I'm pretty sure something else pretty big happened that year.

Yes, George Floyd was killed. BLM happened. People rioted. Police stepped back as calls to defund the police began. African Americans began dying due to homicide in massively increased numbers. Did I miss anything?

You are missing a bunch of things, but the truth cannot be spoken on this site.

Re: San Francisco: An Elitist Bubble Ignoring a Crime Epidemic?

#168

Post by scoofy »

vasco wrote: post #105
DoreenMichele wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of city residents need to come to terms with the fact that some of these progressive criminal justice reforms may need to be adjusted a bit, given that we now have years of evidence of their effects. And/or: We need to make affordable housing available, make a car-optional lifestyle more viable, etc. "The beatings shall continue until morale improves" isn't an effective approach to anything, especially since if…

> The beatings shall continue until morale improves Sure beatings don't improve morale, but since we're not talking about improving the morale of thieves, but rather about making theft a losing proposition, I think the point is not as invalid as you frame it. Unless your point is that there's no advantage in creating consequences for crime because you don't think negative consequences have a deterring effect, which i…

We're talking about people looking at $1,500+/month rent with multiple roommates... if they're lucky, for the rest of their lives. That is not offering people a future. There is no viable path to prosperity. There is no path for lower-class folks to achieve a private residence with a spouse. When these people increase productivity, rents will capture that wealth.

Why should people play by these rules? A tiny condo in SF is over 10x median income before taxes... and we have a very high median income.

The entire system of intentional real estate shortages we have is effectively a cartel. It's a zero-sum game, which is extractive by nature. We need housing for lower-middle class people. We need housing for poor people. We need people to have a future to lose. We need people to have a path to build wealth. Right now, in most liberal urban areas, we just don't. We make up every excuse in the book to preserve the faux-utopia for the incumbent homeowners who set up the system decades ago and have all literally become multi-millionaires from it.

Re: San Francisco: An Elitist Bubble Ignoring a Crime Epidemic?

#169

Post by khuey »

vondur wrote: post #81
marsten wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a new California homeowner, I recommend you never look up what others on your street pay in property tax.

I wonder how many of the non business properties are still under Prop 13? I can't imagine it would be that many at this point. Business property can probably be held in some sort of trust so it appears to never have changed hands over the years.

A huge number of residential properties are receiving massive prop 13 subsidies. Open up https://www.taxfairnessproject.org/map and go poke around a random neighborhood in Palo Alto. Blue means the assessed valuation is close to the market price, while red means the assessed valuation is a tiny fraction of the market price.

Re: San Francisco: An Elitist Bubble Ignoring a Crime Epidemic?

#170

Post by tootie »

wonderwonder wrote: post #147
tootie wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How many times do we read" It's a known principle that crime reporting has increased far faster than actual crime. And I mean, seriously you look at 2020 and think the major story was the police had bad PR? I'm pretty sure something else pretty big happened that year.

Yes, George Floyd was killed. BLM happened. People rioted. Police stepped back as calls to defund the police began. African Americans began dying due to homicide in massively increased numbers. Did I miss anything?

Rather than answer with something overly sarcastic or assume you're being deliberately obtuse, I'm just going to answer earnestly and mention that there was global pandemic.
Post reply on HN