Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many cities in California that are not having a financial crisis. Stop trying to confiscate homes from people because their neighbors paid too much money for their houses, condos, or apartments and "raised the property value." That's pure evil.
No it's directly related to Prop 13. Without that law we could rely on stable property taxes for public services and infrastructure. But instead we shift the burden of taxation to unstable sources and now here we are https://lao.ca.gov/publications/report/3497#How_Did_Proposit...
San Francisco’s Financial Crisis
101–110 of 129 posts
Re: San Francisco’s Financial Crisis
#102Re: San Francisco’s Financial Crisis
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
No it's directly related to Prop 13. Without that law we could rely on stable property taxes for public services and infrastructure. But instead we shift the burden of taxation to unstable sources and now here we are https://lao.ca.gov/publications/report/3497#How_Did_Proposit...
It’s extremely stable. And it raises 2%/year, and gets reset when property changes hands.
This isn't a controversial point. Jerry Brown dedicated his entire career to this. The California budget is incredibly unstable because of Prop 13.
Re: San Francisco’s Financial Crisis
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Are you familiar with the Overton Window? It's shifted hard to the right. This is incorrect. It may have widened in both directions, but it absolutely did not shift to the right. Transgender support from mainstream corporations (Target, Budweiser, etc) would have been completely unthinkable 10 years ago. That’s just one example of many. What has happened is that the Overton window is broken because people don’t eve…
I think this is a perfect example of why the left-right axis doesn't capture the issues here. Support for gay or trans rights seems to have little or nothing to do with the problems described.
These tactics are intentionally meant to divide us and it's wildly effective.
Disclaimer: I'm an atheist but believe people should have the right to worship as they see fit, defend themselves appropriately, and love and be whoever they want.
Re: San Francisco’s Financial Crisis
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
SF does not solve the homeless problem, but there is good money to be made in the welfare-industrial complex pretending to help. Salt Lake City, that bastion of left-liberalism (/s) does a much better job, specially at preventing vulnerable people from becoming homeless in the first place. Ultimately SF’s problems are well understood and the solutions as well, but there is no political will to confront the entrenched…
The solutions to homelessness are well understood? What are they?
The hard part is finding affordable ways to do so. This is compounded by the fact that a large portion of the homeless suffer from mental health problems (my mother was in that boat).
On the mental health front, we need to collectively find a way to institutionalize the mentally ill in a manner that is fair and humane. That should include indigent drug addicts who are unable to care for themselves.
Re: San Francisco’s Financial Crisis
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
The solutions to homelessness are well understood? What are they?
House the people. It's that simple. The hard part is finding affordable ways to do so. This is compounded by the fact that a large portion of the homeless suffer from mental health problems (my mother was in that boat). On the mental health front, we need to collectively find a way to institutionalize the mentally ill in a manner that is fair and humane. That should include indigent drug addicts who are unable to car…
It's not, though. Seattle ran into loads of problems with housing-first policies where the houses would get trashed and people with substance abuse problems would continue camping out as groups.
Re: San Francisco’s Financial Crisis
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't it beyond liberal? I would almost say it's so left it's not even liberal anymore, but that's a different matter. i think for sure it is a factor because the people who make decisions in the city, who are elected to manage the city, are probably not afraid of losing their jobs or the consequences of the decisions they make. There is so little pushback they can just run experiment after experiment with zero reper…
Are you familiar with the Overton Window? It's shifted hard to the right. So if you want to say: is San Francisco tolerant of the LGBQT+ community? Absolutely, with flying rainbow flag colors. But that's the key driver in the culture wars, and it has nothing to do with the business of running a government (other than minimizing government persecution of that community. All of these issues could and should be dissecte…
I'm a centrist and try to stay in the middle because usually that's where solutions are. Whenever political extremes get their way, it tends to go wrong. Case in point is SF. It's not just gender identity politics or allowing people to live outside on the streets, it's also the attitude towards crime, the prioritization of climate change over everything else (while rejecting nuclear energy), and the tendency to control businesses which was evident throughout the pandemic as many small businesses struggled.
Sorry to hear about your mother. I do wonder why you would let her even experience that for a day. Maybe you didn't know, and you don't need to explain, but the left's position here is to think housing is the solution, when I think there is a big factor of families failing to take care of their loved ones and then demanding government pick up the pieces.
Re: San Francisco’s Financial Crisis
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
SF does not solve the homeless problem, but there is good money to be made in the welfare-industrial complex pretending to help. Salt Lake City, that bastion of left-liberalism (/s) does a much better job, specially at preventing vulnerable people from becoming homeless in the first place. Ultimately SF’s problems are well understood and the solutions as well, but there is no political will to confront the entrenched…
The solutions to homelessness are well understood? What are they?
2) Build subsidized housing. SF likes to complain about the end of the state redevelopment agencies but did you know that with just one year’s worth of the $7B a year windfall from the much-despised Tech (difference between the 2022 and 2008 budgets), SF could buy or build a $1M condo for every single of the 7,000 homeless men, women and children in the city? Instead at least half of that was captured by civil self-servants in the city bureaucracy in the form of salaries and benefits.
3) Restore involuntary committal of some mentally ill unable to care for themselves, that was abolished by the well-meaning but clueless Lanterman-Petris-Short Act in 1967
4) means-test rent-control (half of SF’s residential units), which creates haves and have-nots and raises prices to astronomic levels for new entrants
5) remove land-use restrictions like single-family zoning that covers half of the city
6) force drug addicts into treatment, using coercive measures if necessary
Re: San Francisco’s Financial Crisis
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
The solutions to homelessness are well understood? What are they?
House the people. It's that simple. The hard part is finding affordable ways to do so. This is compounded by the fact that a large portion of the homeless suffer from mental health problems (my mother was in that boat). On the mental health front, we need to collectively find a way to institutionalize the mentally ill in a manner that is fair and humane. That should include indigent drug addicts who are unable to car…
Re: San Francisco’s Financial Crisis
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don’t understand. The incentives are all wrong. There is absolutely zero benefit for a bureaucracy to make itself more efficient and require less money each year. No one is incentivized to ensure money is being spent well. The biggest incentive for a lifelong bureaucrat is to increase budget and headcount - the more money and headcount you have, the more important you are. There is never a time when you aren’t re…
The US seems especially bad, though. Do other countries do things differently in terms of incentives?
Because of World War II, and other mid-20th century government changes, European bureaucracies can sometimes be much newer than those in the United States, making them appear they are better designed, when they simply haven’t existed for long enough to become as terrible.