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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

#151

Post by pyuser583 »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #54

>One City Hall insider suggests that San Francisco overreacts to issues that are in the national news, and designs solutions to the country’s problems rather than its own. For example, when Mr Boudin ran on his platform of less punitive justice, San Francisco already had one of the lowest incarceration rates in the country. In 2019, 106 adults were in prison for every 100,000 people, one-fifth the rate in California…

I had exactly the same thought when I lived in SF.

They’d adopt policies that would make tons of sense in Alabama.

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

#152

Post by babesh »

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.

Title of link: Behold The Shit Map: Mapping San Francisco’s 132,562 Cases Of Human Feces

http://www.abcbusinessnews.com/2019/04/behold-the-shit-map-m...

I reported some shit for the city to clean up. They never cleaned it up. It just sat there for weeks decaying. After weeks, there was only a little bit left... probably ended up on someone's shoe.

Early in the pandemic, the city looked worse. Now it looks somewhat cleaner but still depopulated.

There are some tourists but surprisingly many of the people walking around at Bay Area locals. The tourists are still so few that you can recognize them upon seeing them again.

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

#154

Post by runarberg »

zaphar wrote: post #129
shuckles wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this level of evidence, every problem in a nominally democratic society could be explained by “voters” in the abstract. Would you blame local discretion over land use, Prop 13, or CEQA - semi-permanent features of the Californian democratic system - on today’s San Francisco voters? How about the lack of national healthcare system that can support drug abusers and other mentally incompetent which drives a lot of ne…

In a democracy the answer to all of the above has to be yes. You literally get what you vote for in a democracy. Even more so in the kind of direct democracy that San Francisco engages in so frequently.

At the risk of engaging in a childish yes-no debate—and of using the No true Scotsman fallacy, you are absolutely wrong. In a real democracy you cannot vote your self a dictator. So there are policies—at least on a constitutional—level which you cannot blame the voters for.

Also—at the risk of Godwin’s law—historians usually don’t blame the German voters for the horrors of the Nazi regime, even though it was democratically elected, they blame the Nazis them self. As a current example, voters are not blamed for the current climate crises, even though politicians are.

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

#155

Post by thatguy0900 »

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…

Doesnt sf not prosecute robberies? Why would they show up?

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

#156

Post by thatguy0900 »

Jackpillar wrote: post #79
hn8788 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How much of a bubble do you have to be in to think someone peeing on cars is a non issue

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

#157

Post by junon »

tdeck wrote: post #134
junon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's human feces everywhere outside the tourist/financial districts, and the entirety of the inner city (Tenderloin) is disintegrated and full of poverty, homelessness and crime - and it's predominantly people of color who accumulate there. If that's "diverse" and "beautiful" then I'd hate to think what "monocultural" and "dull" looks like...

> There's human feces everywhere outside the tourist/financial districts, This is not accurate. The Sunset, Richmond, Parkside, Presidio, Marina, and many other parts of the city are very clean (or at least not notably dirty for a city). Perhaps the Marina/Presidio could be called tourist areas but the Sunset and Richmond certainly are not.

Sunset, Parkside, and Marina are all wealthy areas in the north/west of the city.

Richmond is not in SF city.

Presidio is right next to the pier and thus I would consider it a "touristy area".

You're living under a (perhaps bejeweled) rock if you've lived in SF and never seen human shit, someone peeing between some cars, dead animals, homeless literally everywhere, disheveled buildings, trash piles lining the gutters, etc.

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

#158

Post by lhorie »

space_fountain wrote: post #147
lhorie wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just don't live in SOMA or the tenderloin and you'll be a lot better off I mean, that's basically just saying "lalala can't hear ya". The entire point of calling SF dysfunctional is that a significant number of people in those areas (and others) are on the streets without access to needed psychiatric help and other basic needs. As a result, there's so much petty crime going unreported that any statistics on the mat…

I think there's a certain kind of voice that's common on here who moved into SF. Got an apartment in one of the new apartments downtown and then experienced a concentrated blast of poverty which isn't representative of the majority of SF. It doesn't help that most new construction in SF has been in these parts of the city either. My point isn't that SF doesn't have huge problems, but that if you live in these parts o…

Eh, I agree that the problem is most visible to newcomers precisely due to the housing layout around Tenderloin/SOMA, but frankly even once you go past that, it's fairly obvious that north/west SF is where affluent neighborhoods are (the trailer city near Lake Merced notwithstanding) and the south/east side is poor. Correlating school ratings to geographic location, for example, makes that divide abundantly clear.

FWIW, I've personally witnessed theft in inner Richmond - one of the nicer areas - and I know that it's an issue all the way out to the Safeway by Ocean Beach (I used to live in front of it and there were cops posted at the door all the time, and recently I've spotted tents in the parking lot)

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

#159

Post by tdeck »

junon wrote: post #157
tdeck wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's human feces everywhere outside the tourist/financial districts, This is not accurate. The Sunset, Richmond, Parkside, Presidio, Marina, and many other parts of the city are very clean (or at least not notably dirty for a city). Perhaps the Marina/Presidio could be called tourist areas but the Sunset and Richmond certainly are not.

Sunset, Parkside, and Marina are all wealthy areas in the north/west of the city. Richmond is not in SF city. Presidio is right next to the pier and thus I would consider it a "touristy area". You're living under a (perhaps bejeweled) rock if you've lived in SF and never seen human shit, someone peeing between some cars, dead animals, homeless literally everywhere, disheveled buildings, trash piles lining the gutters…

Someone who doesn't know that the Richmond is a district of San Francisco doesn't get to pompously lecture me on not knowing about the city I lived in for seven years. Also, the Sunset is not a particularly wealthy district and it's not in the northwest.

I never claimed that these problems don't exist, but the idea that they're part of life in every part of the city is simply false.

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

#160

Post by mixmastamyk »

space_fountain wrote: post #145
mixmastamyk wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unwilling to fix is a de facto unfixable. Until something major changes.

Well, there is lots of working being put in by a lot of people to fix parts of it. For example CA is in the process of passing a law to upzone large swaths of single family housing. The YIMBY movement is gaining steam. I think one fo the saddest things in politics at least in the west is this sort of defeatism where large swaths of the electorate think that things are unfixable. I think especially as technologists we…

I agree they are fixable, not even particularly difficult. But there’s no political will.
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