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San Francisco: The reckoning is here

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Re: San Francisco: The reckoning is here

#31

Post by woodruffw »

whimsicalism wrote: post #24
woodruffw wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it's an apples-to-oranges comparison, but for the record: Manhattan is surrounded on 4 sides by water, and is much hillier than people think (only the southern part of the island is flat). The parts that flat are filled-in salt marsh. There's a reason the top 8[1] most dense municipalities are in the NYC area: there's limited developable land. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_citi…

SF is the second densest city in America outside of NYC.

Second densest large city. But if you do it by municipality, SF is the 21st most dense in the country. Four of NYC's five boroughs (coextensive with counties, the way SF is coextensive with SF county) are individually denser than SF.

Re: San Francisco: The reckoning is here

#33

Post by dilap »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #16

This seems to be a rag-bag of right-wing talking points e.g. * Covid lockdowns - bad * Harsh policing - good So the chances of it being based on anything other than the writers pre-concieved political biases is basically nil. In particular, SF seems to be getting blamed for partly Californian and Federal policies in a somewhat loose manner. Even if you disagree with them, and you think the people in charge of SF at v…

During the pandemic, SF had in-person schooling at private schools, but not in public schools.

This continued long after it was clear that (a) in person schooling was not a significant risk and (b) remote education was not adequate. (You're basically insane if you think sitting on videochat hours a day, with no in-person contact with other children, is in any way a healthy lifestyle for an elementary-school aged kid.)

This was SF policy, not state policy!

It was just a totally fucked, unafir situation: only those w/ enough cash to afford private education could get even the most minimal level of quality education for their kids.

Besides failing at the basic public service of educating children, SF also struggles with things like providing safe, sanitary streets and public transit. All this while having a huge budget.

Here's a memory that has stuck with me, from just before the pandemic started:

A man lying on the sidwalk at the intersection of Colombus and Broadway, covered in his own shit, calling out, "help me, call an ambulance, help me". A constant stream of people, passing by, doing nothing.

That's SF in a nutshell: people are in a sort of state of denial about the condition of their city. Sure, there are lots of great things, and you can ignore the badness and pretend it's not happening, but it's there.

(Or at least it was when I was there, from 2011-2021.)

I hope they figure it out and improve things! It's truly a geographically blessed area. And I've still got a bunch of family there.

Re: San Francisco: The reckoning is here

#34

Post by pmonks »

__lbracket__ wrote: post #22
pmonks wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know what’s “in the minds of SF folks”? Do you live in SF, yourself, for example?

In a scientific sense, it is obviously impossible to know whats in someone's mind. Also, I don't live in SF proper, but more like south bay. However, listening to the rhetoric at the time, it was not hard to guess that COVID policy came to represent the political gap between the two sides. So it stands to reason that in hyper progressive SF, any opposition to absolute closure would be seen as 'siding with the enemy'.…

It does not sound reasonable, as the concerns (and actions in response to those concerns) in the city during 2020 were driven by the actual documented damage COVID was already causing elsewhere (especially NYC), not based on some hypothetical “dunk on The Donald” point scoring exercise.

Many people seem to forget how in the dark we were about COVID at that time, and are now criticizing the actions public health organizations took with the benefit of hindsight.

Re: San Francisco: The reckoning is here

#35

Post by pmonks »

dilap wrote: post #33
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #16

This seems to be a rag-bag of right-wing talking points e.g. * Covid lockdowns - bad * Harsh policing - good So the chances of it being based on anything other than the writers pre-concieved political biases is basically nil. In particular, SF seems to be getting blamed for partly Californian and Federal policies in a somewhat loose manner. Even if you disagree with them, and you think the people in charge of SF at v…

During the pandemic, SF had in-person schooling at private schools, but not in public schools. This continued long after it was clear that (a) in person schooling was not a significant risk and (b) remote education was not adequate. (You're basically insane if you think sitting on videochat hours a day, with no in-person contact with other children, is in any way a healthy lifestyle for an elementary-school aged kid.…

This is 100% false.

Source: I know many families with kids in various private schools in SF, and not one of them had uninterrupted in-person learning throughout the pandemic.

That said, SF public schools were slower to reopen to in-person learning than private schools, which seems to me to have mostly been due to pushback by the SFUSD teacher’s union (who, imvho, responded to this crisis poorly).

Re: San Francisco: The reckoning is here

#36

Post by dilap »

pmonks wrote: post #35
dilap wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During the pandemic, SF had in-person schooling at private schools, but not in public schools. This continued long after it was clear that (a) in person schooling was not a significant risk and (b) remote education was not adequate. (You're basically insane if you think sitting on videochat hours a day, with no in-person contact with other children, is in any way a healthy lifestyle for an elementary-school aged kid.…

This is 100% false. Source: I know many families with kids in various private schools in SF, and not one of them had uninterrupted in-person learning throughout the pandemic. That said, SF public schools were slower to reopen to in-person learning than private schools, which seems to me to have mostly been due to pushback by the SFUSD teacher’s union (who, imvho, responded to this crisis poorly).

I wasn't intending to claim that there were no interruptions at all to in-person learning in private schools, but rather, that for much of the pandemic private schools were open and public schools were closed. My dad and his wife had to switch my half-sister to private school, so she could attend in person. I have never seen a kid so happy to go to school...

Re: San Francisco: The reckoning is here

#37

Post by seanmcdirmid »

mathattack wrote: post #10
pmonks wrote: post #3

San Francisco has always been a boom and bust place, as anyone who was here during the 2008 crash, the dotcom bubble, or probably even the gold rush would tell you. The author of this seagull* article needs to take a deep breath, wait a couple of years, observe, and then realize that they could have saved themselves the effort. *fly in, crap all over everything, fly out

2001 even more than 2008 as it was a long slog with lots of bankruptcies.

The early 90s were hard on the city as well.

Re: San Francisco: The reckoning is here

#38

Post by seanmcdirmid »

hindsightbias wrote: post #23
reidjs wrote: post #11

I'm not so sure things are as dire as the article makes them out to be. As long as you avoid soma, lower nob hill, civic center, fidi, and the tenderloin it's been a great place to live during/after the pandemic. Rent is actually cheaper than pre-pandemic, the city is still super walkable and bikeable, there are more than enough bars, restaurants, and live events every weekend to keep me busy and then some. Shameless…

The first rule of SF should be that you should not talk about this. Better to repeat the dystopian hellscape meme to dissuade the locusts. But good luck with the cast.

> The first rule of SF should be that you should not talk about this. Better to repeat the dystopian hellscape meme to dissuade the locusts.

This is also the first rule of Seattle: mention how much it rains, how the homeless have taken over, and maybe earthquakes and volcanoes. Anything to dissuade more people from moving here.

Re: San Francisco: The reckoning is here

#39

Post by SaintGhurka »

alphakappa wrote: post #6

>San Francisco has replaced its DA and now re-funded police When was SF police de-funded? Budgets have only increased [1] each year, any rhetoric notwithstanding 1. https://abc7news.com/sfpd-budget-defund-the-police-departmen...

>>When was SF police de-funded?

This year and last year.

2019-2020: 692.3M 2020-2021: 667.9M 2021-2022: 657.4M

Source: your link

Edit: sorry about the formatting. For some reason HN is selectively throwing away line breaks.

Re: San Francisco: The reckoning is here

#40

Post by seanmcdirmid »

alphakappa wrote: post #6

>San Francisco has replaced its DA and now re-funded police When was SF police de-funded? Budgets have only increased [1] each year, any rhetoric notwithstanding 1. https://abc7news.com/sfpd-budget-defund-the-police-departmen...

The same thing happened in Seattle. The council talked about defunding police but only parking enforcement was moved out. And because of the hiring crunch, we lost police officers and weren't able to replace them (but this was a problem nation wide).

What I do blame the city and county for is not taking crime seriously enough. Even when police arrest someone who has broken the law, the DA refuses to prosecute, the jail refuses to book them in, and judges let them off repeatedly with light to non-existent sentences. People shop lift with impunity these days because the system simply doesn't care if they do. It isn't really the police's fault (though they are understaffed also).

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