San Francisco Is Suffering From The Excesses Of Its Own Liberalism

[Pedestrian]

By Erielle Davidson
MARCH 16, 2018

About two years ago, I moved to San Francisco from Manhattan . . . .

Within a few days of moving to San Francisco, I immediately noticed something I had not been accustomed to seeing in New York — a preponderance of glittering sidewalks. Every few blocks, it would not be uncommon to see shards of glass strewn across the pavement, and I quickly learned that my new city was notorious for car break-ins . . . . In 2017, San Francisco experienced 31,322 thefts from vehicles alone — that is, 85 thefts from vehicles per day — while an arrest was made in only 2 percent of reported break-ins. Most of the break-ins are attributed to organized gangs and often committed by those with prior felony convictions.

In addition to dangerous patches of broken glass, the sidewalks in San Francisco are often accompanied by truly staggering amounts of trash. I didn’t understand initially from where all this trash was originating, until I witnessed someone breaking open a public trash bin in order to sift through the items. Amongst the trash that lines the many sidewalks of San Francisco, there are often used needles and more than occasionally, human feces.

In November of 2017 alone, 6,211 needles were collected while via the 311 App (the “concerned citizen” reporting app set up by recently deceased San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee), 1,498 requests were made to clean up human feces. The public defecation problem has become so intolerable in San Francisco that private citizens have built an online map to track the concentrations of poop in the city, so that pedestrians may know to avoid certain areas.

And it’s not just poop. The overwhelming smell of urine on parts of Mission Street and Market Street would make your nose bleed. I recall the first time I rode BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit, San Francisco’s subway system) and was nearly knocked over by the sheer stench of the station . . . . In a dark twist of humor, the city has had to replace numerous different street poles due to urine eroding the foundation.

What drives a large part of the human waste issue is San Francisco’s homeless population. The homeless epidemic in San Francisco is tragic and frightening — in a 47-square mile city, we have around 7,500 homeless people, meaning there are approximately 160 homeless people per square mile. Unsurprisingly, it’s not uncommon to see frequented streets downtown blocked by what people dismally have coined “tent cities,” large enclaves of tents that homeless people have set up with little to no pushback from local authorities. What makes the homeless problem particularly alarming is that a variety of tents are often juxtaposed next to $4,000-per-month apartments . . . .

Over the course of the last two years, I’ve reached out to the cops about hearing gun shots on my street at least five to six times. I once came home from work to spot three fire trucks outside my house, after a fight had broken out next to my front door . . . .

About half a year after that, my next-door neighbor’s car was stolen off of our block. It was eventually recovered . . . we even found a crack pipe in the door of the driver’s side.

. . . is an occasional Chekhovian instance of laughter through tears. Just last month, a man attempted to break into my apartment around 3 a.m. . . . . the would-be robber left his small Chihuahua-Papillion mix behind, which I happily took for the night . . . darkly chuckling to myself that only San Francisco could produce such miserable absurdity . . . .

Bloated and inefficient spending (in 2016, the city spent $241 million on the homeless or about $32,000 per homeless person yet the situation as described persists), combined with a gross shortage of housing only worsened by rent-control antics and a fat city bureaucracy, has left a city in utter disrepair . . . .

People are yelling nonsense while wandering into the middle of the street, people are curled up sleeping on almost every block, people have their pants down and are publicly peeing, people simply have their pants down and aren’t peeing at all … The list goes on … My most harrowing encounter was walking to work at 9 a.m. on a sunny Saturday afternoon when a stranger (I don’t think he was homeless) was tailing me on the sidewalk and grabbed my butt at a red light . . . .

The astounding level of mismanagement and general deterioration of public decency will continue to plague the city until reasonable measures are taken to combat vagrancy, including harsher punishment of petty crime and the construction of more affordable housing. Similarly, until there is a greater deterrent for property crime, theft rates likely won’t decrease at any point soon . . . .

http://thefederalist.com/2018/03/16/...wn-liberalism/

Pretty much all accurate--I've personally seen every type of incident described on a regular basis and agree with the author that the principle cause of much of it is an utter failure of government to temper its tolerance and admiration for diversity with a practical intolerance for sociopathy and an insistance that peoples' public behavior not degrade the quality of life for everyone else. In short, we need to enforce the laws pretty much already on the books about what you can and cannot do on city streets and sidewalks, and the local police, judges, juries and legislators need to agree its time to do it.

The typical San Franciscan response when people began stripping naked and bathing in a public fountain within direct site of City Hall: Turn off the water in the fountain and let it go dry so no one can enjoy it. Too much public peeing resulted in maybe the only open air "pissoirs" in North America (we can debate whether that's a good idea or a bad one but the alternative was to clean up existing public bathrooms and keep them clean). Why do people rummage through public trash cans strewing their contents everywhere? Because the city encourages "recycling" with generous payment for bottles, cans and so on (and if you ride public transit in the city you may find yourself sitting next to a person lugging a smelly sack of garbage-encrusted bottles/cans pulled from the garbage bins on his way to the recycling center).

[Crawford]

SF is indeed much grittier and messier than NYC these days (which probably surprises most people) but I don't think it's necessarily "liberalism" at issue. This sounds like a correlation-causation fail.

West Coast cities have good year-round climate, encouraging street living. And it just happens that all the subsidized housing and street people are right downtown, where the tourists congregate.

San Diego, a pretty conservative place by big city standards, is almost as bad. Downtown SD is overrun by aggressive homeless and trash.

[spyguy]

I didn't realize The Federalist would have a problem with liberalism

[BrownTown]

I noticed this issue with a few West coast cities, not just San Fran. I do think Liberalism is a big part of the issue since there is no real will to clean up these sort of problems as the extreme Left see homelessness and drug use as perfectly fine. It's definitely a little ironic to see that the average spent per homeless person is roughly similar to my yearly expenses. While I obviously don't live in San Francisco and therefore don't have to pay such extreme rents* it does seem a little odd that so much money could be spent and these people still homeless.

*And on the topic of extreme rents, this is also entirely the result of extreme Liberalism that makes development all but impossible. Most of San Francisco is relatively low-density housing but there is extreme push back to intensifying even a portion of these areas. Property prices in San Francisco are 100% self-inflicted and even using that term is missing the point because for many people living there they WANT prices to be so high to keep others out or to make their property more valuable.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by BrownTown

I noticed this issue with a few West coast cities, not just San Fran. I do think Liberalism is a big part of the issue since there is no real will to clean up these sort of problems as the extreme Left see homelessness and drug use as perfectly fine.

San Diego is a military town and very conservative West Coast metro, yet has analogous issues. How do you explain this in the absence of "extreme liberalism"?

Originally Posted by BrownTown

*And on the topic of extreme rents, this is also entirely the result of extreme Liberalism that makes development all but impossible.

None of this is true. SF has one of the lowest rent burdens of any major U.S. city, and very robust development these days relative to size.

[dubu]

i think a lot of homeless die. I almost died, I was lucky and a cop picked me up and brought me to a homeless shelter. It’s kinda good people go somewhere warm. We don’t need people freezing to death

[mhays]

I suspect that some of that $241 million is going to people in housing, not included in the 7,500. Anyone know for sure?

But yes, clean the whole thing up. And rethink the self-defeating policies, which seem to be designed to make the overall situation worse (rent control for example).

Having visited several times I've never seen it as bad as the article implies, but I didn't go to City Hall or spend much time in the Tenderloin.

[BrownTown]

Originally Posted by Crawford

None of this is true. SF has one of the lowest rent burdens of any major U.S. city, and very robust development these days relative to size.

Excuse me, WHAT? San Francisco literally has the highest rents of any city in the US.

[jd3189]

^^^ Yeah, I'm trying to figure out what Crawford meant by that. In almost every major news publication you can get a hold of, you see that rent and homes in SF are extremely high in comparison to the rest of the country. I will say that development relative to size is probably true, but it's still too low.Match that with the rest of the Bay Area facing the same affordability crisis and you wonder how normal middle class Americans are going to live and contribute to the economy of coastal Northern California, let alone coastal Southern California where the same crap is roughly happening. Not even NYC is this bad.

[Shawn]

Crawford said "rent burden", not "rent." It's feasible that a city with high rents still imposes a lower rent burden than a city with cheap rents if the high-rent city also pays much higher wages than the low-rent city does. I'm not saying that's actually the case with SF - someone else can look that up - but it's certainly possible.

[mhays]

There are many ways of counting that. Let's assume average vs. median, and only the rental market, not the for-sale market. Some examples:

Average rent, all rentals.
Average rent, market-rate only (much of SF is rent-controlled; this would cause a much lower average).
Average rent paid per earner (many roommates in SF).
Average percentage of income paid to rent (SF would do poorly).
Average remaining income after rent is paid (it would do a bit better in this one).

And so on.

[ardecila]

Originally Posted by mhays

Average rent, market-rate only (much of SF is rent-controlled; this would cause a much lower average).

I'm assuming Crawford is referring to this.

In his worldview, real big-shot cities have to be stratospherically expensive, which means governments have to regulate rents or directly provide social housing to the poorer citizens. Who needs a middle class? Oh wait, they have to get subsidized housing also.

[Shawn]

My understanding of Bay Area housing dynamics is that you basically need to be upper middle class (by the Bay Area's definition) in order to not feel the pinch. Big caveat being "Bay Area's definition". My brother and his wife pull in more than 200k combined but felt they needed to live way the hell out in Davis just to keep the same standard of living they had just outside of Boston. The experiment has not been worth it and they're looking to either come back to Boston or move to Seattle, where my sister in law's family is from.

I don't know how your middle class, services-oriented workers can live in most of the Bay Area. Seriously, how do EMTs and RNs and elementary school teachers exist? Tons of room mates? Can a MUNI station staffer afford to live in SF? Never mind a fast food cashier.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by Shawn

Crawford said "rent burden", not "rent." It's feasible that a city with high rents still imposes a lower rent burden than a city with cheap rents if the high-rent city also pays much higher wages than the low-rent city does. I'm not saying that's actually the case with SF - someone else can look that up - but it's certainly possible.

It's possible but untrue.

San Francisco is eighth least affordable city for renters worldwide
By Adam Brinklow Jul 10, 2017, 3:02pm PDT

In 2016, London-based business consulting and services firm PwC once again included San Francisco in its annual Cities Of Opportunity report, lauding us as one of 30 cities in the world most attractive for new business ventures.

The PwC analysis did mention one small catch, though:

Cities with the greatest economic strength today often have housing that is priced out of reach. Five of our top 10 cities in economic clout fall at midpoint or lower in rent affordability (London, New York, San Francisco, Beijing, and Shanghai) . . . .

Even though several cities with worse rankings had much, much lower rents (in Lagos, Nigeria the average renter pays $355/month in U.S. currency), SF enjoys a much higher average income as well, which tips things back a bit.

The average San Francisco renter pays 41 percent of yearly before-tax income toward housing in the breakdown.

On the one and, that’s not nearly as bad as places like Mexico City (60 percent) or the Manhattan borough of New York (59 percent).

Then again, it’s a wearying statistic when compared to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (20 percent) or Moscow, Russia (21 percent) . . . .

. . . the calculation is based on an average before-tax income of just over $92,000/year.

But the Mayor’s Office of Housing, on the other hand, estimates a non-adjusted median income for one person at less than $81,000 in early 2017.

And the U.S. Census pegs the figure at just a bit over $81,000 (although that figure is for 2015, the most recent available). So it’s possible things are even worse than eighth place.

But the census also reports a median citywide rent of $1,558/month, considerably lower than RENTCafe’s $3,150/month estimate*, although again, the most recent census data is now two years out of date.

RENTCafe competitor ApartmentList has been trying to calculate what it says is a more accurate citywide median rent using the census number as a base and calls the number at $2,418/month now.

That would put SF’s rent burden as low as 31 percent, using the highest income estimate. Or as high as 46 percent using the lowest . . . .

*SF has rent control with vacancy decontrol. The citywide median probably takes into account that a lot of long-time residents have very low rents compared to what a vacant apartment would rent for.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by Shawn

My understanding of Bay Area housing dynamics is that you basically need to be upper middle class (by the Bay Area's definition) in order to not feel the pinch. Big caveat being "Bay Area's definition". My brother and his wife pull in more than 200k combined but felt they needed to live way the hell out in Davis just to keep the same standard of living they had just outside of Boston. The experiment has not been worth it and they're looking to either come back to Boston or move to Seattle, where my sister in law's family is from.

I don't know how your middle class, services-oriented workers can live in most of the Bay Area. Seriously, how do EMTs and RNs and elementary school teachers exist? Tons of room mates? Can a MUNI station staffer afford to live in SF? Never mind a fast food cashier.

You don't need to live in Davis though I have no idea what your brother's expectations for living like in Boston were. And does his calculation include the fact that heating costs compared to New England are negligible for example (though in Davis he probably has air-conditioning whereas in the city many people have niether central heat nor A/C and don't miss either)?

But the least expensive places in the Bay area tend to be in places like Antioch, Solano County, Daly City/Pacifica and some other niches closer than Davis.

As for San Francisco, as I said, the outrageous market rents largely affect newcomers. Many long time residents have low rents due to rent control and then there are some of us who moved there a long time ago and bought homes when they were much, much cheaper. And yes, a lot of singles do double and triple up which is a good thing for the rest of us: it makes for an active cafe/restaurant scene since for many people the local cafe or coffee shop is their living room. San Francisco has become a place not just for the upper middle class (because many of those have housing expectations even they can't afford like your brother) but for long-time residents and singles making upper middle incomes. And that fact may be part of the problem described here. Singles tend to tolerate the grit better than people with families, I would guess, and they may be more willing to keep the "progressive" establishment that has brought about the existing conditons in power..

[CaliNative]

San Francisco should designate one or two of the large piers (or perhaps a couple of large warehouses or ships) as a place where the homeless could sleep, and set up portable toilets and showers so they don't go in the streets. Once this is done, ban camping in the streets. 7,500 people doesn't sound like that many--a couple of piers could house them. New York provides shelter beds for most of its homeless, and few camp out. I also agree with a few of the posters that the homeless problem is as bad in L.A. and San Diego. Balboa Park & many downtown streets in SD are being taken over by homeless. Portland and Seattle are also disaster areas. Almost all the wooded areas have people sleeping there.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by BrownTown

Excuse me, WHAT? San Francisco literally has the highest rents of any city in the US.

OK? What does that have to do with anything?

SF has relatively low rent burden. Whether rents are $1 or $1 billion has nothing to do with anything.

Roughly half of U.S. renters are "rent burdened" per the Census; i.e. they pay more than 30% of income to rent. In SF, the share is much lower than the national average.

https://sf.curbed.com/2017/11/13/166...nt-burden-2017

What this means, in plain English, is that the average SF renter is paying a significantly lower share of income to housing costs than an average renter in the U.S.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Shawn

My understanding of Bay Area housing dynamics is that you basically need to be upper middle class (by the Bay Area's definition) in order to not feel the pinch. Big caveat being "Bay Area's definition". My brother and his wife pull in more than 200k combined but felt they needed to live way the hell out in Davis just to keep the same standard of living they had just outside of Boston. The experiment has not been worth it and they're looking to either come back to Boston or move to Seattle, where my sister in law's family is from.

I suspect the key issue is "same standard of living" which probably translates to "same size house and yard as in exurban Mass". Yeah, if that's his requirement, Bay Area is probably a terrible option.

But at 200k, your brother could live basically anywhere in the Bay Area if he adapted to how regular people live (assuming no debt and small family). He's making far more than average Bay Area households and at 200k you could comfortably afford up to $4,700 in monthly rent.

[Jonesy55]

Originally Posted by Crawford

OK? What does that have to do with anything?

SF has relatively low rent burden. Whether rents are $1 or $1 billion has nothing to do with anything.

Roughly half of U.S. renters are "rent burdened" per the Census; i.e. they pay more than 30% of income to rent. In SF, the share is much lower than the national average.

https://sf.curbed.com/2017/11/13/166...nt-burden-2017

What this means, in plain English, is that the average SF renter is paying a significantly lower share of income to housing costs than an average renter in the U.S.

The article does go on to say though that this is because San Francisco has a lot of high income renters compared with other places in the US (because they can't afford to buy despite high income, they would be homeowners in other cities), and also because a lot of the lower income renters have been pushed out into Oakland and other parts of the urban area where the figures for rent burden are higher than in SF itself.

So yeah, the statement is true, but that doesn't necessarily mean that everything is healthy in the housing market, it just means that particular issue has moved further out from SF and been displaced by other issues within the city itself.

[Phoenix22]

A National Disgrace

I went to SF 6 months ago and there are places in that city worse than a third world city.
the only one to blame here is the Government of SF.
I don't see that problem in Madrid, Santiago, Berlin, even downtown NY, CHICAGO, MIAMI, Dallas are cleaner than SF or LA