Slouching towards San Francisco
Look around San Francisco today. What has changed recently? Crime is way down, lower than it has been in 15 years. Homelessness is down, lower than the past 4 years.
Did tech companies decide to start paying more taxes? Did the city start spending more? No, the actual cause is boring and simple, but makes anti-establishment folks very uncomfortable.
The truth is that our government started operating more effectively, intentionally trying to solve problems that it previously pretended were insoluble. This change was instigated by a relatively small number of rich people where were fed up and decided to and spend their own money to fix the city.
Some other nitpicks I have with the sentiment expressed in the article:
* Police and firefighters in SF make more on average than tech workers. Is that a source of injustice? Or is unequal pay more complicated? Is inequality only bad when the groups benefitting are aesthetically undesirable to you?
* SF remains one of the highest tax cities in the country, and is the highest in the Bay Area. At the margin, businesses are leaving (including Twitter, mentioned in the article). Raising more taxes on these businesses seems unlikely to increase revenue long term.
* We spent more per resident on most services than nearly every other city in the country. Aren't you curious why that is, and doesn't it seem like understanding that problem would lead to insights more interesting than "tech bad"?
Crime is way down, lower than it has been in 15 years. Homelessness is down, lower than the past 4 years.
This makes me so happy. It was heartbreaking to see SF lose the plot the last 10 or so years.
Did tech companies decide to start paying more taxes? Did the city start spending more? No, the actual cause is boring and simple, but makes anti-establishment folks very uncomfortable.
We did pass gross receipts taxes and do tax payroll for larger businesses. So yes, companies pay more taxes than 2015 (though they didn't choose to) and our budget per person in inflation adjusted terms is up:
A $16 billion question: How did San Francisco’s budget get so huge?
A lot of that is from "self-supporting" segments including SFO.
Same thing the large transfer tax changes, vacancy taxes, etc. The inflation adjusted budget is definitely higher.
Do you believe that?
I recall that worked to confuse ChatGPT v2 as it lost context, but it shouldn't confuse a human.
We spent more per resident on most services than nearly every other city in the country.
And then
Look around San Francisco today. What has changed recently? Crime is way down, lower than it has been in 15 years. Homelessness is down, lower than the past 4 years.
The fact is, SF's city government is fat and bloated with all sorts of cushy jobs for friends and family.
This article by the SJ Mercury News captures it best (how much we spend on staff in the city of SF): https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/23/5-charts-that-show-ho...
* Police and firefighters in SF make more on average than tech workers. Is that a source of injustice?
No. People who perform vital, dangerous jobs for society should be paid their weight in gold. They shouldnt have to worry about anything else than their own duties.
Ok so what is the specific annual salary you propose for each police officer?
That would depend on the CoL in their location and would need to be calculated for every region differently.
And should they have more influence in local politics than they already do?
Nobody should have any more influence in politics than their singular, individual vote.
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/28/nx-s1-4992010/supreme-court-h...
It also seems silly to move to a city internationally known for a specific influential industry and then lament that influence. If you hate entertainment industry people, don’t live in LA. If you hate commercial fishing, don’t live in Dutch Harbor. You’re at least 10-20 years late to fight tech being influential in SF.
There are a lot of places to live in this world. Vote with your feet. Conservatives certainly have, migrating en masse to Texas, Florida, Idaho. If you want to see what a place that has actually swung hard right looks like, it’s not SF where the city government is still captured wholly by Democrats and the Board of Supervisors has anti-development NIMBYs and members of the Democratic Socialists of America.
You can’t claim to be progressive if a starter home is a million dollars and if any attempt to change that is opposed at every level. Mostly because of real estate cost, but also other factors, SF has a very wide division between rich and poor. Having a family there on less than $200-$300k is almost unthinkable. I can’t even grasp how working class people live there at all.
In a way, places like Texas and Georgia and Ohio are far more progressive than SF or California as a whole because a working class person can afford a home.
Housing costs are the shame and great hypocrisy of most “blue” cities. If nothing is done about housing costs, I don’t think you can call yourself progressive. Anything positive that comes of any of your progressive policies is negated by the poverty and extreme inequality perpetuated by housing. Ultimately you are just running a housing cartel that distributes wealth to property owners.
Edit: it’s a major reason I’m not in Cali anymore. There are numerous reasons our family left but one was realizing that the state is a real estate cartel. Without an “exit event” you will never climb above real estate.
It’s still expensive but as you say it is possible to find reasonable housing that is commutable. Also not having to own a car frees up money to compensate a bit.
I would never expect hot metros to be as affordable as mid tier cities or rural areas, but when it’s extreme to the point of absurdity and there is no way to get relief something more than just regular market dynamics is happening. Markets like SF are only possible with organized restriction of supply, basically a cartel.
It’s just a lot smaller geographically.
That's actually a fairly important detail. I live in the NYC metro (lived in the city itself for many years) and have visited SF several times. The "city" part of SF is just much, much smaller, and the suburban parts are much less dense.
NYC and its metro are still quite expensive and we have our own problems with NIMBYism driving housing costs up, but I'm always rather shocked at how much more expensive the SF metro is and how under-developed it is.
It could also be a lot denser. It should look like Hong Kong or the Tokyo core.
In a way, places like Texas and Georgia and Ohio are far more progressive than SF or California as a whole because a working class person can afford a home.
Ah the famously progressive Texas where women regularly die because of abortion ban, weed is illegal, and you can’t buy booze on a Sunday, and lawmakers want to overturn Obergefell to ban same sex marriage. Very progressive, much freedom.
Housing costs are the shame and great hypocrisy of most “blue” cities.
Yes, housing costs are often high where people want to live.
Astronomically high housing costs are a policy choice. They result from high demand coupled with density limits, parking requirements, height limits, zoning, and other things designed to limit supply.
When supply is limited and demand is high prices skyrocket far beyond what a market would normally allow. This is why anti trust and anti collusion laws are important. Housing, at least in many major cities, is effectively a cartel.
It always amazes me when I visit the Bay Area and see how low density it is and how much real estate is wasted for storage lockers, strip malls, ridiculously huge car washes. They’ll let you build anything but housing apparently.
This impoverishes people, especially the working class, and contributes to homelessness and all kinds of other problems, but nobody cares. The residents like seeing their home equity go up. “I’ve got mine, fuck you” is not progressive. A cartel to keep prices high is not progressive.
If you want to be anti-abortion, fine, just don't conflate it with the many life-saving procedures currently being swept up in anti-abortion laws and rhetoric.
Instead, local money is now lavished on centrist and right-wing pressure groups — such as GrowSF, Abundant SF, Together SF, and Neighbors for a Better San Francisco — which have in the past four years fundraised over $50 million from conservative tech and real-estate elites.
Probably notable that this happened because the left wing managed to fuck things up so badly in its management of the city. For example:
* 8,323 homeless people in the city - https://www.sf.gov/data--homeless-population
* 846m homelessness budget for FY 2024-2025 - https://www.sf.gov/reports--september-2024--hsh-budget-fisca...
So, a tiny bit over $100k USD per homeless person and they're still not all sheltered (you can see the sheltered vs unsheltered breakdown in the first link). That's an incredible amount of money to not house people.
Of course, SF's famously anti-build-anything processes[1] and culture probably don't help when you're trying to provide housing, but ostensibly 'progressive' people are a big part of that unfortunately[2].
1 - https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/state-report-slams...
2 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00941...
The rational and effective solutions are decried as “punitive conditionality”, “gatekeeping”, “pathologizing”, “institutional violence” etc.
Much easier to pretend that doing more of the same ineffective things will magically start working someday and perpetually blame lack of funding.
Um. If they were housed, they wouldn't be included in the homeless count.
Hence the problem using it as a denominator given all the money being spent subsidizing permanent housing for previously homeless people, rent subsidies for people at high risk for becoming homeless, etc. That and it is just the number of homeless (unsheltered or temporarily sheltered) on a particular day, not for the year. The homeless population isn't static.
Both the city’s public school system and transit systems are crumbling and underfunded, and its housing and homelessness crises remain existential.
Some quick googling indicates that SF has something like 3x the per capita city budget as San Jose, a city in the same metro area with similar average rent (according to Zillow). If its city departments manage to still be underfunded in spite of that, something is deeply wrong.
San Jose also runs a zoo and an airport.
I glanced at the bookshelves around me — a lot of Isaac Asimov and faddish tech-sponsored print magazines covering “the future of governance and society”.
Perhaps because I am in tech I don’t understand how this is a bad “I have to leave this party now” sort of thing.
The city is the indisputable tech capital of the country.
Do people think that? “Silicon Valley” is on the other side on the bay and I usually think of it as an amorphous blob that covers a few city borders. I’d have probably said Mountain View if pressed.
It is one of my favorite things about living here.
If anyone has any questions about GrowSF, feel free to ask!
If anyone has any questions about GrowSF, feel free to ask!
Then crickets when they're asked who funds their multi-million dollar campaigns.
Ask me anything! Except who I answer to!
GrowSF is a front group for wealthy developers and landlords, as well as right wing silicon valley billionaires.
I think that's the only thing I agree with.
(not a US citizen)
local money is now lavished on centrist and right-wing pressure groups — such as GrowSF, Abundant SF
I didn’t know that supply side progressivism was considered right wing or centrist. You build more houses because otherwise working class people can’t afford to live in your city. It’s bad if your kid’s teacher needs roommates or has to commute an hour each morning.
I'm not against social housing either. It can play a role, and like Klein and other proponents, I think we should be pragmatic and do what works out politically to meet goals.
There is certainly overlap with right wing elements, too. Although UK focused, it’s hard not to see the right wing undercurrents in this Abundance-type manifesto: https://ukfoundations.co/
I recently visited SF for the first time in January coming from a city in the Canadian prairies and I really resonate with this article. I was down there for a job interview and the experiences I had whle down there left me with a similar vibe.
Two memories in particular that stick out in my mind are 1) that I accidentally reserved an Airbnb in a poor neighbourhood and, while walking over broken glass, I saw one billboard for Vercel to my left and another billboard for Notion AI to my right.
2) I also really wanted to take a Waymo while down there but couldn't because the app required a US zip code. I took an Uber instead and, while the driver lamented about US politics and inequality to me, I saw at least a dozen Waymos zip by with no driver.
I really liked SF, but it left a pretty strong impression!
I unexpectedly moved here two years ago from Chicago
I was going to say, this sounds like it was written by someone who wasn’t around during 2012-2016. Aside from AI not much is new.
A tech crash wouldn’t just mean a higher unemployment rate; it would also devastate local businesses and public services. Empty offices, empty coffee shops around those offices, empty balance sheets for coffee beans, and so on.
This already happened with COVID and remote work. The city was overflowing with tech hype and industry to support it 10 years ago.
How quickly did America turn from a smallholder society into one trumpeting Manifest Destiny? That seems no different from tech bros trumpeting their utopian cities. It's not exclusively an American thing of course, one thinks of the British of 1800 going from regional naval experts to talking about spreading their idea of civilization to the East in utopian terms. "For the benefit of the natives, you see" doesnt sound very different from the Yarvinesque patter.
It's all hubris, of course. The question is how Nemesis arrives, and who she chews up on the way.
I never know what business codes / job codes get included in "Professional, scientific, and management, and administrative and waste management" but there's an explicit separate one for Information that is only 6.3% (https://data.census.gov/vizwidget?g=050XX00US06075&infoSecti...)
People write about tech jobs because they're highly paid (on average) and highly visible. But it's not the case that the city is entirely dependent on technology. You wouldn't say the same thing about the equally large segment of "Finance and insurance, and real estate and rental and leasing".
* We own the wrong books
* We pay both too much and too little in taxes
* We support "right wing" pressure groups like GrowSF and "right wing" politicians like Mayor Lurie and Supervisor Bilal Mahmood
* We are eager to extend technical expertise to societal problems
SF has its problems, but they are largely problems of success. It is much, much better off than cities like Detroit whose main industries are experiencing slow declines.
Yet I’m left wondering if ordinary San Franciscans will benefit from the boom, or if the city's newfound wealth will remain concentrated among an increasingly tiny class of digital oligarchs and venture capitalists
Thousands of engineers make a lot of money. I think writers like the author sometimes don't realize how much money the median senior engineer makes at Big Tech Of course, most of these said engineers probably came over from a different country, so not sure if this ticks the box for "ordinary San Franciscans"