The Atlantic June 8th 2022 |IDEAS| “How San Francisco Became A Failed City” “And how it could recover” by Nellie Bowles
Read The Atlantic for all the details
Summary by 2244
Exodus from SF during the pandemic, 1 in 20
$117,400 salary “counts as low-income for a family of four [in SF].”
37 year old Dustin Walker’s “body lay there [on a corner of Japantown] for a least 11 hours”
$1,000,000,000 pledged by SF in 2021 to battle homelessness but “8,000 people remain on the streets”
SF “92 drug deaths in 2015…about 700 in 2020…[while]...216 San Franciscans died of COVID.’ Fentanyl laced drugs are deadly in SF and elsewhere.
A block from city hall is a tent city, with many services including “food, medical care, and counseling are free, and every tent costs taxpayers roughly $60,000 a year.”
SF has low violent crime but property crimes like shoplifting and burglary are high. “Burglaries are up more than 40 percent since 2019.”
“In 2021, only 15%” of shoplifters were arrested. A decade early that percentage was 70.
Due to Prop 47 in 2014, theft less than $950 is “a misdemeanor” in SF.
Police are frustrated, in a 2020 tweet Tenderloin Police commented, “‘Tonight for the fifteenth (15th) time in 18 months, and the 3rd time in 20 days, we are booking the same suspect at county jail for felony motor vehicle theft.’”
As we know, more housing is needed but SF is a particularly challenging locale for developers. “Decades of progressive governance in San Francisco yielded a thicket of regulations-safety reviews, environmental reviews, historical reviews, sunlight-obstruction reviews that empower residents who essentially paralyze development.”
SF Bay Area is “52 % White, 6.7% Black, 23.3% Asian” This plays out in school board policy where liberals have worked to eliminate merit-based admission into key schools. This is a blow to those families whose children have successfully competed for enrollment and now, seeking alternatives, can’t afford private school. Reportedly the Asian community has been particularly impacted.
How did this happen? During the Trump era more liberals were elected to local government but since then the pendulum has moved too far left. Leading locals are finally concluding that many overly progressive policies are having a detrimental impact on key institutions and the overall quality of life. They realize too that they can no longer place the blame on the tech industries and their cadre. Consequently, the elections on Tuesday June 7th have ousted some of these incumbents in favor of candidates likely to deal with the current realities.
According to Nellie Bowles, “San Franciscans are now saying: We can want a fairer justice system and also want to keep our car windows from getting smashed. And: It’s not white supremacy to hope that the schools stay open, that teachers teach children, and, yes, that they test to see what those kids have learned.”
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