"This is the city where it can take 87 permits, 1,000 days of meetings and $500,000 in fees to build residential housing projects. This is the city — the only one in the state — that allows housing permits to be appealed even after projects are entitled. This is the city where it costs an estimated $100,000 to build one tiny home for the homeless — up to 10 times more than in other Bay Area cities — and almost $1.2 million to build a single unit of affordable housing. This is the city that at one point celebrated plans to build a single public toilet for $1.7 million."
"1,000 days of meetings" sounds like the ultimate office horror movie.
New York of the 1970s [1] is a better analogy than 9/11.
San Francisco is going broke. Not because of terrorism, but due to its own devices. It will need to be bailed out. When that happens, the state will take over and face the realities its voters choose to ignore.
And the 1970s financial woes aside, NYC also had a lot of petty and not so petty street crime mostly into the 80s. A lot of the area around Times Square was pretty bad, for example. [ADDED: It was really the 90s that saw the ~75% declines from peak.]
I imagine a lot of the direct comparisons break down in various ways. But, at a high level, you see similarities.
San Francisco is largely owned and controlled by about a half dozen extremely wealthy families, who don't just control SF...they're also "kingmakers" for the governor's office, and have been using their influence for personal gain for decades:
https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-gavin-newsom-san-...
Not a dime of public money should go to bailing out the Guggenhimes, Buells, Swigs, Marcuses, Fishers, Gettys, and Pritzkers.
As Biden said: oh boo hoo, capitalism working as intended.
'verge of collapse' & 'brink of collapse' are some of the most frequently-slung clickbait phrases in the editor's grab-bag. Already collapsed? Not going to collapse? Neither newsworthy.
'about to collapse'? That's your stress response being triggered, to be satisfied by clicking on the headline to ascertain how to either head off the stress source or be infotained by it.
I'll tell you what - tell me what metric is in question, and what percent decrease of it over what period of time would constitute 'collapse', following which I will read the article and provide my response.
Bonus to incentivize: I'll even be providing the weird mix of native-San-Franciscan-cum-tech-person take, being born & raised in the Sunset. Therefore I promise to infuse it with a sense of entitlement & disaffection, as if it was possible to have any scope on in-migration/emigration policy across city limits.
I don’t live there, but as a general rule, people overestimate the probability of “collapse“. Things can be declining for a long time without the dramatic acceleration that merits that term.
Agreed. Just look at Twitter. It's running with a skeleton crew but that's only because a system of that size does not collapse in a day. It takes years for the cracks to show and grow.
I think the specific situation with Twitter is that it takes a lot more people to create and update a system of this size than it does to merely maintain it. They simply no longer have the capacity to make a large new product at this point, but even a skeleton staff is enough to keep the existing product running.
Well, this is off-topic now. Twitter had hundreds of developers, Mastodon has ... four. Recently they had just one. It seems Twitter was simply overstaffed.
> people overestimate the probability of “collapse“
Collapse, in this article’s context, means insolvency. That doesn’t mean San Francisco disappears. But public transit may halt for a while, and the city may have control and assets forcibly removed from itself.
In reality, San Francisco is solidly investment grade [1][2]. It can borrow its way out of this hole.
Good. As someone who grew up here, it'll be nice to get back to our original role in American life: open-air asylum for the rest of the country. Literally that's an old joke here: "If you're too crazy for the rest of the country you move to California, and if you're too crazy for California you move to San Francisco." And then under our breathe we add, "And if you're too crazy for SF you move to Berkeley."
This Dot-Com Boom period (roughly 2001 to now) kinda fucked up the city. I can't wait to clear out the folks who were only here for money and hype, and start getting the weirdos and hippies back in.
I passed on a tech job in the Bay Area in the 90s in part because of cost of living. This was also a time when tech salaries in general were much lower than today. It would have been generally a quality of life downgrade to have moved west.
I think one reasonable solution is literally this. Would allow rebuilding whole thing from fresh, with much higher density and maybe in general as high rise buildings.
To do what NYC did and bring more residents into downtown (rather than just offices), SF needs to be an appealing place to live.
NYC tries to make itself an appealing place to live. SF does not. I'm not sure quite what SF is optimizing for, but "pleasant" is not it.
Even if crime is "just" theft and broken windows, it's still an unpleasant day (or week) when it happens. Enough of that and people just don't want to live there.
Having lived in both cities, NYC seems to strive everyday to continue to make it a livable city for families and people of all income levels. SF just seems to be coasting into disaster. Nothing seems to change or improve. Things just seem to get worse. My taxes in NYC seem to actually do something. My CA/SF taxes felt like throwing money into a fire pit.
I skimmed until I found the part where the author was seriously suggesting dumping money on the problem, then I closed the article. The problem is not money.
> skimmed until I found the part where the author was seriously suggesting dumping money on the problem, then I closed the article
“…if you were the state of California, and you were staring down a projected $22 billion budget deficit, would you invest your scarce resources in San Francisco, which has repeatedly proven itself unfit for such investments by building a vast, inefficient bureaucracy at the expense of taxpayers and vulnerable residents?
Readit News
"1,000 days of meetings" sounds like the ultimate office horror movie.
Right now San Francisco is not "too big to fail", but rather "too bloated to save".
San Francisco is going broke. Not because of terrorism, but due to its own devices. It will need to be bailed out. When that happens, the state will take over and face the realities its voters choose to ignore.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-...
I imagine a lot of the direct comparisons break down in various ways. But, at a high level, you see similarities.
https://www.google.com/search?q=california+budget+surplus+20...
I wonder if it'll end like NYC where the state takes permanent control of various municipal services, e.g. NYC subway it's controlled by the state.
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2023/02/budget-deficit-may...
Not a dime of public money should go to bailing out the Guggenhimes, Buells, Swigs, Marcuses, Fishers, Gettys, and Pritzkers.
As Biden said: oh boo hoo, capitalism working as intended.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Bonus to incentivize: I'll even be providing the weird mix of native-San-Franciscan-cum-tech-person take, being born & raised in the Sunset. Therefore I promise to infuse it with a sense of entitlement & disaffection, as if it was possible to have any scope on in-migration/emigration policy across city limits.
Collapse, in this article’s context, means insolvency. That doesn’t mean San Francisco disappears. But public transit may halt for a while, and the city may have control and assets forcibly removed from itself.
In reality, San Francisco is solidly investment grade [1][2]. It can borrow its way out of this hole.
[1] https://www.fitchratings.com/entity/san-francisco-city-count...
[2] https://sf.gov/reports/march-2023/city-credit-ratings
Deleted Comment
This Dot-Com Boom period (roughly 2001 to now) kinda fucked up the city. I can't wait to clear out the folks who were only here for money and hype, and start getting the weirdos and hippies back in.
> Today's outrageous prices are exactly in line with the 6.6% trend that began 60 years ago.
https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employme...
NYC tries to make itself an appealing place to live. SF does not. I'm not sure quite what SF is optimizing for, but "pleasant" is not it.
Even if crime is "just" theft and broken windows, it's still an unpleasant day (or week) when it happens. Enough of that and people just don't want to live there.
“…if you were the state of California, and you were staring down a projected $22 billion budget deficit, would you invest your scarce resources in San Francisco, which has repeatedly proven itself unfit for such investments by building a vast, inefficient bureaucracy at the expense of taxpayers and vulnerable residents?
No.”