Reading that I was struck by how if you changed it from “city” to “country” it also sounds like older, rural white MAGA.
It’s I, me, mine everywhere you look.
Look at conflicts over privately owned beachfront versus public access for some really savage property and land use disputes.
Very well said.
Just before opening the new Academy of Sciences complex the Academy sponsored a reunion of the 1950s student section, where I was a member then supervisor. It was as you describe a time preserved in amber. We went ice skating at Sutro’s glass palace, lunched at the carousel, got burgers and shakes at Mels Drive attached to the windows of classic convertible automobiles and parked among half dozen cars in front of Steinhardt Aquarium. We ushered at the Opera House, paid a dollar a semester to attend SF City College, made .35 an hour working at the Academy and got free tickets to the Planetarium for dates,
Most of the members have dispersed to Marin or the south bay, but a few still live near the park in homes they inherited from their parents. They are protected from taxes by prop13. And, we are all much as you describe. We see The City as it was not as it is.
Hey, my mom ushered at the Opera House! But she hasn’t lived in the Bay Area since 1948. Well, she hasn’t lived anywhere since 2003.
Clearly it’s not just a right-wing sentiment. Conservative maybe, but only in the sense of resisting change. And it’s not the second time that’s been pointed out in the thread.
That’s the interesting thing at play here; it looks like a lot of people of all political alignments are all for various ideological goals, until it’s their wealth or property values that will be affected, at which point they see it differently.
It’s also important to note that people tend to mistake cause for effect, correlation and causation, etc. A classic one is “they built Section 8 housing and the neighborhood went to crap,” but if the neighborhood was so healthy to begin with, it’s unlikely low-income housing would be built there. So the tide had already turned, they just didn’t notice it right away. Similarly, “they built all those luxury condos and now I can’t afford to live here anymore,” while that’s only an expression of an already constrained market. If a neighborhood is attractive to rich people, they’ll find a way to get it. Building that luxury condo building at least takes some of the pressure off the rest of the units in the area. Of course then you get the “but now my house is worth less” while the very same people scream about too much government regulation. Sigh.
To be fair, sometimes it IS imposed from without.
Here in Dallas in my part of town, there was a decision by a federal judge that basically prohibited the City from concentrating all the low income housing in one part of town, and required it to be spread out around the city.
So in my part of town, the government literally introduced a bunch of low-income residents to the area, along with pretty much every single social ill that comes with it. My part of town is now very peculiar; we’ve got neighborhoods with half-million and up homes interspersed with some of the lowest-income and highest crime apartment complexes in the city, wholly because a Federal judge mandated it 30 years ago.
It’s actually kind of similar in concept to the SF woes; at what point does being equitable to one group warrant screwing another group over? And there’s always the fact that distributing the public housing didn’t actually lift UP the public housing residents, rather it blighted everywhere they went.
…some context: this article was written by Nellie Bowles. She is married to notorious alt-right extremist and fantasist Bari Weiss. This article was originally published on Bari Weiss’s Substack. That even part of the article is devoted to exaggerating what happened at a school board meeting should tell you everything that we need to know about the article and the narrative that the author is pushing.
That it hasn’t, and that people even here are taking it seriously, do not bode well for the future of democracy in America.
This isn’t an “interesting article.” Its propaganda. San Francisco hasn’t become a “failed city.” Not by any reasonable metric. The article if full of anecdotes and cherry-picked statistics and right-wing talking points. This wasn’t about “progressive ideals.” The pro-recall effort simply outspent the anti-recall lobby by a margin of 2 to 1.
This is the blueprint for the upcoming disaster of the midterms on how it is all going to play out. The Democrats are going to get shafted and they are going to put all the blame on the progressives.
Eh… Alt-right doesn’t seem to fit her any more than liberal does.
At any rate, it was on The Atlantic, which is not a particularly biased site, and what bias it has is to the left.
Of course the Democrats are going to get hammered. They’ve spent the past two years pretending that they had some sort of mandate other than “Not Trump” and “Not Republicans”. That’s not the same thing as a progressive mandate or anything near that.
I know people may think that a Democratic victory means that, but to a lot of people it doesn’t. It merely meant that they didn’t vote for Trump or his enablers. But that didn’t mean they wanted progressive nonsense or anything close to it either, and the Democrats’ stupidity was in assuming that they did.
…alt-right fits perfectly.
What gives you that impression?
They are decidedly centrist-tending-to-the-right IMHO, and re-publishing something from Weiss’s Substack is really no different to having someone like Conor Friedersdorf on the Atlantic staff.
But that doesn’t really matter. Because this is also about the “establishment left” attacking the progressives. So even if the Atlantic had a “left wing bias”, that doesn’t mean that it would champion progressives, which are a different thing entirely.
Well, no. Not at all.
The progressive mandate is pretty crystal clear and is championed by people like AOC and/or Elizabeth Warren. Bail reform. Defund. Green New Deal. You want a policy position out of them? They’ve got one.
That’s the opposite of what we are seeing out of the centrists. The “Not Trump” and “Not Republicans” isn’t a progressive problem. It’s a centrist one.
I don’t even know what this means. Rob Bonta won the California Attorney General race. Diana Becton won. Pamela Price won in Alameda.
Progressives did fine.
None of them had to deal with what Boudin had to deal with here. You can’t ignore the millions of dollars invested in the effort to recall. The hostile Mayor. The gish-gallop of mis-information about crime rates. This wasn’t a referendum on on progressive policies and ideals. It was just another election in a system that is becoming increasingly rigged.
I think that’s wandering a bit far afield from where you started. Because I assure you the Democrats are NOT going to get hammered in San Francisco. Or likely anywhere in the nine county Bay Area. This fight between the “moderates” and the “progressives” has been going on in SF since forever - the moderates have almost always had the upper hand in city politics. Gavin Newsom was a moderate, so was Kamala Harris and so is current mayor London Breed. Progressives usually make an impact more locally as district supervisors.The city DA’s office has also been prone to the occasional maverick. The city seesaws a bit, but the moderates have always had more muscle.
None of which has much to do with the Democratic Party per se. SF politics are very local and the big D is a given. Republican registration in the city is a whopping 8.6%. Of the 12 congressional seats in the Bay Area as a whole only two are semi-competitive and they are D+5 and D+8. SF (Nancy Pelosi-ville, another “moderate”) is D+37. For the Democratic Party in San Francisco there will be essentially zero fallout from the defeat of Boudin.
A lot of leftist have very strong negative feelings about liberals, so I don’t think it’s very surprising the two groups would clash in the Bay Area. San Francisco is an interesting place, and as an outside, I mean that it is simultaneously odd and wonderful.
I would agree that referring to San Francisco as a failed city is a bit much. But when I hear all the stories about the city being covered in shit and seeing glass from broken automobile windows glittering in the streets, I can’t help but think the Republicans are going to point and say, “This is what the Democrats want to bring to your city.” And I think it’s going to be an effective talking point for the Republicans.
I’m from SoCal, but I’ve been to San Francisco many times. It’s a big city and those always come with their share of unpleasantness, but I’ve never noticed it to be more unpleasant in the ways you describe than LA, San Diego, Seattle, or NYC.
Like you I have heard the CLAIM that SF is full of poop and broken glass many times, but (anecdotally of course) that just hasn’t been my experience.
Is the idea that SF is particularly bad in this regard backed up by any actual evidence?
I’m sure that you can find a photo of some human poop, on the sidewalk, in San Francisco. So, certainly, there is evidence. But evidence doesn’t mean proof, it just means some thing you found, that you can plausibly infer something from.
In terms of poop, really what you would want is something more like a data comparison between cities of “total numbers of poop, per square mile, per capita”.
There are cities outside of the USA that do not have chronically homeless encampments and etc. And nor did those cities always have those encampments, in prior decades. Saying that all of our cities are equivalent doesn’t mean that our cities are well-run.
That said, the USA has made certain choices on things like forcible institutionalization, tax benefits for charitable giving, etc. that - plausibly - you might think are the right choices. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t costs to those choices.
In the traditional scenario, the white hatted cowboy always draws his gun second because that’s the noble and lawful way of doing it. And sure, in the movies, he always gets away with that, without harm. In reality, the guy in the white hat is usually going to die, because he made the choice to be noble and lawful and if he’s now surprised that he’s got blood leaking down his pant leg… I don’t really know what to tell him.
If we make the choices like that you should be free to beg, supermarkets have to give you free food, you’re free to loiter, and you can’t be forced to go somewhere that you don’t want to then…well, the end result of that is what it is.
If you’ve decided that you have the draw the gun second, because of morality, reality has no obligation to live up to your dreams on how that’s going to work out. It might be the morally “right” answer. Morally right isn’t free of consequences.
Well, I can’t say I’ve ever seen an article like this in the Dallas media…
‘20 pounds of human waste’ dropped on San Francisco street corner (sfchronicle.com)
Or seen a website like this:
San Francisco Human Waste Reportings (2011-2019) | Open The Books
Note that this was 20 lbs in a single bag. It’s not like there were so many homeless people shitting on this one street that it added up to 20 pounds. It’s gross and horrifying, but also not evidence of a systemic sanitation problem. It was one weirdo with access to a surprising amount of human feces.
And this is a website that appears to collect about 25 unrelated government reports and then puts them on an extremely slow loading map for some reason? One of the two dozen options is reports of human waste in SF from 2011-2019, which is apparently meant to be taken as evidence that only San Francisco has a human waste problem. There’s also a report on Florida Restaurant Inspections. Since there aren’t any other Restaurant Inspections options in the drop down, I guess only Florida is inspecting their restaurants?
I made frequent trips into Little Rock, but I really didn’t see a lot of the problems in the downtown area until I started working there. When I visited my sister in San Diego a few years back, I didn’t even notice a homeless problem any more severe than other areas. But my sister was sure aware of the problems.
I mean, yes? You can find articles about the increase in property crimes including breaking into parked cards and broken glass (street diamonds/San Francisco snow) being a common sight. And human feces has been a popular subject for a long time, but maybe it’s all bullshit?
Bowles is an heiress to a billion dollar cattle and land fortune. She and wife Bari Weiss are “intellectual dark web” clowns who make a posture of liberal aesthetics while always managing to carry water for the right wing.
This is the type of kool-aid that The Atlantic cannot help resist chugging down to burnish its creds as a centrist rag.
I don’t doubt there’s weird stuff happening in San Francisco… it’s well known for that… but Nellie Bowles is the last person you should trust to give an honest accounting of it.
But that’s a common sight in EVERY city.
I can’t really say anything about LA, San Diego or Seattle but I can say you will not see a city-created tent village in NYC. Might there be individuals living under an overpass or something - yes. Individuals riding the subway all day and night or sleeping on a park bench - you might see that. Tent villages set up by the city with restrooms , showers , security - nope. NYC shelters had the same issue with social distancing in shelters as SF did. NYC placed people in hotel rooms which were reimbursed by the federal government. I have no idea why SF didn’t do the same for everyone, rather than hotels for some and tents for others - but apparently it wasn’t money. Some articles noted that the tent sites are less expensive than hotel rooms but since the hotel rooms were reimbursed by the Federal govt and the tent cites are not, the tents would actually cost SF more than the hotel rooms.