SF is a showcase of what progressives/liberals can achieve in a city when they control it.
I don’t have stats, but I would assume few cities have a higher percentage of liberals than SF.
Also, the average income of SF residents is high, so they have the means to spend money to enact their vision.
So, this is a place where there are liberals controlling the city and with the monetary resources to implement solutions.
Unfortunately, SF is trash. I live in the Bay Area, and 20 years ago visiting SF was mostly a pleasure. For the past several years, it’s been so terrible every time I visit, that I rarely go there any more.
I’m thinking that if this showcase of liberalism is such a disaster, no wonder conservatives will want to use it as a talking point in elections.
Maybe it’s true that America needs both parties. Left to their own devices, either side’s vision on how to run a city/state ends up in a nightmare (for different reasons for the left and right)
But there is a fairly straightforward kind of order beneath the chaos: an illicit market economy operating in plain sight. The Tenderloin is home to two sprawling, overlapping transnational organized crime networks – one centered on drugs and the other on theft – which thrive in that neighborhood because of the near-total absence of the enforcement of laws.
Crowded onto its street corners and inside the tents congesting the sidewalk, countless petty criminals play their roles in a structured and symbiotic criminal enterprise. Its denizens fall into four main groups: the boosters, typically homeless and addicted, who steal from local stores; the street fences who buy the stolen merchandise; the dealers who sell them drugs for the money they make from the fences; and, at the top of the stack, the drug cartel that supplies the dealers and the wholesale fences that resell the goods acquired by street fences. Each has a role to play in keeping the machine moving, and the police know exactly how to disrupt it.
Experts say the city could, in fact, arrest and prosecute its way out of most of the problems in the Tenderloin if it chose to. It thrives, instead, as a zone of lawless sovereignty in the heart of a major American city – the criminal version of the area commanded by Seattle anarchists in the so-called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, in 2020. Where those extra-legal districts were eventually dismantled, the Tenderloin’s structure is entrenched.
Well, speaking of stats, the reality is that San Francisco is not among the most violent cities in the US.
10 Most Dangerous Cities in the US (#1 is the highest cost of crime)
St. Louis, Missouri
Jackson, Mississippi
Detroit, Michigan
New Orleans, Louisiana
Baltimore, Maryland
Memphis, Tennessee
Cleveland, Ohio
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Kansas City, Missouri
Shreveport, Louisiana
Of course, SF is not among the safest either, but it is better to have a sense of perspective when the right comes along with a hobbyhorse.
There were several US cities that had increases in crime that were significant. “It’s worth noting popular tourist destinations like Seattle, New Orleans and Chicago were amongst cities that saw increases in the cost of crime,” says Milnes. “In Chicago the cost of crime increased by 29%, in NOLA the increase was 40% and in Seattle it was 42%. These percentage increases can hide some numbers. NOLA’s increase in the cost of crime was on top of an already high cost of crime. We saw 70% of cities in America reported some increase in the cost of crime.”
This reminded me of how right wing sources of info made a lot of hay about how recently “blue” states that look to control police brutality seeing an increase in crime, forgetting to report that “red” states also saw increases.
In most cities Biden had the lead in 2020 vs Trump. Perhaps that’s not surprising, since cities often lean Democratic even in red states.
Among these top 10 cities, I would say that most do not seem to be a “showcase” for either party’s philosophy, since no party seems that dominant, with the exception of Baltimore, Maryland where Biden got 88%.
By contrast
San Francisco, California Biden 85%
In SF, not only are Dems dominant, but also the city is (I assume) rich enough to be able to enact the policies they want. If I’m not mistaken, Baltimore is a poor city, so not clear how much power they have to fix their problems and enact their philosophy of how to run a city.
…this isn’t about “liberal” policies. It’s about progressive ones.
And if mainstream Democrats were implementing progressive policies then you would have universal healthcare, the police would be “defunded”, cash bail would be abolished.
But that isn’t what most Democrats stand for. Its hard to properly enact progressive policies when everyone from the Mayor’s office to the Police Unions actively oppose them.
The article addresses homelessness, drug use on the streets, and petty crime. It also has this to say:
“You can spend days debating San Francisco crime statistics and their meaning, and many people do. It has relatively low rates of violent crime, and when compared with similarly sized cities, one of the lowest rates of homicide. But what the city has become notorious for are crimes like shoplifting and car break-ins, and there the data show that the reputation is earned. Burglaries are up more than 40 percent since 2019. Car break-ins have declined lately, but San Francisco still suffers more car break-ins—and far more property theft overall—per capita than cities like Atlanta and Los Angeles.”
Never said that San Fransisco was good, only that it is a bit silly to ignore that others are ignored, or that the crime rate increased for both the liberal and conservative cities. BTW the worst rate of car theft is actually Bakersfield, CA. with a Republican mayor and a lot of conservatives too. (Geography has a lot to do with this too, not much the political make up of the cities)
With 85%+ of the SF population being Dems/liberals who cares what the mayor opposes? If the mayor doesn’t want to enact policies that 85% of the population wants, they can be kicked out in the next election and replaced by a candidate who does support the same policies as the population
With an 85% vote share, there are no reasons that the elected officials in SF don’t reflect the will of the electorate in the city.
…you do realize that the Mayor is a “dem/liberal” right?
And that “mainstream” Democrats like the Mayor are often in conflict with the progressive wing of their own party?
This has absolutely nothing to do with anything I said. This thread is about a progressive DA who got recalled less than two years after taking office. That DA and other progressives are taking the blame from both mainstream Democrats AND the Republicans for San Francisco suddenly becoming a “failed city” based on :: waves hands ::
The Democrats are dominant. But a progressive facing a backlash from both centrist Democrats and Republicans, being outspent by a margin of 2 : 1, was always going to struggle here.
Elected officials do things that don’t reflect the will of the electorate in the city all the time.
My point is, if Dems or Republicans had 85% of the vote nationwide, they would have enough of a mandate to enact their dream policies. And if those led to bad outcomes, they couldn’t hide behind things like “the president opposes this” if this 85% vote share persists over many years.
Of course both Democrats and Republicans are not monolithic, and so not all Democrats want all the same policies and not all Republicans want all the same policies
However, there should be at least some core Dem/Rep policies that would please the majority of Dems/Reps
Essentially, if you have 85% of the vote share, you can’t complain that any of the problems you are facing are due to the resistance from the other party.
With 85% both Democrats and Republicans should be able to create a “showcase” of how the country is run according to their ideals
…what kind of world do you think that it is that you think that somehow this is how it works?
It largely isn’t about ideals. It’s about the perception of ideals. I don’t think that anyone in this thread actually knows what policies of Boudin were the ones that caused “SF to become a failed city.” You can’t “showcase your ideals” when the Atlantic publishes blatant propaganda and everyone from the mainstream Dems to the Police Union decide to agree with every word.
What you describe simply isn’t how the real world works. Things don’t exist in a vacuum. The Democrats are often very much not in agreement with how “the country should be run.”
Progressive policies are undeniably popular. But they don’t get the backing of the centrist Dems because they don’t want to lose the “law and order” vote.
This is all about the progressives. And how the progressives are being marginalised by the police unions, by bad faith actors like Nellie Bowles, by the media in general (have a look at all the “progressive backlash” articles posted in the last month) and by the centrist Dems.
Would you agree that if progressives had an overwhelming majority of the vote in a city, then any major failures should be on them? At what point do we say that an ideology has been tried and failed/succeeded?
You make a good point about the different goals of the progressive side and the more centrist side of the Democratic party, so the 85% vote Dems have in SF likely does not translate to a majority for the progressives themselves. I would have thought though, that of all cities, SF would likely to have one of the highest ratios of progressives to centrist Democrats, though maybe I’m wrong.
Don’t discount the effect of lobbying, bribery, campaign contributions, nepotism, and just corruption in general that distorts or even subverts the will of the populace, despite what the polls may say. Ideology, policy, enactment, and enforcement are never 1:1, especially if other key supporters in the administration are not entirely onboard.
I read a story yesterday in the Wall St. Journal about a middle-aged couple that moved out of house in the Potrero Hill section of S.F. to build their “dream home” in Bend, Oregon. Apparently safety (or the lack of it) in S.F. was an issue.
“The couple, who have an 8-year-old son, decided they wanted out of San Francisco, where, they say, their house in Potrero Hill had been burglarized twice, their cars broken into six times and the sound of gunshots had become more frequent.”
On the other hand, they were able to sell their S.F. house (which they’d bought in 2009 for $690,000) for $2.7 million after only 7 days on the market, so it wasn’t hard to find a buyer who viewed it as a swell place to live.
“I don’t have stats” in other words, you’re pulling the numbers out of, let’s say out of the air. Anyway, an irrelevant point. It’s not the number of liberals that matter, it’s how much power and influence they have on the city government.
The average income is high because it has to be in order to live here, the average cost of living is correspondingly high (which you know perfectly well if you really do live in the Bay area, but you don’t want to weaken your point). In fact, the means to spend money has nothing whatever to do with how much the average citizen has in the bank, it depends on how willing they are to spend it – or to have it taken away and spent for them – on social issues.
The only thing you have to bring to this discussion, like so many people, are your supervicial and rosy (and inaccurate) memories of visiting SF 20 years ago, and how you don’t want to visit any more. What a shame, I’m sure we all miss seeing you.
“Yeah, sure, we have 95% liberals in my city, but none of them are in power, so you can’t blame liberals for any of the problems”
The 95% is exaggerated of course, but only to illustrate the fact that the number of liberals is not irrelevant to conclusions about who is to blame. If the numbers are high enough, then they choose who is in government
are your supervicial and rosy (and inaccurate) memories of visiting SF
Along with the myriad other stories we read about, like the following:
No matter how much you love SF (and some of you seem to be taking this personally) it is a bit strange that a house that was burglarized twice, with cars broken into six times, sells for $2.7mil
One expects this level of lawlessness in poor areas of the country, not in an area where houses sell for $2.7mil
There are still people who believe in Communism and Facism. You’d think both political ideologies would have been relegated to the dustbin of history at this point, but both still have believers who in their heart of hearts know that this time things will be different.
Maybe - just maybe - it’s because the “level of lawlessness” has been greatly exaggerated by right wing politicians living elsewhere using San Francisco as a boogeyman.
Despite numerous anecdotes to the contrary, the numbers seem to back this up.
