San Francisco Became a Failed City

&gt; One day, Berlinn was out looking for Corey in the Tenderloin neighborhood when she came across someone else’s son. “He was naked in front of Safeway<p>I was in San Francisco a few years back. No amount of beauty, natural or architectural, and there was a lot of that, can cover up the sadness I saw amongst the homeless. People shooting up. Others drinking cheap malt liquor and crying and drinking some more.<p>There is just something really broken in that city, and I have lived in poverty and have seen broken cities before. Perhaps it’s to do with the contrast between the wealth and the fate of those people on the streets. It’s hard to pinpoint it but I just couldn’t wait get out of there as quickly possible.

Damn. I had no idea things were so bad in SF. I was there a few weeks ago to visit friends and my rental car window got smashed and 15k+ in electronics and jewelry were stolen. I chalked it up to just being a big city. There’s plenty of crime where I live so I didn’t think much of it. Maybe it really is extra bad in the Bay Area…<p>There was also constant solicitation for petitions of all sorts. Nobody I spoke with seemed to have a coherent plan beyond raising taxes. I was chastised by a woman in a $2MM house for not having solar panels on my property in Georgia like she has. In my head I’m shouting “I can’t afford that shit!”<p>Perhaps the Bay Area residents should study up on taxation and economics before passing half baked legislation.

It’s a useful article in the sense that it raises awareness of what a basket case that city is.<p>My dumb pet theory is that SF found itself between the two motions of the left-right pendulum.<p>A city that tolerates huge amounts of homelessness and urban crime and which therefore should be dirt cheap to live in and subsequently provide _some_ opportunity to its inhabitants to pull themselves out. But… it’s astronomically expensive and filled with people who largely don’t work for the “tangible world” and who’s industry and wealth is unreachable to most without the means for education.<p>So it won’t swing left to cater for the poor but it also won’t swing right to make it unattractive to the poor.<p>In the meantime everyone knows that you can run amok and basically run-sack a wall greens and you won’t go to jail, there’s filthy rich people everywhere who may help you with a handout and the weather is forgiving. If I was homeless in America I’d be tempted to get on a bud and try to get to San Francisco.

One strong statement: &gt; But the reality is that with the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city. It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results.

I feel like that article has just strung together every negative complaint you can find on Reddit. With a few &quot;but it&#x27;s not all bad&quot; anecdotes for some sort of balance.<p>Personally I feel the larger problem is the mostly invisible city workers and non-profits that are constantly sidelined by the visible elected officials. There are a great many projects slowing making an impact. But they often lose funding or support once someone has finished using them for some Twitter&#x2F;photo op.<p>Pet projects are the norm, feels like no one wants to do the hard work to reform processes in place that allow for deadlock :(

Even mogadishu is not a failed city.

I&#x27;m sure the article is interesting, but this 12ft.io paywall remover thing caught my eye. Is it what&#x27;s responsible for all the missing photos?