Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point

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As anathema as it may seem to some people I think the real answer has to involve dispersing the homeless population in SF.<p>The SF chronicle did a series on the efforts to house people in shelters and one major problems was that a person who wanted to get clean from opioids is just surrounded by temptation and is just one dose of Fentanyl away from death.<p>Thus these people are more dangerous to each other than they are to anyone else. Not only is there the paradox of warehousing the poor in the most expensive place in America but also that of warehousing them in the most dangerous place in America insofar as fentanyl is concerned.

Make housing affordable with denser mixed-use zoning: You solved 50% of the problem.<p>Make public transport convenient. You solved another 30%.<p>People needs to be able to stay frugal in rough times and socialize. It feels to me that many US cities make this impossible.<p>If you had Spain levels of unemployment I have no idea how would you do.

Every time I got to SF I&#x27;m surprised how far along they&#x27;ve gone in making the city look like Johnny Mnemonic. Just need to neurolink a dolphin to an LLM...

Maybe it&#x27;s because the friends i used to visit live in the tenderloin but to me San Franskidro tipped a decade ago. I live in the south side of Atlanta and there is constant gun crime, car theft, gang violence, etc. but to me that is wholely different than being harassed in a targeted manner on the streets for being in a perceived &quot;class.&quot; There may be an occasional clash of culture in ATL for sure, but not an outright culture war. Oh and no one poops in the street here. That is nice to have.

There are expensive challenges with converting office buildings to apartments that historically made it non-cost effective, since commercial demand was always high enough that building owners could always make a bigger profit leasing to commercial tenants versus converting their buildings to residential.<p>But if remote work has permanently emptied SF’s downtown office buildings, pushing commercial demand to near zero, but demand for housing in the Bay Area is still red-hot, perhaps large-scale conversions will become cost-effective as commercial leases begin to expire, since the alternative for building owners is to just let them rot empty.

Look at Detroit. The city hollowed out, but the suburbs are still among the wealthiest in the country.

Housing shouldn&#x27;t be an investment vehicle. It seems pretty obvious but no-one wants to give up their imaginary number. (Imaginary because most people have 1 or fewer houses and will always need to live somewhere, so they can&#x27;t spend the paper value of their home).<p>The cost of rent feeds into everything, its such a clear drain on everyone&#x27;s resources (apart from landlords). If you have time to give, please think about how to change things. Though I&#x27;m an internet rando so ymmv

The amount of tax revenue and budget is still insanely high.<p>Need to be more efficient

Isn’t San Francisco a boom and best town all the way back to the gold rush?

Sadly at this point geology is the last, best hope for West Coast urbanism. Something like BART could not be built today unless the Bay Area was a pile of rubble. Reconstruction is the only way to get Japan-like high density housing and transit infrastructure.

San Francisco and Oakland are facing combined close to $500 million budget shortfall and are requesting a federal tax payer bailout. The second major federal bailout in eight years. Oakland has one of the highest violent crime rates in the entire country and they just cut more public safety and health jobs. I can&#x27;t see how anyone can look at the situation in the Bay area and not anticipate anything other than continued decline.

Let it die. It&#x27;s the only way for it to be cool again.

Ok... I&#x27;m travelling to SF (I live in the UK) for a few days for work this August. I was looking forward to it but now I&#x27;m mainly scared! Is it still good to visit but just not to live in? The last time I was there was 2007. I&#x27;ve got a couple of days to myself whilst I&#x27;m there. What should I do?

See also the article in the Financial Times &quot;What if San Francisco never pulls out of its ‘doom loop’?&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ft.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;71d8013d-9d94-441e-b2d1-3039c04397d6?sharetype=blocked" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ft.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;71d8013d-9d94-441e-b2d1-3039c0439...</a>

SF City had a 2021 GDP of $230 Billion [1]. The City had a budget of $6B in 2007. [2]<p>What do folks on here think - if the City could cut the homeless population in half for $100 Million per year, would it be worth it? How about $50 Million per year to cut it by 25%, would that be worth it? [3]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;San_Francisco" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;San_Francisco</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Government_of_San_Francisco" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Government_of_San_Francisco</a> [3] 7800 homeless [4]. $2k rent per month. [4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;IkYHB" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;IkYHB</a>

I feel bad for the poor people that moved there for the service industry that supported the startup zero interest rate gold rush. They can’t leave. They didn’t use their stock options to buy a house in the Hamptons or Aspen. They are waiting tables in an empty restaurant and have to make rent and can’t afford to move. The home prices look like this-<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paragonpublic.blob.core.windows.net&#x2F;dash-v2-blog-images&#x2F;185972&#x2F;sf_ca_us_mp-by-year_a.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paragonpublic.blob.core.windows.net&#x2F;dash-v2-blog-ima...</a>

“San Francisco has had what felt like an endless, year-after-year boom,” says Aaron Peskin, president of the Board of Supervisors, the city council. “And now the bubble really burst.”<p>Years of policies that hurt honest people, entrenched landlords and those already here, and made it difficult for new families and groups to come to the city are why the good times are ending. People like Peskin burst the bubble.

Why is this flagged?

Vote Republican to solve the problem, or vote Democrat to make it worse.

What amazes me is that the Valley gazillionaires are not spending their fortunes to fix their own habitat. They can just BUY the city government they want.<p>Instead, they are shoving mountains of cash to turn the United States into some perverted libertarian fantasy, where the government is weak, paralyzed, ineffectual, and out of their way OH WAIT.

I wish I could pay 2$ to read the article by clicking a button on an independent service, instead of giving all my info and signing up to a subscription which is probably a nightmare to cancel. Sigh.

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