This opinion piece provides no context to bits like "The “unsheltered” count continues to rise—up 17%, to 8,011, in 2019 from 2017—and San Francisco continues to wonder why." Or the 17 needle deposits that apparently teach all the children of a 900K-person city that drug use is the norm.
In fact, San Francisco has grown by 100K people in the last 10 years, and construction hasn't kept up. Costs have risen incredibly, while incomes of longstanding citizens in many cases have not.
This is simply a right-wing hit piece on the leftist movements against the war on drugs, gentrification, housing cost inflation, and mass incarceration.
You can't claim the city is wrong about lack of public spending unless you discuss the spending, and the challenges, realistically and with context.
I'd never considered this as Right vs. Left, but I definitely perceive it as a category of article where New York Media likes to highlight San Francisco's failings.
These are really meant to be feel good pieces for the readers by triggering a sense of superiority. I say this as a native San Franciscan who moved to NYC and plans to stay here.
Some of these articles are less grim, for example this piece on Silicon Valley sock fashion was definitely read by many New Yorkers as reinforcing the idea that we have real style here (i.e. making socks your fashion calling card is like watching a little kid play dress up).
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/fashion/in-silicon-valley...
Theoretically, the WSJ and NYT are national papers, but they do really have New York readers as their base. So for that reason, I never pay any attention to their take on anything bay area related.
Nashville gets a lot colder in the winter, which, over a few cold winters, solves this problem. Also, using drugs by daylight Or breaking into a car right under a running security camera in Nashville will get you arrested. In San Francisco, nothing will happen to you
no ... not even in terms of all the money they spend on social programs that further attracts that element vs. focusing their efforts on enforcing law/cleaning up the city. Also and way more importantly making sure every adult man and woman has a job that sustains them and allows them to contribute to society.
Scarcity: because SF is a tiny peninsula where housing growth requires vertical growth, and housing (and associated cost rises) are at the root of so much of this. Also some of the other reasons people said, but probably mostly that. I don't know anything about Nashville, though.
Note that the article also doesn't discuss the trade-offs we routinely see when many of the policies it opposes aren't in place: higher (very expensive) incarceration rates, higher disease rates resulting in higher public health costs, etc.
Also note that as is so often the case, SF is still stuck in a middle ground between policies many believe (based on evidence elsewhere) will really work and save money on balance -- like housing and caring for people -- and the center/right's preferred solution of shoving everyone into expensive prisons as I mentioned above. Few people advocating comprehensive public health and treatment policies think the status quo is anywhere near enough; it's simply all politics is allowing them to do at present.
In fact, San Francisco has grown by 100K people in the last 10 years, and construction hasn't kept up. Costs have risen incredibly, while incomes of longstanding citizens in many cases have not.
This is simply a right-wing hit piece on the leftist movements against the war on drugs, gentrification, housing cost inflation, and mass incarceration.
You can't claim the city is wrong about lack of public spending unless you discuss the spending, and the challenges, realistically and with context.