The residents who fight tooth and nail against going up and more dense forms of housing are just as much to blame as the BoS. The city could ignore them, yes, but government is about what people want.
Most residents of San Francisco -- homeless, tech, lower-income, whatever -- want absolutely nothing to change except for what makes them happier. And in most cases, the loudest, wealthiest, Pac Heights/Sea Cliff voices want the "charm" of San Francisco to stay the same. Meanwhile, it's one of the most undesirable places to merely walk around that I've come across in my life, and I only work in the city because I have to. I will never move to the city.
Some of the comments are already popping up on TechCrunch; "do you want SF to be the next NYC?" My answer to that is abso-fucking-lutely. New York City is perfectly suited to dense living without gritting your teeth; the subways run 24/7, the risk of stepping in homeless shit is significantly lower, there are very few places in NYC that make me cringe as much as the TL after sundown, the varying cultures get along and complement each other instead of beating Google Bus piñatas at a dirty-ass BART station...
If San Francisco slowly became the next New York City I'd be pleased as a peach. (Imagine NYC with SF's weather!) But it will never happen in our lifetimes. Honestly, I think it's a California thing, because L.A. has a better shot at it and that's not going to happen either.
> it's one of the most undesirable places to merely walk around that I've come across in my life
I hear that. Every time I come to SF I'm reminded of why I never want to live there (I live in Seattle).
> "do you want SF to be the next NYC?"
+1.
Frankly, I see a lot of the same shit (not literally, but you get the idea) here in Seattle, and I find it incredibly disappointing. There's constant hand-wringing about the lack of affordable housing, but the minute solutions are proposed, all of the once-upon-a-time hand-wringers vociferously cry out "Not in my backyard!"
The NIMBYism has to stop. I can only hope that as people in their 20s grow older and turn into those louder, wealthier voices, that they remember just how much it sucked for them to live in a city that didn't properly increase population density when it should've.
I wouldn't hold your breath. The current generation of suits were protestors in the 60s before giving themselves debt-financed tax cuts in the 80s and complaining about socialist kenyans in the 10s.
The fear that SF would turn into NYC is definitely odd. Seems to me that SF has already taken on the bad aspects of being NYC, while avoiding many of the good aspects. Becoming more like NYC could only be an improvement.
San Francisco's tourist areas is almost like a completely separate universe than San Francisco's residential areas.
On one side you have old streetcars, cable cars, cute restaurants, tourist traps, and wide sidewalks.
On the other side you have extreme poverty, homelessness, gang wars, a huge violent crime problem, literal shit and piss in the streets, and enough race and class tension to cut with a knife.
The two seldom cross, but they do sometimes. The southern end of the Powell cable car stop is one such place. Walk just a teensy bit further west along Market and you will notice a complete collapse of the city. In the Union Square area head just a few blocks west and you will be in the middle of the Tenderloin, which is the infamous heart of unsavory and disgusting things that happen in the city.
More adventurous tourists that don't rely strictly on the most standard guides will also get to see the other side of the city. Find your way down to El Farolito in the Mission for their famous tacos and burritos? Welcome, you're now in contested gang territory where randoms get shot as part of gang initiations.
It's a puzzling city. I lived there for a year, and while I enjoyed a lot of it, my overall impression was deeply negative.
I used to love to go to the Roxie Theater in the Mission, where they showed movies you might never encounter otherwise. During a retrospective for some anniversary of a Friedkin film, the great director himself just came walking up the sidewalk right through his speechless fans.
On the other hand, I have been stuck in traffic on Mission near 17th while the SFPD put down rows of little yellow numbered plastic cones across three lanes of traffic -- one for each shell casing.
Is there any public transit facility less welcoming than the urine-drenched BART station slash homeless zoo at 16th? Yes, actually. Just pop down to 24th, if you dare.
Heroin dealers used to turn little alleys off of 26th into open-air markets in the wee hours. Maybe they still do.
I just can't bring myself to visit the Mission anymore.
Well, it depends. If you only ever hang out on Valencia (or west thereof), the Mission is vibrant, active, and more or less safe. Just grungy enough to be interesting, and the worst you can expect is a bar fight.
The Mission is very different to visit vs. to live in. It reminds me slightly of Belltown in Seattle - nice to visit, kind of shitty to live in. If you're just there on Thursday nights a lot of the awfulness of the neighborhood fails to bother you.
Catching a giant whiff of shit and piss coming out of the BART station you can shrug off when it's once in a while, especially when you're on the way to a good night out. When it's every single day, to and from work, all hours of the day, it becomes tiresome. When you pass by a homeless dude passed out (maybe dead? who knows) on the sidewalk you can shrug it off, but when you see him slumped over every day on your way to work it starts digging at you. When you hear about some poor Mexican kid who got shot as part of a gang initiation, you can think "how terrible" and get on with your day... when you see the street-side memorials, and then you see another a week later, and then another, it becomes different.
The Mission is a different beast when you live there vs. just visit. If you decide to cocoon yourself strictly in the heavily gentrified western border of the Mission (because let's be honest, the Valencia corridor is a tiny sliver of the Mission), you will never have to deal with any of it. For many people though, the Mission includes everything east of Mission St also ;)
Not to mention, once you leave the bar and restaurant stretch along Valencia/Guerrero the whole thing becomes really shitty, really fast. Have you ever walked down Capp St at night? It's two blocks away from party central at 16th and Valencia. You really, really don't want to.
The Mission isn't Afghanistan, but it's objectively a troubled neighborhood that is among San Francisco's most violent (which is a small feat in itself, considering that SF as a whole has elevated violent crime rates compared to other major American cities). The Tenderloin tends to get a bad rap as SF's "worst" neighborhood - but its violence rate is actually not the highest in the city. Even more concerning is that the Mission's violent crime rate is largely driven by gang activity, which sets it apart from other neighborhoods of the city also.
Yeah dude, I live there, the southeastern sketchy part, and I've been jumped off of my bike by random people for no other reason than they wanted to kick my ass. And I don't hang out on Valencia street at all. So thanks for being presumptuous, but you missed that one by a longshot.
You're still overstating the case. Yes, gang violence is prevalent, but its not like in Oakland where bystanders get shot for shit they had nothing to do with.
And I should add, I live about a block from where that 19 year old football player got shot a few weeks ago. I saw the memorial, the posters up all around the block, the whole thing.
I think you should ask yourself what made you automatically assume I was the kind of person you're describing in your response to my original comment. Because this whole debate is constantly poisoned by idiotic assumptions on both sides.
San Francisco is one of the only places I've ever commuted where the question isn't if you'll step in human shit, but when. The quality of my workday usually begins with "did I get a face full of hot, evaporating urine and avoid a pile of shit on the way here today? no? gonna be a good day."
The people that live near my office on the ground level have put up "please don't defecate near our door, this leads right into our living room" signs. Good luck getting anybody to care. Nobody cares. I bet if someone dropped a deuce in front of a New York bodega, there'd be a dozen locals competing to rinse it off. I love New Yorkers. Tough as nails and been through some shit, man, and you really get that in the culture.
Walk around late enough in the same neighborhood and appear vulnerable and see what happens, too. If you stuck to the various places that we keep squeaky-clean for tourists, that's why you didn't notice.
What is it about San Francisco that causes its denizens to defecate on the streets?
I've visited it as a tourist many times, and have walked around extensively in neighborhoods such as Nob Hill, Fisherman's Wharf, Union Square, Financial District, and Inner/Outer Richmond. Never stepped on human shit, much less dog shit.
Homelessness and a government whose attitude towards it is to pretend the passive aggressively opposing them will make them go away.
The city has, over the past decades, slowly taken over all public seating in homeless-prone areas of the city. It's a sunny day outside and you want to have a seat and munch on a sandwich instead of eating at your desk? No can do, there are literally no seats, benches, or anything that might be remotely comfortable to rest on.
Ditto public restrooms, which have been taken away under the same pretenses.
Of course, the response hasn't been a decrease in homelessness - they lean, lie, and sit against buildings just fine, and they piss and shit in the streets just as well too.
San Francisco's stance towards homelessness seems to be "if we make it inconvenient to be homeless, people will stop being homeless", which strikes me as shockingly idiotic for a city famous for its liberalism.
Heh. Where I live (Long Beach, CA), they deal with the homeless in equally idiotic ways.
I was volunteering for an "alleyway beautification" project in downtown, and it just turned out that there was a small, cute park adjacent to the alley. To our dismay though, we found it to be locked 24/7. When we asked the city officials, they said it got locked because the homeless were using it as their living space!
Similarly, when the cops are dealing with homeless people with mental disorders, do you know what they do? They don't actually take them to the station to write them up - they learned long ago that doing so doesn't accomplish anything (the system is not equipped to deal with mental disorders, especially in people with no money).
Instead, they sit them in the backseat of their patrol car, drive them over to one of the adjacent cities (i.e. San Pedro, Carson, etc.) and drop them off there. That way, those homeless become that other city's problem!
Can you believe it?
It's crazy. I feel really bad making this analogy, but it's like sweeping the trash under the carpet and pretending the room is clean.
In Detroit the police used to round up homeless people in vans and after promising to take them to shelters, dropped them off in the nearby city of River Rouge. If you're not familiar with River Rouge, that's where nearly all of Detroit's heavy industry, such as several steel plants, is located. Here's what it looked like in the 70s:
When I visit family, the I-75 bridge over River Rouge is a windows-up, vent-closed affair. River Rouge is rather famous these days for annoying Canada with hums, too.
SF needs to do what NYC did in the 90s. Bring in someone like Giuliani who will really crack down on these issues. That's basically impossible though with all the liberals in SF.
I'm not sure I'd call NYC's policy less liberal overall, though it's different. It puts considerably more effort (and money!) into providing housing in the first place: about 5% of NYC's population is housed in public housing, versus about 1% for SF. NYC's homeless shelters have also been somewhat more effective at transitioning people off the streets and into apartments, though with recent budget cuts some of the programs that were used for that have been cut, so we'll see if that persists.
The difference between SF and NYC is in SF the homeless never freeze to death. And the difference between SF and Oakland is in Oakland the cops will taser you and the street gangs will break your legs for sleeping in the wrong neighborhood. Compared to everywhere else, SF is a hobo paradise.
I think L.A. is going to happen because it has a dictatorial and thus effective office of Mayor. Antonio Villaraigosa has been cracking the whip and I think his successors can follow in his footsteps.
Oh, I forgot to follow up. Private schools tend to be very different in terms of stuff like what happened with that girl. Its a mix of the higher end parent base along with tuition checks on the line.
Most residents of San Francisco -- homeless, tech, lower-income, whatever -- want absolutely nothing to change except for what makes them happier. And in most cases, the loudest, wealthiest, Pac Heights/Sea Cliff voices want the "charm" of San Francisco to stay the same. Meanwhile, it's one of the most undesirable places to merely walk around that I've come across in my life, and I only work in the city because I have to. I will never move to the city.
Some of the comments are already popping up on TechCrunch; "do you want SF to be the next NYC?" My answer to that is abso-fucking-lutely. New York City is perfectly suited to dense living without gritting your teeth; the subways run 24/7, the risk of stepping in homeless shit is significantly lower, there are very few places in NYC that make me cringe as much as the TL after sundown, the varying cultures get along and complement each other instead of beating Google Bus piñatas at a dirty-ass BART station...
If San Francisco slowly became the next New York City I'd be pleased as a peach. (Imagine NYC with SF's weather!) But it will never happen in our lifetimes. Honestly, I think it's a California thing, because L.A. has a better shot at it and that's not going to happen either.