Stories like this are fun and I think they resonate well with a lot of people, but unfortunately the details are actively harmful cynicism that ignore fact that would ruin the narrative.
Look around San Francisco today. What has changed recently? Crime is way down, lower than it has been in 15 years. Homelessness is down, lower than the past 4 years.
Did tech companies decide to start paying more taxes? Did the city start spending more? No, the actual cause is boring and simple, but makes anti-establishment folks very uncomfortable.
The truth is that our government started operating more effectively, intentionally trying to solve problems that it previously pretended were insoluble. This change was instigated by a relatively small number of rich people where were fed up and decided to and spend their own money to fix the city.
Some other nitpicks I have with the sentiment expressed in the article:
* Police and firefighters in SF make more on average than tech workers. Is that a source of injustice? Or is unequal pay more complicated? Is inequality only bad when the groups benefitting are aesthetically undesirable to you?
* SF remains one of the highest tax cities in the country, and is the highest in the Bay Area. At the margin, businesses are leaving (including Twitter, mentioned in the article). Raising more taxes on these businesses seems unlikely to increase revenue long term.
* We spent more per resident on most services than nearly every other city in the country. Aren't you curious why that is, and doesn't it seem like understanding that problem would lead to insights more interesting than "tech bad"?
Agreed.
The fact is, SF's city government is fat and bloated with all sorts of cushy jobs for friends and family.
This article by the SJ Mercury News captures it best (how much we spend on staff in the city of SF): https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/23/5-charts-that-show-ho...
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> Did tech companies decide to start paying more taxes? Did the city start spending more? No, the actual cause is boring and simple, but makes anti-establishment folks very uncomfortable.
We did pass gross receipts taxes and do tax payroll for larger businesses. So yes, companies pay more taxes than 2015 (though they didn't choose to) and our budget per person in inflation adjusted terms is up:
A $16 billion question: How did San Francisco’s budget get so huge?
A lot of that is from "self-supporting" segments including SFO.
We had 7 years of budgets with that tax before things got better, so it seems unlikely this made the situation better. In fact it seems to have made things much worse.
The percentages and methodology changed over time though (this was the big argument between Benioff and Dorsey, since gross receipts ignoring business model and margins hit very differently).
Same thing the large transfer tax changes, vacancy taxes, etc. The inflation adjusted budget is definitely higher.
I think we are not disputing the same claim. I claim the city is much better now than 1 year ago, and spending more cannot explain that difference because large increases in spending did not happen 1 year ago and have not helped in the past.
> Crime is way down, lower than it has been in 15 years. Homelessness is down, lower than the past 4 years.
This makes me so happy. It was heartbreaking to see SF lose the plot the last 10 or so years.
I don’t think this is true though, as this chart from the city indicates: https://www.sf.gov/data--homeless-population
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That's just not true. Our mayor was able to win in part because he is rich, and clearly that has mattered to change the city.
Whether that's good or bad is a different question, but it's very obvious a small number of rich people used their wealth to change the city (and IMO the results have been fantastic so far)
Believing that a rich guy is going to save us is one of the more worrying trends in the American polity. The downward tend of crime has nothing to do with Lurie. That has been going down since the COVID lockdowns, which.. of course it was. The data lays this out clearly. It's not even clear that Brooke Jenkins has had that much of an effect. Turns out the COVID lockdowns and BLM unrest were generational events that raised crime and after them society pretty much went back to normal.
Lurie has been trying to do his version of a crackdown. Mission Local has covered it thoroughly -- he's accomplished very little in reality, because actually, these problems are difficult to solve: https://missionlocal.org/2025/04/tracking-sf-mayor-luries-fi...
Then why did crime not go down until less than a year ago?
Because that's literally not what happened. Crime during 2024 was at all time historical lows: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/san-francisco-crime-rate....
The data is publicly available: https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crim...
How do you explain the 9 year delay from 2015 to 2024.
And to be clear I am not even claiming that Lurie alone has caused crime to go down. I am claiming that a small number of rich people have, including all of their actions prior to 2025. What is the alternative explanation? What changed in 2024 under your theory?
9 year delay in what? Not all types of crime followed the same patterns during that time period.
Believing that a rich guy is going to save us is one of the more worrying trends in the American polity.
Well, bums aren't going to save us, so...
The only two people who exist in the world are rich guys and bums. Not meant as an attack: this is a quintessentially American statement.
Well, the middle class isn't going to save us, so...
Who is us? The answer to that question is who will actually do the saving. Not the trust fund kids or the "middle class", which unfortunately means little in 2025.
Idk where you live but I’ve experienced way more crime in the last year of living here than I did when I last lived here before the pandemic.
Civic center, but on average it's down a lot throughout the city.
> * Police and firefighters in SF make more on average than tech workers. Is that a source of injustice?
No. People who perform vital, dangerous jobs for society should be paid their weight in gold. They shouldnt have to worry about anything else than their own duties.
Ok so what is the specific annual salary you propose for each police officer? And should they have more influence in local politics than they already do? Currently the police union is either the most or second most powerful entity in San Francisco
> Ok so what is the specific annual salary you propose for each police officer?
That would depend on the CoL in their location and would need to be calculated for every region differently.
> And should they have more influence in local politics than they already do?
Nobody should have any more influence in politics than their singular, individual vote.
In San Francisco.
> Nobody should have any more influence in politics than their singular, individual vote.
This has never happened anywhere in any political system. As long as people are allowed to talk to one another, they are able to exert power by choosing to vote as a bloc
You just wrote that higher taxes and higher public sector pay have correlated with better outcomes.
Do you believe that?
No I didn't write that, and I don't believe that's true at the margin in SF. Some cities tax too little and would benefit from taxing more, SF is not one of them
You did write that, you just separated them with a couple of paragraphs.
I recall that worked to confuse ChatGPT v2 as it lost context, but it shouldn't confuse a human.
Would you mind quoting the portion of my comment where you think I said anything about public sector pay causing better outcomes?
Are these anecdotes? Comments further down are saying the exact opposite and that nothings changed?
Pretty sure SF has the same story as here in San Diego. Homelessness is not actually down but far less visible thanks to last year's Supreme Court ruling. No more tent cities downtown but now camps have shifted along federal highways.
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/28/nx-s1-4992010/supreme-court-h...
Any discussion about San Francisco's fortune is woefully incomplete without touching on the effects that marijuana legalization across the country has had on the industry and thus the economy of not just San Francisco but the also the broader Bay Area and the rest of California. The black market marijuana industry was worth tens, if not hundreds of millions in untracked cash in California. Legalization in California and Oklahoma has moved all of that cash money out of San Francisco, out of the Emerald Triangle, and out of the state because it is no longer lucrative to grow it here. I can't speak how it's related to crime rates, but it means that many people can't afford to live in the area since they're no longer employed by that industry. The area can no longer afford art that was funded by cash money from hippie types that couldn't be used in the mainstream market any other way. as a curious detail, San Francisco used to have tons of illegal grow ops that forced upgraded electrical infrastructure that can now be used to charge electric vehicles instead.
I'm one of the co-founders of an organization mentioned in the article, GrowSF. We focus on common sense outcomes, not political posturing or national progressive rhetoric. The author makes the classic mistake of cynically dismissing the hard work required from regular people to make a difference. And to cast a centrist organization like GrowSF as part of some secret cabal is both lazy and irresponsible journalism.
If anyone has any questions about GrowSF, feel free to ask!
Thanks for everything you do! I love the data driven approach.
I wish basic economics and effective governance had the same tribal magnetism as the culture war issues do.
It stands to reason that the biggest funders of an organization have the most influence over it. Who are GrowSF's biggest funders? How much money have they given?
> If anyone has any questions about GrowSF, feel free to ask!
Then crickets when they're asked who funds their multi-million dollar campaigns.
"Ask me anything! Except who I answer to!"
GrowSF is a front group for wealthy developers and landlords, as well as right wing silicon valley billionaires.
> Both the city’s public school system and transit systems are crumbling and underfunded, and its housing and homelessness crises remain existential.
Some quick googling indicates that SF has something like 3x the per capita city budget as San Jose, a city in the same metro area with similar average rent (according to Zillow). If its city departments manage to still be underfunded in spite of that, something is deeply wrong.
San Francisco is both a city and a county, unlike San Jose. In addition, you can't directly compare municipal budgets without taking into account enterprise departments that are meant to be revenue neutral, such as airports - in this case, both have an airport.
True but if you’re talking about per capita spending, the $650M for San Jose’s airport is about a billion dollars less than SF is spending on the much larger and busier SFO, so even that really skews the budgets.
Read this: https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/23/5-charts-that-show-ho...
San Jose also runs a zoo and an airport.
This is what you are looking for: https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/23/5-charts-that-show-ho...
Perhaps SF is not underfunded, but rather spends money ineffectively.
> I unexpectedly moved here two years ago from Chicago
I was going to say, this sounds like it was written by someone who wasn’t around during 2012-2016. Aside from AI not much is new.
> A tech crash wouldn’t just mean a higher unemployment rate; it would also devastate local businesses and public services. Empty offices, empty coffee shops around those offices, empty balance sheets for coffee beans, and so on.
This already happened with COVID and remote work. The city was overflowing with tech hype and industry to support it 10 years ago.
Yeah, the number of statements in this essay that, if not uninformed, at least lack perspective, is pretty telling. Anyone who says the Muni is "crumbling" hasn't spent much time in other cities or in SF of a decade or two ago. SFUSD is famous for its dysfunction but anecdotally, friends with kids there say their schools are fine. And the "right-wing pressure groups" she lists are only called these names by ultra-ideologue "progressives" trying to score brownie points with their identity-driven constituencies.
People talk about SF because the US is not otherwise producing much change, and people are hoping things will change.
But anecdotes and selective stats pique interest without leading to insight.
Too bad this is what drives the zeitgeist!
Reminded me of this documentary I just watched about humans and Waymo - beautiful and sad. Highly recommend it. Kind of a hard opener, but stick with it https://youtu.be/WsGWqxxMt9k?si=ycrIBGvdy73SLgsA
This was a great read!
I recently visited SF for the first time in January coming from a city in the Canadian prairies and I really resonate with this article. I was down there for a job interview and the experiences I had whle down there left me with a similar vibe.
Two memories in particular that stick out in my mind are 1) that I accidentally reserved an Airbnb in a poor neighbourhood and, while walking over broken glass, I saw one billboard for Vercel to my left and another billboard for Notion AI to my right.
2) I also really wanted to take a Waymo while down there but couldn't because the app required a US zip code. I took an Uber instead and, while the driver lamented about US politics and inequality to me, I saw at least a dozen Waymos zip by with no driver.
I really liked SF, but it left a pretty strong impression!
> local money is now lavished on centrist and right-wing pressure groups — such as GrowSF, Abundant SF
I didn’t know that supply side progressivism was considered right wing or centrist. You build more houses because otherwise working class people can’t afford to live in your city. It’s bad if your kid’s teacher needs roommates or has to commute an hour each morning.
It isn't, to anyone except far-left progressives. They want social housing. Depending on the day it will be argued that supply-and-demand doesn't play, or it does but successfully increasing housing elasticity and lowering costs would not help their broader push for socialism of some stripe. Abundance has to fail to satisfy their worldview, housing is completely secondary.
I'm not against social housing either. It can play a role, and like Klein and other proponents, I think we should be pragmatic and do what works out politically to meet goals.
It is centrist because it fails to propose a different way of doing things or structuring society. Just because it’s a liberal vision, doesn’t mean it’s not centrist.
There is certainly overlap with right wing elements, too. Although UK focused, it’s hard not to see the right wing undercurrents in this Abundance-type manifesto: https://ukfoundations.co/
Most discussion of employment is for the San Francisco metro area, but I think the county level statistics at https://data.census.gov/profile/San_Francisco_County,_Califo... are actually specific to people who live in San Francisco.
I never know what business codes / job codes get included in "Professional, scientific, and management, and administrative and waste management" but there's an explicit separate one for Information that is only 6.3% (https://data.census.gov/vizwidget?g=050XX00US06075&infoSecti...)
People write about tech jobs because they're highly paid (on average) and highly visible. But it's not the case that the city is entirely dependent on technology. You wouldn't say the same thing about the equally large segment of "Finance and insurance, and real estate and rental and leasing".
Lumping centrists who want to solve intractable livability problems with rich right-wing libertarians is the road to failure. Not everyone who wants to stop throwing mountains of money at nonprofits and ineffectual, corrupt city officials is a Peter Thiel/Elon Musk fascist. The more that the left continues to force ideological purity tests like this, the more it will fail.
It also seems silly to move to a city internationally known for a specific influential industry and then lament that influence. If you hate entertainment industry people, don’t live in LA. If you hate commercial fishing, don’t live in Dutch Harbor. You’re at least 10-20 years late to fight tech being influential in SF.
There are a lot of places to live in this world. Vote with your feet. Conservatives certainly have, migrating en masse to Texas, Florida, Idaho. If you want to see what a place that has actually swung hard right looks like, it’s not SF where the city government is still captured wholly by Democrats and the Board of Supervisors has anti-development NIMBYs and members of the Democratic Socialists of America.
I have never been able to even see SF as a progressive place. It’s progressive in popular rhetoric and that’s it. The goal is to make its rich residents feel good about themselves, not to actually help anyone.
You can’t claim to be progressive if a starter home is a million dollars and if any attempt to change that is opposed at every level. Mostly because of real estate cost, but also other factors, SF has a very wide division between rich and poor. Having a family there on less than $200-$300k is almost unthinkable. I can’t even grasp how working class people live there at all.
In a way, places like Texas and Georgia and Ohio are far more progressive than SF or California as a whole because a working class person can afford a home.
Housing costs are the shame and great hypocrisy of most “blue” cities. If nothing is done about housing costs, I don’t think you can call yourself progressive. Anything positive that comes of any of your progressive policies is negated by the poverty and extreme inequality perpetuated by housing. Ultimately you are just running a housing cartel that distributes wealth to property owners.
Edit: it’s a major reason I’m not in Cali anymore. There are numerous reasons our family left but one was realizing that the state is a real estate cartel. Without an “exit event” you will never climb above real estate.
> In a way, places like Texas and Georgia and Ohio are far more progressive than SF or California as a whole because a working class person can afford a home.
Ah the famously progressive Texas where women regularly die because of abortion ban, weed is illegal, and you can’t buy booze on a Sunday, and lawmakers want to overturn Obergefell to ban same sex marriage. Very progressive, much freedom.
> Housing costs are the shame and great hypocrisy of most “blue” cities.
Yes, housing costs are often high where people want to live.
Texas is not progressive, which is why it’s such a great way of pointing out the hypocrisy of SF and many other blue cities’ housing policies.
Astronomically high housing costs are a policy choice. They result from high demand coupled with density limits, parking requirements, height limits, zoning, and other things designed to limit supply.
When supply is limited and demand is high prices skyrocket far beyond what a market would normally allow. This is why anti trust and anti collusion laws are important. Housing, at least in many major cities, is effectively a cartel.
It always amazes me when I visit the Bay Area and see how low density it is and how much real estate is wasted for storage lockers, strip malls, ridiculously huge car washes. They’ll let you build anything but housing apparently.
This impoverishes people, especially the working class, and contributes to homelessness and all kinds of other problems, but nobody cares. The residents like seeing their home equity go up. “I’ve got mine, fuck you” is not progressive. A cartel to keep prices high is not progressive.
no dies for not having an abortion.
You're wrong. A lot of what constitutes an "abortion" is taking care of things like stillborn pregnancies and numerous life threatening issues with the woman's uterus. You would learn a lot googling on this topic.
If you want to be anti-abortion, fine, just don't conflate it with the many life-saving procedures currently being swept up in anti-abortion laws and rhetoric.
nope. I know what is an abortion. Abortion is purposely killing a child in the womb. Theres never a medical need to kill your own child.
You might want to start by googling reading lessons. Then work your way up to medical issues.
Literally not true
NYC does not suffer this problem for some reason. Yes, of course there are prohibitively expensive neighborhoods in the trendiest areas. But if your goal is to live and work in the city, or to have a reasonable commute in, it is extremely doable on just about any salary, and you can actually reasonably expect to be able to afford a home in the suburbs some day. A one hour drive out of the city is considered “upstate boondocks” and you can still buy a 300k home. Whereas that is barely into the middle suburbs for SF, where houses still start at $800k+.
NYC has higher density and excellent transit, things California refuses to do.
It’s still expensive but as you say it is possible to find reasonable housing that is commutable. Also not having to own a car frees up money to compensate a bit.
I would never expect hot metros to be as affordable as mid tier cities or rural areas, but when it’s extreme to the point of absurdity and there is no way to get relief something more than just regular market dynamics is happening. Markets like SF are only possible with organized restriction of supply, basically a cartel.
SF is already the second-most dense city in America. It’s dramatically more akin to NYC than Austin, LA, and so on. It’s just a lot smaller geographically.
The problem is that all of that density is delimited within a perfect 7x7 mile square. Outside of which is the worst of the worst when it comes to urban sprawl anywhere in the US. What really kills SF is just the complete inability to reasonably commute. Any form of housing anywhere within a 2 hour drive of the city is the most expensive in the country.
> It’s just a lot smaller geographically.
That's actually a fairly important detail. I live in the NYC metro (lived in the city itself for many years) and have visited SF several times. The "city" part of SF is just much, much smaller, and the suburban parts are much less dense.
NYC and its metro are still quite expensive and we have our own problems with NIMBYism driving housing costs up, but I'm always rather shocked at how much more expensive the SF metro is and how under-developed it is.
What SF needs is a bunch of rail way out to its exurbs like NYC. But Cali can’t do that either.
It could also be a lot denser. It should look like Hong Kong or the Tokyo core.
Another interpretation is that SF is the empirical test result of what happens when progressives get the power.
The evidence that falsifies this idea is the fact that policies considered “progressive” in America are just called “universal status quo” in almost all countries with higher human development indexes and lower inequality. In fact some of the fastest growing cities in America, like Austin and Denver, are also famously progressive (not that they are perfect). Seems doubtful even total hegemony by conservatives would fix SF’s problems in short order. The common sense solutions do not fall exclusively on one end of the spectrum or the other.
Centrists dont have a very good track record of actually accomplishing much more than lifting the foot off the accelerator a little bit. I think our problems are intractable right now under the current way we have our economy setup. But left wing solutions are fundamentally incompatible with the people we aim to please the most, so we see this rightward push instead.
It’s unclear from your comment whether you’re talking about things specific to SF or you’re just speaking in generalities. Examples would help.
San Francisco’s problems arent much different than the problems of the rest of America (and this can probably be extended to the entire “West”). Money and people with it run the show and are increasing their wealth unsustainably. Any other reasoning about the situation (“DSA” members in city hall) are excuses.
I agree the macroeconomics are important but to say that the architecture of local political power doesn’t matter is silly. Local elections have really direct consequences for social and economic policy in the city.
> Instead, local money is now lavished on centrist and right-wing pressure groups — such as GrowSF, Abundant SF, Together SF, and Neighbors for a Better San Francisco — which have in the past four years fundraised over $50 million from conservative tech and real-estate elites.
Probably notable that this happened because the left wing managed to fuck things up so badly in its management of the city. For example:
* 8,323 homeless people in the city - https://www.sf.gov/data--homeless-population
* 846m homelessness budget for FY 2024-2025 - https://www.sf.gov/reports--september-2024--hsh-budget-fisca...
So, a tiny bit over $100k USD per homeless person and they're still not all sheltered (you can see the sheltered vs unsheltered breakdown in the first link). That's an incredible amount of money to not house people.
Of course, SF's famously anti-build-anything processes[1] and culture probably don't help when you're trying to provide housing, but ostensibly 'progressive' people are a big part of that unfortunately[2].
1 - https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/state-report-slams...
2 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00941...
When solving a problem becomes a massive interconnected industry of NGOs who never have to show progress, and in fact get more funding the worse the problem gets, there’s little incentive to solve the problem.
The rational and effective solutions are decried as “punitive conditionality”, “gatekeeping”, “pathologizing”, “institutional violence” etc.
Much easier to pretend that doing more of the same ineffective things will magically start working someday and perpetually blame lack of funding.
Those last two links seem pretty old. I’m wondering how the politics behind building more housing has changed since then?
Pretty old? The first one is less than two years old, it's October 2023.
Yes, but there's been an election since then, along with pressure from the state government to build more housing.
> That's an incredible amount of money to not house people.
Um. If they were housed, they wouldn't be included in the homeless count.
Hence the problem using it as a denominator given all the money being spent subsidizing permanent housing for previously homeless people, rent subsidies for people at high risk for becoming homeless, etc. That and it is just the number of homeless (unsheltered or temporarily sheltered) on a particular day, not for the year. The homeless population isn't static.
SF is built out. To build something, you have to tear down something first.
> San Francisco looms large over the American imagination.
Not for me, or only in the sense if not careful it could become the next Detroit. In 1960, Detroit was the richest city in America. Now, not so much.
Asking the important question: where's this sub-$10 burrito?
Hard-hitting journalism: billboard proves greedy companies would rather not hire anyone.
I dont think the transformative zeal that powerful people experience is new. The assumption that expertise in one domain, coupled with money/power and vision must equate to positive results in another.
How quickly did America turn from a smallholder society into one trumpeting Manifest Destiny? That seems no different from tech bros trumpeting their utopian cities. It's not exclusively an American thing of course, one thinks of the British of 1800 going from regional naval experts to talking about spreading their idea of civilization to the East in utopian terms. "For the benefit of the natives, you see" doesnt sound very different from the Yarvinesque patter.
It's all hubris, of course. The question is how Nemesis arrives, and who she chews up on the way.
> I glanced at the bookshelves around me — a lot of Isaac Asimov and faddish tech-sponsored print magazines covering “the future of governance and society”.
Perhaps because I am in tech I don’t understand how this is a bad “I have to leave this party now” sort of thing.
> The city is the indisputable tech capital of the country.
Do people think that? “Silicon Valley” is on the other side on the bay and I usually think of it as an amorphous blob that covers a few city borders. I’d have probably said Mountain View if pressed.
I don’t live in a tech center and at parties I try to avoid mentioning that I work in tech because it’s an instant conversation killer. And I get it. Tech conversations at parties are utterly boring. Even at work they are boring.
That is one of the differences living in silicon valley. It was so refreshing to have conversations on robotics, biology, AI, etc. while watching the kids play at a birthday party. It is generally different when you pass some threshold with enough technical people in a party.
It is one of my favorite things about living here.
Do only people who work in tech read Isaac Asimov? What a great pity.
lol, just ask yourself, where are all my elders? Why are we in a zone of same agers. Ah, ignorance is bliss, your future is elsewhere. Enjoy it whilst it lasts.
The absolute gall of this person, who is a 2 year transplant from Chicago, to cast aspersions on the tech industry. Their evidence of our wrongdoing?
* We own the wrong books
* We pay both too much and too little in taxes
* We support "right wing" pressure groups like GrowSF and "right wing" politicians like Mayor Lurie and Supervisor Bilal Mahmood
* We are eager to extend technical expertise to societal problems
SF has its problems, but they are largely problems of success. It is much, much better off than cities like Detroit whose main industries are experiencing slow declines.
funny how people think anything right wing adjacent is bad.
Like what?
you cant say you like a specific policy of the current US administration without people thinking you like the President, etc
can you say a specific policy of the current US administration that you like?
Halting production of the penny.
I think that's the only thing I agree with.
(not a US citizen)
- Which views, exactly?
- Oh, you know the ones
> Yet I’m left wondering if ordinary San Franciscans will benefit from the boom, or if the city's newfound wealth will remain concentrated among an increasingly tiny class of digital oligarchs and venture capitalists
Thousands of engineers make a lot of money. I think writers like the author sometimes don't realize how much money the median senior engineer makes at Big Tech Of course, most of these said engineers probably came over from a different country, so not sure if this ticks the box for "ordinary San Franciscans"