San Francisco native here. Still work there. Inside the modern high tech liberal dynamo of San Francisco, some institutions have been the slowest to change: the police, the city government. In such a city of opportunity, public service is, sadly, a poor job comparatively and it tends to attract the worst and they tend to spend their time on exploitation, not real work. We have allowed this to happen and we’re all to blame. It says little about liberal politics, because those are not actually exercised in the way San Francisco is governed, except in a few cases like the DA typically refusing to prosecute sex workers and the homeless. They go unprosecuted, and yet they aren’t officially sanctioned and supported either. So what you get is street prostitution run rampant and street vagrancy galore.
Conservatives love to show how San Francisco means liberal politics don’t work. But liberal politics are not in fact in effect. The liberals are too busy getting rich and building homes in the hills. If you want to see actual liberal politics in effect, you have to go to Amsterdam or other places in Europe where deep liberal politics are actually the basis of public policy including taxation. SF, sorry to tell you, Fox News, ain’t that.
One other thing that comes to mind as a native - a lot of the shady stuff used to be more spread out across the city. SoMa, the Dogpatch, Bayview, etc have gentrified, but the poverty and crime in those areas didn’t disappear, it just moved and became more concentrated in specific parts of town.
When I used to work in South Park in the 90’s, that park was mostly people smoking crack and drinking 40s. That stuff didn’t go away, it’s happening somewhere else now.
San Francisco native here. Still work there. Inside the modern high tech liberal dynamo of San Francisco, some institutions have been the slowest to change: the police, the city government. In such a city of opportunity, public service is, sadly, a poor job comparatively and it tends to attract the worst and they tend to spend their time on exploitation, not real work. We have allowed this to happen and we’re all to blame. It says little about liberal politics, because those are not actually exercised in the way San Francisco is governed, except in a few cases like the DA typically refusing to prosecute sex workers and the homeless. They go unprosecuted, and yet they aren’t officially sanctioned and supported either. So what you get is street prostitution run rampant and street vagrancy galore.
Conservatives love to show how San Francisco means liberal politics don’t work. But liberal politics are not in fact in effect. The liberals are too busy getting rich and building homes in the hills. If you want to see actual liberal politics in effect, you have to go to Amsterdam or other places in Europe where deep liberal politics are actually the basis of public policy including taxation. SF, sorry to tell you, Fox News, ain’t that.
One other thing that comes to mind as a native - a lot of the shady stuff used to be more spread out across the city. SoMa, the Dogpatch, Bayview, etc have gentrified, but the poverty and crime in those areas didn’t disappear, it just moved and became more concentrated in specific parts of town.
When I used to work in South Park in the 90’s, that park was mostly people smoking crack and drinking 40s. That stuff didn’t go away, it’s happening somewhere else now.