It is empathy that is in great part responsible for for the crime ridden shit show that is much of SF.
How do we balance empathy while making SF not a gigantic pile of shit? I don't think there is an answer here. It's choose one, or choose the other.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/san-francisco-sign-stolen-...
Free syringes make sense because people will find disease-prone means to get their fix, and then they end up in emergency rooms requiring more expensive care.
>Also, many would beg to differ that SF is a "gigantic pile of shit."
It's like the myriad of people living in North Korea who think it's the greatest country in the world. There's reality and then there's people who don't face it.
The housing crisis extends across the bay area and SF is noticeably shittier then most places int he bay area. So it's likely not the housing crisis that is the reason why SF is particularly bad.
But their rights can’t trump victims, that’s not justice. Like someone else mentioned prop 47 was a bad idea.
You're right in that SF does way too much to accommodate robber barons, tech moguls, heavily-subsidized Silicon Valley industries, and housing speculators.
It does: https://www.sf.gov/information--overdose-prevention-resource...
Which ones? Are there stats showing before/after unhoused numbers?
> There's reality and then there's people who don't face it.
I guess I'm just too brainwashed to be miserable living in the Mission.
Capped property tax increases is a moronic empathy law based on “protecting little old ladies on fixed incomes”. It has resulted in an incentive structure that means all home owners are incentivized to block all new housing and keep the value of their homes sky rocketing.
The second level of empathy laws causing the housing issue is all if the ones that empower NIMBYs to stop housing developments.
“Preventing gentrification”, “stopping the character of the neighborhood from changing”, “delays for a 1 year impact study” are all empathy motivated laws that caused the housing crisis in Cali.
This is not correct. SF gets a superset.
Car break-ins in SF were commonplace 25 years ago. They never became bad in the South Bay. SF just has legitimately bad policies that directly cause a lot of their issues.
The housing crisis is about the only thing it has in common with the South Bay and that’s because it is a state issue.
I’m too lazy to find stats and stats may not exist anyway. You don’t need science to prove to you the ground exists when you get up in the morning. You use your common sense for that.
Car break-ins are because the police were not doing anything. They have started trying to finally do something about it and made a dent: https://www.sf.gov/news--increased-enforcement-against-car-b...
But keep in mind that police only ever make positive progress on policies in order to extract concessions from the city
> "I'm optimistic about the progress we've made in reducing the number of auto burglaries in San Francisco, but this is just a start," Chief Bill Scott said. "I want to thank our officers for their tireless work. The SFPD hopes to build on this progress with additional tools, like automated license plate readers, to continue making arrests and holding perpetrators accountable."
> The City has also reached a 5 year high in applicants to join SFPD, which is essential for adding more police officers back.
Oh look, the police force is becoming more politically powerful & crime is down. Wonder how that happens.
With regard to migration, I frequently see expensive CoL and remote work vis-a-vis the pandemic cited as primary reasons, not homelessness or crime. If you have reputable sources saying otherwise, please cite them.
That's not empathy. Empathy is being sympathetic to someone based on how similar they are to you. You're talking about much older, less relative concepts, such as equality under the law and limits on what the state can do to people.
Most other cities that have large homeless populations aren’t on a peninsula so they can eventually shuffle them to places that are “out of sight, out of mind.”
https://x.com/sp6runderrated/status/1879257360344199255?s=46...
To act like housing policy is controlled by developers, even in this contemptuous jest you exude, is delirious and is the remainder of the problem with San Francisco.
You go continue to live in a universe where you ignore general sentiment and fill in reality with your own happy construct where a void of stats and science exists. Did they do a research study on whether people enjoy eating feces? No? I guess I can make up whatever garbage I want around this area now. Yes people love eating shit. (This is what you and all the science maniacs around HN love doing).
No science exists on how much people hate San Francisco even though there are reams and reams of people talking about how bad things are? Ok fill it in with your own delusion of reality. San Francisco is great. I love the whiff of fresh human shit I occasionally get when the right breeze just waffs by under my nose. I love stepping on broken syringes when I go run.
And it's not particularly insightful to point out that people who are homeless often have difficulties coping with the demands and challenges of life.
My apologies.
There are so many reasons why this happened and it's way more than just San Francisco being supposedly more empathetic.
Rhetorically speaking, how about the fact that China is quite happy to supply precursor drugs to help make fentanyl cheap? How is that related to San Francisco's perceived empathy? Again, rhetorically.
It makes me angry that this problem is reduced so frequently when it's been proven time and time and time to be a complex problem. It's almost like citizens / voters / taxpayers are willing to play sport with this problem in order to score some kinds of points around being right, or to avoid the sense of blaming oneself, because they know they can do something about it and yet they aren't.
Being honest is a big part of making progress with this, and I think honestly this problem is way more complex than many of us have actually appropriately characterized.
The article goes a long way towards characterizing the problem well, by talking about each individuals, perspectives, situations, and how the system succeeded or fails, knocking them off the path to gaining public support.
It’s empathy for people with problems you don’t fully understand the cause of that turns into ham fisted destructive regulation.