This is a weak rant that has little business being on HN. Just a bunch of random complaints that poorly reflects the totality of SF. Some hits are totally misplaced, like this one:
> But the culmination of local incompetence and misplaced priorities has to be the blackouts and fires. The monopoly utility, PG&E, began rolling blackouts this past autumn to prevent sparks in dry and windy weather. Millions went without power for days.
What on earth does this have to do with SF? PG&E is a state-wide utility over which SF has no particular authority, and SF wasn't even affected by the rolling blackouts.
Certainly SF has problems with property crime, homelessness, housing costs, and NIMBYs. But clearly people still love living here, as evidenced by the continual inflow of people to the city and the region. Articles like that this attempt to paint it as a wasteland feel completely out of touch with the actual reality of living here.
> Certainly SF has problems with property crime, homelessness, housing costs, and NIMBYs. But clearly people still love living here, as evidenced by the continual inflow of people to the city and the region. Articles like that this attempt to paint it as a wasteland feel completely out of touch with the actual reality of living here.
San Francisco, objectively, has a net-outflow. This is not a normative statement.
Having lived there for 3 years in downtown and recently moved away I couldn’t be happier. For how much tax Californian residents pay, San Francisco is a disgrace of a city.
- Define what your assessment of the article as a "weak rant" means in objective terms.
- Pick a random sample of op-eds from major news outlets and measure them using your chosen metric
I claim no reasonable definition of weakness/rantiness will disqualify the OP while allowing more than 20% of opinion pieces. But maybe you can prove me wrong.
Agreed, SF has it's fair share of problems as most cities do. I'm not sure why the "well techies live there, why isn't it a utopia by now" comment still pops up.
I spent 15 years in SF. Experience: Paying $4100 for a 2 bedroom, being assaulted on the muni multiple times, trying to explain to my parents why needles litter the sidewalk, going through a detective witness interview (after my neighbor was violently attacked and had her home ransacked). I was willing to stay. I love SF. Once I realized things would only get worse, I left :(
This piece seems to be a political hit piece on SF. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of critical analyses on the failures of both the city and the citizens of SF, but this is not that.
This appears to be someone who is mostly interested in just complaining. (And with a clickbait headline that isn't backed up in the article.)
Yes, you could feel the seething behind the words. Still tended to agree with it.
One nitpick, Chavez is a favorite punching bag for the right. Most don’t seem to know Vz was pillaged for decades by corrupt capitalists before that. If you ever wondered why folks choose communism when it’s never worked at scale this is why. After the experience you’d probably rather watch the world burn as well.
>Oracle, for example, has moved its yearly conference to Las Vegas.
This is kind of a bad example to show that San Francisco is losing its place as the US's premier tech city, as Vegas is a huge conference city and already hosts tech oriented conferences like CES and Defcon.
I think it actually is a good example, I think your argument would make sense if they were moving to a new growing location, but the fact that they're moving to a place they could have moved all along exactly shows that now there is some incentive that didn't exist before
> Even the sights and sounds of the city suggest a certain derangement. When the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system was first built in the 1970s, its designers failed to understand the acoustics between wheel, track, and tunnel. Since the nineteenth century, competent railroad engineers have known that a tapered, flanged wheel will handle turns better and generate less noise. For some reason, BART designers ignored this design in favor of a cylindrical wheel with a straight edge.
The "some reason" was to withstand the crosswinds on the Golden Gate Bridge. We only use the top of the bridge's two possible decks, and the bottom deck was slated to carry the BART Marin line: https://i.imgur.com/hVT6fya.jpg
I've noticed in Seattle how differently Covid-19 has impacted the city core vs the suburbs.
Suburbs seem almost normal. People are out. They are shopping. There are kids around. People are in parks.
The big difference is nobody is drinking at bars or restaurants.
The urban core seems like something out of a zombie movie. It's dead. Everything is closed. There is almost nobody out and about. Few people are on transit. If you do see someone they have a mask on.
If I lived downtown right now I'd really be regretting my choice. Not having a yard, a car, and a home office right now would be awful.
Downtown is great for running and biking due to lack of foot traffic and pedestrians. Otherwise downtown is a ghost town as of late and it’s eerie at times.
It feels a bit misleading to immediately attack Boudin for his work in Venezuela. He was a translator there between undergrad and law school. His leftist background is certainly quite interesting but I felt that the early attempt to attack his character by associating him with Chavez comes across as a bit of a stretch that I think hurts the credibility of the author.
I kind of want to write a dystopian novel where to solve the housing crisis, the state of California contracts private businesses to build out rapid transit underground. But instead of paying them any money, the excess earth is dumped into the Bay and the tunnelers are granted land rights to anything above water. The Bay is only 12 feet deep anyway.
An ecological disaster resulting in the construction of a neo-feudal society in the new county of Rancho Musk. Everything between the Bay bridge and San Jose, suburban sprawl.
Hey kid, did ya know Treasure Island used to be an Island?
I have a silly fictional notion that California's way forward will at some time require being annexed by Oregon so that they can wipe away oodles of historical legislative choices in one swoop. Followed quickly by a "civil war" in which "South Oregon" secedes.
Most of these complaints aren't really city issues. BART isn't run by the city. PG&E provides power to 1/2 of the state.
The housing issue is one that the Mayor has some control over. But not a lot. There are too many landowning moneyed interests to get anything done with zoning. Even the non-moneyed interests work against themselves by supporting policies that actually hurt the poor.
Right now, it makes sense not to prosecute petty crime. Those folks really have nowhere to go, so they could be arrested, then released back to the streets, and now they can't get a job because they have a record.
SF needs to make major strides in up-zoning the entire city. That alone would solve a lot of the problems. Then they can start worrying about petty crime with all that extra tax money they would have.
SF isn't even the biggest city in the Bay Area (San Jose is) so if anyone is going to push on PG&E it should be a multi-county effort, not just rest on SF.
> Right now, it makes sense not to prosecute petty crime
Right now, ok, maybe an argument could be made for it. But petty crime wasn't being prosecuted before CV either. CVS Pharmacy downtown was keeping many products in the back (as opposed to the shelves) because police don't do anything about thieves that were stealing stuff in broad daylight. You literally had to ask the cashier to go and look for some items.
Left SF after 8 years. Many other world cities have what SF offers, including the beauty, restaurants, quirky bars and cafes etc. but the thing that stands out most is the concentration of talented, smart, ambitious people in tech. Tech scenes in other cities don't compare. Something in the air that will push you to be better.
I do hope said concentration diffuses to other cities, because in retrospect it's clear to me SF is a mess... the generally low quality overpriced housing, filth, and general anxiety walking on sidewalks in most parts of the city (not unfounded, been harassed many times). Goes for most neighborhoods. Was still fun experience in my 20s, but I wish I hadn't been so attached to the idea of living in SF.
I think it's fair at this point to say that any HN submissions that are critical of SF are going to be immediately flagged. Every single submission I've ever made that talks about these issues has been immediately flagged.
I've often wondered why people are so touchy about SF, but perhaps it's simply because startup people have a lot invested in SF. They live there, and they want to promote a certain fairytale image of the place that doesn't reflect the reality of shit-covered sidewalks, lack of police presence and public safety, crack dealers, discarded needles, and aggressive barking mad homeless people. But the danger is that it makes HN look like a place where vigorous debate and exchange of ideas and criticism is not welcome.
The article brings up BART wheel/rail noise, which is an interesting window into SF’s unique and some might say self inflicted issues.
It’s my understanding BARTs screech comes from statutorily over-powered brakes grinding flats into the wheels.
The power rating didn’t take into account the fact that BART is both an all weather outside and an underground (dry) system. On wet outdoor tracks the indoors-only power brakes lock up and wear the wheels flat.
In turn these flats grind periodic indents in the tracks, and the whole thing has a feedback loop which ends up in the entire track being corrugated and no wheel ever being truly circular. Solid axles (no differentials) don’t help either.
Screeching and howling ensues to a level that is damaging to the hearing of passengers and staff alike.
The flat wheel thing is a mistake that was made what, 60 years ago. Everyone involved is dead. They've been finally working on fixing it. Yeah BART could be a better built systems if only people long dead had made better choices.
The property values and city taxes probably keep going up, so the powers that be and the NIMBY donors won't care about any of the little people problems.
So in economic techtopia, will it be decline be a myspace, or a facebook?
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi congratulated her in a tweet, saying, “I look forward to working with you to continue San Francisco’s proud tradition of standing as a guiding light for progress across America.”
Are you disagreeing with Nancy then? Since the 60's SF has had a continuous (60 years!) progressive rule and this is what we end up with.
Looking at the major problems in SF, I see a direct link to SF government policies:
Crime - stop locking people up!
Homelessness - we just need to spend more money!
Schooling - we just need more money!
Housing - unless it's subsidized, we'll block it every time
Because for decades liberalist idealism hasn’t effectively addressed the issues and people keep on thinking that the problem is they’re not liberal enough and double down on it(DA Budin). Although if ND is any representation some people are experiencing buyers’ remorse... We’ll see.
Maybe because SF has been sucking all the oxygen out of the room and people continually apologize for all of its shortcomings and bad decisions. There's a lot I like about SF, but it's easily the most putrid city in America I've ever lived in.
SF's problems are serious enough to warrant discussion. That being said, there is a growing narrative on the right of how the urban (read:liberal) centers are failing. This article is one of many such hit pieces.
[+] [-] necubi|5 years ago|reply
> But the culmination of local incompetence and misplaced priorities has to be the blackouts and fires. The monopoly utility, PG&E, began rolling blackouts this past autumn to prevent sparks in dry and windy weather. Millions went without power for days.
What on earth does this have to do with SF? PG&E is a state-wide utility over which SF has no particular authority, and SF wasn't even affected by the rolling blackouts.
Certainly SF has problems with property crime, homelessness, housing costs, and NIMBYs. But clearly people still love living here, as evidenced by the continual inflow of people to the city and the region. Articles like that this attempt to paint it as a wasteland feel completely out of touch with the actual reality of living here.
[+] [-] bhupy|5 years ago|reply
San Francisco, objectively, has a net-outflow. This is not a normative statement.
https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/bay-a...
[+] [-] notyourwork|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d_burfoot|5 years ago|reply
I challenge you to do the following:
- Define what your assessment of the article as a "weak rant" means in objective terms.
- Pick a random sample of op-eds from major news outlets and measure them using your chosen metric
I claim no reasonable definition of weakness/rantiness will disqualify the OP while allowing more than 20% of opinion pieces. But maybe you can prove me wrong.
[+] [-] GaryNumanVevo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ransom1538|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notyourwork|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 101404|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pfhreak|5 years ago|reply
This appears to be someone who is mostly interested in just complaining. (And with a clickbait headline that isn't backed up in the article.)
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|5 years ago|reply
One nitpick, Chavez is a favorite punching bag for the right. Most don’t seem to know Vz was pillaged for decades by corrupt capitalists before that. If you ever wondered why folks choose communism when it’s never worked at scale this is why. After the experience you’d probably rather watch the world burn as well.
[+] [-] jdhn|5 years ago|reply
This is kind of a bad example to show that San Francisco is losing its place as the US's premier tech city, as Vegas is a huge conference city and already hosts tech oriented conferences like CES and Defcon.
[+] [-] derision|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Lammy|5 years ago|reply
The "some reason" was to withstand the crosswinds on the Golden Gate Bridge. We only use the top of the bridge's two possible decks, and the bottom deck was slated to carry the BART Marin line: https://i.imgur.com/hVT6fya.jpg
[+] [-] mc32|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dweekly|5 years ago|reply
https://sf.streetsblog.org/2018/06/08/bart-makes-headway-aga...
[+] [-] refurb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostromo|5 years ago|reply
Suburbs seem almost normal. People are out. They are shopping. There are kids around. People are in parks. The big difference is nobody is drinking at bars or restaurants.
The urban core seems like something out of a zombie movie. It's dead. Everything is closed. There is almost nobody out and about. Few people are on transit. If you do see someone they have a mask on.
If I lived downtown right now I'd really be regretting my choice. Not having a yard, a car, and a home office right now would be awful.
[+] [-] notyourwork|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enoreyes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] refurb|5 years ago|reply
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/chavez-life/
[+] [-] bosswipe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qppo|5 years ago|reply
An ecological disaster resulting in the construction of a neo-feudal society in the new county of Rancho Musk. Everything between the Bay bridge and San Jose, suburban sprawl.
Hey kid, did ya know Treasure Island used to be an Island?
[+] [-] RhysU|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedberg|5 years ago|reply
The housing issue is one that the Mayor has some control over. But not a lot. There are too many landowning moneyed interests to get anything done with zoning. Even the non-moneyed interests work against themselves by supporting policies that actually hurt the poor.
Right now, it makes sense not to prosecute petty crime. Those folks really have nowhere to go, so they could be arrested, then released back to the streets, and now they can't get a job because they have a record.
SF needs to make major strides in up-zoning the entire city. That alone would solve a lot of the problems. Then they can start worrying about petty crime with all that extra tax money they would have.
SF isn't even the biggest city in the Bay Area (San Jose is) so if anyone is going to push on PG&E it should be a multi-county effort, not just rest on SF.
[+] [-] starik36|5 years ago|reply
Right now, ok, maybe an argument could be made for it. But petty crime wasn't being prosecuted before CV either. CVS Pharmacy downtown was keeping many products in the back (as opposed to the shelves) because police don't do anything about thieves that were stealing stuff in broad daylight. You literally had to ask the cashier to go and look for some items.
[+] [-] not_a_moth|5 years ago|reply
I do hope said concentration diffuses to other cities, because in retrospect it's clear to me SF is a mess... the generally low quality overpriced housing, filth, and general anxiety walking on sidewalks in most parts of the city (not unfounded, been harassed many times). Goes for most neighborhoods. Was still fun experience in my 20s, but I wish I hadn't been so attached to the idea of living in SF.
[+] [-] wyclif|5 years ago|reply
I've often wondered why people are so touchy about SF, but perhaps it's simply because startup people have a lot invested in SF. They live there, and they want to promote a certain fairytale image of the place that doesn't reflect the reality of shit-covered sidewalks, lack of police presence and public safety, crack dealers, discarded needles, and aggressive barking mad homeless people. But the danger is that it makes HN look like a place where vigorous debate and exchange of ideas and criticism is not welcome.
[+] [-] droopyEyelids|5 years ago|reply
That is not what this article is about.
[+] [-] gorgoiler|5 years ago|reply
It’s my understanding BARTs screech comes from statutorily over-powered brakes grinding flats into the wheels.
The power rating didn’t take into account the fact that BART is both an all weather outside and an underground (dry) system. On wet outdoor tracks the indoors-only power brakes lock up and wear the wheels flat.
In turn these flats grind periodic indents in the tracks, and the whole thing has a feedback loop which ends up in the entire track being corrugated and no wheel ever being truly circular. Solid axles (no differentials) don’t help either.
Screeching and howling ensues to a level that is damaging to the hearing of passengers and staff alike.
[+] [-] Gibbon1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|5 years ago|reply
So in economic techtopia, will it be decline be a myspace, or a facebook?
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Proven|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] voz_|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tjr225|5 years ago|reply
We’re all aware of SFs problems, not sure why this article is worth even a glance.
[+] [-] refurb|5 years ago|reply
Are you disagreeing with Nancy then? Since the 60's SF has had a continuous (60 years!) progressive rule and this is what we end up with.
Looking at the major problems in SF, I see a direct link to SF government policies:
Crime - stop locking people up!
Homelessness - we just need to spend more money!
Schooling - we just need more money!
Housing - unless it's subsidized, we'll block it every time
[+] [-] mc32|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ravenstine|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dajohnson89|5 years ago|reply