As with previous articles from this source[1], this article contains misleading editorializations: the "pooper scooper" compensation number includes the government's retirement and insurance obligations, and doesn't reflect anywhere close to actual take-home pay[2].
I'm not a SF resident, and have no particular loyalty to it (or any particular interest in defending its municipal policies). But the author (and publication at large) seem to be interested primarily in gleeful portrayals of SF's collapse, with factuality as a distant concern.
In 2018, the SF median household income was $97k [1], which suggests a median individual income of about $76k [2]. An average private-sector employee receives benefits worth 42% of their wages/salary [3]. So a hypothetical median SF worker earning $76k in salary would receive about $32k in benefits, for about $108k total.
So it seems to me that the "pooper scoopers" combined salary+benefits of $184k really is, in fact, extraordinarily high.
Yeah gleeful is an apt descriptor for the vibe there. It got non-objective pretty abruptly at the end imho...
> There are tens of thousands of mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters of San Francisco drug addicts who likely feel the same way as Berlinn [mother of an addict who disagrees with SF drug policies]. They should be heard, and new policies should be implemented to get drug use off the streets, provide support for those struggling with addiction, and return functionality to a city that lost its bearings so many years ago.
I mean as a frustrated hippie idealist SF native hypocrite I think I totally agree... but thats just like, you know, your opinion man?
This article and lots of the commenters are falling into the same trap that happens in every article about San Francisco. It states:
> In 2018, the city created a pooper scooper team, each member of which received annual compensation of about $211,000 that year.
The implication of a $211K salary sounds too ridiculous to be true. And instead of assuming that it is therefore false, people freak out. If you look up an actual article from the time [1], you'll see that the claim is already not true purely by the numbers:
> workers make more than $184,000 a year in salary and benefits
And if you dig in further you'll see that "and benefits" is a huge caveat:
> Employees of San Francisco's "Poop Patrol" are set to earn $71,760 a year, plus an additional $112,918 in benefits, such as healthcare and retirement savings, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
That $112K in benefits includes health care benefits (which are mandated for city workers, which is a good thing). And health care—if you've been paying attention—is completely fucked in the US, so any attempt at pricing it is going to sound ridiculous. The workers don't actually see any of that money.
If you take the $72K in salary, you'll see that it is below average for San Francisco:
> On average, a San Francisco resident earns about $96,677 a year, nearly double the median household income in the US.
And "below average" is what you'd probably assume a sanitation worker makes. So a huge amount of outrage over nothing.
Which would personally lead me to flag this story, rather than trust any of the other numbers its quoting.
> In 2018, the city created a pooper scooper team, each member of which received annual compensation of about $211,000 that year. Given the inflation that has occurred since that time, scooper compensation may be close to $250,000 per year today.
I needed to read this to convince myself that I’m not asking for or expecting outrageous compensation at work.
That number, of course, is made up. The real paycheck for the scoopers is ~$71k:
"As members of the city's "Poop Patrol," workers are entitled to $71,760 a year, plus an additional $112,918 in benefits, such as healthcare and retirement savings, the San Francisco Chronicle reported." (https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-poop-patrol-em...)
Want to reduce that cost further? Nationalize health care and increase social security.
It’s a dirty job, just like any other tech job, where you have to clean up the previous guys mess. Except, in the tech world, the mess-makers make out like bandits, go on to become directors, senior directors, vice presidents, etc. The ability to make messes is highly rewarded.
The article nitpicks on some of the most pressing issues that were so many times discussed. But I find this bit to be absolutely hilarious:
> In 2018, the city created a pooper scooper team, each member of which received annual compensation of about $211,000 that year. Given the inflation that has occurred since that time, scooper compensation may be close to $250,000 per year today.
> As members of the city's "Poop Patrol," workers are entitled to $71,760 a year, plus an additional $112,918 in benefits, such as healthcare and retirement savings, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
> In August, the city announced that five staffers from the San Francisco Department of Public Works would soon roam the Tenderloin neighborhood — where nearly half of the city's homeless population is — in search of waste. The staffers will begin their efforts each afternoon equipped with a steam cleaner for sanitizing the streets
I'm willing to be that some digging would probably find this to be a gross misrepresentation (remember the McDonalds coffee? Where a cup of coffee was served too hot, in order to reduce costs, and that caused three degree burns to an old women? And that was spun as "the legal system is broken"?)
There is a concentrated effort to make CA, and especially SF, fail, as an excuse to regress. And when SF (and NYC, where there's also a similar effort) regress, the rest will follow. Just see what happened with the DA recall: since then, crime has risen, spend on policing has risen, and we jail more people unnecessarily.
Edit: ha! While I posted that, someone indeed found that number isn't the real comp. The number is $71k.
If houses in hot markets truly had economic / inherent value, for example the quality of life improvement / job opportunities, then that can’t really be lost.
Its more obvious with something tangible. If I give you a $100 bill, and then you drop it down a drain, have you lost it? Of course you have.
The same is true for the value of assets though. You had the opportunity to cash it in by selling, you could have secured a loan against the value, you had the status of the wealth of owning a more expensive home. Those things have real implications on your life, and now you don't have them. It doesn't really matter that it's not actual cash.
As pointed out in the article the lions share of losses are in Pac Heights and Nob Hill due to the outsized prices already there.
I rent a home there that fluctuates between 7 million and 5 million over the course of the pandemic and I watched a neighbor poor over 100! Million into a house when he thought things were only going up.
That being said most people here don’t ever sell really. You just hold and buy another home someplace else. It’s a funny place.
So the loses are not real until they are realized. That being said I don’t think the city is headed in a positive direction anytime in the next 5 years.
The Redfin YoY price change he quotes is a median price change.
He then extrapolates a median price change on the entire market to calculate the “$260B” change in asset valuations. That is dubious at best for a monthly volume of ~500 sales…
This is great news for the housing affordability crisis. Sure we should build more housing and that helps an incremental amount, but reducing home value across the board is a much bigger lever. Of course there’s many interests that understandably want to keep home values up so we only focus on the supply side of the problem.
I've thought often about the economic power of a large number of well compensated people, but this is staggering "Between 2019 and 2021, San Francisco lost nearly $15 billion of household income, even after accounting for those who moved into the city."
I'm pretty sure in the last year plus with interest rate increases, the value of "for sale" real estate across the "bay area" from napa/sonoma down to monterey county, maybe lost value in the billions, but $260bil? no.
Look at sales, yes, they have slowed, but demand is still incredibly high. My primary residence is in a rural county north of Truckee/Tahoe - housing prices in the last 7 years have doubled or more (wide area, wide variation), truckee/tahoe way worse.
I don't see the argument even if you extend it beyond the city. Santa Cruz - houses picked up for $1m or more turned into student ghettos pulling in $5-7k/mo in rent. (my other neighborhood).
Is it though? The homes themselves do depreciate (nobody wants a 1970s house with no aircon that hasn't been repaired or renovated), it's just that the price of the land which the house is situated on increases faster, because it's not like the land loses any value from having somebody live there.
The more people move into an area, the more demand there is for that land, so the more its price increases. The only reason you'd expect the price to decrease would be because people don't want to move there anymore because of new areas that are more desirable or something negatively impacts the desirability of the area.
there is an obsession with the "pooper scooper team" which is a small part of the article. There is also a general issue on HN which comes from certain demographics crawling all over themselves to show they are superior to SF's civic and cultural issues because their own slumdog country they shit all over in private posts.
San Francisco has issues, the main one being it has become too popular with a certain set of TC chasers and chasing out any cultural doversity (sorry desi/indian culture isn't one of those). We've lost blues venues, drag venues many others because of the BS TC uber alles from a certain segment of the tech crowd prior to covid. That same group is panties in a bunch to return to office because of whatever. You have one or the other, not both.
And, this will get me down voted, but fuck the indian community TC chasers (biggest part of the comnunity, but there are others) for ruining the bay area. I hear it from friend from SF to Morgan Hill.
The guys I worked with 20 years ago were different. It was about building things and helping others, not stomping on people to make your next move.
housing as an asset/investment who's value needs to keeps rising is a big contributer to homelessness. If Dense affordable housing isn't created because of the vested interests of the home owners worried about their properties losing value then they are partly to blame..
bought my condo in 2018. in the wrong part of town
redfin says I'm down 30% at least
debating whether to cut my losses - with tech companies gone, mass transit on the brink, and the city in a tailspin, I have this nightmare scenario in my head where prices end up 1/10th of what I paid
[+] [-] woodruffw|2 years ago|reply
I'm not a SF resident, and have no particular loyalty to it (or any particular interest in defending its municipal policies). But the author (and publication at large) seem to be interested primarily in gleeful portrayals of SF's collapse, with factuality as a distant concern.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35857223
[2]: https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-poop-patrol-em...
[+] [-] timmaxw|2 years ago|reply
So it seems to me that the "pooper scoopers" combined salary+benefits of $184k really is, in fact, extraordinarily high.
(No comment on the rest of the article.)
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/weath-maps-cities-san-franci...
[2] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio... (I took the nationwide ratio of "$71k median household income" to "$56k median individual full-time year-round worker income" and estimated that the same ratio also applied to SF.)
[3] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecec.nr0.htm
[+] [-] pkdpic|2 years ago|reply
> There are tens of thousands of mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters of San Francisco drug addicts who likely feel the same way as Berlinn [mother of an addict who disagrees with SF drug policies]. They should be heard, and new policies should be implemented to get drug use off the streets, provide support for those struggling with addiction, and return functionality to a city that lost its bearings so many years ago.
I mean as a frustrated hippie idealist SF native hypocrite I think I totally agree... but thats just like, you know, your opinion man?
[+] [-] ianstormtaylor|2 years ago|reply
> In 2018, the city created a pooper scooper team, each member of which received annual compensation of about $211,000 that year.
The implication of a $211K salary sounds too ridiculous to be true. And instead of assuming that it is therefore false, people freak out. If you look up an actual article from the time [1], you'll see that the claim is already not true purely by the numbers:
> workers make more than $184,000 a year in salary and benefits
And if you dig in further you'll see that "and benefits" is a huge caveat:
> Employees of San Francisco's "Poop Patrol" are set to earn $71,760 a year, plus an additional $112,918 in benefits, such as healthcare and retirement savings, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
That $112K in benefits includes health care benefits (which are mandated for city workers, which is a good thing). And health care—if you've been paying attention—is completely fucked in the US, so any attempt at pricing it is going to sound ridiculous. The workers don't actually see any of that money.
If you take the $72K in salary, you'll see that it is below average for San Francisco:
> On average, a San Francisco resident earns about $96,677 a year, nearly double the median household income in the US.
And "below average" is what you'd probably assume a sanitation worker makes. So a huge amount of outrage over nothing.
Which would personally lead me to flag this story, rather than trust any of the other numbers its quoting.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-poop-patrol-em...
[+] [-] dilippkumar|2 years ago|reply
I needed to read this to convince myself that I’m not asking for or expecting outrageous compensation at work.
[+] [-] snotrockets|2 years ago|reply
"As members of the city's "Poop Patrol," workers are entitled to $71,760 a year, plus an additional $112,918 in benefits, such as healthcare and retirement savings, the San Francisco Chronicle reported." (https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-poop-patrol-em...)
Want to reduce that cost further? Nationalize health care and increase social security.
[+] [-] ryanSrich|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsunamifury|2 years ago|reply
Many tech roles total cost is more than 1.5x-2x their salaries.
[+] [-] silisili|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vlovich123|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thelastgallon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] varenc|2 years ago|reply
(After many years of running, the bot seems broken. Not sure if I’ll fix it this time.)
[+] [-] StrangeATractor|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swarnie|2 years ago|reply
Where do i sign up for £170k a year?
[+] [-] tomashertus|2 years ago|reply
> In 2018, the city created a pooper scooper team, each member of which received annual compensation of about $211,000 that year. Given the inflation that has occurred since that time, scooper compensation may be close to $250,000 per year today.
[+] [-] neuronexmachina|2 years ago|reply
> As members of the city's "Poop Patrol," workers are entitled to $71,760 a year, plus an additional $112,918 in benefits, such as healthcare and retirement savings, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
> In August, the city announced that five staffers from the San Francisco Department of Public Works would soon roam the Tenderloin neighborhood — where nearly half of the city's homeless population is — in search of waste. The staffers will begin their efforts each afternoon equipped with a steam cleaner for sanitizing the streets
[+] [-] snotrockets|2 years ago|reply
There is a concentrated effort to make CA, and especially SF, fail, as an excuse to regress. And when SF (and NYC, where there's also a similar effort) regress, the rest will follow. Just see what happened with the DA recall: since then, crime has risen, spend on policing has risen, and we jail more people unnecessarily.
Edit: ha! While I posted that, someone indeed found that number isn't the real comp. The number is $71k.
[+] [-] personjerry|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bo-tao|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pokstad|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cornfutes|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcme|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gleenn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|2 years ago|reply
Its more obvious with something tangible. If I give you a $100 bill, and then you drop it down a drain, have you lost it? Of course you have.
The same is true for the value of assets though. You had the opportunity to cash it in by selling, you could have secured a loan against the value, you had the status of the wealth of owning a more expensive home. Those things have real implications on your life, and now you don't have them. It doesn't really matter that it's not actual cash.
[+] [-] 10u152|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsunamifury|2 years ago|reply
I rent a home there that fluctuates between 7 million and 5 million over the course of the pandemic and I watched a neighbor poor over 100! Million into a house when he thought things were only going up.
That being said most people here don’t ever sell really. You just hold and buy another home someplace else. It’s a funny place.
So the loses are not real until they are realized. That being said I don’t think the city is headed in a positive direction anytime in the next 5 years.
[+] [-] snake_doc|2 years ago|reply
He then extrapolates a median price change on the entire market to calculate the “$260B” change in asset valuations. That is dubious at best for a monthly volume of ~500 sales…
[+] [-] throw03172019|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] varenc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] foota|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notyourwork|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teaearlgraycold|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bottlepalm|2 years ago|reply
Great for cash buyers...
[+] [-] option|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmspring|2 years ago|reply
Look at sales, yes, they have slowed, but demand is still incredibly high. My primary residence is in a rural county north of Truckee/Tahoe - housing prices in the last 7 years have doubled or more (wide area, wide variation), truckee/tahoe way worse.
I don't see the argument even if you extend it beyond the city. Santa Cruz - houses picked up for $1m or more turned into student ghettos pulling in $5-7k/mo in rent. (my other neighborhood).
260b is a load of bs.
[+] [-] snotrockets|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joegibbs|2 years ago|reply
The more people move into an area, the more demand there is for that land, so the more its price increases. The only reason you'd expect the price to decrease would be because people don't want to move there anymore because of new areas that are more desirable or something negatively impacts the desirability of the area.
[+] [-] EMCymatics|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conductr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmspring|2 years ago|reply
San Francisco has issues, the main one being it has become too popular with a certain set of TC chasers and chasing out any cultural doversity (sorry desi/indian culture isn't one of those). We've lost blues venues, drag venues many others because of the BS TC uber alles from a certain segment of the tech crowd prior to covid. That same group is panties in a bunch to return to office because of whatever. You have one or the other, not both.
And, this will get me down voted, but fuck the indian community TC chasers (biggest part of the comnunity, but there are others) for ruining the bay area. I hear it from friend from SF to Morgan Hill.
The guys I worked with 20 years ago were different. It was about building things and helping others, not stomping on people to make your next move.
[+] [-] anthlax|2 years ago|reply
1b1b, 750sqft
[+] [-] browningstreet|2 years ago|reply
Lake Tahoe, the ski resort. Ahem.
[+] [-] camel_gopher|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmingod666|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fnord77|2 years ago|reply
redfin says I'm down 30% at least
debating whether to cut my losses - with tech companies gone, mass transit on the brink, and the city in a tailspin, I have this nightmare scenario in my head where prices end up 1/10th of what I paid
[+] [-] n_eutrino|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karmasimida|2 years ago|reply