Deconstructing San Francisco

As we all know by now, San Francisco is being destroyed. It is being destroyed by poverty, by drug addiction, by homelessness, but especially it is being destroyed by weak public prosecutors. These latter, led by the pathetic Chesa Boudin, gave a green light to crime in the city. The results should have been predictable.

As you know, the city’s mayor, London Breed, has changed her stance and is now favoring more vigorous prosecution and enforcement. We will see how that one works out.

Now, we have a nicely squishy account of life in San Fran, by Financial Times columnist Hannah Murphy.

She reports:

During the pandemic, preexisting wealth disparities have been exacerbated. In 2020, drug overdoses outnumbered Covid deaths by more than double. Homeless encampments line up alongside rows of the city’s famous colourful town houses.

Crime is the issue, more so since the forces of order seem largely to be ignoring it:

Both organised and opportunistic crime is rampant, particularly property and auto theft. A colleague who came to film in the city said her team had to hire security guards after a spate of robberies targeted camera crews at gunpoint. Last month, footage emerged of residents leaving car doors open so burglars would not smash their windows. “The real epidemic is poverty,” a friend offers, in one of many conversations about the state of the city.

One notes that squishy minded San Fransicans are afraid to let the police do their job. They think that the problem is a lack of social programs.

For some privileged inhabitants, unable to cope with the desperation and lawlessness, the answer may have been to flee. This month, Silicon Valley executives began sharing statistics showing that the proportion of staff they hire in the city and the surrounding Bay Area has shrunk dramatically in recent years. Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong notes that in the first quarter of 2019, 30 per cent of the company’s hiring was outside the Bay Area; in the last quarter of 2021, it was 89 per cent.

Murphy soft-pedals the responsibility that should be borne by Chesa Boudin.

Some blame the ultra-permissive policies of district attorney Chesa Boudin, who came to power in 2020 on pledges to reduce prison sentences and decriminalise poverty. His perceived failure to guarantee public safety is now being seized upon by Republicans, and he faces a recall in June. The democratic mayor, London Breed, has switched from preaching “compassion” to “tough love”; from defunding to refunding the police.

The problem lies with those who do not understand the problem and who think that it can be solved by more social programs:

What is missing is a thoughtful attempt to tackle the root issues of the “poverty epidemic”. Margot Kushel, who leads the University of California San Francisco’s Center for Vulnerable Populations, argues that the first step is to tackle a crippling need for affordable housing. “Low-income housing has just disappeared from our landscape. Every day, we see people spilling into homelessness,” she says. “It is a huge policy crisis at every level of government.”

Resilience in times of crisis is vital. But if the city wants its tech crown back, unlike the evening crowds in the Mission, it cannot afford to just continue as normal.

Is it an accident that the women in charge seem viscerally to avoid a tough law enforcement approach?