Nationalistic flamewar will get you banned here. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, so please don't post like this here—regardless of how other commenters are behaving.
>> Americans clearly have very low expectations for their standard of living.
One SF startup I saw had executives mostly working remotely in Sonoma county (wine country) or Marin County (mountains and beautiful views) or Atherton. HR declared themselves remote also. For office visits, many Uber-ed in or drove in, conveniently avoiding all the chaos outside.
The median listing home price in Atherton, CA was $10.4M in February 2023. Unfortunately, it is easy to ignore the other half when decision-makers in power living in some of the most beautiful places on earth.
Low-level workers were the ones trekking into SF daily and dealing with reality.
Every city in America is so much incredibly safer than it was in 1990 that nobody old enough to remember that is going to be bothered by much of anything.
(That is, if you think now's bad, you should've seen it then.)
Nobody really cares about the murder rate. What they care about is being murdered.
A city where gangs are killing each other off but never bother normal people will feel much safer than a city where a comparatively few people are killed but it’s from the greater pool of everyone.
Nationwide crime is up 50% in the past 3 years, and at about 70% of the 1991 all time high. It's safer than our absolute peak for sure, but this historical reversal should be very concerning.
We should all be incredibly skeptical of the claim. For the 2020-2021 years our rates in Charleston were returning to the “90s Crack Epidemic” rates.
Much like other commenters in the thread, I’ve had a man threaten to “cut my mother effing throat” in broad daylight in front of a dozen bystanders. Thankfully, he turned tail once I drew a handgun and no one died that day. Police showed up 45 minutes later and were of no use, so why bother reported the three times I’ve had guns pointed at me in traffic since 2020?
When police response times are at or above the hour mark and the best you’ll get is an “oh that sucks man, need a report for insurance?” people stop reporting crimes. Now the politicians get to pretend crime is “better”.
These are all too gameable. Some even go against the grain of common sense. You think if you include porch pirates that theft is down, or that everyone knows there is no point in even reporting it. Murder is the only useful thing to track as a proxy for other crimes, but even that can make things seem better than they are due to better medical interventions.
Things like hospitals tracking gunshots and stabbing is harder to game, but a city can be relatively nonviolent and still feel like an absolute shithole of theft is petty and common.
This is certifiably untrue. Philadelphia, for example, just had our highest 3 year murder period ever. Additionally, we should really compare this to previous eras, not just the other highest crime periods you could name. We're at triple the homicides of the 50s and 60s, for example, and our population has declined since then.
Isn't there a Father Ted episode in which they're trying to lure him from rural Ireland to somewhere in the USA with "it's really not that bad: last month there was a something-percent fall in the number of drive-by shootings"?
America is a land of extremes. We actually have relatively high standard of living thanks to extremely high wages, which allow us to live lives of relative luxury. We also have high wealth inequality and tolerate many horrors - some unfathomable to other developed countries (e.g. gun deaths).
Arguably the latter is a symptom of the former. So there are broadly 2 approaches to tackle the problem - reduce inequality, or use draconian measures to control the people who got the wrong end of the inequality stick.
Nothing seems complicated if you wave away all the details. You made quite a leap even in the first link of the chain ("wealth inequality => poverty"). I don't see how poverty follows from wealth inequality. That there are people who earn more or have amassed more wealth than me, sometimes fantastically so, doesn't make me any poorer. In fact, often times my own life is enriched by the value created by those who ended up becoming wealthy. Of course, this is not to suggest that every rich person created value for others to get there, or that people who create value for others necessarily become rich.
The link between poverty and homelessness, as discussed elsewhere in the thread, is mostly due to policy choices local to SF and California as a whole that greatly disincentivize building more homes to keep up with demand. I come from a country where (with some exaggeration) it feels like an urban park might have higher population density than San Francisco. There's no reason why one of the most desired markets in the world should be that way, other than through artificially restricting the supply.
> Countries that have affordable housing and jobs don't have this problem.
Very few countries, whether housing is cheap or expensive and whether jobs pay well or poorly, have this problem of people strung about, high in public, engaging in antisocial behavior. Most countries don't turn a blind eye towards drug addiction from a personal liberty standpoint, which I think is quite a uniquely American concept. Most will imprison people for possessing or consuming any and punish with death those who traffic. There is broad cultural acceptance of behaving in this way.
There's no leap, but we don't even need to have that conversation.
Poverty exists, which leads to homelessness.
This is not because of "local SF and California" policies. Homelessness is a problem in nearly every North American cities, from Vancouver to New York. Large cities in Europe also struggle with it, albeit to a lesser degree.
I'm not against building more housing, but no matter how much you build, not everyone will be able to afford it.
And I don't know where you got the idea that the USA is "turning a blind eye" to these problems. There's no blind eye. The US has the highest carceral population in the world. Cities already spent hundreds of millions on police. The problems are not being ignored, the solutions attempted just don't work.
> Homelessness is a problem in nearly every North American cities, from Vancouver to New York.
It's an order of magnitude higher in San Francisco at ~2.5% of the population compared to New York at ~0.8% and Vancouver at ~0.3%. SF isn't the only city with homeless people, but it likely has it to the highest degree, with other undesirable traits like open-air drug use, public defecation, and property crimes.
> no matter how much you build, not everyone will be able to afford it.
That's true, but we should still build more so that more people will be able to afford housing. No policy choice will completely eliminate poverty or homelessness nor reduce it for free without opportunity cost, so as a society we have to make prudent tradeoffs that help the most people for the least cost.
> Poverty exists, which leads to homelessness.
Are you suggesting that we're capable of totally eliminating poverty?
What's your point? What are you even arguing here? You started at questioning if wealth inequality lead to the current situation, and now you abandoned that point and moved on to claiming SF is unique (it's not), and going off on tangents that you yourself admit don't solve the problem.
Places with lower wealth inequality seem to have fewer mentally ill drug addicts terrorising the public.
Putting aside arguments of social responsibility and taking a purely self-interested perspective, it's typically cheaper and more effective to provide for these people than it is to lock them up. When there's nothing to take away, enforcement doesn't provide any deterrent and frequently leads to an escalation of behaviour instead.
Well I was surprised by the number of murders so far this year. It's less than my much smaller hometown that isn't considered particularly unsafe, while on here everyone acts like SF is hell.
There's no question there's a huge homeless problem in SF but the number of murders there are really low compared to a southern or midwestern city.
Americans have low expectations when it comes to the acceptable level of violence in a country that has third world levels of crime. And in Europe, many politicians wants their own citizens to live in what the former perceive as the ideal society? Just no.
Even being rich in US doesn't protect anyone from being murdered randomly...
The decades of internal and self-violence are quickly forgotten when something happens to a tech bro. I simply can't take that country seriously anymore...
As demonstrated by the amount of insane 'actually the murder rate isn't that bad' comments in this thread.