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San Francisco is Becoming the Model Progressive City and it’s Sad

San Francisco is Becoming the Model Progressive City and it’s Sad

“half of San Francisco Bay Area voters plan to leave the region in the next few years”

The once great American city of San Francisco is now routinely criticized by tourists and residents alike for rampant crime, filthy streets, and a homeless problem that’s out of control.

It’s beginning to look like something out of a science fiction film set in a dystopian future where the population has been reduced to two classes. One class is wealthy, progressive, and politically connected. The other class is a poor, dependent underclass which will never vote out their benevolent overlords.

Many people who fall in between are leaving. Patrick Chu reports at CNBC:

Why nearly half of San Francisco Bay Area residents plan to leave

Nearly half of San Francisco Bay Area voters plan to leave the region in the next few years, fed up with exorbitant housing costs and the long commutes caused by the lack of available homes near their workplaces.

Less than 48 hours before polls open for the California election, the business-sponsored Bay Area Council advocacy group released its annual survey of registered voters in the nine-county Bay Area showing that 46 percent are likely to move away, the highest percentage in three years.

Bay Area employers are losing talent and many companies are relocating to more affordable housing venues in the state, or much more likely, leaving California altogether, the Council says, as rising housing costs far exceed the compensation to cover monthly payments. Housing costs topped the list of issues for the fourth straight year. Not surprisingly, 42 percent of those polled in an open-ended question said the housing crisis was the most troubling issue.

The left loves to talk about income inequality. Yet in San Francisco, undoubtedly one of the bluest cities in the nation, the wealth gap has grown so vast that even people who would qualify as high income in other parts of the country are considered economically disadvantaged.

Emmie Martin of CNBC writes:

In San Francisco, households earning $117,000 qualify as ‘low income’

The increasingly steep cost of living in the Bay Area means that even earning six figures in San Francisco might not be enough to make ends meet.

A new report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development says that a San Francisco metro area family of four bringing in $117,400 a year qualifies as “low income.” Last year, the cut off was $105,350. An annual salary of $82,000 now puts single adults in the “low income” bracket as well.

Other notoriously expensive cities aren’t nearly as extreme. In New York, the “low income” threshold for a family of four is $83,450 per year. In Los Angeles, it’s $77,500.

Making ends meet for a family of four in San Francisco requires a household income of $92,139, according to MIT’s living wage calculator.

These disparities are not only affecting the way people live. They are having an adverse effect on the city’s economy because people see the city as unsafe.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

SF’s appalling street life repels residents — now it’s driven away a convention

In a move that is alarming San Francisco’s biggest industry, a major medical association is pulling its annual convention out of the city — saying its members no longer feel safe.

“It’s the first time that we have had an out-and-out cancellation over the issue, and this is a group that has been coming here every three or four years since the 1980s,” said Joe D’Alessandro, president and CEO of S.F. Travel, the city’s convention bureau.

D’Alessandro declined to name the medical association, saying the bureau still hopes to bring the group back in the future.

As a rule, major conventions book their visits at least five years in advance. So when D’Alessandro and members of the hospitality industry hadn’t heard from the doctors about re-upping, they flew to the organization’s Chicago headquarters for a face-to-face meeting with its executive board.

What has to happen in order for city and state leaders to call for a change of course?

Featured image via YouTube.

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Comments

“It’s beginning to look like something out of a science fiction film set in a dystopian future…”

The film I was thinking about: “Soylent Green.”

SF is just Utopia arriving at the station. The ruling class is still ruling so what is the problem?

Bucky Barkingham | July 4, 2018 at 7:47 am

Only a coincidence that Joe D’Alessandro has the same family name as Nancy Pilosi (nee D’Alessandro) ?

When you lose the American Medical Association……..

    fscarn in reply to herm2416. | July 4, 2018 at 9:04 am

    . . . you lose the chance that a visiting doctor might street-revive one of your less-than-stellar residents.

DINORightMarie | July 4, 2018 at 8:27 am

It won’t change until these progressives wake up and realize they are in the Detroit-zone, and elect Republicans.

So sad….I wanted to go there one day. Scratch that city off my list….

Liberals left their turds on San Francisco
Piled high as a hill, it stinks to thee
To be where needle balustrades climb halfway to the stars
Our morning highs may fill the air, we don’t care

Conservative Beaner | July 4, 2018 at 9:03 am

California was a great place to live. Hippies, Free thinkers and government officials who really cared about the people.

Then leftist from the northeast such as Boxer from New York and Pelosi from Baltimore along with other radicals and illegals helped turn the state into a shithole.

Democrats have had the opposite of the Midas Touch turning gold into shit.

    Close The Fed in reply to Conservative Beaner. | July 4, 2018 at 10:31 am

    Dear Conservative Beaner:

    Never forget to discredit the judiciary its fair share of why California has turned derelict. The citizens voted for all manner of referenda etc. to staunch the decline and the judiciary reversed, reversed, reversed them, in its arrogant usurpations of power.

These enlighten liberal freethinkers ought to rethink their policy of never zoning low income housing. It is inhumanity to throw the poor and middle class onto the streets.

    Close The Fed in reply to rotten. | July 4, 2018 at 10:32 am

    Or just remove local barriers to building.

    Their zoning and building permitting must be astonishingly restrictive for housing to be so out of reach.

      randian in reply to Close The Fed. | July 4, 2018 at 12:02 pm

      High-rise buildings are forbidden in most of SF, so you can’t build up to increase housing stock, and anywhere that you might build out is off-limits too. SF should look like Manhattan, and likely would but for that.

      In Silicon Valley to the south the counties have spend hundreds of millions of dollars of their resident’s tax money buying as much land as they can to keep it out of the hands of those same residents lest they build housing on it. Of course none of that land now generates property tax revenue, and those same governments are always strapped for cash because of their profligate spending. Still, one must have priorities.

      Government development fees in the Bay Area exceed $100k/unit, in addition to the costs implied by a permitting process that takes years to complete and usually has some sort of extortion involved i.e. pay us a big chunk of money for something that’s not related to your project or we won’t approve it.

They just need some old fashioned NYC style rent control to ail what heals them.

#snarky

The Friendly Grizzly | July 4, 2018 at 9:19 am

I lived in San Francisco back in the mid 1970s. It was expensive then, quirky as can be. But, it was still relatively clean and livable, had good radio stations, great food, and plenty to do. I last was in SF about 1997, doing fieldwork for an energy conservation program. I commuted on the BART from Concord because I walked and rode public transit everywhere because it was easier.

I would see the hopeless street people up and down Market Street. Drug-addled, drunk, or the ones who were, in more sensible times, in mental institutions. There was human excrement and the stench of urine in the stairwells of the BART and MUNI stations. The characters on the buses and street cars would be amusing to someone with no compassion; to me, they were pathetic.

I’d get home at night and would be so depressed it was incredible. I made a proper living doing what I was doing, but could no longer take it. I took a job in the Los Angeles area just to escape it all.

The problem is that they move, but most bring their voting pattern with them, spreading the poison to other places. The cause and effect seems to have escaped them.

    MajorWood in reply to MrGarabaldi. | July 4, 2018 at 12:07 pm

    We have good Californians and bad Kalifornians in Portland. It is the bad ones who bring the shit-hole mentality with them when they move. SF and PDX both suffer from a pleasant weather pattern which makes surviving outside possible, hence the shelter-challenged congregate in these areas where the elements won’t kill them off. That and the libtard progressives throw food out into the street and then wonder where the rats have come from. We also have the migratory variety which float between LA and Seattle over the course of a year.

    Vera Katz, who really put the nail in Portland’s coffin hailed from New Jersey. near the end of her term more and more “I’m allergic to Katz” bumper stickers started to appear.

California in general and San Francisco in particular is nothing but a petri dish for all things progressive. You don’t need a microscope to see the results. It’s not very pretty. The lie of unlimited wealth along with the subsidy of bad behavior makes that San Fran a nice place to visit, but you don’t want to live there.

    Tiki in reply to Redneck Law. | July 4, 2018 at 3:45 pm

    I can tell you’ve never really traveled Calfornia. Valley counties are very different from coastal counties. SF progressivism is as extreme to many of its residents as it is to you. It literally says so in the article.

    Valley counties as struggling to survive under the onslaught of this pernicious ‘petri dish’ of radical coastal Maoism.

    Remember – there are hundreds of thousands of right wing people like me in California.

I’m a second generation California. Grew up in then rural Orange County. Came to San Francisco after being stationed by the Army at Fort Ord.

Left San Francisco for the Peninsula in 1972. Raised family there, started businesses. Went to the City sometimes, particularly to the Building Department.

There are many parts of San Francisco where few tourists go. These are mostly still clean and safe. The homeless of all varieties congregate where the tourists are and where they are most visible.

The voters of San Francisco who live in the nice neighborhoods vote for the people who do nothing about the homeless. More fools they.

The voters who are most likely to want to move out are generally those who rent or those who own homes that have greatly appreciated in value.

Those who rent despair of ever being able to afford a house or condo, those who own are tempted to cash out and buy something far nicer and larger somewhere else.

Fifty years ago, I predicted that the restrictive zoning regulations would lad to this. That was when, with a stroke of a pen, the City of San Francisco reduce the potential housing stock by about 50%, rezoning much of the City from R2 (duplexes or pairs of flats) to R1, single family homes.

And the suburban communities are worse.

We are adding jobs far faster than we are building housing. We are not building any new freeways and our communities don’t have the density to make public transit work.

As the saying goes, “I’ve seen California destroyed by progress”. Mostly by folks who moved here, not the few of us that are natives.

Much of California is still very beautiful. Downtown San Francisco and the touristy parts not so much.

    Oregon Mike in reply to erc. | July 4, 2018 at 11:56 am

    Indeed.

    My wife and I just spent a few days east of the Sierras searching out ancient Bristlecone pines (4K+ years old), visiting the Manzanar Japanese internment camp, and seeing other sights, then crossing the Sierra Nevada for Giant Sequoias and such, and then across the San Joaquin valley for a cowboy wedding west of Coalinga, before returning to Oregon by way of the Central Valley, and then up past Mount Shasta.

    A lot of California is just great. Just avoid the cities (though I have a special fondness for LA, Pasadena, and Glendale).

    One big problem: Everywhere else on our road trip (Oregon, Nevada, and Utah), I could carry my firearm, either concealed or openly. In California, I had to tuck it away in the truck. Just downright un-American, that’s all!

      Conservative Beaner in reply to Oregon Mike. | July 4, 2018 at 2:47 pm

      I’ve been to Manzanar as well. The Eastern Scenic Highway is great going Lone Pine up to Carson City and Reno. The only bad spot is when you go by the dry lake bed of Lake Owen in which the city of Los Angeles sucked dry. Dam Angelinos.

        Highway 395 is incredible. At the far north end at Hallelujah Junction is the old Vinton cemetery – it looks more like Boot Hill than Boot Hill. That whole desert area is teeming with wildlife; pronghorn antelope, mule deer, countless hawks and birds, coyote and fox and I even saw a badger. We found a very old adobe hovel- probably mid 19th century.

        Bodie is worth stopping at for half a day. Bring a high-quality camera and snacks.

rangerrebew | July 4, 2018 at 12:50 pm

I was stationed in Alameda in the early 70s and loved to go across the bay to just be in the city. I loved it.

When transferred to San Diego, it felt as if I had lost a friend.

I was there about 8 months ago and wondered what had happened to the city I loved? It was gone, and is gone. I don’t believe it has a snowball’s chance in hell to recover and be the charming, unique city of the world it once was. It has become a 3rd world hell hole.

I live about 30 miles south of SF … haven’t been to SF for almost 15 years … hate everything about the place.

San Francisco is nothing more than another Democrat/Leftist center of excellence no different form Detroit, Philadelphia, Newark, etc. What is so amazing about all of this is how the Left continues to double down on obvious failure.

harleycowboy | July 6, 2018 at 8:37 am

“…the Model Progressive City…”
And let that serve as a warning to all.