SF's Market Street debacle, the debate over real wages, why U.S. growth has gotten smoother, TikTok as a propaganda engine, and California homelessness
“ . . . if the U.S. can’t bring itself to force a sale of TikTok, we’ll have proven democracy incapable of defending itself against totalitarian states in the realm of information warfare.”
It is simply stunning, given the U.S. has the CIA, NSA and a dozen more federal intelligence agencies, that the alarm bells haven’t been loudly ringing about the threat presented by a hostile foreign power shaping public opinion of young people. Imagine if the algorithm started targeting young men with anti-military propaganda, which may well be happening given the dismal recruiting efforts of the U.S. military.
It feels like one of those things that everyone knows is happening but for some reason those in power don't act. It's all the more difficult to understand when the foreign totalitarian state pulling the propaganda strings in the US bans foreign social media at home.
Why should anyone believe a federal agency absent Cuban missile style public proof? Like I’m supposed to make my life considerably worse on a trust us, unlike all those other times we were lying this time around we’re telling the truth. But oh there’s no clear claim whatsoever that is falsifiable?
It’s weasel words all the way down. It’s influencing, and shaping minds, which I’m not sure are crimes worthy of punishing either foreign states, or worse American consumers for.
The study on TikTok revealed that the Chinese are taking steps to suppress certain kinds of news. I wonder how we would figure out whether they are trying to insert certain kinds of news.
Causality in that direction does seem tougher to prove.
Because I'm middle-aged, I get my TikTok content a few weeks late via Instagram. I probably wouldn't notice when that Chinese recipe guy demands someone poison our precious Mississippi River water with that blue chicken powder until it's already done.
FDR was implementing the policies of Keynes and other similar economists. Before Keynes, policy was dominated by neoclassical economics. Keynes had the view that demand, not supply, is the driving factor determining levels of employment. This provided FDR and his economists with a theoretical basis to argue that governments should intervene to alleviate severe unemployment.
I have read most of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. It's probably worth reading if you want to understand the underpinnings of modern economic theory. A lot of is dated, but the basic premises have held true and the most recent economic cycle have just reinforced them.
"But in fact, the Market Street closure is part of a larger debacle of urban politics and governance that has seen the city of San Francisco spend hundreds of millions of dollars to destroy its most important commercial area."
SF is and has been for years controlled and "governed" by progressives, who may be great at screaming RACISM but otherwise could not manage a hot dog stand, let alone run a city (except into the ground). So, just keep voting for them and then complain about what they deliver.
On the other hand, this unprecedented explosion of wealth has delivered similar returns in taxpayer dollars to the local government, which doesn't seem to be able to manage it very well. Willie Brown's budget in 2000 was $5B, which would be $8.9B in today's dollars. Our most recent budget was $14.6B, a 60% increase, even though the population only increased a few percent. Some of this was due to the increased cost of living here, but as a resident I don't see 60% more or improved city services.
There is also a lot of corruption and patronage. There has been a huge increase in the number of employees on the city payroll, though I am having a tough time figuring out how many. Willie Brown added 4,000 and probably enshrined a culture of graft that continues to this day.
We can and should demand more for our taxpayer dollars.
Market Street is mostly suffering due to the aftereffects of Covid and work at home policies becoming permanent. I don't think that government has done much right here, but it's not the primary culprit for the reduction in foot traffic downtown.
A big part of the city and county budget goes to homeless nonprofits that are incentivized to perpetuate the problem and provide outreach to their “clients” while paying themselves well. The pandemic ended a long time ago and it’s a stretch to blame the SF downtown shit show on Covid when other cities aren’t struggling nearly as much. Market Street was always a wide concrete barrier, but closing it to cars but not buses doesn’t make it a magnet for foot traffic. I used to work in SoMa 30 years ago and even then rarely went north of South Park for lunch.
I can't ever remember Market Street as any great place for people. We all used it as needed when working in the financial district. Converting a street designed for automobiles into a pedestrian/bike way is quite hard and depends on a lot of things going right. Hard to correct for the prior mess. And yes, the SF government didn't handle it well on top of that - but it would have been hard no matter what. Realistically, even SF (which has some mass transit - more than a lot of the West) is still built around autos
Reading the Market Street article - references a very large number for pedestrians pre-pandemic. At least from my experience, an awful lot of those (at least in the downtown) were workers in the financial district, etc. - going to and from work and out for lunch. After work time, the street was quite dead in comparison.
So, yes, all the dumb things that were done - but a lot of the demise of Market Street is simply the hollowing out of employees down there.
Seems to me you answer your own question. Government takes all hat tax growth and spend it on themselves, graft and all. Not on the public good. Noah is providing an example of just the opposite: they spent it on the public no-good. This is not unique to San Francisco, but "Willie Brown added 4000 to the payroll" might be a hint at where the $$$ goes.
And I would say "on the aftereffects of government Covid policies." Over the top safety-ism has downsides, it turns out.
San Francisco's political factions include its imperious public employee unions. Most workers don't live in the city.
Among transit systems, Muni is also famous for having the highest driver unexcused driver absenteeism rates in the U.S. The absenteeism is as famous as the cable cars. Even San Francisco is experiencing the post-pandemic driver shortage, but even pre-pandemic there was a driver shortage despite a driver or mechanic position being as hard to get as a longshore worker gig.
San Francisco has one of the best public transit systems in the country. As a regular rider, I can state for certain that it is a better experience today than it was 20 years ago, mostly because there are a few lines, like the 14, 24, 38, and 49, and the letter lines, that I can rely on without needing to look at a schedule or an app. This makes the whole experience much better for me. Depending on where you live, your mileage might vary.
I think your absenteeism rates are from old news articles circa 2014, but I would be curious what it is today. I know they renegotiated the contract to reduce the number of sick days allowed.
I last rode Muni in 2019 but I think the better experience vs. the turn of the century is because the bus fleet is modern now.
Pretty much all of the vehicles are 10 years or younger New Flyers in the red and silver paint. Newer buses help in reliability. I also noticed that the trolleybus poles don't fall off the wires anymore.
During the height of the first tech boom (late 1990s), I could remember how old and dingy the buses were. Trolleybuses from the 1970s in the yellow and orange livery, diesel buses from the early 1980s, and almost all buses still had curtain signs instead of electronic headsigns.
Median household income in San Francisco is the highest of any metropolitan area in the country. It is currently at $136,689. Average Household income is $178,742.
Only DC is even close and overall the San Francisco median household and median worker income is almost double that of the nation.
I can't embed images, but if you to the Fed's website and compare San Francisco Median Household income to the United States, we went from 116% in 2004 to 181% in 2022. It's really been an astonishing difference.
The region has been the center of the greatest creation of wealth in history. Almost all internet technologies and their far reaching impacts globally have come from the San Francisco Bay Area. Over the last 40 years, crime has fallen precipitously, public schools have improved and parks and libraries have been rebuilt.
If that's what failure looks like, give me some more of that.
Mountain View, Cupertino and Palo Alto are not much like San Francisco in government or dysfunction , and even in SF the elected city government is not in any way responsible for the success of Stripe, OpenAI, SalesForce, Uber or AirBNB. And Washington DC is similarly dysfunctional and progressively governed.
Don't you think that it is peculiar that all these places that you believe are mismanaged have the most dynamic economies and are creating the most new business and have the most innovation? I would expect it to be the other way around.
Can you think of an example of a very dynamic and successful economy that has a highly functional government?
This is a case of rich people moving to SF as much as it SF creating wealth. And it means that nobody else except the rich can afford to live there. Pushing out poorer residents doesn't sound like progress to me.
Can you site something to back up this claim? I have not heard about any large migration of billionaires (or millionaires) to S.F. Tales of their creation through tech startups about the Bay Area abound.
[edit]. Why are these rich people moving to S.F? As far as I know, most migration to the area is for high paying tech jobs. That isn't rich people to the area. It is people moving to the area to become rich.
Okay I'd been a bit imprecise with my language yesterday. Yes, it's the high-paying tech jobs that push up house prices in the area, it is people moving there to become rich (though you could argue therefore that most of the potential wealth was created by whoever taught these guys how to code, and then SF just sacked up that value); I guess what I was trying to get at was that, although GDP per capita has risen greatly, that's not because of productivity increases and wage rises for the people who were already living there. Have people who live in the city but aren't employed by Silicon Valley companies really seen much benefit, or are they just getting priced out?
For all that big tech gets criticised, it has delivered immense value to the world and overall there's clearly more good than bad there. But, it seems like big tech has created a local homelessness problem through gentrification-on-steroids. All the global benefit that thr industry provides doesn't mean much to the victims of this state of affairs; and it doesn't have to be this way, smarter policies would enable the elite tech workers and regular working-class families to coexist.
Comparing TikTok to "toaster ovens that hacked into their phones and secretly blocked links to certain news stories" just doesn't work. I would be 100% on your side if the TikTok app was shown to literally hack into the other social apps on your phone to suppress content sensitive to the CCP, but that's just not what's happening here as far as we know.
Forcing a sale or banning TikTok should not be part of a liberal democracy's defense toolkit. There are better options that are much more in line with our values. Sunlight is probably the best remedy here. Some effort (probably decentralized, probably from competitors) to equate TikTok with Russia Today or Xinhua is really all that is needed to mount a defense.
Idk. Comparing TikTok to Russia Today might be impactful to an audience of Substack readers, but the average member of gen-alpha, the people that the CCP may be targeting, will be like "what's Russia Today?"
A government is suppressing speech that affects U.S. Citizens. This seems to be close enough to the spirit of the First Amendment that the U.S. Government stepping-in to improve the situation, seems totally okay.
Banning TikTok in the US would be more of a commerce issue rather than speech, the speech being done is by the users, not the company. Since PRC restricts many internet services (Google, YouTube,Facebook, etc) so similar to how trade restrictions (which are not good, but sometimes actually needed for national security) the US could restrict the service, or prevent monetization unless the PRC lifts their restrictions. Anyone who posts on TikTok is able to use Instagram or X or even Threads or SubStack instead. It’s funny how many of the people worried about free speech issues for TikTok are happy to ignore the USHS threatening X, YouTube or Facebook for disinformation causing them to delete posts the government doesn’t like (lab-leak, vaccine data, Hunter Biden activity, etc).
I remember in the 1970s taking the train in to San Francisco from the Peninsula, and then taking the bus to Market Street. My friends and I would wander around shopping all the weird little antique stores and boutiques and then getting ice cream and watching all the people. I don't have a point. I'm just reminiscing. It's what old people do.
I wasn't totally convinced by your discussion of TikTok since it doesn't seem like the threat to democracy is limited to attack by outside totalitarian states. If we can't do something about the demand side, then absent some drastic curtailing of the First Amendment, aren't we lost anyway, to the threats from inside? I confess I don't have any great suggestions for hardening the consumer side of the disinformation threat: our education system isn't in great shape, and arguably forces like Moms for Liberty mean we have our work cut out for us just keeping it from getting worse, much less making it better.
You think Moms for Liberty is a greater threat to education than Randi Weingarten and AFT/NEA?who support school closures and child masking to keep teachers “safe”? And are you suggesting that TikTok users are indoctrinating themselves by avoiding anything offensive to the PRC? Both seem questionable.
The attraction of CA weather (what attracted my parents from the east coast in 1949), combined with environmental laws and NIMBYs created a perfect storm for homelessness
How much is TikTok in particular relevant? I remember a few years ago talking to my nephew about some geography game he was playing on his phone. When I first talked to him about it, he was still struggling with identifying countries like Australia or Egypt, but when I talked a few months later he was getting them all, even islands like Mauritius and Kiribati. But I asked him something about Taiwan and he had never heard of it - I guess this app was designed to be legal in China.
Fixing TikTok won’t fix all these deeper and equally insidious issues elsewhere. A counterweight might be more useful than a ban.
For <30s, a large number of them cite TikTok as a news source. Yes, it's the same problem about 10-15 years ago when Facebook and Twitter were described as news sources (i.e., confusing a platform carrying news for actual news-gathering).
Culturally, TikTok is on par or has even eclipsed what MTV was for Gen-Xers. It's also where not-olds are socializing, since Facebook has similar demographics to cable TV subscribers and Twitter is a Nazi Bar.
I think there is at least a weak correlation between average high and average low temperatures as attractors/detractors to the homeless quantity by state. La and SF have much more livable outdoor weather than Florida, Texas and the midwest and northern states.
I think these states have net migration in for those who become homeless. If you end up homeless in Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin, or Louisiana, Alabama, NH, it seems a reasonable factor to consider the homeless will leave cold and high temperature extremes for more temperate climes.
Some of what you propose happens. But it doesn't even have to be homeless people migrating in to create a "sink" for homelessness.
-People with adequate funds move to California for the weather (or jobs or whatever reason) and get a place to live.
-Housing demand is way higher than supply due to historic development choices. We already have a lot of people living on the margins (crowding and such).
-The temperate weather keeps homeless people from moving out of state (in addition to other relocation barriers).
DougAZ, Some people over at TD are wondering why they haven't heard from you lately. I just thought might like to know. Why you left or why you are taking a break is totally your business.
The truth is, Steve Hayes banned me for my written attacks on Marvin Olasky's abortion column, and other commentators who called abortion, "murder and killing". I took exceptional outrage at that, as it is factually all a lie. There is no law saying that abortion is murder or killing.
I told Hayes who never replied, that I consider this "Hate Speech" - against women who choose to have abortion, or have had an abortion. It is vicious, outrageous, demonizing, vilifing hate speech.
But as you know, TD is a private company, and they control and dictate what speech is acceptable to them. I agree that is their right.
He also stated I lost him subscribers. For this, I frankly do not care. That is not my responsibility to conform such that I boost his Brand. His Brand, however, he can manage anyway he chooses at his arbitray choice.
I think my 3 months is up in early January.
I still read most of columns an a lot comments. There are several conservative commentators they apparently have banned that led with ad hominem attacks on me. Or maybe I'm not there to be their hurtfelt outlet :).
Anyway, I'll be back - and thanks again for asking Just Dean
I am still scanning TD for stories that interest me but am commenting a lot less.
I recently commented on an AO episode about the Colorado Supreme Court decision and was admonished for supporting that decision. The dissenters felt that Trump needs to have his day in court with a jury and that otherwise we are just as bad as Trump. It is not a real concern that the Supreme Court will uphold the decision but if they do, it seems that he will have been given due process and justice will be served.. Sometimes you can't win.
Happy Holidays and all the best in the New Year to you.
I think the homelessness issue is also driven by Boise v. Martin, a 9th Circuit Court ruling, that along with some other related cases, made addressing homelessness in the 9th Circuit a real problem. California obviously has its own issues but Oregon, Washington, Hawaii and other 9th Circuit states are all still trying to figure out how to address homelessness in light of the ruling.
Oahu/Honolulu is a mess these days. But Portland takes it to a whole new level. I haven't been back to Seattle in several years, but my last visit to downtown area was thick with street homeless a that time.
I worked in Portland as a cop when a lot of this was going on. Kind of like California, Portland had its own issues that set the stage for a lot of its problems, and these are somewhat unique to the city. That said, I do think regional court cases created a huge headwind for addressing issues around homelessness.
I was on another substack and wrote something about this. I will not go into all the details, but Boise ID has managed to keep it city clean, so it is not just the court that is the cause. I think most police agencies take their lead from the community, and if they are in a community that generally is opposed to enforcement or rule of law regarding issues around camping, littering, public drug/alcohol use, etc. they will tend to err on the side of doing nothing that could later result in being found outside the law. In other communities, where public order is a higher priority, agencies will take greater risks (because they are less concerned with being fired/disciplined) and push the envelope more.
For the statistically minded I think there is an interaction effect between the level of community commitment to public order, support for police generally, and clarity in what police can legally do that influences the level of disorder generally, and problematic homelessness (a lot of homeless stay in out of the way places and cause very few problems, like most other things it is only a smaller portion that causes most of the problems) in particular. When there is legal confusion around what is acceptable, the police are less willing to do things that could anger even a small but vocal minority. This is because that small but vocal minority tends to wield disproportionate power at city hall and will aggressively take steps to get chiefs fired or officers disciplined.
As the courts clear up the confusion they have created and as agencies develop new tactics, I think cities like Portland will become more livable. It will just take time, legislation, and case law to create an environment where police feel safe to enforce the laws. From speaking with former co-workers in Portland it sounds like this process is already emerging there.
I'd say there are a lot of factors - some of which this touches on. But if you go to Tokyo (most populous city in the world), you don't see trash on the streets, you don't see many homeless, and you don't have a lot of cops going around enforcing things.
Tokyo made any city I've seen in the US look sloppy and noisy and dirty....
There are lots of ways for a community to function - and in different cultures, it isn't about what the police are allowed to do or not do
Thanks for sharing. Agree it comes down to the community as a whole, sometimes the majority needs to tell that vocal minority to fuck off in order to make the streets livable, even if not thrive.
We've visited Boise 3 or 4 times over the past 5 years, and I was amazed at how few street homeless were in downtown and college areas, and we walked a lot a miles in those areas. There were some, to be sure, but nothing like the west coast cities.
But the level of subsidized housing (per 1,000 people) in California is as high if not higher than of any neighboring state (excepting Oregon), and higher than that of a wide swath of farther central states. So a move to California is a good move for almost anyone in the western U.S.
And the growth in California's median household income (ranked about 5th in level in 2021) for the last ten years is amongst the highest of any state. (It ranked 11th ten years before.)
That demonstrates California is as good as any other state if you are as lucky enough to obtain subsidized housing. The critical difference lies in the price of non-subsidized housing compared to other states.
Isn't the vibecession a result of the fact that inflation hits everybody while getting a job or seeing your low-end job wages go up only benefits a small minority of people. During the transient inflation surge, people witth jobs (the vast majority of the workforce even in a recession) saw their real wages go down and the surge in prices was in things they bought frequently like food and gasoline, so it was in their faces on a regular basis. On the other hand, the formerly unemployed and low-wage workers who sarted getting a paycheck or saw their paycheck grow were a small minority of the workforce. IMO a transient episode of inflation is a price worth paying to get back to full employment and the benefits that brings to society (like less domestic stress and substance abuse), but I think most people don't take that into consideration when answering pollsters.
The discussion of wage growth with the two charts still doesn't really make sense to me. If Radia's chart includes people who went from unemployment to employment, which is what I'm getting from the description, then it seems to mix apples and oranges. The whole point of a wage growth analysis is to understand what happened to wages for a consistent set of jobs. Employment growth is a separate dynamic. As much as I like the story about the economy doing well and wages growing, let's not get so attached that we paper over the real reasons many people may be dissatisfied with their situations and with the economy overall.
Some of the wage falls were fake. Some people got reduced hours but were supplemented by COViD relief payments. Had a friend that had hours cut by 20% but was told he’d actually make more with the COViD payments and, with a wink, the firm still expected the same work to get done.
Where my son worked a bunch of staff took the 20% cut to hours and made more money as well. However, my son was pissed because it just left everyone who felt obligated to show up to work with more to do. So, the people who wanted to be lazy (it was voluntary) got more money total but left their work to the ones who thought showing up when getting paid was the ethical thing to do. At least in your friend's case there work sounds like it was divided up evenly.
This is probably not the norm but was frustrating to him at the time.
Ethical, except for the perjury they are induced to commit on the benefit application where they had to say their hours were being cut when they were still expected to work those hours.
Noah - this is the best "five things" compilations that you have produced since I subscribed. We split our lives between Wydaho (Teton Valley) and Hawaii. Little to no homeless in Wydaho (way too cold in the winter, and public drug use is not tolerated, let alone encouraged. There are still are plenty of people struggling with housing, though, including some living in campers/trailers and no shortage of "couch surfers" amongst the younger adults, but they probably would not be counted as "homeless." The only thing stopping Hawaii from being even worse the California is they have to get on a plane to get there. Even still, Honolulu is nearly is bad as LA. We have several "camps" on Kauai island. The local county government can't do much about it, even if they wanted to.
If you are sleeping in a camper or on a friends couch, you are homeless. One of the reasons places like West Virginia don't have a homeless problem like California even though they have a much worse addiction problem, is that it is extremely easy to get cheap substandard housing there. All this stuff has been gentrified in CA. We tore out most of our SROs and turned them into condos and trailer parks are almost a thing of the past in coastal CA.
Agree the couch surfers and trailer are technically homeless. But, they aren't street people homeless. They bathe, have jobs, some spending money, clean clothes, aren't on fentynl, go out to bars and parties, ski, etc.
When most of us think "homeless" we are talking about the street people.
Couch surfers and vehicle dwellers are definitionally homeless. A homeless person is anyone without a permanent address, either as an owner-occupier of a house or a leaseholder.
Street people are visibly homeless, and it's not a definitional term but a pejorative. One of the challenges among the street homeless population is a segment who are service-resistant, who will not avail themselves to shelter or assistance unless forced to by courts and law enforcement.
Anecdotal: Many/most/nearly all of the couch surfer, vehicle/small trailer dwelling persons that I have met through the years was doing so voluntarily in order to live in a certain area. Example, a woman in her upper 60s who we know on Kauai preferred to spend a few years living in her car, or a tent or a van in order to stay on Kauai rather than live in an MIL apartment her daughter had available for her in Las Vegas. And we meet all sorts of 20-30 and even 40-somethings in Teton Valley Wydaho who do so in order to ski/fish/play in the outdoors, although they could easily afford an apartment/condo even house somewhere less interesting/expensive.
More anecdotal: One of our sons (33 yo) rents an expensive bedroom with shared bathroom in a house in Santa Clara so he can continue to live in Bay Area, even though he could buy a house in les expensive areas of the country. He does not want to live in those areas. re other son (31 yo) bought a house with his GF a few years ago in a farming community in NoCal. (She had roots there), but no way they could afford a house anywhere near the Bay Area.
“ . . . if the U.S. can’t bring itself to force a sale of TikTok, we’ll have proven democracy incapable of defending itself against totalitarian states in the realm of information warfare.”
It is simply stunning, given the U.S. has the CIA, NSA and a dozen more federal intelligence agencies, that the alarm bells haven’t been loudly ringing about the threat presented by a hostile foreign power shaping public opinion of young people. Imagine if the algorithm started targeting young men with anti-military propaganda, which may well be happening given the dismal recruiting efforts of the U.S. military.
TikTok is a grave threat.
It feels like one of those things that everyone knows is happening but for some reason those in power don't act. It's all the more difficult to understand when the foreign totalitarian state pulling the propaganda strings in the US bans foreign social media at home.
It becomes much easier to understand when you learn the phrase "The cossacks work for the czar."
Why should anyone believe a federal agency absent Cuban missile style public proof? Like I’m supposed to make my life considerably worse on a trust us, unlike all those other times we were lying this time around we’re telling the truth. But oh there’s no clear claim whatsoever that is falsifiable?
It’s weasel words all the way down. It’s influencing, and shaping minds, which I’m not sure are crimes worthy of punishing either foreign states, or worse American consumers for.
The study on TikTok revealed that the Chinese are taking steps to suppress certain kinds of news. I wonder how we would figure out whether they are trying to insert certain kinds of news.
Causality in that direction does seem tougher to prove.
Because I'm middle-aged, I get my TikTok content a few weeks late via Instagram. I probably wouldn't notice when that Chinese recipe guy demands someone poison our precious Mississippi River water with that blue chicken powder until it's already done.
FDR was implementing the policies of Keynes and other similar economists. Before Keynes, policy was dominated by neoclassical economics. Keynes had the view that demand, not supply, is the driving factor determining levels of employment. This provided FDR and his economists with a theoretical basis to argue that governments should intervene to alleviate severe unemployment.
I have read most of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. It's probably worth reading if you want to understand the underpinnings of modern economic theory. A lot of is dated, but the basic premises have held true and the most recent economic cycle have just reinforced them.
"We are all Keynesians now" - Milton Friedman
"But in fact, the Market Street closure is part of a larger debacle of urban politics and governance that has seen the city of San Francisco spend hundreds of millions of dollars to destroy its most important commercial area."
SF is and has been for years controlled and "governed" by progressives, who may be great at screaming RACISM but otherwise could not manage a hot dog stand, let alone run a city (except into the ground). So, just keep voting for them and then complain about what they deliver.
On the other hand, this unprecedented explosion of wealth has delivered similar returns in taxpayer dollars to the local government, which doesn't seem to be able to manage it very well. Willie Brown's budget in 2000 was $5B, which would be $8.9B in today's dollars. Our most recent budget was $14.6B, a 60% increase, even though the population only increased a few percent. Some of this was due to the increased cost of living here, but as a resident I don't see 60% more or improved city services.
There is also a lot of corruption and patronage. There has been a huge increase in the number of employees on the city payroll, though I am having a tough time figuring out how many. Willie Brown added 4,000 and probably enshrined a culture of graft that continues to this day.
We can and should demand more for our taxpayer dollars.
Market Street is mostly suffering due to the aftereffects of Covid and work at home policies becoming permanent. I don't think that government has done much right here, but it's not the primary culprit for the reduction in foot traffic downtown.
A big part of the city and county budget goes to homeless nonprofits that are incentivized to perpetuate the problem and provide outreach to their “clients” while paying themselves well. The pandemic ended a long time ago and it’s a stretch to blame the SF downtown shit show on Covid when other cities aren’t struggling nearly as much. Market Street was always a wide concrete barrier, but closing it to cars but not buses doesn’t make it a magnet for foot traffic. I used to work in SoMa 30 years ago and even then rarely went north of South Park for lunch.
I can't ever remember Market Street as any great place for people. We all used it as needed when working in the financial district. Converting a street designed for automobiles into a pedestrian/bike way is quite hard and depends on a lot of things going right. Hard to correct for the prior mess. And yes, the SF government didn't handle it well on top of that - but it would have been hard no matter what. Realistically, even SF (which has some mass transit - more than a lot of the West) is still built around autos
Reading the Market Street article - references a very large number for pedestrians pre-pandemic. At least from my experience, an awful lot of those (at least in the downtown) were workers in the financial district, etc. - going to and from work and out for lunch. After work time, the street was quite dead in comparison.
So, yes, all the dumb things that were done - but a lot of the demise of Market Street is simply the hollowing out of employees down there.
Shit show works figuratively and literally.
Seems to me you answer your own question. Government takes all hat tax growth and spend it on themselves, graft and all. Not on the public good. Noah is providing an example of just the opposite: they spent it on the public no-good. This is not unique to San Francisco, but "Willie Brown added 4000 to the payroll" might be a hint at where the $$$ goes.
And I would say "on the aftereffects of government Covid policies." Over the top safety-ism has downsides, it turns out.
San Francisco's political factions include its imperious public employee unions. Most workers don't live in the city.
Among transit systems, Muni is also famous for having the highest driver unexcused driver absenteeism rates in the U.S. The absenteeism is as famous as the cable cars. Even San Francisco is experiencing the post-pandemic driver shortage, but even pre-pandemic there was a driver shortage despite a driver or mechanic position being as hard to get as a longshore worker gig.
San Francisco has one of the best public transit systems in the country. As a regular rider, I can state for certain that it is a better experience today than it was 20 years ago, mostly because there are a few lines, like the 14, 24, 38, and 49, and the letter lines, that I can rely on without needing to look at a schedule or an app. This makes the whole experience much better for me. Depending on where you live, your mileage might vary.
I think your absenteeism rates are from old news articles circa 2014, but I would be curious what it is today. I know they renegotiated the contract to reduce the number of sick days allowed.
I last rode Muni in 2019 but I think the better experience vs. the turn of the century is because the bus fleet is modern now.
Pretty much all of the vehicles are 10 years or younger New Flyers in the red and silver paint. Newer buses help in reliability. I also noticed that the trolleybus poles don't fall off the wires anymore.
During the height of the first tech boom (late 1990s), I could remember how old and dingy the buses were. Trolleybuses from the 1970s in the yellow and orange livery, diesel buses from the early 1980s, and almost all buses still had curtain signs instead of electronic headsigns.
Median household income in San Francisco is the highest of any metropolitan area in the country. It is currently at $136,689. Average Household income is $178,742.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MHICA06075A052NCEN
See page 5 of the Feds Household income report for 2021:
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2022/acs/acsbr-011.pdf
Only DC is even close and overall the San Francisco median household and median worker income is almost double that of the nation.
I can't embed images, but if you to the Fed's website and compare San Francisco Median Household income to the United States, we went from 116% in 2004 to 181% in 2022. It's really been an astonishing difference.
The region has been the center of the greatest creation of wealth in history. Almost all internet technologies and their far reaching impacts globally have come from the San Francisco Bay Area. Over the last 40 years, crime has fallen precipitously, public schools have improved and parks and libraries have been rebuilt.
If that's what failure looks like, give me some more of that.
Mountain View, Cupertino and Palo Alto are not much like San Francisco in government or dysfunction , and even in SF the elected city government is not in any way responsible for the success of Stripe, OpenAI, SalesForce, Uber or AirBNB. And Washington DC is similarly dysfunctional and progressively governed.
Don't you think that it is peculiar that all these places that you believe are mismanaged have the most dynamic economies and are creating the most new business and have the most innovation? I would expect it to be the other way around.
Can you think of an example of a very dynamic and successful economy that has a highly functional government?
Singapore?
This is a case of rich people moving to SF as much as it SF creating wealth. And it means that nobody else except the rich can afford to live there. Pushing out poorer residents doesn't sound like progress to me.
Can you site something to back up this claim? I have not heard about any large migration of billionaires (or millionaires) to S.F. Tales of their creation through tech startups about the Bay Area abound.
[edit]. Why are these rich people moving to S.F? As far as I know, most migration to the area is for high paying tech jobs. That isn't rich people to the area. It is people moving to the area to become rich.
Okay I'd been a bit imprecise with my language yesterday. Yes, it's the high-paying tech jobs that push up house prices in the area, it is people moving there to become rich (though you could argue therefore that most of the potential wealth was created by whoever taught these guys how to code, and then SF just sacked up that value); I guess what I was trying to get at was that, although GDP per capita has risen greatly, that's not because of productivity increases and wage rises for the people who were already living there. Have people who live in the city but aren't employed by Silicon Valley companies really seen much benefit, or are they just getting priced out?
For all that big tech gets criticised, it has delivered immense value to the world and overall there's clearly more good than bad there. But, it seems like big tech has created a local homelessness problem through gentrification-on-steroids. All the global benefit that thr industry provides doesn't mean much to the victims of this state of affairs; and it doesn't have to be this way, smarter policies would enable the elite tech workers and regular working-class families to coexist.
Comparing TikTok to "toaster ovens that hacked into their phones and secretly blocked links to certain news stories" just doesn't work. I would be 100% on your side if the TikTok app was shown to literally hack into the other social apps on your phone to suppress content sensitive to the CCP, but that's just not what's happening here as far as we know.
Forcing a sale or banning TikTok should not be part of a liberal democracy's defense toolkit. There are better options that are much more in line with our values. Sunlight is probably the best remedy here. Some effort (probably decentralized, probably from competitors) to equate TikTok with Russia Today or Xinhua is really all that is needed to mount a defense.
Idk. Comparing TikTok to Russia Today might be impactful to an audience of Substack readers, but the average member of gen-alpha, the people that the CCP may be targeting, will be like "what's Russia Today?"
A government is suppressing speech that affects U.S. Citizens. This seems to be close enough to the spirit of the First Amendment that the U.S. Government stepping-in to improve the situation, seems totally okay.
Banning TikTok in the US would be more of a commerce issue rather than speech, the speech being done is by the users, not the company. Since PRC restricts many internet services (Google, YouTube,Facebook, etc) so similar to how trade restrictions (which are not good, but sometimes actually needed for national security) the US could restrict the service, or prevent monetization unless the PRC lifts their restrictions. Anyone who posts on TikTok is able to use Instagram or X or even Threads or SubStack instead. It’s funny how many of the people worried about free speech issues for TikTok are happy to ignore the USHS threatening X, YouTube or Facebook for disinformation causing them to delete posts the government doesn’t like (lab-leak, vaccine data, Hunter Biden activity, etc).
I remember in the 1970s taking the train in to San Francisco from the Peninsula, and then taking the bus to Market Street. My friends and I would wander around shopping all the weird little antique stores and boutiques and then getting ice cream and watching all the people. I don't have a point. I'm just reminiscing. It's what old people do.
I wasn't totally convinced by your discussion of TikTok since it doesn't seem like the threat to democracy is limited to attack by outside totalitarian states. If we can't do something about the demand side, then absent some drastic curtailing of the First Amendment, aren't we lost anyway, to the threats from inside? I confess I don't have any great suggestions for hardening the consumer side of the disinformation threat: our education system isn't in great shape, and arguably forces like Moms for Liberty mean we have our work cut out for us just keeping it from getting worse, much less making it better.
You think Moms for Liberty is a greater threat to education than Randi Weingarten and AFT/NEA?who support school closures and child masking to keep teachers “safe”? And are you suggesting that TikTok users are indoctrinating themselves by avoiding anything offensive to the PRC? Both seem questionable.
Yes.
The attraction of CA weather (what attracted my parents from the east coast in 1949), combined with environmental laws and NIMBYs created a perfect storm for homelessness
How much is TikTok in particular relevant? I remember a few years ago talking to my nephew about some geography game he was playing on his phone. When I first talked to him about it, he was still struggling with identifying countries like Australia or Egypt, but when I talked a few months later he was getting them all, even islands like Mauritius and Kiribati. But I asked him something about Taiwan and he had never heard of it - I guess this app was designed to be legal in China.
Fixing TikTok won’t fix all these deeper and equally insidious issues elsewhere. A counterweight might be more useful than a ban.
For <30s, a large number of them cite TikTok as a news source. Yes, it's the same problem about 10-15 years ago when Facebook and Twitter were described as news sources (i.e., confusing a platform carrying news for actual news-gathering).
Culturally, TikTok is on par or has even eclipsed what MTV was for Gen-Xers. It's also where not-olds are socializing, since Facebook has similar demographics to cable TV subscribers and Twitter is a Nazi Bar.
I think there is at least a weak correlation between average high and average low temperatures as attractors/detractors to the homeless quantity by state. La and SF have much more livable outdoor weather than Florida, Texas and the midwest and northern states.
I think these states have net migration in for those who become homeless. If you end up homeless in Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin, or Louisiana, Alabama, NH, it seems a reasonable factor to consider the homeless will leave cold and high temperature extremes for more temperate climes.
Some of what you propose happens. But it doesn't even have to be homeless people migrating in to create a "sink" for homelessness.
-People with adequate funds move to California for the weather (or jobs or whatever reason) and get a place to live.
-Housing demand is way higher than supply due to historic development choices. We already have a lot of people living on the margins (crowding and such).
-The temperate weather keeps homeless people from moving out of state (in addition to other relocation barriers).
DougAZ, Some people over at TD are wondering why they haven't heard from you lately. I just thought might like to know. Why you left or why you are taking a break is totally your business.
Just FYI,
Just Dean
Hello Dean,
Thanks for asking, Happy Holidays and New Year.
The truth is, Steve Hayes banned me for my written attacks on Marvin Olasky's abortion column, and other commentators who called abortion, "murder and killing". I took exceptional outrage at that, as it is factually all a lie. There is no law saying that abortion is murder or killing.
I told Hayes who never replied, that I consider this "Hate Speech" - against women who choose to have abortion, or have had an abortion. It is vicious, outrageous, demonizing, vilifing hate speech.
But as you know, TD is a private company, and they control and dictate what speech is acceptable to them. I agree that is their right.
He also stated I lost him subscribers. For this, I frankly do not care. That is not my responsibility to conform such that I boost his Brand. His Brand, however, he can manage anyway he chooses at his arbitray choice.
I think my 3 months is up in early January.
I still read most of columns an a lot comments. There are several conservative commentators they apparently have banned that led with ad hominem attacks on me. Or maybe I'm not there to be their hurtfelt outlet :).
Anyway, I'll be back - and thanks again for asking Just Dean
DougAZ,
Thanks for your reply.
I am still scanning TD for stories that interest me but am commenting a lot less.
I recently commented on an AO episode about the Colorado Supreme Court decision and was admonished for supporting that decision. The dissenters felt that Trump needs to have his day in court with a jury and that otherwise we are just as bad as Trump. It is not a real concern that the Supreme Court will uphold the decision but if they do, it seems that he will have been given due process and justice will be served.. Sometimes you can't win.
Happy Holidays and all the best in the New Year to you.
Just Dean
My pleasure Dean. It was very kind of you to reach out to me. Happy New Year
I think the homelessness issue is also driven by Boise v. Martin, a 9th Circuit Court ruling, that along with some other related cases, made addressing homelessness in the 9th Circuit a real problem. California obviously has its own issues but Oregon, Washington, Hawaii and other 9th Circuit states are all still trying to figure out how to address homelessness in light of the ruling.
Oahu/Honolulu is a mess these days. But Portland takes it to a whole new level. I haven't been back to Seattle in several years, but my last visit to downtown area was thick with street homeless a that time.
I worked in Portland as a cop when a lot of this was going on. Kind of like California, Portland had its own issues that set the stage for a lot of its problems, and these are somewhat unique to the city. That said, I do think regional court cases created a huge headwind for addressing issues around homelessness.
I was on another substack and wrote something about this. I will not go into all the details, but Boise ID has managed to keep it city clean, so it is not just the court that is the cause. I think most police agencies take their lead from the community, and if they are in a community that generally is opposed to enforcement or rule of law regarding issues around camping, littering, public drug/alcohol use, etc. they will tend to err on the side of doing nothing that could later result in being found outside the law. In other communities, where public order is a higher priority, agencies will take greater risks (because they are less concerned with being fired/disciplined) and push the envelope more.
For the statistically minded I think there is an interaction effect between the level of community commitment to public order, support for police generally, and clarity in what police can legally do that influences the level of disorder generally, and problematic homelessness (a lot of homeless stay in out of the way places and cause very few problems, like most other things it is only a smaller portion that causes most of the problems) in particular. When there is legal confusion around what is acceptable, the police are less willing to do things that could anger even a small but vocal minority. This is because that small but vocal minority tends to wield disproportionate power at city hall and will aggressively take steps to get chiefs fired or officers disciplined.
As the courts clear up the confusion they have created and as agencies develop new tactics, I think cities like Portland will become more livable. It will just take time, legislation, and case law to create an environment where police feel safe to enforce the laws. From speaking with former co-workers in Portland it sounds like this process is already emerging there.
I'd say there are a lot of factors - some of which this touches on. But if you go to Tokyo (most populous city in the world), you don't see trash on the streets, you don't see many homeless, and you don't have a lot of cops going around enforcing things.
Tokyo made any city I've seen in the US look sloppy and noisy and dirty....
There are lots of ways for a community to function - and in different cultures, it isn't about what the police are allowed to do or not do
Thanks for sharing. Agree it comes down to the community as a whole, sometimes the majority needs to tell that vocal minority to fuck off in order to make the streets livable, even if not thrive.
We've visited Boise 3 or 4 times over the past 5 years, and I was amazed at how few street homeless were in downtown and college areas, and we walked a lot a miles in those areas. There were some, to be sure, but nothing like the west coast cities.
We'll see what SCOTUS does with Johnson vs. Grants Pass. They should decide whether to grant cert soon.
But the level of subsidized housing (per 1,000 people) in California is as high if not higher than of any neighboring state (excepting Oregon), and higher than that of a wide swath of farther central states. So a move to California is a good move for almost anyone in the western U.S.
https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-most-and-least-subsidized-housing/
California also ranks 7th in Public Welfare State Expenditures Per Capita, at almost double Texas' rate, for instance.
https://www.statsamerica.org/sip/rank_list.aspx?rank_label=censgovtre_exp_1_c&item_in=040
And the growth in California's median household income (ranked about 5th in level in 2021) for the last ten years is amongst the highest of any state. (It ranked 11th ten years before.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_income
That demonstrates California is as good as any other state if you are as lucky enough to obtain subsidized housing. The critical difference lies in the price of non-subsidized housing compared to other states.
Isn't the vibecession a result of the fact that inflation hits everybody while getting a job or seeing your low-end job wages go up only benefits a small minority of people. During the transient inflation surge, people witth jobs (the vast majority of the workforce even in a recession) saw their real wages go down and the surge in prices was in things they bought frequently like food and gasoline, so it was in their faces on a regular basis. On the other hand, the formerly unemployed and low-wage workers who sarted getting a paycheck or saw their paycheck grow were a small minority of the workforce. IMO a transient episode of inflation is a price worth paying to get back to full employment and the benefits that brings to society (like less domestic stress and substance abuse), but I think most people don't take that into consideration when answering pollsters.
The discussion of wage growth with the two charts still doesn't really make sense to me. If Radia's chart includes people who went from unemployment to employment, which is what I'm getting from the description, then it seems to mix apples and oranges. The whole point of a wage growth analysis is to understand what happened to wages for a consistent set of jobs. Employment growth is a separate dynamic. As much as I like the story about the economy doing well and wages growing, let's not get so attached that we paper over the real reasons many people may be dissatisfied with their situations and with the economy overall.
Some of the wage falls were fake. Some people got reduced hours but were supplemented by COViD relief payments. Had a friend that had hours cut by 20% but was told he’d actually make more with the COViD payments and, with a wink, the firm still expected the same work to get done.
Where my son worked a bunch of staff took the 20% cut to hours and made more money as well. However, my son was pissed because it just left everyone who felt obligated to show up to work with more to do. So, the people who wanted to be lazy (it was voluntary) got more money total but left their work to the ones who thought showing up when getting paid was the ethical thing to do. At least in your friend's case there work sounds like it was divided up evenly.
This is probably not the norm but was frustrating to him at the time.
Ethical, except for the perjury they are induced to commit on the benefit application where they had to say their hours were being cut when they were still expected to work those hours.
Noah - this is the best "five things" compilations that you have produced since I subscribed. We split our lives between Wydaho (Teton Valley) and Hawaii. Little to no homeless in Wydaho (way too cold in the winter, and public drug use is not tolerated, let alone encouraged. There are still are plenty of people struggling with housing, though, including some living in campers/trailers and no shortage of "couch surfers" amongst the younger adults, but they probably would not be counted as "homeless." The only thing stopping Hawaii from being even worse the California is they have to get on a plane to get there. Even still, Honolulu is nearly is bad as LA. We have several "camps" on Kauai island. The local county government can't do much about it, even if they wanted to.
If you are sleeping in a camper or on a friends couch, you are homeless. One of the reasons places like West Virginia don't have a homeless problem like California even though they have a much worse addiction problem, is that it is extremely easy to get cheap substandard housing there. All this stuff has been gentrified in CA. We tore out most of our SROs and turned them into condos and trailer parks are almost a thing of the past in coastal CA.
Agree the couch surfers and trailer are technically homeless. But, they aren't street people homeless. They bathe, have jobs, some spending money, clean clothes, aren't on fentynl, go out to bars and parties, ski, etc.
When most of us think "homeless" we are talking about the street people.
Couch surfers and vehicle dwellers are definitionally homeless. A homeless person is anyone without a permanent address, either as an owner-occupier of a house or a leaseholder.
Street people are visibly homeless, and it's not a definitional term but a pejorative. One of the challenges among the street homeless population is a segment who are service-resistant, who will not avail themselves to shelter or assistance unless forced to by courts and law enforcement.
Yes, yes. Of course.
Anecdotal: Many/most/nearly all of the couch surfer, vehicle/small trailer dwelling persons that I have met through the years was doing so voluntarily in order to live in a certain area. Example, a woman in her upper 60s who we know on Kauai preferred to spend a few years living in her car, or a tent or a van in order to stay on Kauai rather than live in an MIL apartment her daughter had available for her in Las Vegas. And we meet all sorts of 20-30 and even 40-somethings in Teton Valley Wydaho who do so in order to ski/fish/play in the outdoors, although they could easily afford an apartment/condo even house somewhere less interesting/expensive.
More anecdotal: One of our sons (33 yo) rents an expensive bedroom with shared bathroom in a house in Santa Clara so he can continue to live in Bay Area, even though he could buy a house in les expensive areas of the country. He does not want to live in those areas. re other son (31 yo) bought a house with his GF a few years ago in a farming community in NoCal. (She had roots there), but no way they could afford a house anywhere near the Bay Area.