Slouching towards San Francisco

Tech hubris and ideology

• Several comments link today’s “visionary” tech urbanism to older imperial and Manifest Destiny-style projects: powerful people assume money + success in one domain = authority to redesign society.
• This is framed as recurring hubris; the real question is how and on whom the eventual backlash (“Nemesis”) falls.

Homelessness, NGOs, and spending

• One line of argument: SF spends an enormous homelessness budget relative to the visible unsheltered population, yet fails to house everyone; this is cited as evidence of progressive mismanagement and an entrenched nonprofit industry with perverse incentives.
• Pushback notes the naïveté of “dollars per homeless person” math: point-in-time counts exclude people already housed or prevented from becoming homeless with those funds, and homelessness is dynamic.
• Some say genuinely effective, conditional interventions are dismissed as punitive, so ineffective programs persist.

Housing, density, and “progressive” hypocrisy

• Many argue SF’s core problem is constrained housing supply: anti-development processes, zoning, parking and height limits, and NIMBY culture create a de facto housing cartel that enriches owners and drives inequality and homelessness.
• SF is described as “progressive” only rhetorically; a place where starter homes cost seven figures and working-class families can’t live is called fundamentally regressive.
• Comparisons: Texas/Georgia/Ohio are said to be “more progressive” on housing simply because you can buy a home; counter-arguments point to those states’ conservative social policies.
• NYC is cited as an example where higher density, transit, and commutable outer areas make living possible on more incomes; commenters argue SF should be much denser and better connected regionally.

Budgets, crime, and government performance

• Data cited in-thread say SF’s per-capita budget far exceeds nearby cities; some conclude the city is not underfunded but spends ineffectively, with a bloated public payroll.
• Others caution that city vs county roles and enterprise departments (like airports) complicate comparisons.
• There’s a sharp dispute over recent trends: some claim crime and homelessness are down significantly, crediting a small number of wealthy actors who forced government to “actually solve problems.”
• Skeptics attribute crime trends more to post-COVID normalization and policy changes (including court decisions on encampments) than to any one mayor or donor bloc; some say homelessness is less visible, not clearly lower.

Role of tech, civic groups, and inequality

• Debate over whether centrist, supply-side housing groups (GrowSF, Abundant SF, etc.) are “right-wing,” merely centrist, or pragmatic reformers.
• Supporters see them as common-sense, data-driven attempts to fix livability issues; critics allege they’re fronts for landlords, developers, and right-leaning billionaires and question funding transparency.
• Some commenters argue SF’s problems are “problems of success” relative to deindustrialized cities; others say the macro driver everywhere is concentrated wealth, with local political architecture still mattering a lot.

Lived experience and perceptions of SF

• Visitors and residents describe the jarring juxtaposition of extreme wealth and visible poverty: AI/tech billboards and driverless cars alongside broken glass and struggling neighborhoods.
• Locals disagree over whether transit and schools are “crumbling” or merely imperfect but functional compared to the past and to other cities.
• Several note that SF dominates national imagination partly because the U.S. produces so little visible change elsewhere, so selective SF anecdotes get overinterpreted as symbols for broader societal trends.