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[                    ]
United StatesAug 28th 2021 edition

Fogged in
Why San Francisco's city government is so dysfunctional

Covid-19 has exposed many of the city's old problems--and some new
ones, too

[20210828_USP003_0]
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Aug 28th 2021

SAN FRANCISCO

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SAN FRANCISCO boasts the lowest death rate from covid-19 of any big
American city. An early shutdown, a culture of caution and mask
mandates helped curb the spread of the virus. "Our response to
covid-19 has been hailed as a national model," crows London Breed,
the mayor. More than 78% of those eligible are fully vaccinated, one
of the highest rates in the country.

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The City by the Bay may have avoided a heavy death toll from covid-19
but, counter-intuitively, it could feel the virus's impact longer
than other places. Ted Egan, the city's chief economist, admits as
much. "San Francisco could well have a slower economic recovery than
other cities," he says. The city, with a GDP which roughly matches
that of Greece, is facing a swathe of problems. These include
emigration, a rise in some types of crime, drugs and homelessness.
Dysfunctional and corrupt governance makes them harder to fix.

Faced with the prospect of paying steep rents while enduring some of
the longest, strictest lockdowns in the country, people left--some
permanently. According to CBRE, a commercial-property firm, 27% of
offices are being marketed as available in San Francisco (compared
with 19% in Manhattan). An analysis by California Policy Lab at the
University of California shows that "net exits" from San Francisco
(those leaving minus those arriving) rose by 649%--from 5,200 to
nearly 39,000--in the last three quarters of 2020. The drop in
apartment rents was the largest in the country, although they are
climbing back. Even with this adjustment, the cost of living in San
Francisco is still around two and a half times higher than the
national average and 44% more than New York City.

[20210828_U]

Much attention has been paid to techies taking their laptops to the
suburbs, the Sierras or Austin, Texas, but the less well-off have
moved too. In the first quarter of 2021 average wages increased 34%
year-on-year, the largest jump of any big county and six times the
national average. This suggests a severe shortage of workers,
especially in hospitality, says Mr Egan.

With less bustle and fewer commuters, San Francisco's problems have
become more obvious. "We're a smaller city, a dense city, so our
social problems are more visible to people," says Matt Haney, who
represents the troubled Tenderloin neighbourhood on the 11-member
Board of Supervisors, which functions as the city's legislative
branch. "Our city government overall fails to meet the moment and has
for some time," he admits.

Start with schools. San Francisco was the only top-25 city not to
bring most middle- and high-school pupils back to classrooms at all
in the 2020-21 academic year. Meanwhile the school board used its
time to scrap merit-based admissions to its leading high school in
order to boost diversity, and spent months researching and then
voting to change schools named after people it deemed objectionable
on grounds of racism or otherwise standing in the way of progress,
such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, before abandoning the
idea after a public outcry.

The renaming-while-not-reopening saga was almost a parody of San
Francisco. A school-board commissioner criticised for racist tweets
tried to sue her fellow board members and the school district for
$87m. Parents who could afford to do so, including the former head of
the Parent-Teacher Association, moved their children to private
schools. Now an effort is under way to gather enough signatures to
remove three commissioners from the school board in a special recall
election. On Twitter some teachers and school board members are
firing back at "reopener" parents.

A similar dysfunction afflicts policing and the criminal-justice
system. Before covid-19 San Francisco was the car-break-in capital of
America; but with fewer tourists, criminals have shifted their
attention. Home burglaries are up. Shootings have more than doubled
in the past year. Viral videos show daytime heists, with perpetrators
sauntering out of stores without consequence. Lax enforcement of drug
laws can become fatal when even small amounts can kill. In 2020 San
Francisco saw around 700 deaths from overdoses, mostly from fentanyl:
more than double the number from covid-19.

The district attorney (DA), Chesa Boudin, who ran on a platform of
sending fewer people to prison and assumed office in January 2020, is
the public's person-of-interest. Two recall campaigns to remove him
from office were started. One failed, but the other looks poised to
gather enough signatures to trigger a vote. Mr Boudin, the son of two
members of the leftist Weather Underground who were convicted for
their involvement in the murder of two police officers and a security
guard, has many critics, including, unsurprisingly, the police. Tony
Montoya, who runs the police union, says officers are taking some
cases directly to federal prosecutors, because they feel the DA is
loth to prosecute them and pursue maximum charges.

Mr Boudin says he is being unfairly targeted. "None of the recall
groups talk about how our courthouse has been mostly closed for the
past year," he says. "The issues have been driven more by a pandemic
than any policy I've pursued." Nor are the police blameless. In the
fourth quarter of last year, the "clearance" rate for robbery (which
measures the share of reported crimes that result in an arrest) was
half that of New York City. The police are notoriously unresponsive.
Gillian Morris, a startup founder, called three times about two
office break-ins and one stolen package but never heard back. She
describes San Francisco as "the most dysfunctional place I've ever
lived when it comes to the protection of property and public safety".
(She left and now lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico.)

All this is despite San Francisco's budget more than doubling since
2010 while the population rose less than 9%. As Michael
Shellenberger, a journalist, writes in his forthcoming book, "San
Fransicko": "Though I have been a progressive and Democrat all of my
adult life, I found myself asking a question that sounded rather
conservative. What were we getting for our high taxes? And why, after
20 years of voting for ballot initiatives promising to address drug
addiction, mental illness, and homelessness, had all three gotten
worse?"

One City Hall insider suggests that San Francisco overreacts to
issues that are in the national news, and designs solutions to the
country's problems rather than its own. For example, when Mr Boudin
ran on his platform of less punitive justice, San Francisco already
had one of the lowest incarceration rates in the country. In 2019,
106 adults were in prison for every 100,000 people, one-fifth the
rate in California and the nation. If the rest of the country behaved
like San Francisco, the prison population would decline by 80%, says
James Austin of the JFA Institute, a think-tank that evaluates
criminal-justice policies.

City politics would look very different, quips one prosecutor, if
everyone who got fed up could vote after they left San Francisco.
Joel Kotkin of Chapman University blames high costs for the city's
political make-up: "You wouldn't have the politics of San Francisco
if there was still a middle class left," he says. Young techies are
transient and older residents, who locked in affordable housing
decades ago, are happy enough with the status quo. The well-heeled
can insulate mostly themselves, opting out of public schools and
hiring neighbourhood security guards. As it is, the city has been
safely Democratic for 40 years and seems allergic to choosing a
Bloomberg-type figure from one of the big tech companies to try
something different.

No elected mayor has failed to be re-elected in 20 years, points out
Griffin Gaffney of Together SF, a volunteer group. That is despite a
slew of corruption scandals. Joe Eskenazi, a reporter for Mission
Local, an online news site, reckons "San Francisco's problems aren't
liberalism. They're incompetence and corruption." Municipal graft has
long been a feature of the city, dating back to the Barbary Coast
days and the Gold Rush. But many are unaware that their city is
currently at the centre of a big public corruption probe by the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Already three former City Hall department heads have been charged by
federal prosecutors, including the former boss of the Public Works
Department, Mohammed Nuru, who has been accused of bribery. Craig
Fair, the FBI agent in charge, describes "insidious corruption
plaguing San Francisco". Mayor Breed, who once dated Mr Nuru,
recently agreed to pay a fine of $23,000 to the city's Ethics
Commission for accepting payment for her car repairs from Mr Nuru and
using mayoral stationery to press the then-governor to reduce her
brother's prison sentence.

Ms Breed is also the highest-paid mayor in the country, earning a
salary of $351,000. She sits at the summit of a highly paid
bureaucracy. In 2020 nearly 150 city employees earned salaries of
over $300,000, and roughly one-fifth earned salaries of over
$150,000. The cost of living contributes to these pay-packets. But
city government also functions like one of those clubby, richly
valued startups that politicians accuse of ruining San
Francisco--flush with cash, but operating with little oversight. #

This article appeared in the United States section of the print
edition under the headline "Fogged in"

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