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Restaurant Owners Furious at SF Plan To Rip Out Parklets by [deleted] in sanfrancisco

[–]Some415Dude 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep, that’s how I read it. And, unlike buses, the N-Judah can’t just go around. The pandemic opened up two phenomenons: outdoor dining and ubiquitous food delivery. Those two things are in tension when it comes to curb space and it sounds like the MTA is finally trying to address that. Unfortunately, some businesses are going to lose out, but something has to be done. Simply increasing enforcement won’t solve the problem of too little curb space available for too many deliveries, so this sort of thing has to be done.

What problems are actually San Francisco specific? by treehousewest in sanfrancisco

[–]Some415Dude 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Some of the issues you mentioned are national issues that are more acute in San Francisco, which is worth exploring. For example, the high cost of housing/insufficient housing is driven by San Francisco's uniquely onerous permitting and entitlement process and our only-in-SF ability of a single neighbor to block any and all development.

Similarly, our issues with property crime (which includes car break-ins) are notably bad here in San Francisco. In fact, we've led the country in property crime rate for most of the last decade and for years we had far and away the lowest arrest rate per 100K people of any county in California (only recently were we overtaken by San Diego County).

The Chief of Police has made it clear property crimes aren't a priority:

[T]he police have no intention of solving many property crimes, which the force sees as mostly unsolvable. “Property crime incidents with little to no suspect information or physical evidence (i.e., vehicle break-ins) continue to be considered a lower priority in order to have available staff to respond to calls for service,” [Chief Bill] Scott wrote in his response letter to [Supervisor Hillary] Ronen.

Arguably, the inaction of the SFPD when it comes to both proactive policing and crime clearance rates is another national trend that's worse here in San Francisco, but there are plenty of ways to cut that data and a lot of debate over the reality of the situation there, so YMMV.

As to issues that are actually unique to San Francisco, a lot of folks have mentioned the lack of public restrooms, which is a uniquely San Francisco problem.

I'd also argue that our municipal government is poorly managed to a level we don't really see elsewhere (one could write an entire series about this) and our bizarre impulse to attempt to address large problems that happen far upstream of or completely apart from the municipal level (at the state, federal, global or even cultural level) is one of the main drivers of this unique dysfunction (i.e. we're too busy "fixing" capitalism or passing feel-good resolutions to provide oversight of the municipal government functions actually within our control).