Fox News and San Francisco

Fox News has been putting a lot of emphasis lately on painting San Francisco as a city run by incompetent liberals - I presume hoping some of the paint will spill onto Nancy Pelosi.  

Yes San Francisco has major problems.  No, the "liberal" government of San Francisco is not the reason.

San Francisco is being buffeted by forces that no other city in the America faces.  San Francisco sits in a spectacularly beautiful setting with a marvelous climate.  In the winter the low temperature never gets much below 40 degrees, in the summer the daytime high temperature is almost always in the 60 to 80 degree range.

Since it's founding it has been a place lots of people want to live and are loath to leave.  But the city sits on 7 square miles of steep hills, landfill and sand dunes, surrounded by water on three sides, and riddled with earthquake faults.  Locations within the city where it is safe to build multi-story buildings are limited.  The building limitations have limited the the population of the city to under 800,000 people.

The tech industry that started in Silicon Valley loves San Francisco and much of it has moved north to San Francisco in the last two decades, pushing San Francisco to the point of being one of the most expensive cities in the world.  Tens of thousands of the residents of San Francisco can no longer afford to live a normal life in a place where they grew up or chose to move to.  Some left, many have tried to stay, disgruntled and feeling abused.

To understand Prop 47, which your article cites as the source of San Francisco's petty crime problem, some back story is necessary.  From the late 1970's through the early 2000's Republicans, with financial support from the prison guards union, controlled California.  Their main policy goals were cutting taxes and getting tough on crime.  As a result California's prison population exploded and thousands of young people ended up with criminal records limiting their future options.  The tax cuts usually cut social programs that helped socially disadvantaged and mentally ill folks, contributing to the explosion in homelessness.

In the mid-2000's California voters tossed out the last vestige of Republican control of the state, but the problems from 30 years of Republican exclusive focus on tax cuts and being tough on crime still haunt the state.  The imbalance is demonstrated by a simple statistic.  

In 2010, about 14 employees of the State of California were paid more than $500,000.  One was an educator, the president of the University of California.  The rest were all employees of the Department of Corrections.

The single event that was emblematic of the problem that sparked Prop 47 was a 25 year prison sentence handed down for stealing a piece of pizza.  

Many prosecutors always opposed Prop 47 but a 2018 University of California study that compared the changes in crime rates in California under Prop 47 with other states found trends in California matched trends in other states.

But even though Prop 47 has worked at reducing prison populations and been good for most of California, in San Francisco the combination of a large, disgruntled population displaced by the tech industry living in the midst of vast wealth has created a culture of disrespect for the law.  But Prop 47 is a state law, San Francisco does not have the power to change it and must comply with it.

Private police?  High taxes or not, how many new police officers can the city afford when to lure new officers it has to offer a salary to live in or near a city where a one bedroom apartment costs around $4000 a month, and the median home price is $1.6 million?

It is going to take many years to continue to unwind all the narrow minded policies pushed by Republicans for 30 years, and the problems with wealth taking over San Francisco.  As a lifelong resident of California, who spent many years registered and voting as a Republican, I know California's problems have more to do with the Republican anti-tax and tough on crime views that Fox News thrives on than with anything the left has ever done.