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0 pointspeter4223y ago0 comments

Who is going to strictly enforce all the laws? The excess police officers that can't be hired because they can't afford to live in the city and don't want to commute into a city they don't care about to make less money than other nearby communities will pay them? Fewer than 25% of SF cops live in SF.

It all comes back to housing. If you have a desirable place, people want to live there, and at some point if you don't keep up with growth then your city starts to lose the really important people that kept it running (nurses, teachers, police officers, etc).

It's not like SF almost kept up with growth... They didn't try and fell so far behind in a deliberate attempt to keep a status quo, which completely led to the current disaster.

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pfannkuchen3y ago· 2 in thread

Sorry if my point wasn’t clear. I am saying that conceptually some of the other problems people are discussing aren’t strictly caused by a housing shortage. The path we took from a prior “okay” state to the current “not okay” state may have been rooted in a lack of housing, but not all paths back to an “okay” state necessarily require that we solve the housing problem.

Asserting that e.g. people pooping in the street is caused strictly by expensive housing would require some mental gymnastics IMO, there are simpler explanations and simpler ways out, without blocking on solving the expensive housing problem. If for example we ended up with a nice peaceful city but the police budget was really really high (so they could live locally), that would be a much less hairy problem than we have today I think. Nice peaceful city tends to generate more tax revenue also.

travisjungroth3y ago

Seems unfair to call a suggestion to fix the main cause of many problems “mental gymnastics”. Raising police salaries and lowering housing costs are both about making things more affordable, just from different ends.

pfannkuchen3y ago

That isn’t what I was calling mental gymnastics.

> Asserting that e.g. people pooping in the street is caused strictly by expensive housing would require some mental gymnastics

Key word being strictly, i.e. expensive housing is the cause of street pooping, and there is ultimately no other way to prevent street pooping other than to reduce housing costs broadly.

Raising police salaries is obviously a much easier problem to solve, right? It is something that is already under government control and it can be modeled using a simple spreadsheet. Housing cost on the other hand is not really possible to model accurately, the system is too complex and has too many inputs.

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