Astral Codex Ten

San Fransicko

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San Fransicko

Article

San Fransicko is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 23, 2022 and June 29, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “I think San Fransicko gets this mostly right”; “Now let’s see what San Fransicko has to say”; “Continuing in San Fransicko :“. It most often appears alongside Amsterdam, Bay Area, California.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: June 23, 2022
  • Last seen: June 29, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: San Fransicko
June 23, 2022 · Original source
In the spring of 2021 two colleagues and I went to San Francisco. We first went to check in on the open-air drug scenes in the Tenderloin and United Nations Plaza. It was the usual scenes of people sitting against buildings and injecting drug needles into their necks and feet. There was garbage, old food, and feces everywhere. After a couple of hours, we decided to go out to eat in the Mission. Work was over. We were all looking forward to a relaxing dinner. We were eating ice cream and walking along Valencia Street when a psychotic man, perhaps about thirty years old, began following us and screaming obscenities. When we turned around to look at him, he screamed at us, “What are you looking for, huh! WHAT. ARE. YOU. LOOKING. FOR!” and started walking faster toward us. We walked faster until the man found other people to verbally assault.
Things haven’t always been like this. San Francisco used to be one of the safest and most beautiful cities in the world. Shellenberger opens with the story of a 1970s SF candidate who campaigned on a message of public cleanliness, promising stronger punishments for owners who failed to pick up after their dogs. The message was a hit, so much so that the increased community and social pressure was enough to reverse the dog-poop-in-parks problem with minimal police enforcement.
In 2018, San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, held a walking tour with television cameras and newspaper reporters in tow. “I will say that there’s more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen,” said Breed. “Growing up here, that was something that wasn’t the norm.”
Highlights From The Comments On San Fransicko
June 29, 2022 · Original source
I asked experts and advocates, “How do we know that the homeless population won’t replace itself if provided with housing?” Said Randy Shaw, the Tenderloin permanent supportive housing provider, “The question you’re raising is one that never gets discussed. Somehow, there’s this sense that San Francisco is under the obligation that anyone who comes here we have to suddenly house. There is an underlying logic that San Francisco doesn’t really ever want to talk about.”
But the stats I found were that 70% of SF homeless lived in SF before becoming homeless, 22% were elsewhere in California, and 8% were from other states. From this report, I gather most of the Californians were elsewhere in the Bay Area or nearby, and this is more like homeless people in Palo Alto going to San Francisco because it’s the nearest big city with a shelter, rather than people opportunistically seeking places with good social services. So while the opportunistic thing does happen, it doesn’t seem to be responsible for very much of the homeless presence.
Inline links: 70% of SF homeless, this report
Overall these numbers make me a little less worried about this concern. San Francisco is already quite generous, and even if some new policy doubled the absolute number of people who came from elsewhere, it would only increase the total number 10-20%.