The Atlantic on SF: is DC too a failed city or about to be one?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DC is nothing like SF

Hard disagree. It doesn’t have as much to recommend it. So it’s in a greater danger.

You either have a political agenda or just don't know what you are talking about. I'm guessing the former.

I don’t, I’m really just appalled by the deterioration of the quality of life, especially for those most vulnerable and yet with most to lose. Where are the girls who study and go to school and try to sweep while ATVs and dirt bikes rip through the streets back and forth for hours on end every single night? Who cares for them? My political agenda is to make a healthy, happy, hopeful and unafraid city. This place could be Monaco given its size and strategic importance. Why isn’t it?

Did you say that without the ATVs DC could be Monaco? Huh?

And you pick up on Monaco? Not the little girls? Exactly. And that’s how it all unravels

Are you the PP? What’s this Monaco business about? It makes zero sense on any level. I hope you can explain?

I think it’s just a similar size and with a similar strategic importance yet a balancing act in between more powerful states.
The idea being that frankly one is a massive failure if they can’t keep a scant half mil living in the seat of the leading world government in a well organized, served, orderly city

A small, sovereign city-state governed by a Prince whose economy is based on tax evasion that is most famous for a casino and an annual F1 race has the same strategic importance as the capital of the most powerful nation in earth, governed by an elected President who has by his side 24 hours-a-day a briefcase that contains information that could annihilate all life in the planet within 30 minutes? You may want to take a break from your local “gift shop” for a few days because you’ve clearly been smoking something.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DC is nothing like SF

It doesn’t have as much to recommend it.

Life in the District has been plummeting down hill since The Big Hunt closed.

Omg. When did it close?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-francisco-became-failed-city/661199/

This article is written by Bari Weiss’s partner who is SF old money and family is worth over a billion.

And? Is it untrue?

I don’t think so. It’s an easy scapegoat for a city whose self identification is completely based on denial of what it truly is, which is what it has always been: a boom/bust economy where fortunes are made and people are exploited. They have deceived themselves into believing that the city is anything else and that’s the problem.

[Anonymous]

Which city? Who’s made a fortune in DC?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Which city? Who’s made a fortune in DC?

San Francisco. There’s a reason the NFL teams is called the 49ers.

[Anonymous]

Life in DC started to suck when Round Table closed and there was no late night illegal bar that sold coke, lol

[Anonymous]

Big Hunt had some really cheap pitchers

[Anonymous]

Lol, Round Table......every bartender and waitstaff from Bethesda used to hit that bar after their place closed. Great place for a late night hang out. Good live music too

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:“I used to tell myself that San Francisco’s politics were wacky but the city was trying—really trying—to be good. But the reality is that with the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city. It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results.

But this dogmatism may be buckling under pressure from reality. Earlier this year, in a landslide, San Francisco voters recalled the head of the school board and two of her most progressive colleagues. These are the people who also turned out Boudin; early results showed m that about 60 percent of voters chose to recall him.

Residents had hoped Boudin would reform the criminal-justice system and treat low-level offenders more humanely. Instead, critics argued that his policies victimized victims, allowed criminals to go free to reoffend, and did nothing to help the city’s most vulnerable. To understand just how noteworthy Boudin’s defenestration is, please keep in mind that San Francisco has only a tiny number of Republicans. This fight is about leftists versus liberals. It’s about idealists who think a perfect world is within reach—it’ll only take a little more time, a little more commitment, a little more funding, forever—and those who are fed up.“

You are an idiot. Please stop wasting oxygen.
I feel like San Francisco has always been a dark and cruel place, it’s just that somehow people over the last few decades have tried to pretend that it wasn’t.

Like go watch the Maltese Falcon or any other film noir set in the city. Those stories use SF as a backdrop for a reason. Go read again Call of the Wild (starts with Buck getting stolen in Santa Clara) or Kerouc’s On the Road, where he basically is a sociopath exploiting people for hundreds of pages.

I lived in the Bay Area during the early dotcom boom, the aggressive Darwinistic brutality of the place was never lost on me. Not for a moment.

[Anonymous]

I like people that don’t know how quote tags work calling others idiots.

Here is a quick summary for you: The City and County of SF has always sucked. It’s surprising that it’s taking people so long to figure out.

Even when DC was the murder capital of the US, it actually didn’t suck. But ironically, even if it’s vastly safer, it sucks a lot more now. certainly It sucks a lot more now.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The petty crime was frustrating, but it wasn’t what lit the city up for revolution. The housing crush is miserable, but it’s been that way for more than a decade now. The spark that lit this all on fire was the school board. And the population ready to rage was San Francisco’s parents.

The city’s schools were shut for most of the 2020–21 academic year—longer than schools in most other cities, and much longer than San Francisco’s private schools. In the middle of the pandemic, with no real reopening plan in sight, school-board meetings became major events, with audiences on Zoom of more than 1,000. The board didn’t have unilateral power to reopen schools even if it wanted to—that depended on negotiations between the district, the city, and the teachers’ union—but many parents were appalled to find that the board members didn’t even seem to want to talk much about getting kids back into classrooms. They didn’t want to talk about learning loss or issues with attendance and functionality. It seemed they couldn’t be bothered with topics like ventilation. Instead they wanted to talk about white supremacy.

This doesn't fully resonate with me as a DCPS parent (I did feel there were people within the schools willing to talk about return to school, learning loss, ventilation, even if there never seemed to be any real progress) but the thing that does resonate is that sense of anger and powerlessness as a parent. I actually envy that SF parents had a way to channel that energy towards a concrete action, even if the school board was not that powerful.

There will be no comparable message sent by DC public school parents this election cycle. The alignment is too convoluted anyway. Bowser supported reopening schools but was ineffective at either taking the safety measures the union wanted, or negotiating a different approach with the union. White and other challengers on the ballot are largely backed by the union and, rather than criticize Bowser's inability to get schools safely open in a timely manner, consistently argue that the closures were necessary and they had to go on as long as they did. There is no single politician, or group, arguing vocally that the city made a mistake in keeping schools closed so long, especially after vaccines had been made available to teachers. No one is talking openly about how severely learning loss hurt the city's most vulnerable students, the kids who are essentially in the wind after a year without school, or how long term closures almost certainly increased child hunger and criminal activity among minors.

It's very much as though it never happened. Sometimes I just want to scream. If a DC politician would just stand up and tell the truth about it (that the closure was a mistake that will be paid by kids, especially those at highest risk of negative outcomes to begin with) maybe I'd feel like this depressed about the state of the city. But no one will. This never happened.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The petty crime was frustrating, but it wasn’t what lit the city up for revolution. The housing crush is miserable, but it’s been that way for more than a decade now. The spark that lit this all on fire was the school board. And the population ready to rage was San Francisco’s parents.

The city’s schools were shut for most of the 2020–21 academic year—longer than schools in most other cities, and much longer than San Francisco’s private schools. In the middle of the pandemic, with no real reopening plan in sight, school-board meetings became major events, with audiences on Zoom of more than 1,000. The board didn’t have unilateral power to reopen schools even if it wanted to—that depended on negotiations between the district, the city, and the teachers’ union—but many parents were appalled to find that the board members didn’t even seem to want to talk much about getting kids back into classrooms. They didn’t want to talk about learning loss or issues with attendance and functionality. It seemed they couldn’t be bothered with topics like ventilation. Instead they wanted to talk about white supremacy.

This doesn't fully resonate with me as a DCPS parent (I did feel there were people within the schools willing to talk about return to school, learning loss, ventilation, even if there never seemed to be any real progress) but the thing that does resonate is that sense of anger and powerlessness as a parent. I actually envy that SF parents had a way to channel that energy towards a concrete action, even if the school board was not that powerful.

There will be no comparable message sent by DC public school parents this election cycle. The alignment is too convoluted anyway. Bowser supported reopening schools but was ineffective at either taking the safety measures the union wanted, or negotiating a different approach with the union. White and other challengers on the ballot are largely backed by the union and, rather than criticize Bowser's inability to get schools safely open in a timely manner, consistently argue that the closures were necessary and they had to go on as long as they did. There is no single politician, or group, arguing vocally that the city made a mistake in keeping schools closed so long, especially after vaccines had been made available to teachers. No one is talking openly about how severely learning loss hurt the city's most vulnerable students, the kids who are essentially in the wind after a year without school, or how long term closures almost certainly increased child hunger and criminal activity among minors.

It's very much as though it never happened. Sometimes I just want to scream. If a DC politician would just stand up and tell the truth about it (that the closure was a mistake that will be paid by kids, especially those at highest risk of negative outcomes to begin with) maybe I'd feel like this depressed about the state of the city. But no one will. This never happened.

Good summary. Bowser has messed a lot of things up but people will hold their nose and vote for her because R. White didn’t know how to campaign on competence.

[Anonymous]

This is a beautifully written article, thanks OP.

[Anonymous]

Progressive policy and civilization are incompatible. Hard stop.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DC is nothing like SF

It doesn’t have as much to recommend it.

Life in the District has been plummeting down hill since The Big Hunt closed.

True!