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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

I grew up just south of SF and still live in the Bay Area. You are right about this, but there is another element here: anti-Asian racism and violence, and the non-response of city politicians to that racism and violence. The school board recall was driven by Asian parents who had kids who had been targeted and racially harassed (and worse) and the progressive school board members were doing nothing except tearing apart Lowell and keeping kids out of school. Kids and elderly Asians were (and are) subjected to violence and awful racism in SF. But the city progressive politicians essentially did not react.

It’s true that SFPD has also largely gone on strike. They have never cared about victims of racist violence, though, so that isn’t new.  [/quote]

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