SF ‘Doom Spiral’ Is A Psy-Op
Great things happen here. Why are billionaires trying to drag us down?
Every day online I read stories about how San Francisco is caught in a doom spiral. Relatives reading national media ask how I can live here. Increasing crime and homelessness, the story goes, are causing stores and offices to close and tourists to stay away, leading to more unemployment and crime, and so on down the drain.
Where are these scare stories coming from? Why are there bunches of videos on YouTube with names like “San Francisco Becoming a Ghost Town” and “San Francisco Falling Apart”? A lot of it comes from the tech industry and real estate developers who want to transform the city in their image.
When tech millionaire Bob Lee, founder of Cash App, was slain on a San Francisco street, tech leaders including Elon Musk blamed homeless people and condemned SF’s ‘lax policing’ for allowing it. ‘San Francisco is a nightmare’ memes spread over social media. When it turned out that another tech bro named Nima Momeni , had killed Lee in a personal dispute, the tech people did not admit their mistake or apologize to those they had slandered.
Like the Lee murder, nearly all stories of SF doom turn out to be lies and distortions, as I found in two weeks of exploring so-called high-crime and commercial areas. I’ll describe my findings and explore who is running the city down and why they’re doing it.
My crime search
On a Friday night, I went to see performances put on by the Afro Solo Theater at Stage Werx, a small theater on Valencia at 16th Street. Stage Werx is one block from the 16th Street BART Station, supposedly a dangerous, crime-infested part of the Mission District.
I came out of the BART station about 7:00, and everyone seemed to be having a good time. Some people were vending food or packaged products, some possibly stolen. ‘Harm reduction’ volunteers were giving away supplies to drug users and sex workers, but everyone I saw seemed in good spirits. I didn’t feel threatened at all, and the show was great.
Saturday, I went back to the Mission, this time to Harrison Street for the Carnaval street festival. So many vendors and food and music and fun! Dozens of social agencies and volunteer groups had booths showcasing the good they do. Thousands of people of all ethnicities and ages, no incidents of violence I could see or arguments I could hear.
The good vibes weren’t happening in a park or in a rich neighborhood. This was working class people, the people we’re supposed to fear, celebrating life. I don’t knows where they all lived, but many had ‘Made in the Mission’ hats or t-shirts, and I’m sure most of them would still live there if they could afford it.
Sunday was the Carnaval Parade down 24th Street, hours of culture from around the Americas. From my spot at 24th and Mission, another ‘crime hot spot,’ I saw no signs of crime and both performers and onlookers seemed delighted. The beauty, rhythm, and sexuality of people celebrating their culture are hard to match.
I returned to my apartment on the West side of town, in a development called ParkMerced, although we have no park. It’s a lower middle-class mix of highrises and row apartments, now having trouble keeping apartments occupied, because the rents are too high. Still, walking around the neighborhood, one feels perfectly safe. Birds were singing, flowers growing, pet dogs romping. So, I didn’t see much sign of a collapsing San Francisco here.
The next Wednesday, I went to Heart of the City Farmers’ Market. This market is located one block from what is supposed to be the region’s drug capital, with everyone wasted on Fentanyl, robbing each other and local merchants to pay for their fixes. Even so, there was no sign of crime at the Market, despite there being no police there to keep order. The city has hired agencies such as Urban Alchemy and Community Ambassadors to improve safety. They are not armed; they employ formerly incarcerated people to reinforce behavior norms and help people in need, like with first aid for minor injuries.
This market is one of my favorite places in the world. People are so positive; the farmers are so helpful, the food and flowers are so beautiful, even the elevator operators are so friendly. There’s a lot of poverty visible around the market. Lots of people in wheelchairs, and lots of people lined up to turn in their food stamps for tokens they could use to buy food. Probably 1/3 of the customers use food stamps, but what a wonderful use of government money, supporting food growers and feeding people in need with healthy food.
So, I was surprised to read a doom spiral story about the Heart of the City, saying that many vendors had stopped coming because they or their customers felt unsafe. There were, in fact, empty spaces in the rows of stalls, but market organizers said this was a seasonal phenomenon. Two weeks after the scare article appeared, all the vendors were back. They had stayed away because their crops weren’t ripe. When harvest came, they returned, and the place was buzzing.
It’s not all flowers and food
There really is crime in San Francisco, as in nearly all American cities, and some people, especially homeless people are really suffering. After the parade on Sunday, I returned to 24th and Mission to take BART home. A dozen vendors, often accused of fencing stolen goods from chain stores, had set up their blankets again. I don’t know where these vendors’ get their stuff, but they certainly have good prices, and lots of shoppers were buying. If this is unfair competition for the Walgreens and Targets of the world, why should we care? If those highly profitable chain stores close, how many smaller local proprietors will gain their business?
Out at ParkMerced, residents complain about increasing crime, mostly ‘porch pirate’ package thieves and cars stripped of their catalytic converters. We don’t know who is doing the thefts, and the police rarely come when called. Vacant apartments are being occupied by squatters, and management finds it difficult to evict them, since they can easily relocate to another vacant unit.
Some residents are upset because PM has brought in a lot of low-income renters subsidized by the government’s Section 8 housing vouchers. They do this to fill some vacant apartments and collect rents far above what they could fetch on the open market. Subsidized renters create a more working-class feel to the community, e.g. fixing cars on the street, which some residents find threatening or unpleasant.
A block or two away from my beloved farmers’ market, I saw homeless people, people nodding out, sleeping in doorways, being sick, asking me if I wanted to buy drugs. And there are places I didn’t go, to housing projects in very-low-income neighborhoods where people in need use more drugs to ease their pain, and may commit more property crimes to get them.
But these neighborhoods aren’t the source of the doom spiral narratives. The people spreading that narrative don’t know or care about poor communities. They’re worried about downtown. So, what’s the truth of San Francisco’s supposed crisis?
Why are stores closing?
In recent months, some large office buildings and big stores like Nordstrom’s, Old Navy on Market Street, some Whole Foods and Walgreens stores have closed in San Francisco. Several very large apartment buildings and office towers have been constructed downtown in the last ten years, and many of the apartments and office spaces go unrented. The doom narrative blames the closures and vacancies on high costs from rampant crime, and on homeless people keeping customers and renters away.
The real causes are different. Starting in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic lead to thousands of people working from home, not coming to their offices. Employers couldn’t afford to pay for unused office space. Stores lost all those commuting customers.
Smaller stores, restaurants, and cultural centers were shut down by the city’s harsh pandemic response, leaving only the large chains. Young techies who would pay inflated rents to live in SF when it was a cultural center, saw no reason to keep paying when the city was shut down. But developers kept building highrises and luxury apartments instead of the affordable housing we need. Now they can’t rent them.
Stores also close because online shopping is so much easier than a trip downtown. Big retail is on the way out, but small enterprises could replace them if rent were affordable, just as local bookstores thrive while megastores like Borders and Barnes and Nobles are gone. It’s not the actual crime that caused stores like Nordstrom’s to close, although constant crime stories must keep some customers away.
The real problem is that tech and real estate power savages what made San Francisco attractive and great. San Francisco used to be a working class port city, and a haven for artists, musicians, union workers, rebels, and chefs. Through the dotcom boom of the 90s and the tech boom of the teens, extremely rich techies gentrified large sections of the city and now want it to be a playground for people like them. Real estate developers want the city to be a high-rent investment center. Their rents helped create the poverty here, and now they want to drive poor people out of sight. This is the real reason for the doom spiral narrative.
The real doom spiral
Doom spirals are being felt throughout the USA, not only in SF. They are driven by ever-increasing wealth disparities and by governmental austerity policies. In one month, a federal government budget deal cut the SNAP food assistance budget by an average of $82 per family, three million people were cut from California’s version, called CalFresh, and SF Mayor London Breed announced a 33% reductions in the city’s support for local food banks. How are people supposed to eat? Nobody should be surprised if many take to shoplifting food or robbing stores, begging or dying homeless on the streets.
The crucial thing to understand is that poverty, drug use, and property crimes are not police problems. Whatever the doom spiral propagandists say, they can’t be fixed by locking up drug users or hiring more highly — paid, heavily-armed police. SF’s problems start with wealth disparity: the rich taking everything, then complaining because all the poor people mess up their view. The problems continue with austerity programs: cutting back benefits and services that keep people alive and then screaming about the resulting crime.
More policing and imprisonment, higher rents and higher food prices make these problems worse. They reinforce the culture of cruelty, alienation, and hyper-individualism that makes people think, ‘Nobody cares. I will do what I have to do to survive.’ This is the real doom spiral. We’re seeking safety through power and money, while breaking up communities, the only thing that brings real safety.
Data contradicts the strategy of more police and less tolerance. The police department’s own statistics report violent crime was down under “soft” DA Chesa Boudin, but is up now under tough on crime Brooke Jennings.
Virtue spirals
So much of the crime and homelessness could be easily fixed. Many of the vacant buildings could be profitably rented. ParkMerced could easily fill their units with solid working families, displacing the squatters and decreasing the number of subsidized renters. All they would have to do is lower the rents to make them affordable. They could afford that, but it would decrease their profits, so they won’t. We could have a vibrant working class neighborhood like we had before rents soared.
Programs like The Community Ambassadors and Urban Alchemy control crime much better than the police do, because they are part of the same community as those they serve. They employ people who would otherwise be hungry. They’re stopping crimes rather than committing them. They and the people on the street understand and accept each other in a way the police could never do.
We could and should have more Carnavals and fewer luxury office buildings. We should have more Farmers’ Markets and fewer Whole Foods. More small business and fewer giant chain stores. We need more organized community programs and fewer prison cells. Vacant apartments could be made into affordable housing with social services; empty mega-stores could be repurposed as small commercial and cultural spaces.
We could do this. All the people we need to make SF great are already here. The artists, the activists, the workers live here or would come in a heartbeat if rents were lower. It’s just a question of building community and getting the profit-centered doom spiral crowd off our backs.
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