Name: Can San Francisco Be Saved?
Uploaded: 2020-02-14
Duration: 16 min 11 s
Description: The twin troubles of homelessness and income inequality threaten the storied city by the bay.

[ BLANK_AUDIO ] [ MUSIC ] [ MUSIC ] San Francisco's uniquely beautiful place. It has these gorgeous mountains and seasoned bays that surround it and are unique Culture that has grown up around a place that is relatively small compared to any other great American city. It's got self reliance. It's got Yankee ideas of community. It's got incredible diversity. This is just a great place to be yourself. There's possibility. Everyone has a new idea. Everyone has Something they want to create the city of creators. It's incredible tolerance for difference. It's sort of celebration of all the best things about living With people who are not like you. This is a city that for as long as it's existed, people have come here from everywhere to make live for themselves. People choose to come here because of what San Francisco represents. Because our city is so small, it's seven miles by seven miles and we're all basically living on top of each other. Problems that might. Be in the background elsewhere are very, very visible here. Homelessness, housing, affordability, income inequality, property, crime, congestion, all of the things that make living in a city unpleasant combined with a time where some of the greatest things ever are happening in San Francisco. So the trick is to hit all the good parts of the city and to minimize the bad parts of this city into embrace it all together. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Mayor of the City and County, of San Francisco. of San Francisco, Congratulations. [ APPLAUSE ] Over the past decade we've made great Progress but through it all we've grappled with the twin troubles of homelessness and housing affordability. The suffering on our streets, it offends our civic souls and it should. But if we're gonna do something about the conditions on the streets, we need to level with each other. Housing is too expensive. Working class jobs are too uncertain, and their wages too outpaced by the cost of living. San Francisco and California have been Very good at creating jobs. It has not been good at building housing. In 70 % of the landmass in San Francisco, it's illegal to build anything other than a single family home or maybe a two unit building. We went through a very bad time in the 40s and 50s, in the 60s where we had a redevelopment agency that was literally bulldozing neighborhoods. And at the same time, there was a plan to put all sorts of freeways all over San Francisco, which would have ruined the city. There was a reaction to that, which was a good thing. But we went too far in the other direction when a community decides it's not a priority to build housing. And housing is somehow a bad thing because we don't want any development, we don't want to block views, we don't want more competition for parking. You end up overtime creating a massive shortage. NIMBY stands for Not In My Back Yard, it's a national expression, it's a particularly powerful one. In San Francisco, it's a political way of thinking that says, I don't care how you solve this problem, so long as you don't do it in my neighborhood, in my backyard. There's a little bit of a selfishness about it. I have mine. I'm stable in my housing. Everything works for me, in my community. And so I don't want that to change. It's not majority sentiment. I think most people either legitimately understand that we have to make space for other people and be empathetic to the needs of other people. They understand that to have a vibrant and diverse community. That means allowing people to be able to live there. I don't think that. Any right- minded person would argue that everyone doesn't deserve the dignity of a place to live. I think the argument is over what the best way to achieve that. [ MUSIC ] Marc Benioff, the software titan, has been very philanthropic around San Francisco for quite a few years. He was a supporter of a ballot initiative that would raise hundreds of millions of dollars to build housing and do other things for homeless people in San Francisco. And he then got connected with Doctors at the University of California, San Francisco, who told him that one thing that's needed in homelessness policy is good data. So he gave $ 30 million to the University of California, specifically to support a doctor named Margo coo shell, who then hired another doctor named Joshua Bamberger, who are going about assembling exactly this data. What's really striking to me as sort of a scholar of this as someone who's devoted my life to this Sees homelessness as the completely predictable result of a series of policy failures. It was it's like an oncoming train for a long time. I think that the public and actually people who experience homelessness and See it instead as a result of individual failures. I mean first of all yes people with substance use and mental health disabilities are more likely to be homeless than is the general population. There is nothing about this Abilities that means that you have to be homeless. It just means that you're going to have a lot harder time competing and an otherwise sort of very challenging and crow market. Three quarters of all the people who are homeless in San Francisco, were housed in San Francisco before they became homeless. So this idea that people are getting on a bus and coming to San Francisco and filling up our streets is just not supported by data. Of these three quarters of the people who were living stable in San Francisco before they became homeless. The average amount of time that live stapley San Francisco's about ten years, the economy is causing this huge new number of people falling into homelessness. People who have built this city. Who have worked all of their lives to build the skyscrapers that we see around here and now on the streets of our city, not because they're mentally ill, or addicted drugs, but because they're poor, and there just is no way to maintain the rent in a city that is so supercharged. In homelessness we've had remarkable success Using evidence based policies like permanent it's part of housing to really decrease homelessness and people with significant disabilities. We have more supportive housing per capita in San Francisco than any city in the United States. And yet you compare and contrast that to the conditions on the street that you see today and it's really hard to reconcile those two parallel. Facts that we have housed enormous numbers of people, and yet we still have not made much headway on all the people who are on the streets. So, how does that sit? While we were doing that, we weren't doing anything to change the underlying structural factors that caused homelessness. This devastating lack of what we call extremely low income housing. We need to pay attention to wages. And we need to pay attention to the ongoing and insidious effects of racism that have really driven this crisis and have led the dramatic over representation of black Americans among people experiencing homelessness .>> The fact that housing is the treatment for homelessness is hard to pitch. When you see how much housing we've invested, and how little impact we've made, even though if you dig into a little bit and that's really what our job is, in our UCSF initiative is to prove that what we have done actually has been working quite a bit, but it needs to pivot or shift or evolve, to take care of the new homeless people. Who are on the streets who weren't the typical homeless person 20 or 30 years ago. Today, the majority of people become homeless or just poor and there isn't a place for them to live and that's really different and that the way the system needs to respond Austin needs to evolve. I think certain topics reach a boiling point and in San Francisco multiple topics have reached a boiling point simultaneously. Thanks in those small part to the tech revolution and the great wealth and convenience that has come with it. For a long time tech was, you could see the potential in it. But it wasn't really ruling the world. You know, now it's pretty obvious even you know any company who's doing anything. They've got just a huge dependency on tech. So tech just has a way bigger responsibility To kind of own up to and I think our region is just grappling with that. Chris Larson is a real San Franciscan. He was born in San Francisco. He went to SF State. He loves San Francisco. He got pissed off by the car break ins that were happening in his neighborhood. We kind of worked with the police department and with the district attorney and coming up. With some ideas. He decided to buy cameras to help the police track down the people who were breaking into cars. Once he realized that was a viable thing that a wealthy citizen like him could do, he started doing it for other neighborhoods too. So we donated two and a half, $ 3 million so far. And we're donating more Well we're sort of doing it in a way where we're trying to be effective from crime prevention but also very privacy aware. No facial recognition, no audio and then all the data and all the decision making about what happens with those feeds. To prevent crime, is handled by the local community. I think this is a, again a quintessential San Francisco approach to crime, to technolnology, to urbanism. There's been an ethos here in the valley which I think set the whole thing wrong. And it's this whole obsession with Disruption. That's a bad thing. disruptors are dictators. We've got to think about people that work in Silicon Valley as gilders who are serving the world of every tech company just a little bit. I mean, these problems would they would be solved very quickly if this place is really gonna be such an engine of wealth. And creation and prosperity, but it can't stay like this. People just have to step up though and they can't just ignore it and think it's gonna get better on its own because it's not. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Recall there's a young guy who grew up in Indiana, attended Harvard Business School dropped out to Founded a business in San Francisco, which provides mobile dental care, essentially, the tech workers, they show up in a trailer with dentists and say to these largely young people who maybe didn't have their own dentist, hey, we'll we'll take care of your teeth right here. I think we would not have been successful if we'd started this company in another city that didn't have as an advanced ability to take on and digest new ideas. And so in a way, I feel like San Francisco maybe one or two other cities is the only place that we could have started our company when we did. In 2017, just opened up our brick and mortar office. And so we spent a lot of time growing into that space. In the Tenderloin, which is this down and out neighborhood that's been down and out for a long time, but it's Central. It's near downtown. Town, so it's a pretty good location. Everything that people understand is probably true that there's really great food in the area there. It's really convenient to get there and I think the fears are that people may have about it are also true. For me, it's like any other neighborhood in the city and That's the context. That's the fabric of the city that we're in. He is a true hyper local civic leader and entrepreneur, the quintessential San Franciscan because he's not from here But he loves San Francisco. San Francisco represents the ideals of what he sees as being good or bad of the city and he is also has his eyes wide open about what the challenges are being. Not just in any city but in pretty tough neighborhood in San Francisco in 2020. [ MUSIC ] We donated a day of services to Project Homeless Connect every month. providing free dental services feels great and as a really positive thing to do for a human. It's not the solution to the problems that we're facing on the streets. It feels like a bandaid on an issue that's a little bit more challenging and complex. Two years ago, I joined the board of tendo and community benefit District, which is an organization that taxes property owners In the tenderloin, and they use that tax money to provide additional services above and beyond what the city provides. I'm the president of the board now. And so I've gotten really into figuring out how to create an organization in this neighborhood that That is fighting for the version of the neighbor that we want for me and for each human. I think getting involved with your community and the people who live and work near you. That level of connectedness can build empathy in a way that can build a sense of responsibility. [ MUSIC ] [ MUSIC ] This is a city that is in a really unique time in that there is a lot of focus around the world on the issues that we're facing. But I think that energy and that focus is really exciting because when channeled I think it could really rewrite how to solve these issues. [ MUSIC ] I think that we're all people who deserve an equal share, and I think the tenance that this country is built on is around equality and fairness and justice. And I don't think that anybody who is born on this earth Shouldn't be given an equal opportunity. I think in modern society we've a lot of times gotten away from the notion that we're all in this together and that we're all interconnected and that we don't as human beings just exist in a vacuum, but if we keep sticking our heads in the sand, our problems are going to get more and more pronounced are going to become more and more A city with fabulous wealth and abject poverty on the streets. And we have it within our control to take the right fork in the road and have that bright future of having a diverse, innovative, healthy community. I think we need to reimagine. How we think of things in this country, and what price we're willing to pay as a society. If we can get there, we're gonna have so much more of a vibrant community. And we're gonna return San Francisco to the city that we all moved out here for that is a place of opportunity, as opposed to a place of widening despair. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Can San Francisco Be Saved?

Features

Homelessness and income inequality threaten SF

The twin troubles of homelessness and income inequality threaten the storied city by the bay.