Misunderstanding San Francisco

San Francisco is the richest city in America by a margin. The city is so rich that the median household income of the entire city is on par with New York’s wealthiest neighborhoods. Not only is the city rich, but it also doesn’t have very many people - just 800,000.

San Francisco is often misunderstood in the media and by its own residents because the focus is on the city’s problems. The city defines itself by its problems, rather than expects to stand where it should given its resources.

Crime Rates

A lot is written about crime in San Francisco. The levels of crime compared to rich neighborhoods in NYC is incredibly high.

Effective Policing

Yet within San Francisco itself, there are neighborhoods that are policed by Federal police rather than SFPD where crime rates are low. Federally policed neighborhoods that make up 5% of the city have crime rates similar to those of other wealthy neighborhoods in the US. The Federally policed neighborhoods also have high median income rates.

These figures are another way of illustrating what the data shows: SFPD is one of the worst-performing police department in California on a dollar-per-arrest basis. Over the past 10 years, the SFPD budget is up about 20%, the number of reported offenses is up 15%…and the number of arrests is down 60% per reported offense. This is according to San Francisco and the SFPD.

Indeed, SFPD officers make nearly 50% more per year than the Federal police and yet the Federal police deliver. The solution to crime in San Francisco more likely lies in performing basic police work - as the clean-up for the visit from President Xi showed last week - than in solving complex social problems.

Homelessness By The Numbers

Despite the headlines, San Francisco has a small homeless population.

Homelessness By Choice

Homelessness in San Francisco is in the headlines because the city does not provide many shelters. The reason shelters matter is that if everyone has a place to go, then the city can enforce laws to limit vagrancy, ensure quality of life and curtail property crime. Even though NYC has half the homeless population of all of California, San Francisco has slightly more unsheltered homeless people than NYC does.

San Francisco spends big on fighting homelessness - about a third of Denver’s entire city budget every year. The city also has a special revenue tax levied on businesses to address homelessness. But the city makes the choice to build very few shelters.