Breed’s office has said the measure was intentionally designed to be flexible on the treatment component. Treatment options could range from out-patient services to a prescription for buprenorphine, a medication used to treat addiction. They noted it doesn’t include a requirement for participants to remain sober, recognizing that people often lapse in recovery and shouldn’t be kicked out of the program for a slip-up.
Ah so the real estate developers are finally ready to finish their gentrification efforts. They must've forced out the last remaining owners in the area so now they can crack down and turn it into overpriced bullshit
And to be clear, they vote authoritarian because they are the authoritarians. In a capitalistic society money is authority. Those with money rule.
People assume rich people are voting against their self interests somehow, but they're not. Money serves them and allows them to be exempt from most of the laws and rules.
They vote on laws that let them keep and make more money, at the expense of you not making as much. Then they use that wealth and influence to do it more.
Drug treatment is important, yes, but making it a precondition for benefits will absolutely hurt the most vulnerable. If there was actually enough affordable housing available for everyone that needs it, there would be far less of a need for this kind of policy. It is well documented that providing housing before anything else sets people up for success. If someone has been living on the streets and suddenly has housing available, their life will improve so drastically thanks to the job and social opportunities that will become available, also making it less likely that drug abuse will continue.
This seems like a cop out to me. Just build houses for fuck’s sake.
Breed has been on the wrong side of so many issues. Most recently she made an incredibly tone-deaf statement denouncing the city council’s vote against the genocide in Gaza. I’m done with her.
Thanks for the heads up. Yeah, I’m cautiously hopeful, but still quite skeptical they’ll get it right. These measures often sound good, but implementation is key.
Yeah I feel the same, cautiously hopeful. It seems like the implementation always gets bogged down with corruption, red tape and fingerpointing in this city...
Given that neither her nor the council have anything to do with policy in Gaza and that both are going to be making statements purely to aim to appeal to chunks of the electorate, does it make sense to condition your vote on that?
If you were choosing a dentist, would you use their stated positions on the Levant to do so?
I'm not a San Francisco resident, so I don't get a vote, I just have lots of connections to the region. She didn't have to denounce the city council's resolution against the genocide, she chose to, and that felt like a gut punch to me at the time. As for the relevance of it all, it was a non-binding (obviously) resolution taking a moral stand on an issue directly impacting hundreds if not thousands of residents in a pretty small city, so it matters.
I take your point, but if I asked my dentist if they thought it was okay to indiscriminately kill tens of thousands of children because they were born on the wrong side of a border, and they said yes? I'd absolutely find a different doctor.
If I had a dentist who told me that they were okay with tens of thousands of children being murdered? Yeah, I might worry about their compassion as a healthcare provider.
For one thing, it's extremely difficult to force someone out of an addiction. You usually have to want to quit in order for that to be an option. Otherwise you have to do something like torture them by making them go through a possibly extremely painful cold turkey withdrawal.
So I'd say torturing the most vulnerable would hurt them.
One of the worst parts of this, and one that will get people killed, is they loosened the restrictions on police chases. Now police can chase cars for crimes where there's no longer a threat of violence like robbery through the second densest city in the country. People are so indoctrinated by copaganda that they think police chases always end up with the cop catching the bad guy instead of how they usually end, with a fatal crash.
The way I always hear it is that they are only ever chasing murderers and violent offenders and you should want them to catch those grandma-killers before they get you, too.
That's how it was before, for the police to chase their had to be a reasonable suspicion that the criminal was in there way to commit another violent crime. So if a robbery happened and the police arrive and the criminal takes off the reasonable assumption is theyre heading back home, not off to commit another violent crime, so the police would not pursue them. Now they can pursue them and endanger all the people on the road just to protect the property of the store owner.
Cop shows and movies distort our perception of them but the reality is that most police chases end in a crash and serious injury if not death. This chance goes up even higher with dense cities with a lot of pedestrians around like San Francisco. So they should only be used if they're preventing someone from murdering or seriously injuring someone else. A car at high speeds is just as , if not more dangerous than a gun and should be used as such.
I occasionally get in the police dash cam rabbit hole. It's crazy how most states have realized how dangerous car chases are and don't chase at all. BOLO the car and go arrest them the next day.
Then there Arkansas and Georgia where all the cops are just itching to get into a 130mph chase through neighborhoods willing to pit at any speed risking their life, the suspects life, and the hundreds sometimes thousands of people they go screaming past during a chase.
That same measure also allows the use of drones and other technology to follow and track the suspects, so may not necessarily mean more automobile persuits. We'll have to wait and see I guesa.
That is a pretty sad turnout. The votes reflect the choices of about 92K registered democrats, vs. roughly 13K registered rebublicans though, so it's not like this is some right wing takeover.
Local tech billionares are recently dumping more money into the city politics to shift it ot the right. The CEO of Y combinator, a hugely influential silicon valley incubator is notoriously antagonist and recently drunkenly said the local city council should "die slow."
Measures supporting low income housing, more ethics laws for city officials, turning office space into residential space, and $6B for mental health care also passed in the election. Those definitely don't seem like things that the right would support.
Hes right of San Fransisco progressive politics. Basically bog standard tech bro liberals, i.e "Yimby but not actually where I live, also don't tax me in any real way and where are all my cops at?"
The 7 city council members he told to die were all progressives. He opposes actual progressive reforms, and is willing to spend his billions and his massive influence to fight them.
Yeah he definitely seems like a bit of a loose cannon that only has a platform due to his wealth. Not that it makes it excusable, but he did issue an apology for what thats worth. I definitely don't think that the majority of voters agree with the remarks he made to the city council members.
However, I do think that due to the prominent quality of life crimes, homelessness and drug use in recent years, a lot of the voters in San Francisco have become disenfranchised with Progressive politics, viewing them as failed experiments.
The rest of the propositions you mentioned were pretty liberal but the office space one was lead by the right. It allowed for fast tracking transforming office space from commercial to residential, which sounds good on paper, until you realize that fast track already existed for affordable housing. All the proposition did was fast track developers plans to turn the space into non-affordable housing, which San Francisco already has plenty of, and removes the incentives to build affordable housing out of that space.
You could argue that reducing the red tape for market rate housing would help increase the supply and therefore reduce the cost for everyone, but that's a standard right wing pro-developer argument. The left would say that SF has been building tons of market rate housing for years with no decrease in rent and that the only way to make housing affordable is to build affordable housing. You can either build it through state funding and building, like the affordable housing proposition A does, or by incentiving developers to build it, because the base incentive of the market is to build the most expensive housing possible to maximize profits.
The Inclusionary Housing Program requires developers to set aside a percentage of the housing as affordable.
Even if it is not classified as affordable housing, it is still more housing which the city needs regardless.
Also, another measure that passed in the previous vote was for a tax on vacant units it multi-unit buildings. If they don't at least compete with market rate, they will suffer.