Can San Francisco Be Saved?

[Music] Sam Cisco's a uniquely beautiful place it has these gorgeous mountains and and seas and Bay's that surround it and a 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 as 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 lives for themselves people choose to come here because of what San Francisco represents because our city is so small at 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 have all the good parts of the city and to minimize the bad parts of the city and to and to embrace it all together Mayor of the City & County of San Francisco of San Francisco congratulations 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 going to 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 in their wages to out pasted 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 of 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 into the 60s where we had a Redevelopment Agency that was literally bulldozing neighborhoods and at the same time there was a plan that put all sorts of freeways all over San Francisco which would have ruin 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 the development we don't want to block views we don't want more competition for parking you end up over time creating a massive shortage NIMBY stands for not in my backyard it's a it's a national expression it's 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 the dignity of a place to live I think the the argument is over what the best way to achieve that is Marc Benioff the 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 at San Francisco who told them that one thing that's needed in homelessness policy is good data so he he gave 30 million dollars to the University of California specifically to support a doctor named Margot kachelle 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 is so and he's devoted my life to this sees homelessness as the completely predictable result of a series of policy failures it was it's like been an oncoming train for a long time I think that the public and actually people who experience homelessness 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's nothing about those disabilities that means that you have to be homeless it just means that you're gonna have a lot harder time competing in an otherwise sort of very challenging and grow market you know 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 were living stabili in hot San Francisco before they became homeless the average amount of time they live stable in San Francisco is about 10 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 supportive housing to really decrease homelessness in 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 streets 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 well we were doing that we weren't doing anything to change the underlying structural factors that cause 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 structural racism that have really driven this crisis and have led to the dramatic of a 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 and our UCSF initiative is to prove that what we'd 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 who become homeless are 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 also 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 no 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 our region is just scrapping 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 in coming up with some ideas he decided to buy cameras us to help the police track down the people who were breaking into cars once he realized that that was a viable thing that a wealthy citizen like him could do he started doing it for other neighborhoods too so we've donated a two and a half three million dollars so far donating more and we're sort of doing 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 to crime Knology 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 builders who are serving the world of every tech company just did a little bit I mean these problems with you they would be solved very quickly if this place is really going to be such an engine of wealth and creation and prosperity 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 [Music] well Calder is a young guy who grew up in Indiana attended Harvard Business School dropped out to found a business in San Francisco which provides mobile dental care essentially to 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 us at 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 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 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 were in he is a true you know hyper local civic leader and an 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 about a city and he also has his eyes wide open about what the challenges are of being not just in any city but in a pretty tough neighborhood in San Francisco in 2020 we donated a day of services to Project Homeless Connect every month providing free dental services feels great and is 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 band-aid on an on an issue that's a little bit more challenging and complex two years ago I joined the board of Tenderloin 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 that is fighting for the version of the neighborhood that we want for me and for each human I think getting involved with your community and the 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] 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 it could really rewrite how to solve these issues I think that we are all people who deserve an equal share and I think the tenants that this country is built on is around equality and fairness and justice and I don't think that anybody who's 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 gonna get more and more pronounced we're gonna 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 avoiding despair [Music]

Channel: Fortune Magazine

Views: 332,604

Rating: 4.1410089 out of 5

Keywords: Journalism Franchise, Fortune, business, wall street, finance

Id: bnyoar9gq9Q

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/RockefellerAndRoll]

lol no

[u/FinanceCorpStrategy]

If you kick out the government.

[u/[deleted]]

Lived there for a year. The answer is "if you burn it to the ground".

[u/FoidBlaster]

No, and they don't deserve to.