San Francisco has long seen skirmishes among factions of its overwhelmingly Democratic electorate, but fissures are widening, positions are hardening and the public sees little hope of fixing the chronic problems that have plagued the city for decades, according to one of the most comprehensive surveys of city residents ever done.
即使在旧金山逐渐恢复的crushing blow of the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority of respondents expressed deep worry, frustration and continued pessimism about civic life in the city, The Chronicle’s SFNext poll of 1,653 residents found.
“I’m getting kind of fed up with the city,” said poll respondent Dae Echols, 53, who expects that the high cost of living will force him to move elsewhere when he retires. “I just remember the hippie generation, and it was all about, take care of your friends, brotherly love. And that is totally gone.”
The result is a city that has already ejected from office its district attorney and three school board members. Unhappiness with law enforcement has led to rallies by Asian Americans protesting violence against their elders and a lack of police protection and prosecutions. Frustration over homelessness and its impact on street life in the Castro district led to a threat by the neighborhood’s merchants’ association to withhold business taxes.
John Whitehurst, a political consultant, said he has “never seen voters more upset and angry in San Francisco than they have been over the last two years and continue to be, and that anger gets expressed in many ways. Two ways, recently, include the district attorney recall and the Board of Education recall.”
Roughly one-third of the respondents said they were likely to leave within the next three years. A large majority, 65%, said that life in the city is worse than when they first moved here. Less than one-quarter of respondents said they expected life in San Francisco to improve in two years. More than one-third said it would worsen.
San Franciscans were largely in agreement about the city’s biggest problems: Homelessness took first place, followed by public safety and housing affordability. When asked if, three years from now, those problems would be significantly less severe, nearly 70% of people said either “slightly likely” or “not likely at all.”
“Unfortunately the pessimist in me is, more people who have lived here for a long time, or just people who don’t make a lot of money, don’t make $150,000 a year, will be pushed out of the city,” said a respondent who requested anonymity. “People of color will be pushed out of the city, if things keep going the way they’re going, if we just let the market run the way that it is. And that’s really sad and not the way it should be. It’s not good.”
Racial divisions also persist, and in some cases have grown more strained. When asked how much racism makes it difficult for San Francisco to solve its biggest problems, only 12% of respondents said “not at all.” More than 60% said either a “moderate” amount, “a great deal,” or “a lot.” That figure was highest among Black and Asian residents, at 73% and 70%, respectively — and lowest among white residents, at 56%.
Participants in the poll, conducted after the June recall of District Attorney Chesa Boudin, answered more than 90 questions. The makeup of those polled reflects the city’s demographics. More details of the survey’s methodology arehere.
Uncertainty about the future only adds to respondents’ widespread unease. The city has already lost many of its younger residents amid the greatest pandemic-driven population drop in the nation — of people age 25 to 29, 20% left between April 2020 and July 2021. The rise of remote work enabled some professionals to keep their San Francisco-based jobs while moving to more affordable locales, hollowing out offices and giving companies a reason to ditch their expensive leases. Meanwhile, many firms are struggling to manage local workers’ preferences for working from home rather than commuting to offices. What tomorrow’s business corridors will look like as a result — and whether they will continue to sustain city coffers and fund public services — is anyone’s guess.
Based on the Chronicle’s survey, that outmigration will continue. People who expect to move away in the near future tend to be younger adults — the people who will determine the city’s cultural identity, drive the local economy, and start businesses and families.
“San Francisco’s risking a brain drain,” said Rebecca Eissler, assistant professor of political science at San Francisco State University. “It’s worth considering for a politician. What do we do to keep young innovators?”
那些想要离开不只是年轻,也就是说erant — they also express more negativity toward the city’s prospects and elected politicians than those who say they’ll continue living in San Francisco, the survey shows. They fall across all income brackets, including people in the lowest economic tiers who typically struggle to afford to live in the city.
Fixing the big problems that could change people’s minds might require new, and perhaps bigger, policy solutions than officials have employed up to now, some political observers say.
“看这个数据,有一个机会o that,” said political consultant Jim Stearns, reading the survey results as an indicator that voters are hungry for change. “If politicians who actually held a lot of power, like London Breed, would embrace big, bold solutions, I think they would be overwhelmingly popular.”
But that would probably require deeply progressive officials and their more moderate peers to work together more than they do, said Jason McDaniel, associate professor of political science at San Francisco State.
While a few politicians have begun to emphasize the need for more collaboration and compromise, they remain in the minority. McDaniel pointed to the latest example: an ongoing inability to agree on how to ease the city’s lack of affordable housing, which has led tocompeting visionson the November ballot.
Complicating matters is the makeup of the Board of Supervisors, which is based on individual districts, McDaniel said.
“There’s only really one politician, maybe two or three, that are incentivized to think citywide: the mayor, maybe the D.A., maybe the city attorney,” he added. While the mayor runs for office at the city level, supervisors run at the smaller district level, which makes those specific neighborhoods’ interests paramount to them.
“And so getting them to work together, row together and agree on a common thing, a common direction for policy, has not been something that the city leadership has been great at since I’ve been here,” McDaniel said.
Meanwhile, the pandemic-fueled switch to working from home could exacerbate the problem, as city residents center more of their lives in their own neighborhoods.
Up to now, politicians haven’t needed to come together to offer big solutions to the city’s most pressing problems in order for it to thrive, McDaniel said, because San Francisco “always had wealth and resources that other cities would kill for.”
The economic impact of the pandemic threatens to change that, which could lead to even more heated battles over public resources for city dwellers.
“Over the last six years, we’ve seen people wake up to the realization that participating in politics could be a force for change, and I don’t see that stopping,” said Eissler.
Chronicle SFNext social media editor Audrey Brown contributed to this report.
Noah Arroyo is The San Francisco Chronicle’s SFNext lead reporter. Email:noah.arroyo@sfchronicle.com