San Francisco, CA
San Franciscans sound off on study labeling city 'worst-run' in the US for second consecutive year
San Franciscans had mixed reactions while sounding off on a recent study that dubbed their city the “worst run” in the United States for the second year in a row.
The ranking comes courtesy of WalletHub, a personal finance company that measured the “effectiveness of local leadership” by comparing the quality of city services matched against the city’s total budget to determine its operating efficiency. Their “Best & Worst-Run Cities in America” report casts an analytical eye on 148 sizeable U.S. cities, scrutinizing their performance across several critical service categories and 36 key metrics, while also considering their per-capita spending.
“The best-run cities in America use their budgets most effectively to provide high-quality financial security, education, health, safety and transportation to their residents. Many of the top cities also have a very low amount of outstanding government debt per capita, which can prevent financial troubles in the future,” WalletHub analyst Cassandra Happe explained in a report detailing the study earlier this month.
Despite coming in at 24 in quality of services, analysts placed San Francisco last in its total budget per-capita rank, along with having the highest amount of long-term debt outstanding. The city ranked 148th overall.
SAN FRANCISCO DUBBED WORST CITY IN THE UNITED STATES, ACCORDING TO NEW REPORT
San Francisco, California’s Golden Gate Bridge. (iStock)
“I’m not surprised at all,” Tom Wong, a lifelong San Francisco resident who owns a private security firm in the area, told Fox News Digital of the ranking last Monday. “What we have in San Francisco is not a problem of governance. We have a problem with criminals in governance.”
Wong, a Republican, has voiced his dissent with local officials multiple times, including on the Fox News Channel and the FOX Business Network. When asked what he believes caused many of the city’s issues he identified, he restated that dissent.
“The progressive movement is not about making things better. It’s about how much they could grift before it bellies up,” he said. “They’re pushing the limits of how much people will tolerate beforehand so, in order to fix what we have in the city, we need to change just about everything… The city’s broken. That’s because every level of governance is corrupt.”
A second respondent, who asked to remain anonymous, also agreed with WalletHub’s findings.
“As a New Yorker that has been here in San Francisco for well over a decade, I would say, yeah, it’s pretty poorly run. I wouldn’t argue with the findings,” she told Fox News Digital during an interview last Wednesday.
“The budget is $49 billion, and so I think a lot of people and the residents of the city wonder where that money’s going. We know that it’s going to inflated salaries or whatever, but why aren’t they paying teachers and cops? Teachers sometimes have to pay out of their own pocket for supplies for their classrooms, and we’re understaffed with cops. We can’t attract talent because cops aren’t respected here.”
The respondent identified herself as a “left-leaning progressive” who has become more moderate over time. When asked for her thoughts on city leadership, she pointed out a great divide between progressive Democrats and moderates.
“The city supervisors are split. They prevent Mayor Breed from doing her job. We have a lot of city supervisors that are just really toxic, and they are just bottlenecks for Breed,” she said, particularly naming Supervisors Connie Chan, Hillary Ronen, Dean Preston and Shamann Walton.
“They literally oppose law and order,” she added.
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San Francisco Mayor London Breed listens at a press conference at City Hall on Feb. 16, 2022, in San Francisco, California. Breed criticized WalletHub’s report, calling it “misleading and inaccurate.” (Gabrielle Lurie/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Ben Wang, owner of San Francisco clothing store Dare Fashion, offered a different take on the study. While speaking to Fox News Digital last Thursday, he emphasized San Francisco’s unbreakable spirit and its longstanding reputation as a progressive haven, where people could go if they felt they didn’t belong anywhere else.
“I totally disagree that San Francisco is the ‘worst-run’ city,” he said.
“I mean, I don’t know because I don’t live in another city,” he continued. “But it might be a little bit unfair because most of the bigger cities on there [the study] have lower ratings… and that makes a lot of sense because problems get more complicated when you have a bigger city and more diverse neighborhoods, and it doesn’t work all over the city. Whereas smaller cities tend to be a bit more homogenous.”
Wang additionally disagreed with the study’s general premise and methodology.
“Philosophically, I don’t agree with these types of rating systems because you’re trying to take something that’s very complicated and put it into a numbered list,” he said.
“As a former scientist, I can understand doing some sort of what’s called a multivariate analysis. You’re putting a lot of variables into something, and you’re trying to get it into one metric, but I didn’t see anything that took into account the size of the city, the population of the city or the population density, as a factor in their multivariate analysis. Without those factors, New York City is really low on their list. So is Los Angeles, so is San Francisco, because I feel like maybe a factor was being left out, which is actually very important.”
Wang feels that pinning the blame on city officials is largely unfair, given the complex nature of commonly-cited problems like drug use and homelessness. He emphasized the need to “dig around for the roots of the problem” instead of blaming those problems on the people who are trying to fix them, even if their efforts sometimes might not yield positive results.
“Where did this problem start? A lot of the homelessness comes from habitual heroin users, and where did they start? I think Big Pharma started that problem with the opioid crisis, pumping out cheap pills, and telling people they weren’t going to get addicted, and they did.”
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Ina Coolbrith Park, San Francisco, California, USA. (iStock)
Despite the respondents each having their own take on the study, they shared a few common themes. For one, they had all witnessed crime to some extent.
Tom Wong, for instance, told FOX Business’ Ashley Webster last year that his private security firm had been rattled by thieves – both the physical business location and vehicle break-ins as well.
“Safety-wise, it’s not good,” he said of the crime conditions in San Francisco last week. “The reason being is that a lot of the crime is being underreported because there are not enough detectives, so the police are not responding to a lot of calls. The business owners, the homeowners are so fed up that they don’t even report the crime.”
Law enforcement, he elaborated, tends to go after more violent crimes under the assumption that insurance will help cover expenses incurred from burglaries.
“After dark, it’s a Third World country,” he added.
Despite his fashion shop being robbed twice in the last three years – with the most recent incident costing the business a whopping $300K that forced him to set up a GoFundMe page to help alleviate the cost – Ben Wang remains determined not to give up on San Francisco.
“I think it’s a big problem,” he said when asked about crime. Linking back to his cause-and-effect example of Big Pharma instigating drug usage and homelessness, he added that income inequality exacerbated by the COVID pandemic made poorer residents more desperate and therefore more likely to commit crimes.
“I love that San Francisco is a very progressive place, and that the whole idea of this place is that we’re going to try new things. The environmental movement started here, all these cool things, Dotcom and the Silicon Valley… it encourages people to try new things, which is fantastic. One of the things that we tried was not prosecuting, shoplifting and small crimes and also going easier on drug crimes and users and all that stuff, and it didn’t work out well,” he added.
The anonymous respondent shared an experience from her own neighborhood, when a nearby abandoned home was burglarized earlier this year.
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“The cops are called at 2:30 in the morning on a Monday morning, and you have a bunch of SFPD respond to this call. You could see that the gate was broken. You could see that there was a light on. You could see that there were burglars in the house. The cops even had nest cam footage showing the casing and them coming back with crowbars and flashlights. You had all the evidence,” she said.
“My husband dealt with the cops and the neighbors. I went back to bed. When I woke up at 8:30 in the morning, their getaway car was still parked outside. The cops left the burglars inside the house because they stated that there wasn’t a homeowner to give them permission to enter the house.”
Meanwhile, Mayor London Breed called WalletHub’s ranking “misleading and inaccurate” because she said the study compared San Francisco’s city and county budget with other cities, which only have city budgets, according to FOX 2, an affiliate based in San Francisco,
The report highlighted her previous remarks from her State of the City Address, where she said, “I’m tired of the people who talk about San Francisco as if our troubles are inevitable and our successes a fluke. Our successes are not a fluke, and they’re not fleeting,” adding, “They’re the product of years of hard work, collaboration, investment, creativity, and perseverance. They’re the output of thousands of people, in government and out, who believe in service not cynicism.”
All three respondents have their own unique bond with the city – and each raved about it in their own way.
“It is the most beautiful place,” Wong said, adding later, “There’s plenty of good food here.”
The second respondent had some similar opinions to share. “There’s a lot of creative, smart people that live here. We have excellent culture and food. The weather is amazing. We’re close in proximity to Big Sur and Napa. And, if you feel like you need services – not that I do – but it’s nice to know that those services are available to people.”
“You just can’t kill the spirit [of the city],” Wang said. “That’s what San Francisco has been from the times of the Gold Rush. Chinese people came here early… this was always a place that there was opportunity… Even if it’s taking us a little longer, and we should be backpedaling from some misguided policy or things that we tried that didn’t work, I just I find it difficult to believe that you’re going to really kill the spirit of the city.”
Fox News’ Lindsay Kornick contributed to this report.
San Francisco, CA
Harris glosses over debate at San Francisco fundraiser, highlights Biden victories over 'liar' Trump
At a fraught moment in President Biden’s reelection campaign, as he faces calls to drop out of the race due to serious flubs at last week’s debate, Vice President Kamala Harris addressed donors at a private fundraiser Tuesday in San Francisco and focused on the election as a choice between civil liberties and dictatorship.
“Let’s just deal with the elephant in the room. There are actually two: One is the debate, and the other is Trump,” Harris said to light laughter from a group of about 35 supporters at the Nob Hill condo of real estate executive Susan Lowenberg, in a high-rise building overlooking the city and bay.
“The debate, as the president said, [was] not his finest hour. We all know that,” Harris told the room. But the outcome of the election, she added, “cannot be determined by one day in June.”
“It is still the fact that the stakes are so high in this election. It is still the fact that the race is close. It is still the fact that there is a profound contrast on the two sides of the split screen in terms of who stands for what and what each has accomplished,” she said. “And it’s still true that Trump is a liar.”
Her appearance at the San Francisco fundraiser came the same day Trump’s campaign reported raising $331 million compared with Biden’s $264 million during the second quarter of this year, eliminating the cash advantage Biden previously had over Trump.
“President Trump’s campaign fundraising operation is thriving day after day and month after month,” the Republican’s top campaign advisors, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, said in a statement. “This fundraising momentum is likely to grow even more as we head into a world-class convention and see the Democrats continue their circular firing squad in the aftermath of Biden’s debate collapse.”
Harris didn’t say anything further about Biden’s debate performance while a Times reporter was present at Tuesday’s private fundraiser.
Elizabeth Ashford, a Democratic strategist who served as Harris’ chief of staff during her tenure as California’s attorney general, applauded Harris’ focus in recent days on delivering a crisp, clear message to an anxious American electorate. Harris’ job, Ashford said, is to focus on the administration’s accomplishments, and to demonstrate to voters — without actually saying it — that she can step in if necessary to effectively lead the nation.
“That is where I would be singularly focused,” Ashford said. “One of Kamala’s areas of growth has been to be really confident in how she communicates. And this is that moment.”
A new CNN poll indicates some 75% of voters think Democrats would have a better shot at keeping the White House if they swapped Biden out for someone new. The poll also showed nearly as much support for Harris as for Trump in a hypothetical matchup — with 47% of registered voters surveyed nationwide saying they would support Trump and 45% saying they would vote for Harris. The same poll indicated the difference between the current likely candidates was larger, with 49% backing Trump and 43% favoring Biden.
At the fundraiser Tuesday, Harris seemed comfortable and relaxed in a room full of longtime donors and friends stretching back to her start in San Francisco politics as district attorney 20 years ago.
Harris touted the administration’s policy accomplishments, such as capping the price of insulin for seniors on Medicare and erasing student loan debt for millions of borrowers. She highlighted the White House’s commitment to mitigating climate change through investments in green energy, and its support for reproductive freedoms and other rights for women and marginalized communities.
“There is an awareness among the American people that there is a full-on attack — an intentional attack — against hard-fought, hard-won freedoms and liberties,” she said.
Those stakes became “even higher” with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Monday that gave Trump — and possibly future presidents — legal immunity from criminal charges stemming from official actions while in office, Harris said.
“And let’s not forget, Donald Trump has openly said he admires dictators and intends to be ‘a dictator on Day One,’” Harris said. “We gotta fight, and we know how to fight.”
Almost everyone has likely experienced the disappointment of walking into their favorite bar only to find it too crowded, or empty, for their liking. But what if you could find out what you’re in for before you leave the house? That’s the premise behind an app launched in San Francisco earlier this year.
2nite, the self-proclaimed “all-in-one app for managing, promoting and discovering nightlife,” has partnered with a number of local bars to provide livestreams of the insides of their venues. You can also purchase tickets for events at these venues through the app.
The participating bars control the cameras within their establishments, and the app has introduced livestream blurring to ensure patrons’ anonymity. Not all San Franciscans are thrilled by the prospect, though, with many raising concerns about privacy. “You should be able to let loose in a bar where Big Brother isn’t watching you,” one resident told the Standard.
San Francisco, CA
‘The power of fiction’: San Francisco store sends LGBTQ+ books to states that ban them
A San Francisco bookstore is fighting back against escalating anti-LGBTQ+ book bans across the US by sending prohibited queer texts to communities battling censorship.
Fabulosa Books, located in the Castro, the city’s historic gay neighborhood, has received widespread support during Pride month for its Books Not Bans program, which allows customers to buy and send books to LGBTQ+ organizations operating in conservative parts of the country.
Becka Robbins, founder and director of the program, and the bookstore’s events manager, launched the initiative last year, inspired by repeatedly witnessing how impactful it can be when youth discover queer literature for the first time: “At the store, I’ve seen young people who don’t have access to these books, and it’s definitely a cinematic moment, where they are like: ‘Oh my god!’ … This should be ordinary. They should see this queer lit in their own libraries, in their classrooms, on their parents’ bookshelves. But they’re not.”
She decided the most practical way to push back against bans, which have become a priority of anti-LGBTQ+ school boards across the country, was to send books directly to groups that could provide them to readers who might not be able to access the texts in their schools or through their families.
The project is a grassroots effort that operates out of a closet in Fabulosa, and since launching, Robbins said she has sent more than 700 books to states across the US, including Texas, Florida, Alabama, Arkansas and Oklahoma.
“I really believe in the power of fiction as a driving force for connection, resilience and empathy. It gives you the capacity, in a way that nothing else does, to connect with people who are different than you,” Robbins said. “There’s been times in my life where fiction has really kept me going.”
She has more boxes ready to ship, and since the program got recent news coverage in the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press and local television stations, donations have been pouring in, with more people stopping by the store wanting to buy books for other communities: “It’s been a community effort. Customers come in and pay for entire boxes and say: ‘Send this to Florida.’ They leave a note that says: ‘Hang in there, you’re going to get out of that place.’ It’s encouraging and also a little heartbreaking. People shouldn’t have to leave to find safety and comfort.”
The American Library Association (ALA) reported in March that more books were banned in 2023 in US schools and libraries than any other year on record – 4,240 titles censored, which was more than the previous two years combined. Many targeted books are about race and LGBTQ+ people.
Last week, South Carolina adopted one of the harshest book ban laws in the country, with a vague policy requiring books to be “age or developmentally appropriate”, an edict that could impact a broad range of texts. Public school textbooks have also increasingly been targeted, with literature on the climate crisis, vaccines, history, racism and sex education facing censorship.
Fabulosa owner Alvin Orloff said some of the local patrons supporting Books Not Bans come from the communities that are now facing rising censorship: “Our customers live in San Francisco, but they know what it’s like to grow up in a small town where everybody’s bigoted. So they feel really strongly that they want to do anything they can to make life easier for the next generation.”
The program is also designed to show solidarity with transgender and queer groups that are sometimes faced with significant backlash and violent threats over their efforts to defend people’s rights, Orloff added: “There’s a psychological thing for them to just know there’s people out there who are thinking about them and care about them, that they’re not invisible, that there’s a world beyond their community that values them.”
Watching the escalating book bans has reminded Orloff of the 1970s campaigns of anti-gay activist Anita Bryant, who claimed her efforts were about “saving the children” and promoting parents’ rights: “Politicians just want to whip up the fear. It’s a big, symbolic thing for them to say we’re ‘protecting the children’. It’s the same thing they were saying 50 years ago when I was growing up.”
“Books offer a wider variety of role models and a greater understanding of queer communities than you’re going to see in the movies,” Orloff added. “It just makes you feel so much better to know that there are people like you out there and that you don’t have to have a life constricted by people who don’t value you.”
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