san-francisco

isn’t

That San Francisco is governed by a strong-mayor system is a “point of view,” in Moritz’s book. “And I just don’t happen to share that view.”

Moritz was born on Sept. 12, 1954, in Cardiff, Wales. His parents, Alfred and Doris, were German-Jewish refugees, and his father was a classics professor at the University of Cardiff.

Fabulous wealth did not appear to be in the cards, as Moritz went the route of the typeset drawer, heading into journalism.

In 1984, he penned the influential book “The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer.” By 1986, he was hired on by Sequoia Capital, and a storybook career ensued. He got in early on many of the companies on your phone: Google, Yahoo, PayPal, YouTube. As well as the phone itself — Apple.

Asked if he sees contradictions in his philanthropic and political giving, Moritz says he doesn’t. “The thing that gets lost on a lot of people,” he says, “is that the political stuff is a tiny percentage of the charitable giving. It takes a village, and it’s difficult to seek perfect alignment. I don’t worry about occasional overlaps.”

The jarring misstep by Moritz’s TogetherSF was, dutifully and thoroughly, covered by Moritz’s San Francisco Standard. If nothing else, Moritz could take solace that his journalists took him seriously when he told them at all-hands meetings that his own activities were fair game for reportage.

He also thinks Farrell will “be more forceful about getting uniformed officers on the street, which is the most effective, cheapest way to make everybody in San Francisco feel a lot safer.”

The point is that her photo, her slogan, her eyes that loom over San Francisco like T. J. Eckleburg, are part of the city’s culture, a culture that Kraft and Florida often find to be either discredited, misrepresented, or simply ignored by the snobs in “nightlife cities” like New York or Los Angeles.

Nine years ago, when HBO premièred the series “Silicon Valley,” a deadpan comedy lampooning the Bay Area’s life-style blandishments and hapless global power, the city seemed to exist in a helium balloon, floating ever upward. Now the same place is viewed as an emblem of American collapse.

The change has been unsettling because the city’s broad project is widely shared. Since the end of the industrial period, the main path of the U.S. metropolis has been what’s often called urban renewal

Urbanists had already begun to circulate a paper by the economist Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh that traced a post-pandemic spiral of collapsing retail and declining safety leading to less public revenue and fewer public services—what he called an “urban doom loop.”

the city, whose early industry harvested outlying gold, silver, and timber as the heart of what the architectural historian Gray Brechin has called the “imperial” West Coast, remains the fifth-largest metropolitan economy in the global Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

“We have two dominant shades of blue—progressives and moderates,” he said, pointing at a slide. “Now, a San Francisco moderate would be considered liberal anywhere else, and a San Francisco progressive would be considered super far left anywhere else. In San Francisco, they’re both Democrats. But they spar as if they were opposing political parties.”

From 2021 to 2022, San Francisco spent seventy-six million dollars on drug-treatment programs; its homelessness budget was nearly seven hundred million dollars. (New York City’s was $1.4 billion, for about ten times the urban population.)

But after living through their own pandemic challenges, people had what Bransten calls “compassion fatigue.”

“We have an understaffed police department,” Matt Dorsey, the supervisor for the South of Market section of downtown, said, citing a shortfall of seven hundred officers. Dorsey, a former police-department spokesperson

Last year, a magistrate judge filed a temporary injunction declaring that, until San Francisco met its deficit of shelter beds, law enforcement couldn’t compel anyone who was involuntarily unhoused to move off the street. The rule, which was intended to encourage construction, riled the retail and hospitality trades. “We’ve got to take the handcuffs off the cops so that they can help these people get up off the sidewalks,” Brian Sheehy, who has opened a series of popular bars downtown in the past twenty years, told me. “San Francisco has to get back to being a destination.”

This year, the mayor’s office signalled that it was emphasizing an enforcement philosophy (the idea that drug use is a crime) rather than relying, as it had in the past, on a harm-reduction philosophy (the idea that addiction is a disease).

“When I walk by a luxury hotel downtown and I see four police officers standing there—just standing there, for hours—and then I walk four blocks away, to the Tenderloin, where I have a merchant who’s, like, ‘Why is there no beat cop walking around here?,’ I would challenge any leader to look that merchant in the eye and say, ‘Oh, it’s because we have too few police officers,’ ” Preston told me. In the spring, he commissioned an audit of the police budget; it is pending. “I mean, we still fund, for millions of dollars, a mounted horse unit.” He looked at me incredulously. “We just bought a new horse! In San Francisco! A dense urban city!”

Workplaces in the industry were transitioning to a model known as A.I. First. “A.I. First means you turn to A.I. before you talk to a human. A.I. First means you turn to an A.I. before you hire. If the A.I. doesn’t do it, you build it. If you can’t build it, then you hire someone.” He added, “That is a precursor of what’s going to happen to corporate America.” The downtown of the future, then, will be a smaller, tighter, less worker-oriented place.

A lot of it is perception,” the mayor, London Breed, told me one day. “The feeling of ‘I don’t know if something is going to happen to me.’ ” We were sitting in her office, a wood-panelled sanctum deep in City Hall; a placard on her desk read “WHAT WOULD BEYONCÉ DO?” “It’s what people are seeing on the Internet,” she added.

GrowSF is not the only nonprofit with center-left politics to have cropped up recently.