San Francisco votes overwhelmingly to recall progressive DA Chesa Boudin
Last time I visited SF the city literally smelled like a toilet. I&#x27;ve lived in and visited a lot of &quot;bad&quot; parts of various cities and the condition of SF was shocking. I&#x27;d never seen anything in the US quite that filthy or with so many obviously mentally ill people roaming around in a state of perpetual psychiatric distress. I&#x27;ve been to places that probably had higher crime rates but the condition I saw in SF seemed more <i>degrading</i>. Even in the nicer parts of the city you could smell pain and squalor.<p>How is allowing the city to get that bad progressive? Isn&#x27;t that creating an even more radically two-tier city where the rich live in gated homes and work in posh offices while everyone else can&#x27;t afford to live somewhere that doesn&#x27;t smell like human waste? (If they can afford a roof over their head at all. Real estate costs in SF are still batshit insane.)<p>SF may well be the city in the US with the most radical division between rich and poor. Nobody who isn&#x27;t rich can ever hope to afford homeownership unless they want to commute three hours.<p>How is any of this progressive? To me it looks like a lot of elitism plus general political incompetence and corruption coated with a superficial veneer of low-effort progressive <i>rhetoric</i> to sell it to naive young liberals who vote for mere words and don&#x27;t pay attention to outcomes.<p>I&#x27;ve become fond of saying this: &quot;Texas is more progressive than California because in Texas a working class person can afford a place to live.&quot; That seems to sometimes wake people up to the rank hypocrisy of all this.<p>We&#x27;ve created a political environment where we give far, far too much weight to words and not nearly enough to deeds or outcomes. Ultimately only outcomes matter and when measured by outcome SF&#x27;s policies are not progressive.