By Mike Males, Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice/YouthFacts.org
Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis slams San Francisco constantly, most recently as a “once great” city that has “really collapsed because of leftist policies”. ”No wonder why we’ve had so many people move from San Francisco to Florida over the last few years,” he declared.
That may play well with Twitter’s Elon Must or on Fox News and other rightist media, or (bafflingly) in the Atlantic Magazine, New York Times, and other herd-journalism outlets where due diligence fact-checking the endless anti-San-Francisco tirade has been nil. But not for anyone who checks even basic facts.
No one has criticized San Francisco governance more over the last 30 years than the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. Republican ex-Vice President Mike Pence even cited a CJCJ report on San Francisco’s racially-biased policing in his debate against Democrat Kamala Harris.
But we do believe that arguments require solid documentation. Let’s compare the supposed Sin City of San Francisco with the country’s biggest Republican city, Jacksonville, which has had a Republican mayor for the last eight years* and 26 of the last 30 years, and happens to be in DeSantis’s solidly Republican-governed, Republican-legislatured state of Florida. Surely, Jacksonville must be the shining paradise of what DeSantis means by “sanity.” No blaming liberals allowed.
Bottom line: DeSantis has a weird idea of “sanity.”
Compared to supposedly terrorized San Franciscans, Centers for Disease Control and police agency figures show that Jacksonville residents are 5% more likely to be victimized by violent crime, 10% more likely to die from fentanyl overdose, 28% more likely to from violent causes, 45% more likely to die as infants or in childbirth, 59% more likely to commit suicide – and here it gets really ugly – 2.6 times more likely to be murdered, 3.3 times more likely to die from COVID-19, and 3.8 times more likely to die by guns.
How about the economic measures conservatives worship? Jacksonville: per-capita income of $37,461, poverty rate of 15.4%, downtown office vacancy rate of 26.1%. San Francisco: per-capita income of $63,394, poverty rate of 10.3%, downtown office vacancy rate of 24%. Jacksonvillians are just half as likely to have bachelor’s degrees or higher and three times more likely to lack health insurance compared to San Franciscans. However, San Francisco’s cost of living is 2.6 times higher than Jacksonville’s, primarily because San Francisco was greatly overpopulated and overbuilt by the early-2000s now-receding tech boom.
Let us be honest, however. San Francisco is troubled in three highly visible areas – and has been for decades. The most glaring is drug abuse. A San Franciscan is 7% more likely to die from drug abuse than a Jacksonville resident. But hold off on Florida’s gloating. San Francisco may suffer the 6th worst drug overdose death rate of the nation’s 75 largest metropolitan counties, but Jacksonville is the 7th worst. Further, Jacksonville residents are more likely to die from fentanyl (10th worst rate in the country) than San Franciscans (13th worst).
The second is property crime. San Franciscans are twice as likely to be victimized by property crimes than Jacksonvillians, and that is a major annoyance. But this does not represent the decline of a “once great” city. In fact, San Francisco’s violent and property crime rates are much lower now than they were in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. San Francisco is a densely populated retail and tourism center with tens of thousands of non-residents in the city at any given time to commit and be victimized by crime.
Finally, San Francisco has 7,754 homeless as of the latest count (57% of whom are sheltered), compared to 3,400 homeless in Jacksonville (fewer than one-third in shelters). Just as DeSantis picked a San Francisco street with homeless and drug abusers to blame on “leftist policies,” so anyone could pick a similar street in Jacksonville to blame on DeSantis’s far-rightism.
Census migration figures adjusted for the two state’s population sizes show a Floridian is 37% more likely to move to California than a Californian is to move to Florida. Florida is the fourth largest source of new out-of-state San Francisco residents, and Florida appears among the top destinations for an undetermined number of San Francisco out-migrants.
We at CJCJ have been critical of San Francisco leadership over many years because it is one of the world’s wealthiest, famously liberal, global cities that proclaims lofty ideals it often fails to achieve. It is that failure, not “leftist policies,” that produces the city’s visible social ills. That said, one only has to look at a much more violent, murderous, gun-plagued, diseased city like Jacksonville to know right-wing delusions of “sanity” produce far worse.
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*A Democrat will take over as Jacksonville mayor on July 1, 2023. Curiously, that party power shift has not received nearly the excited commentariat attention as the recall of liberal San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin did.