Some blame San Francisco’s high cost of living for the exodus. How bad? As some city blocks have been taken over by drug gangs selling fentanyl in open-air superstores (think of an opioid version of Costco, without the membership card), city supervisors have spent their time talking about defunding police, abolishing rent, abolishing prisons, and demanding that if Whole Foods is to be allowed to develop a grocery store in a vacant building in the city, it must include affordable housing. San Francisco’s decline is driven by absurdly bad local economic policies.
Move over Detroit, here comes San Francisco, which lost 6.3 percent of its population between 20, a rate of decline larger than any two year-period in Detroit’s history and unprecedented among any major US city.ĭetroit’s fall was primarily driven by the relocation of the US auto industry to southern, right-to-work states, where auto producers, including foreign firms who build autos here, have avoided the union conflict that was endemic in Detroit. No major American city has failed at the same level as Detroit, whose population dropped from 1.85 million people in 1950 to about 630,000 today.