I do agree that the political leadership has squandered a fortune, but if there is a root cause, it ultimately comes down to the voters. It is the voters who repeatedly vote for the same leaders who implement the same policies emphasizing the same values with the same outcomes over and over. And when confronted with those problems, the response from voters is to shame dissenting voices for a lack of empathy instead of recognizing the reality around them and applying common sense.

SF shows problems on almost every facet of city governance from businesses unable to set up shop (https://youtu.be/SQo6UZzyR3Y) to feces on the streets (https://youtu.be/VEOkX9dp85I) to BART subway stations that are open drug markets (https://youtu.be/5gT5NULvRSk) to mismanagement of massive budgets (https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-spends-recor...) to rampant property crime (https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/The-Scanner-San-Fr...) to the city worsening the used needles problem (https://www.hoover.org/research/why-drug-addicts-outnumber-h...)...

I could go on, but if I had to pick a few basic things that are broken and need attention:

- Unequal enforcement of the law. Residents who follow the rules and care about their city are subject to the law. If they break the law, for instance by littering or not paying for parking or not being properly permitted for something, they'll be subject to fines or other penalties. But drug addicted homeless vagrants can break every last law with impunity, and face no consequence for it.

- Incredible bloat in governance, with massive public agencies that are really just job creation schemes for those who are looking to lazily coast through a 'career'. We see the same issue at the state level in California.

- Woke politics that focuses on pandering to a few loud activists over serving tax paying residents. The city's leaders are willing to devote time, energy, and resources to social justice causes disproportionately, at the expense of other real problems the city faces. This is because of politicians' own personal political biases but also because the voters incentivize them this way by voting based on alignment to a far left progressive agenda instead of goals and results.

- Lack of accountability. SF spends hundreds of millions a year on the 'homelessness crisis' and has nothing to show for it. Those breaking the law are released back on the streets and the lack of law enforcement only incentivizes more drug addicted nomads to pour in. No ones seems to talk about tracking the effectiveness of spending with metrics and goals.

- A lack of diversity. Yes SF has people of many racial backgrounds. But they're welcome only if their true culture and religion is the SF progressive political culture. Diversity is very literally skin-deep in SF, and there is almost no diversity of thought. This reflects in the city's politics - SF (also CA) is a one-party state and of course, it displays all the classic problems of a one-party state. The city has become so hostile to any differing views that there's no one left who's willing to actually take a stand.

The saddest part of all this is that as California and San Francisco bleed residents to other locations, those voters seem to be bringing their same values/politics to those new locations, causing those places to also deteriorate, instead of retrospecting and realizing that they are recreating the very problems they are fleeing from. To me, this is a form of deep arrogance - the inability to learn from the culture of the place they move to, and the blind faith in their own cultural superiority. Unfortunately many formerly beautiful and well-managed cities like Portland, Austin, Denver, and Seattle are starting to show the same problems SF faces - they just seem to be lagging SF by a few years as their local politics gets taken over by SF/CA transplants.