The story of San Francisco’s supposed escape from the “doom loop” is being delivered to the public with all the fanfare of a political victory parade, a narrative carefully crafted by a new crop of leaders who claim to have restored order to the beleaguered “City by the Bay.” The statistics they wield, decreased crime and booming Artificial Intelligence (AI) investment, are presented as unassailable proof that the city has finally emerged from the pandemic-era shadow.
However, the reality is that San Francisco has merely substituted one crisis, a chaotic, visible spiral of decay, for another, more pernicious cycle. A publicly subsidised development deal designed to prioritise the profits of a gilded tech elite while deliberately displacing and punishing the city’s most vulnerable residents. This is a politically manufactured fiction, an act of rhetorical judo designed to whitewash profound structural inequalities and confirm that, for the establishment, capital is always prioritised over humanity.
Consider the core symptoms of the alleged recovery. Yes, the staggering inflow of AI capital provides a momentary economic high, and, yes, official crime numbers have trended downward. But these superficial improvements mask the persistent, deepening chasm that defines modern San Francisco.
The recovery is inherently uneven and structurally precarious. According to reports, downtown foot traffic has climbed above 75% of 2019 levels, which sounds encouraging, but at the same time, a measure that truly matters for the city’s tax base and commercial vitality, office attendance, is still stuck at a paltry 53.7% compared to pre-pandemic benchmarks.
This disparity reveals the truth that people may be visiting, yet the economic engine has not fully returned, signalling that the structural challenge of remote work remains a long-term liability, not a temporary inconvenience.
Weaponising public safety data
The most powerful evidence leveraged by the city’s political class is the sharp decline in crime. The data, at first glance, appears irrefutable, but compared to the three-year average between January 2018 and 2020, property crime is down 40%, and violent crime is down 24%.
Specifically, larceny theft, which includes the notorious car break-ins, has seen a 39% reduction, and the city boasts a remarkable 45% decrease in homicides since 2019, contrasting sharply with cities like Austin and Memphis, which have seen increases of over 115% and 49%, respectively, during the same period.
The current District Attorney, Brooke Jenkins, and Mayor Daniel Lurie claim this public safety progress requires a blank check, fighting vehemently to exempt police, fire, and prosecution agencies from cuts related to the looming $800 million city deficit.
Jenkins even requested a $4.5 million budget increase, arguing that any reduction would “cripple” her ability to prosecute crimes effectively.
Yet this urgent demand for increased, punitive funding comes at the expense of proven, effective, and community-focused measures. The DA’s office stands accused of cutting programmes like “Make it Right,” which had successfully reduced recidivism among juvenile offenders by up to 66%.
The city is actively choosing to prioritise prosecution and incarceration over prevention and rehabilitation, gutting programmes that stabilise people in favour of those that punish them.
The push for punitive measures is further manifested in statewide politics. San Francisco leadership is openly endorsing policies like “Proposition 36,” which seeks to increase penalties for certain drug and theft crimes. Experts warn the move will drive up state prison costs, diverting funding away from critical behavioural health treatments and potentially worsening homelessness.
This political manoeuvring constitutes a direct assault on the legacy of “Proposition 47,” the 2014 reform that reduced penalties for nonviolent crimes and allocated over $800 million in prison savings toward behavioural health treatment and services designed to reduce recidivism.
The current political establishment is using the crime drop as a convenient pretext to dismantle successful, equity-focused strategies, favouring policies of mass incarceration that historically and disproportionately target Californians of colour.
The trend indicates that crime reduction is being cynically exploited to reinforce structural inequity, guaranteeing that the true societal cost of a superficially “safe” city will be borne by the most marginalised residents, exactly the segment of the population that reformers sought to protect by limiting aggressive tactics like pretext stops.
Subsidising tech oligarchy
San Francisco’s economic celebration is entirely pinned on the undeniable, staggering concentration of AI capital. The city is the global epicentre, hosting an enormous number of leading AI firms, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, and Scale AI.
The scale of investment is historic. Databricks, recently valued at $62 billion, raised $10 billion in non-dilutive financing to fuel its AI expansion. Perhaps most famously, Salesforce pledged a jaw-dropping $15 billion investment over five years for a new AI Incubator Hub and workforce development.
But does this tsunami of capital represent an organic, broad-based economic recovery for San Francisco, or does it merely confirm that the city remains an immensely profitable playground for a concentrated few? The evidence points to the latter. While the Bay Area added 36,950 tech jobs between 2021 and 2024, a significant figure, the overall national tech job growth was actually higher in other metros, such as New York and Dallas–Fort Worth, which added 47,940 and 47,100 jobs, respectively.
Moreover, the economic impact of generative AI is described as a “historic paradigm shift.” While it benefits highly specialised tech talent, it represents a threat to the broader labour market, potentially displacing or augmenting entry-level workers in non-tech professions.
Even Salesforce itself noted that internal AI usage cut customer service escalations by half, offering a clear demonstration of AI’s productivity gains translating into potential job cuts for routine tasks. The wealth generated is immense, but the workforce benefits are concentrated, leaving the general labour base exposed.
The most damning evidence of the political establishment’s true priorities, however, lies in how the city manages its financial relationship with these wealthy firms. Despite facing immense structural fiscal challenges and projecting long-term structural deficits, the city approved “Proposition M,” a measure backed by companies like Google, Meta, and Uber.
This proposition simplified the gross receipts tax structure, shifted the tax calculation away from payroll toward sales, and decreased anticipated annual revenue by approximately $40 million in its initial years. Simultaneously, the city offers new tax credits of up to $1 million to lure businesses into select vacant zip codes.
The city, bleeding resources and struggling to fund essential services, is actively giving away future revenue to the richest actors in the world, desperate to bandage a crumbling commercial tax base by paying billionaires to occupy office spaces they likely need anyway.
A selective recovery
San Francisco has not escaped the shadow of the doom loop but has merely refined and codified it. The so-called recovery is highly selective, favouring a small caste of corporate interests and highly paid specialised talent, while simultaneously tightening the screws on the working class and the vulnerable.
The political establishment, led by Mayor Lurie and DA Jenkins, is sacrificing structural equity, cutting successful recidivism programmes, promoting mass incarceration policies through “Proposition 36,” and ignoring the housing crisis fuelled by their newest corporate neighbours, all to present a superficially clean and profitable face to the world.
The $15 billion promises and the “Proposition M” tax breaks are not an investment in the city as a whole but are a specialised subsidy to a highly centralised industry that reinforces existing economic segregation.
When the structural failures of commercial real estate still plague the tax base, when the most vulnerable must fight for shelter after pandemic protections expire, and when half of all low-income households are paying more than half their income just to survive, calling this an “emergence” is an act of deliberate, political cruelty.
The data confirms the above reality, as the “City by the Bay” remains defined by a ruthless, unconscionable chasm between its gilded elite and its struggling poor, a chasm now deeper, more starkly exposed, and increasingly protected by the very political class claiming salvation. San Francisco’s so-called recovery benefits only a few, leaving most residents struggling with housing, jobs, and basic security, while inequality grows.