One other Ballot Finds A Lot of Folks Who Declare They will Go away San Francisco In a Few Years

San Francisco has always been a passing city, a place where people come to work for a couple of years and maybe find a good time or romance and then go to a cheaper and more boring place when it comes to “settling down” “.

Well, somewhere around 40 or 50 percent of the people who live here – people who live here, who answer surveys – say they want to leave the country in the next few years. And many of these people have told pollsters that the biggest problems facing the city these days are crime, homelessness and “street behavior”.

The SF Chamber of Commerce released the results of its annual CityBeat poll Thursday, which asks San Francisco voters a series of questions about the state of the city and their perception of it.

This year’s survey found, like last year, 70% of city dwellers who say that the quality of life in the city has decreased. 80% of residents surveyed said tackling homelessness must be a high priority for the city, and 88% said the problem had worsened in recent years.

71% also said that “road behavior” has deteriorated. And 80% of San Franciscans support extending conservatory laws and making it easier for the mentally ill to be sent for treatment.

Additionally, 76% of San Franciscans said increasing the number of police officers in high-crime neighborhoods should be a high priority for the city, and 60% supported prioritizing funding for police academy courses and recruiting new police officers.

“San Francisco has suffered over the past year, highlighting and exacerbating issues such as homelessness, road conditions and safety concerns,” Chamber President and CEO Rodney Fong said in a statement. “Public infrastructure and the ability to handle road conditions have also pushed their limits, and it’s not surprising that residents have a strong sense of it.”

The Chamber of Commerce unveiled a data dashboard earlier this year listing 311 complaint dates across the city, and overall the data shows that complaints about theft and homeless tent camps have been on the decline since 2019.

This is just the latest poll from a local organization that has registered the growing public perception of worsening crime and found that many San Franciscans dream of escaping it all. As reported by the SF Business Times, a recent survey by the Bay Area Council found that nearly half of respondents plan to flee California entirely in the coming years.

Dignity Health was the presenting sponsor of the chamber’s survey, and a Dignity representative, Mark Klein, flipped the survey data on people who want to go to Business Times this way: “They are expressing their intentions to move. We still have the ability to “make changes that keep them here.”

Photo: Karam Alani