Talk:San Francisco

Wiki Education assignment: Writing 1 MW

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 23 August 2023 and 13 December 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Juanafrancescaa (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Juanafrancescaa (talk) 22:25, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

"Doom loop" in lede

I have removed the content referring to the so-called "doom loop" in San Francisco. Several of the articles cited ([1], [2]) are opinion pieces from the Chronicle and the Hoover Institution that do not qualify as reliable NPOV sources. And the claim about "San Francisco's challenge to remain a relevant center for flagship commerce and industry given its relative geographic isolation from other North American commercial centers in an era of increasingly ubiquitous e-commerce" is sourced to a quote about the price of gasoline in California, which has nothing to do with either e-commerce or businesses leaving the city.

It is certainly true that downtown San Francisco is continuing to suffer from the combined effects of the shift to remote work, crime, and homelessness, and I support the continued inclusion of that content in the "Economy" section of the article. But I question whether it merits mention in the lede – particularly given the disputed accuracy of the "doom loop" framing ([3], [4]). This overview should focus on content of long-term significance, not the latest boom-and-bust economic cycle. I note that the articles on cities like Seattle and Portland, Oregon, which have been affected by similar conditions in their downtown areas, do not discuss those challenges in their ledes.

Pinging @Castncoot in case they have any thoughts. Conifer (talk) 07:30, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

• Thank you for your comment. I respectfully beg to differ that this content represents a pure short-term blip or that it represents undue weight. The work-from-home phenomenon is a sea change in human society and no place on the planet has been affected by this sea change even proximately to the extent that San Francisco has. Yes, West Coast U.S. cities have been disproportionately impacted by this phenomenon, but even amongst this group, San Francisco sticks out like a sore thumb. If this had happened just a month or even a year ago, then one could make the argument of recentism, but this is a downslide that has lasted for years now and certainly now warrants merit in the lede, if not necessarily to the detail outlined and could be reasonably somewhat shortened. There are many reliable sources out there which describe San Francisco's doom loop and a countless number which reliably state that San Francisco has been described as experiencing a doom loop, if changing the source is an issue. But there's no apparent reason to discount the Hoover Institution's findings as long as attribution is given.

• On the other hand, what does represent an example of recentism in the lede is the following verbiage: " As of 2020, the metropolitan area, with 6.7 million residents, ranked 5th by GDP ($874 billion) and 2nd by GDP per capita ($131,082) across the OECD countries, ahead of global cities like Paris, London, and Singapore. San Francisco anchors the 13th most populous metropolitan statistical area in the United States with 4.6 million residents, and the fourth-largest by aggregate income and economic output, with a GDP of $669 billion in 2021. The wider San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland Combined Statistical Area is the fifth-most populous, with 9.5 million residents, and the third-largest by economic output, with a GDP of $1.25 trillion in 2021. In the same year, San Francisco proper had a GDP of $236.4 billion, and a GDP per capita of $289,990. San Francisco was ranked fifth in the world and second in the United States on the Global Financial Centres Index as of March 2023. All of this seems to obliviate the entire grave impact wrought upon San Francisco by the catastrophic Covid pandemic.

• A certain amount of recentism is inevitable in most geographical lead sections of Wikipedia. As long as that material is factual, reliably sourced, and duly pertinent, it's not only appropriate but constitutes responsible editing. Castncoot (talk) 05:27, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for your detailed response. I disagree with the premise that "no place on the planet has been affected by [the work-from-home] sea change even proximately to the extent that San Francisco has". Due to the dominance of the tech industry, the city has the highest office vacancy rate among major US cities ([5]) and the lowest return-to-office rate ([6], [7]), but the shift to remote work is a nationwide phenomenon. As you can see from the tables in those sources, we are talking about a 10–20% edge over cities like Houston, Denver, and D.C., none of which have received the same level of "doom loop" commentary in the media or in their Wikipedia articles.

I think it is perfectly appropriate to update the local and regional GDP figures for 2022/2023 when possible. While it doesn't look like the BEA has released its numbers past 2021 yet, the independent estimates I can find ([8], [9]) project strong GDP growth and low unemployment since the pandemic ([10]). Regionally, unemployment remains comparable to other large metropolitan areas and below some major ones like Dallas, New York, and Chicago—far from an economic catastrophe ([11]). No one would deny that the effects of the pandemic have been far-reaching, but San Francisco's software engineers and bankers continue to power a strong economy. They are just doing so without commuting to office buildings in downtown.

To comply with WP:DUE, if we are to give credence to the reliable sources arguing for the existence of a "doom loop", we must also consider the plethora of reliable sources that have challenged the accuracy of such a concept, some of which I linked above; I am happy to provide more upon request. I continue to believe that the lede section is not the right place to incorporate this level of nuance—it should be dedicated to a long-term overview of the entire city (not only the Financial District or the Tenderloin). Conifer (talk) 07:47, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

@Conifer, we can absolutely do that, please ignore the disruption of the disparaging stalker who reverted my edit (yes, I'm 'privileged' to have my vey own Wikipedia stalker whom I have warned about being as such more than once before). That aside, in accordance with your proposal, both the doom loop and the contrarian viewpoints should be given no less than a brief mention when the downtown area powers the city's economic engine and when the 'description' of a doom loop and steadily decreasing apartment rents over a trend-period of years now has characterized San Francisco as no other city; the very term "doom loop" itself would not have come about to describe San Francisco so widely in the media if there were no legitimate reason, and intrinsically implies something that is not temporary. And the bottom line is that the media has indeed characterized San Francisco in this way, far more so than any other city to the extent that this has become a WP:NOTABLE trope characterizing SF now. The type of language that could perhaps be employed is that, "San Francisco, led by its downtown area, has been characterized as having entered a doom spiral since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2019,<ref> but this has also been refuted.<ref>" By the way, the San Francisco Chronicle is the city's de facto flagship newspaper and holds legitimate weight concerning its observations about San Francisco. Castncoot (talk) 20:23, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Ok, reviewing the sources that you added, it sounds like we agree on several key points here. Let me know if I'm off base with any of these:

• San Francisco continues to be one of the most prosperous cities in the country, with moderate GDP growth and low unemployment since the pandemic. Rents remain among the highest of any US city ([12]), indicating sustained demand for housing, albeit somewhat lower than pre-pandemic ([13]).
• The Bay Area has seen the highest shift to remote work of any US metro area, leading to correspondingly high office vacancies in downtown San Francisco.
• San Francisco has long struggled with homelessness, drug use, and property crime, concentrated in several neighborhoods near the Financial District. While these problems predate the pandemic, they have become substantially worse since 2020 and remain at elevated levels, in part due to the absence of office workers.
• Many retailers in downtown have closed as a result of a combination of the factors listed above.
• The city's tax revenues are driven by the fortunes of its downtown ([14]).
• San Francisco has received a large amount of media attention around the potential for an "urban doom loop". In general, these articles discuss the interplay between two threads: remote work/office vacancies and the homelessness/drug use/property crime crisis ([15]). Some focus more on the former (e.g. WSJ and SF Standard) and other (FT and Curbed) on the latter.

The concept of an potential "urban doom loop" is not exclusive to San Francisco. It appears to have been coined in a business school case study of New York ([16]) around the first meaning above: shift to remote work > declining office real estate values > reduced tax revenues > cuts to public services > continued exodus from cities. Reliable sources have assessed the vulnerability of dozens of American cities to this cycle, and they indicate a wide range of uncertainty around whether this scenario will transpire ([17], [18], [19]). By contrast, the secondary meaning, as applied to concerns around public order, seems to be largely restricted to San Francisco. (To pick two other cities with widely reported struggles with homelessness, my searches for "Seattle doom loop" and "Los Angeles doom loop" return few results.)

To me, the essential question here seems to be whether the sheer volume of coverage around San Francisco's potential doom loop—driven by longstanding, well-documented problems related to homelessness that are largely separate from the way the term is used in other contexts—obligates us to discuss it in the lede. I believe that it does not. Certainly no one is suggesting that an encyclopedic summary of Charlotte, North Carolina deserves a mention of its struggling downtown office market (30% mortgage delinquency rate in 2023, per WaPo!). And if we were just considering San Francisco's homelessness crisis alone, I doubt that it would merit inclusion in the lede either. Washington, D.C. (rightfully) does not mention the surge in violent crime since 2020 in the lede; it is discussed in the "Crime" section below, where it can be properly contextualized against historical and national trends.

I appreciate your edits to the lede to present reliable sources both supporting and challenging the doom loop concept. But a single sentence cannot possibly do justice to what you accurately described as a "broad characterization of the city", one that is widely contested and used to describe several different urban trends. There is little encyclopedic value in taking a "some say this, some say that" approach in the most important section of the article—it demands a comprehensive explanation that is impossible to deliver given the space constraints. For those reasons, and to comply with the spirit of NPOV, I suggest that we omit the discussion of the "doom loop" from the lede and move the content to the "Economy" or "History" section instead. I would be happy to add some of the background that I've sketched out above. Conifer (talk) 00:36, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Sure, I think that's a great idea. I'll move it to the end of the History section, and that way you can expand upon it and clarify it as you wish. Best, Castncoot (talk) 02:28, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

References

New hi-res panoramic photos

Hey SF page editors, I have uploaded a couple of very high-resolution panoramic shots taken just a few days ago, maybe there's interest in using them in the article:

Market Street, San Francisco, night view

San Francisco centered around Market St

San Francisco at dusk

 podstawko  ●talk  04:54, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

Inconsistent Source for Population Estimate

The population of San Francisco is listed for each decade, and the source is the United States Census. But at the very end of that list, rather than using the most recent United States Census Bureau estimate (which can be accessed at https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/sanfranciscocountycalifornia), for some reason someone decided to trash the consistency of the list and cherry-pick a different source for the current population estimate. And the discrepancy between the official US Census Bureau estimate and that of the cherry-picked and inconsistent source is significant. Is this just local San Francisco fans cherry-picking a figure that they like better, or think paints their hometown in a more favorable light? What justifies the inconsistency? 2603:8001:8F00:79D2:14CB:EB78:526A:FB0F (talk) 21:50, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

I would also like to point out that the cherry-picked source for the prior version of the estimate population (which I replaced with the most recent US Census Bureau figure to keep the list consistent) has a different and more recent estimate of San Francisco's population. So if we must be inconsistent and unjustifiably cherry-pick a different source, at least use the most recent figure from that source. 2603:8001:8F00:79D2:14CB:EB78:526A:FB0F (talk) 22:02, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Frankly, I agree with you. I do not know why Wikipedia uses estimates or these so-called "guestimates" when citing the population of US cities, counties, or states. The US Census does an official count every ten year period. For these events, they send out representatives to actual count people. This event is done in every year ending in a zero, such as 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, 2020, etc. There is no reason that Wikipedia should be using estimates from any year that falls within these real counts. Just simply use the last official census count numbers, not estimates. Many times these estimates prove to be wrong once the official count is done. Not to mention, I've noticed some Wikipedia city articles give population data based on estimates, or from completely other entities than the US census itself. The only data that should be used is the every-ten-year- official US census count; nothing else. This way everything stays consistent within Wikipedia's articles. The administrator of this Wikipedia article on San Francisco keeps reverting everything back when somebody contributes something to the article, even if what they're contributing is true. 2600:8801:131C:6F00:780E:8958:D8C9:7B61 (talk) 10:01, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

Question about European arrival

There seem to be two dates in conflict in the article.

One statement is: "...Spanish exploration party arrived on November 2, 1769, the first documented European visit to San Francisco Bay.'

Another is: "The mission received its name in 1776, when it was founded by the Spanish under the leadership of Padre Francisco Palóu." / "On June 29, 1776, settlers from New Spain established the Presidio of San Francisco at the Golden Gate, and the Mission San Francisco de Asís a few miles away, both named for Francis of Assisi."

Spanish must first have arrived in 1776 or earlier to have built "The Mission Dolores adobe chapel, constructed in 1776" Mission San Francisco de Asís?

Can anyone clarify?

I visited recently but don't live in the US. I am researching for something I am writing and noticed this difference. Pakoire (talk) 19:52, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

The 1769 date refers to the first European exploration of the area - the Portolá expedition - while the 1776 date refers to the settlement of the area. Two different things. Cristiano Tomás (talk) 14:00, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

@Cristiano Tomás thanks, yes. I think now I look at it again that I was being dyslexic with the numbers actually. It does make sense! Pakoire (talk) 02:00, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Image proposal

Hello, I've searched for suitable images for the infobox of this article and have found several options I'd like to propose for consideration:

• Image 1: File:Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco skyline from Hawk Hill at Blue Hour dllu (cropped).jpg, depiction of a panorama of San Francisco similar to the current image but with higher resolution and better contrasts
• Image 2: File:Low Fog in Golden Gate Bridge.jpg, picture captures the Golden Gate Bridge amidst San Francisco fog, with the bridge still being the main subject
  • Alternatively, I found File:Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco (40268274764).jpg or File:Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco (39168876760).jpg, both showing the bridge without fog, although they require cropping
• Image 3: File:Alcatraz 2021.jpg, view on Alcatraz Island
• Image 4: File:San Francisco at dusk.jpg, high quality image of the city skyline

I believe these options could enhance the visual appeal and contribute to the encyclopedic value of the article's infobox. Tobiasi0 (talk) 11:42, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

I'd call this proposal unopposed and insert the images on April 28. –Tobias (talk) 11:57, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

Image 1

Image 2

Image 2 alt. 1

Image 2 alt. 2

Image 3

Image 4

Tobiasi0 I've added the images to this comment as previews, hope that was OK. '''[[User:CanonNi]]''' (talk|contribs) 11:48, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

CanonNi Sure thank you, I just have to change the Alcatraz picture Tobiasi0 (talk) 11:53, 7 April 2024 (UTC)