POLL: San Francisco residents most likely to move to different city due to high crime rate and homelessness

10/20/2022 / By Mary Villareal

Home is not where the heart is for San Francisco residents. Survey shows they are likely to move to a different city due to the high crime rate and homelessness in their area.

The American Housing Survey asked residents in the United States’ largest cities if they planned on moving, and it seemed that many Democratic-led cities are leading the way in the upcoming exodus as 7.6 percent of San Francisco residents and 7.2 percent of Seattle residents said they wanted to move to a different city.

Following them were Washington D.C. and Detroit, which both reported 6.8 percent of residents wishing to move away. New York City appeared to have the most content residents, with only 3.2 percent saying they wanted to move someplace else.

San Francisco’s problems began in 2019. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Unified Crime Report, it had the highest overall crime rate of the 20 largest cities in the United States that year, recording 6,917 crimes per 100,000 people.

This is more than double the crime rates in New York and Los Angeles, and well above the rates of cities with the next three highest crime rates – Chicago, Houston and Phoenix.

A year later, the call to defund the police grew among Democratic leaders as the Black Live Matter protests gained traction. San Francisco Mayor London Breed demanded the same last year, saying that the Golden Gate City would be among the first to do so. He promised to cut the budget of his city’s police and sheriff’s departments by $120 million.

The city also greenlit its first open-air drug market in the civic center, spurring people from homeless encampments across the city to use illegal substances in broad daylight.

As drug use, car break-ins and theft increased, Breed had to take back his word, instead asking the city’s Board of Supervisors for more money to be given to the police to stamp out the increased crime rate.

Crime rose 7.4 percent as of August 14 compared to the same period last year. Assaults were up nearly 12 percent while robberies were up 5.1 percent. Thefts also spiked by 115.1 percent compared to last year, while rapes increased by 9.7 percent.

A poll conducted by the Bay Area Council also found that crime has emerged as the top concern among San Francisco voters, with 65 percent claiming they avoid going into the city’s downtown areas to avoid becoming a crime victim. Additionally, 52 percent of Bay Area residents stated that they don’t consider the city a safe place to live.

DA Boudin’s anti-incarceration policies blamed for San Francisco’s crime crisis

In June, citizens were more than fed up with the state of the city and voted to oust District Attorney Chesa Boudin, whose anti-incarceration policies were being blamed for being the cause of the crisis.

Originally elected on a platform of criminal justice reform, Boudin’s notoriously progressive laws had been blamed for the rising crime and homelessness in the Bay Area since the beginning of the pandemic.

At the time, San Francisco lost around 25 percent of its late-20s white population as the city experienced the biggest drop in household income in any U.S. city.

The Bay Area, known as the home of Big Tech, saw the biggest drop in citizens’ earnings with median household income falling from $21,551 in 2019 to $116,005 in 2021. Over 72,000 workers moved out of Silicon Valley between January 2020 and September 2021, serving as another evidence of the city’s loss. (Related: San Francisco lost 6.3% of its population following pandemic and vaccines – did they all die?)

Meanwhile, the rising mortgage rates, crimes and warnings of a looming recession have caused property prices along the West Coast metropolitan areas to dip. The mass exodus of earners left a glut of properties on the market.

In addition to the widespread migration, fewer people are moving to the city in its current state. Move-ins are down by 24 percent since the beginning of the pandemic.

Watch the video below about the increased crimes in San Francisco.

This video is from the GalacticStorm channel on Brighteon.com.