San Franciscans had mixed reactions when weighing in on a recent WalletHub analysis, ranking the city last behind 147 others
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San Franciscans had mixed reactions while sounding off on a recent study that dubbed their city the "worst run" in the United States for the second year in a row.
The ranking comes courtesy of WalletHub, a personal finance company that measured the "effectiveness of local leadership" by comparing the quality of city services matched against the city’s total budget to determine its operating efficiency. Their "Best & Worst-Run Cities in America" report casts an analytical eye on 148 sizeable U.S. cities, scrutinizing their performance across several critical service categories and 36 key metrics, while also considering their per-capita spending.
"The best-run cities in America use their budgets most effectively to provide high-quality financial security, education, health, safety and transportation to their residents. Many of the top cities also have a very low amount of outstanding government debt per capita, which can prevent financial troubles in the future," WalletHub analyst Cassandra Happe explained in a report detailing the study earlier this month.
Despite coming in at 24 in quality of services, analysts placed San Francisco last in its total budget per-capita rank, along with having the highest amount of long-term debt outstanding. The city ranked 148th overall.
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San Francisco, California's Golden Gate Bridge. (iStock)
"I'm not surprised at all," Tom Wong, a lifelong San Francisco resident who owns a private security firm in the area, told Fox News Digital of the ranking last Monday. "What we have in San Francisco is not a problem of governance. We have a problem with criminals in governance."
Wong, a Republican, has voiced his dissent with local officials multiple times, including on the Fox News Channel and the FOX Business Network. When asked what he believes caused many of the city's issues he identified, he restated that dissent.
"The progressive movement is not about making things better. It's about how much they could grift before it bellies up," he said. "They're pushing the limits of how much people will tolerate beforehand so, in order to fix what we have in the city, we need to change just about everything… The city's broken. That's because every level of governance is corrupt."
A second respondent, who asked to remain anonymous, also agreed with WalletHub's findings.
"As a New Yorker that has been here in San Francisco for well over a decade, I would say, yeah, it's pretty poorly run. I wouldn't argue with the findings," she told Fox News Digital during an interview last Wednesday.
"The budget is $49 billion, and so I think a lot of people and the residents of the city wonder where that money's going. We know that it's going to inflated salaries or whatever, but why aren't they paying teachers and cops? Teachers sometimes have to pay out of their own pocket for supplies for their classrooms, and we're understaffed with cops. We can't attract talent because cops aren't respected here."
The respondent identified herself as a "left-leaning progressive" who has become more moderate over time. When asked for her thoughts on city leadership, she pointed out a great divide between progressive Democrats and moderates.
"The city supervisors are split. They prevent Mayor Breed from doing her job. We have a lot of city supervisors that are just really toxic, and they are just bottlenecks for Breed," she said, particularly naming Supervisors Connie Chan, Hillary Ronen, Dean Preston and Shamann Walton.
"They literally oppose law and order," she added.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed listens at a press conference at City Hall on Feb. 16, 2022, in San Francisco, California. Breed criticized WalletHub's report, calling it "misleading and inaccurate." (Gabrielle Lurie/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Ben Wang, owner of San Francisco clothing store Dare Fashion, offered a different take on the study. While speaking to Fox News Digital last Thursday, he emphasized San Francisco's unbreakable spirit and its longstanding reputation as a progressive haven, where people could go if they felt they didn't belong anywhere else.
"I totally disagree that San Francisco is the ‘worst-run’ city," he said.
"I mean, I don't know because I don't live in another city," he continued. "But it might be a little bit unfair because most of the bigger cities on there [the study] have lower ratings… and that makes a lot of sense because problems get more complicated when you have a bigger city and more diverse neighborhoods, and it doesn't work all over the city. Whereas smaller cities tend to be a bit more homogenous."
Wang additionally disagreed with the study's general premise and methodology.
"Philosophically, I don't agree with these types of rating systems because you're trying to take something that's very complicated and put it into a numbered list," he said.
"As a former scientist, I can understand doing some sort of what's called a multivariate analysis. You're putting a lot of variables into something, and you're trying to get it into one metric, but I didn't see anything that took into account the size of the city, the population of the city or the population density, as a factor in their multivariate analysis. Without those factors, New York City is really low on their list. So is Los Angeles, so is San Francisco, because I feel like maybe a factor was being left out, which is actually very important."
Wang feels that pinning the blame on city officials is largely unfair, given the complex nature of commonly-cited problems like drug use and homelessness. He emphasized the need to "dig around for the roots of the problem" instead of blaming those problems on the people who are trying to fix them, even if their efforts sometimes might not yield positive results.
"Where did this problem start? A lot of the homelessness comes from habitual heroin users, and where did they start? I think Big Pharma started that problem with the opioid crisis, pumping out cheap pills, and telling people they weren't going to get addicted, and they did."
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Ina Coolbrith Park, San Francisco, California, USA. (iStock)
Despite the respondents each having their own take on the study, they shared a few common themes. For one, they had all witnessed crime to some extent.
Tom Wong, for instance, told FOX Business' Ashley Webster last year that his private security firm had been rattled by thieves – both the physical business location and vehicle break-ins as well.
"Safety-wise, it's not good," he said of the crime conditions in San Francisco last week. "The reason being is that a lot of the crime is being underreported because there are not enough detectives, so the police are not responding to a lot of calls. The business owners, the homeowners are so fed up that they don't even report the crime."
Law enforcement, he elaborated, tends to go after more violent crimes under the assumption that insurance will help cover expenses incurred from burglaries.
"After dark, it's a Third World country," he added.
Despite his fashion shop being robbed twice in the last three years – with the most recent incident costing the business a whopping $300K that forced him to set up a GoFundMe page to help alleviate the cost – Ben Wang remains determined not to give up on San Francisco.
"I think it's a big problem," he said when asked about crime. Linking back to his cause-and-effect example of Big Pharma instigating drug usage and homelessness, he added that income inequality exacerbated by the COVID pandemic made poorer residents more desperate and therefore more likely to commit crimes.
"I love that San Francisco is a very progressive place, and that the whole idea of this place is that we're going to try new things. The environmental movement started here, all these cool things, Dotcom and the Silicon Valley… it encourages people to try new things, which is fantastic. One of the things that we tried was not prosecuting, shoplifting and small crimes and also going easier on drug crimes and users and all that stuff, and it didn't work out well," he added.
The anonymous respondent shared an experience from her own neighborhood, when a nearby abandoned home was burglarized earlier this year.
"The cops are called at 2:30 in the morning on a Monday morning, and you have a bunch of SFPD respond to this call. You could see that the gate was broken. You could see that there was a light on. You could see that there were burglars in the house. The cops even had nest cam footage showing the casing and them coming back with crowbars and flashlights. You had all the evidence," she said.
"My husband dealt with the cops and the neighbors. I went back to bed. When I woke up at 8:30 in the morning, their getaway car was still parked outside. The cops left the burglars inside the house because they stated that there wasn't a homeowner to give them permission to enter the house."
Meanwhile, Mayor London Breed called WalletHub's ranking "misleading and inaccurate" because she said the study compared San Francisco's city and county budget with other cities, which only have city budgets, according to FOX 2, an affiliate based in San Francisco,
The report highlighted her previous remarks from her State of the City Address, where she said, "I’m tired of the people who talk about San Francisco as if our troubles are inevitable and our successes a fluke. Our successes are not a fluke, and they’re not fleeting," adding, "They’re the product of years of hard work, collaboration, investment, creativity, and perseverance. They’re the output of thousands of people, in government and out, who believe in service not cynicism."
All three respondents have their own unique bond with the city – and each raved about it in their own way.
"It is the most beautiful place," Wong said, adding later, "There's plenty of good food here."
The second respondent had some similar opinions to share. "There's a lot of creative, smart people that live here. We have excellent culture and food. The weather is amazing. We're close in proximity to Big Sur and Napa. And, if you feel like you need services – not that I do – but it's nice to know that those services are available to people."
"You just can't kill the spirit [of the city]," Wang said. "That's what San Francisco has been from the times of the Gold Rush. Chinese people came here early… this was always a place that there was opportunity… Even if it's taking us a little longer, and we should be backpedaling from some misguided policy or things that we tried that didn't work, I just I find it difficult to believe that you're going to really kill the spirit of the city."
Fox News' Lindsay Kornick contributed to this report.
Taylor Penley is an associate editor with Fox News.
