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If the more progressive policies are helping, that impact is getting drowned out by other factors pushing parts of town in the other direction.
As someone who lives in the SF / Oakland area, I can attest to people constantly talking about drugs, crime and homelessness going in the wrong direction. People bring it up without being prompted.
My theory is that more progressive addiction policies work, but that’s just one variable. And there are other things impacting day to day vibe in the city that are overshadowing the stuff that’s working.
When people go to the ballot box, nuance often goes out the door. When things aren’t great, they vote for whatever is different.
Of course they're going to talk about crime, what else are they going to talk about, the weather that never changes?
In all seriousness though I do think it's the lack of other issues that's driving this. Most other issues liberals care about have come to a secure consensus in the city, abortion and LGBT rights are as secure as they can get, marijuana and even mushrooms are basically legal, the last gun store has closed, the city has a good recycling and composting system and a green energy option, the parks and schools get decent funding etc. The only thing left is affordable housing and crime. Since the minutia of housing policy is boring that just leaves crime for the media and people to talk about, so even if crime itself is stable or even declining, people's awareness of it increases.
You can see this during the pandemic where homelesness and crime were just as bad if not worse, but people were focusing on other things.
The lack of other issues also demobilizes the average liberal voter who already has everything they want and doesn't see a need to vote, so the election becomes dominated by people who care about that one remaining issue.
If you look at something like car break ins in SF, the data did show that it dropped a ton during the pandemic, then rebounded to the 2019 craziness.
It wasn’t something that was in people’s heads. The SF Chronicle has been pretty good about charting this stuff, and if you search for things like car break in graphs, Google images will get ya past some paywalls.
IMHO, those of us who have been living in the area for decades have some legitimate observations and experiences that are supported by data. I’m not saying the solution has to be super conservative policies. I’m just saying that the problems are real.
Car break ins did go up during/after the pandemic, just as crime went up across the entire country, but that early 20s crime wave seems to be subsiding. This election took place in a context where car break ins are declining and crime in general is decreasing. If these propositions were truly a reaction to real crime then they would have happened in 2022 when crime was peaking and looked like it was going up.
I'm not saying the problem isn't real, there is crime. But I don't think the idea it's getting worse is true. I've only been here for 5 years but my understanding is that SF, like most cities, was far worse in the 80s and 90s . Maybe there was some golden era in the 2000s , early 2010s where it was slightly better but just comparing to what I've seen since I've been here I haven't noticed any changes that warrant this recent tough in crime bend that local politics is going.
Here is the broader data set going back to 2009. I wish it went back further do capture life before the great recession. Cutting things off at 2018 doesn't really tell the full story and doesn't really show you why people who've been here for 10, 20, 30+ years are unhappy.
Visualization: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/sf-car-break-in-data-18639763.php Source: https://datasf.org/opendata/
The concern is the post pandemic uptick it was the overall trend going back a decade. Things have gotten a LOT better over the past 6 months. Whether that's because of the aggressive 2023 crack down efforts, or because of something else, I don't know. All I know if that people in the region are not reacting to the past couple years, they're reacting to the past decade or more.