I don't know much about how SF is doing, but I find that highly doubtful.
San Francisco seems to be complaining about waste and bureaucracy. Those aren't healthy things.
But Detroit has been suffering massive crime, drug violence, depopulation, failing city services, depression-level unemployment, steadily falling revenue, skyrocketing illiteracy, public safety problems presented by the rotting infrastructure, plummeting graduation and has been flirting with bankruptcy for years.
Most of those problems were recognized problems decades ago, and have only worsened.
>But Detroit has been suffering massive crime, drug violence, depopulation, failing city services, depression-level unemployment, steadily falling revenue, skyrocketing illiteracy, public safety problems presented by the rotting infrastructure, plummeting graduation and has been flirting with bankruptcy for years.
Of these, only flirting with bankruptcy and failing city services are things for which city hall is responsible. The rest are not things city hall can solve. Compare it to soccer. The goalie is there to stop the other team from scoring, but is in no way responsible for his/her team to score goals. You can't win with just a good goalie. Likewise, a lot of what you described are problems the citizenry, and not city hall, are responsible for. I challenge the best city hall in the world to go see what it can do in Detroit; that place is a disaster anyway.
The quality of City hall is orthogonal to most of Detroit's problems, but not to San Francisco's.
Most of the other problems, the ones which I agree are not direct responsibilities of the mayor and council, have grown as symptoms of those failing city services.
If you can't get your street plowed or your trash picked up, you move. If your kid isn't safe walking to, or being in school, you move. If there are no jobs in the city, you move.
The more people move, the less revenue the city gets, the more blight it acquires, the less incentive businesses have to stay in the city. Then they move. The blight accelerates and exacerbates the problem of keeping those places from becoming havens for criminals, drug dealers and vandals.
Did you know there isn't a single grocery store chain in the city of Detroit? Yeah, the Eastern market and a few community gardens are stepping up to fill the void for their neighbors. But even with those, there remains a very real and serious protein problem that's only solved by leaving the city.
So, is the city directly responsible for things like the unemployment rate and drop-out rate? No. But year after year after year they've ignored these problems. Refused change. Literally shouted down people who have raised these issues at council meetings. Let their hatred, bigotry, sense of entitlement and corruption waylay any and every attempt to turn things around.
So, no. They're not directly responsible for kids dropping out. They are however responsible for having essentially ignored the problems in schools for the last few decades as the graduation rate has sunk to 25%. They are responsible for being so incredibly inept that the entire system was taken over by the State.
If I'm responsible for a division of programmers and our output is so consistently bad that higher-management needs to step in and address the problems - while it may not have been my personal responsibility to get code written, clearly I've not been doing a good job.
