I’ve asked the mayor’s office if anyone there has any data on a key economic question: When the unemployment rate in San Francisco dropped from more than 8 percent to a little over 5 percent, how much of that was existing unemployed San Francisco residents finding jobs – and how much was unemployed residents leaving the city and being replaced by new arrivals who came for tech jobs?
I have received no response to that question except that the mayor’s data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I called the local office of the BLS and got a data analyst there who said they don’t track that kind of information. We do know that some 40,000 new jobs were created in the city; we don’t know how many unemployed San Franciscans got them. You would think that would be information the Mayor’s Office would want to have.
Particularly since the controller’s report says that number of jobs created in low-income communities was abysmal, just 340.
Let’s take a look at a few other things in the controller’s report:
Homicide clearance: Always a big issue in this city, it isn’t getting better. There were 50 homicides reported, and 24 homicide cases filed. Of course, some homicide investigations take more than a year to investigate (and murders are down from a high of close to 100 a decade ago.) Still: Half the homicides reported are still open.
Violent crimes went up, from 6,842 to 7,386.
The number of traffic accidents that led to an injury soared, from 1,546 to 3,150. That’s almost double the carnage on the streets.
Muni on-time performance was down from 60 percent last year to 59.3 this year –nowhere near the official standard of 85percent. I’m a big fan of Muni and my kids ride the buses every day to school, and I understand why it’s so hard to keep the underfunded system maintained and operating. But this isn’t a deficit year; the city’s general fund has almost doubled in the past decade, and right now the economic boom is filling the city coffers. And we still can’t improve Muni?
The Ethics Commission, which has never won awards for its oversight of the political process and the many (sometimes shady) characters involved, reports that only 58 percent of the complaints it received were resolved.
Oh, and by the way: The Board of Supervisors got nearly 100 percent in every category.
These reports are complicated, and running a big city like San Francisco is complicated, and there is good news along with the bad. But in some critical areas, at a time when there’s actually cash to address problems, the Lee Administration doesn’t have a lot to brag about.
