“There’s a hole. Smack in the middle.” Mark Dietrich pointed at a brown garage door across the street. Someone has taken a hand drill to it, just above eye level. “They reach through with a wire or a coat hanger, and then there’s a little red handle. As soon you pull that red handle, the garage [door] goes right up.”

Dietrich is an analytics executive and San Francisco anti-crime activist, with a bike rider’s build and a close-cropped business haircut. We were walking around his Inner Richmond neighborhood, a lovely place with modest homes that cost millions of dollars. It does not look like it has a crime problem, but appearances can be deceiving. “I don’t think there’s a business here that hasn’t been broken into in the past two or three years,” he told me. “Maybe the bank?”

If you’ve paid attention to the media in the last couple of years, you’ve probably read an article that begins a lot like this one. It probably went on to inform you that San Francisco is dying horribly, the once-great metropolis destroyed by progressive policy madness. Tent encampments fruit like mushrooms upon its rotting corpse, and the addicts who crouch within them purchase fentanyl at what the Hoover Institution described as “an opioid version of Costco.” The streets are paved with needles and human excrement, while roving gangs of criminals steal everything in sight. The Washington Examiner compared it unfavorably to Planet of the Apes. The Atlantic called it “a failed city.” In 2023, Michael Moritz, a former journalist turned billionaire venture capitalist, wrote a guest editorial for The New York Times entitled “Even Democrats Like Me Are Fed Up With San Francisco.”

“SF has a drug problem. SF has a cleanliness problem. SF has an education problem. SF has an anti-tech problem,” venture capitalist Garry Tan said in a taped speech entitled “Fixing San Francisco” at 2023’s Network State Conference. “SF has a fundamentally political problem. So the question is: How do we solve it?”

Tan, Moritz, and others involved in the city’s self-described moderate movement believe they have an answer. They have founded or sponsored groups with generically liberal-sounding names like Grow SF (Tan), TogetherSF (Moritz), and Neighbors for a Better San Francisco and have poured millions into local politics to advance solutions they often describe as “common sense.” Though the real estate titans, conservative philanthropists, and tech bros who fund these projects don’t see eye to eye on everything, they share a common and often obfuscated goal: to create a centralized political machine powerful enough to transform the city into a regulation-free, heavily policed paradise for the wealthy.

Twenty years ago, many people recognized these ideas as reactionary. After two consecutive election cycles in which Democrats primarily ran on a platform of not being Donald Trump, however, ideas and governing philosophies have taken a back seat to questions of loyalty. The tech elite in San Francisco aim to redraw political lines so that conservatives can feel at home on both sides, and progressives are boxed out of politics as dangerous communist radicals. But progressives aren’t the actual radicals in this story. That moniker belongs to some key players at the top of this “commonsense” movement—those who yearn to replace nation-states with anarcho-capitalist “startup societies” ruled by philosopher-king CEOs. The impracticality of such pipe dreams does not stop them from pouring resources into the project, and the results are painfully real.

I recently visited San Francisco in search of the failed city I’d heard so much about. Aside from a few awful blocks in the Tenderloin district, most of its streets looked clean enough to eat off, at least in my New York City eyes. The tent encampments I’d been promised largely failed to materialize, and I braved BART and Muni without a single unpleasant experience. San Francisco has the highest retail and office space vacancy rates in the country, but also had the highest rate of remote work in 2021, at 35 percent. Today, it stands at 20.5 percent, still far higher than the national average. Most departing businesses cited either this trend or downsizing, not crime, as the reason for their exodus—and the AI boom has started to fill the space they left behind. Tourists and residents walked without fear in the warm September sun, and, statistically speaking, they were correct to do so; San Francisco has a significantly lower rate of violent crime than the national average for large U.S. cities.

But the city is not paradise either. Nearly a quarter of San Franciscans pay more than 50 percent of their income to keep a roof over their heads, placing them one emergency away from eviction. Nearly one of every hundred residents experienced homelessness in 2022. Drug overdoses are far higher than the national average, and while I did not find any fentanyl farmer’s markets, I did find curated human misery at the heart of the Tenderloin. People with nowhere to go stood in line, or sat on the curb, or lay on the sidewalk in a stupor. Several openly smoked fentanyl using foil and a straw—something I’d never seen before, even in New York.

“The people lying on the ground passed out from fentanyl, that’s new,” Jim Stearns, the political consultant who worked on progressive mayoral candidate Aaron Peskin’s campaign, told me. “It really makes you feel like there’s something wrong with the world, when you see that.”

The city also has an extremely high property crime rate: 41 percent higher than the national average as of 2020. Dietrich believes this number is probably low. Stearns agrees. “My girlfriend had her car window smashed three times since she moved in with me a year ago, and we’re not reporting that. [The statistic] going up or down is accurate. But what is being reported as the absolute amount of car break-ins is probably nowhere near accurate.”

Back in Inner Richmond, Dietrich and I popped into what is known as the most shoplifted Walgreens in the country, before circling back toward his house. “The CNN narrative or the Fox News narrative [is]: San Francisco is a hellhole. And as residents, we’re so torn,” he told me. “Is this a hellhole? No. It’s beautiful. But at the same time, is the crime real, and is it way worse than it’s been? Yes.” He pointed across the street. “There’s a garage that’s been broken into. You can see it’s been boarded up.”

The problem is real, but is it worse now than it has been in the past? Property crime rose steadily in Richmond from 2020 to 2022, but last year rates fell to the lowest they’ve been since 2017. By 2023, this neighborhood still had one of the lowest property crime rates in San Francisco. Then again, statistics like these mean little to those on the wrong side of them, and visible crimes leave visceral impressions. People remember a boarded-up garage, a smashed car window, or thieves breaking into businesses by driving a car through the front windows, as happened to a bank in Outer Richmond in January and a Central Richmond cigarette shop in June. Numbers and percentages are abstract. Battering-ram robberies stick with you.

Dietrich’s own garage feels a bit like Fort Knox for bicycles—he’s an avid rider and owns several. He’s reinforced the grates on his garage door so no one can kick them in, and a small plastic shield protects the red emergency tab from wayward coat hangers. Two dead bolts on either side of the door snap shut as soon as the door lowers. And if all else fails? “When you pull your car in, you park it close to the back. When you lock up your bikes, you use a New York City level bike chain.”

This isn’t the only vehicle vault on these blocks; Dietrich has helped many neighbors secure their garages over the years. He’s not afraid to confront people on the street, either—Dietrich recently made the news for filming a break-in and enduring a barrage of Brazilian heavy cream for his trouble. He is, as one might expect, a prominent and polarizing figure on Nextdoor. “Remember Bewitched? I’m kind of a Gladys Kravitz type. I’m like, what’s going on?” he says. You could call it nosiness, but you could also call it community-mindedness, and it’s an impulse that extends beyond his immediate neighbors. A popular form of property crime in San Francisco (dubbed “bipping” by locals) involves breaking windows of rental cars by Fisherman’s Wharf, stealing tourists’ luggage, removing anything with resale value, then dumping the remainder off the first highway exit—which leads straight into Inner Richmond. “That’s somebody’s stuff, somebody’s vacation,” Dietrich said. “Eighty percent of the time, there’s passports in it. I’ve met people from all over the planet just by returning their stolen luggage.”

These are real problems, and understandably distressing to the people who live here. And yet, it does not explain why one of the safest major cities in the country manifests as an irredeemable hellhole in the national imagination. Every city has a Tenderloin to some degree. Of America’s 25 largest cities, San Francisco had the fourth-highest rate of property crime and the highest percentage of unhoused people in 2022, but people experience homelessness and crime at high rates across the United States. Nashville had approximately the same overdose rate as San Francisco in 2022, and its violent crime rate was nearly three times higher. And yet when was the last time you read a national article about the failed city of Nashville? San Francisco’s real and serious problems cannot explain its place within 2020s American mythology. Who, then, are the mythmakers?

It is 4 p.m. on the last Saturday in September, and Folsom Street is already beginning to transform in preparation for its infamous street fair the following day. I pass twinks in leather puppy masks walking alongside—or being walked by—bears in harnesses. A large man in assless chaps stands on a street corner.

I am not wearing chaps, assless or otherwise. I am wearing a Day-Glo vest and holding a large orange bag in one hand, a trash picker in the other. This is Refuse Refuse’s weekly trash pickup in the South of Market neighborhood, one of several weekly cleanups across the city. You can find these events on Refuse Refuse’s website, but the sign-up links lead to a........

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