The doom loop: It’s not a new roller coaster at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, it’s the hottest thing in the discourse about San Francisco. The term, in fact popularized by author Jim Collins in a 2001 book, is just another way of saying “death spiral,” which got worn out in short order.
Many commentators, from an MMA fighter who used to live here to publications from far away, believe it’s happening. Reports of brazen shoplifting as well as a rash of store closures downtown are pushing the impression that SF is teetering on the brink; the Westfield Mall management even blamed “rampant criminal activity” for the shuttering of the enormous Nordstrom store on Market Street.
However, crime in the long run — since 2017 — is down in San Francisco, as The Frisc and other outlets have found. Nevertheless this doesn’t make a dent in public perception. (Crime is also down compared with what we saw 10 and 20 years ago, but let’s stick with recent history.)
“Generally, it’s anecdotes and media-driven narratives” that affect people’s opinions “when things get repeated over and over and over again,” says Jeffrey Asher, cofounder of the crime data analysis firm AH Datalytics, whereas numbers just don’t seem to have much psychological weight. (Yes, the media has written about that too: SFGate recently wondered if all the talk about the doom loop is causing a doom loop.)
A counterargument to the crime data is that people have stopped bothering to report many crimes out of frustration with lack of enforcement. Underreporting does seem to be common, and researchers noting it have even coined the phrase “dark figure” to refer to the volume that goes unrecorded. Responding to SF crime stats in 2021, the Pacific Research Institute cited national surveys estimating more than half of all U.S. crimes are never reported. But these surveys don’t get at where, how, or how much crime goes unreported at any given time or place.
So what about SF’s dark figure? Is it figuring into our city’s malaise?
One way to try to probe it: housing prices. Rob Warnock, economist for the SF-based rental site Apartment List, says that crime (reported or not) should have an effect: “It’s fair to expect crime rates and housing prices to move inverse of one another.”
Academics such as Wesley Skogan, author of Community Policing and advisor to the Chicago Police Department, agree, though the research varies on how big the effect should be.
While thousands of people have left San Francisco since 2020, there’s no indication crime is the main reason. There were also pandemic layoffs, school closures, remote work mandates, and the general sense that the sky was falling.
Plenty of folks may express pessimism, but they also vote with their wallets. If the city were indeed a dystopian hellscape (insert your own #SFhashtag if you like), we’d likely see rents and home prices plummet, because there should be very few takers for a $2,200 a month studio overlooking Fury Road.
Running the numbers
According to the SFPD, an institution with no incentive to downplay crime, both violent crime and property crime are down in San Francisco over the past five years. The end of 2022 brought an uptick compared with 2020 and 2021 (years in which the pandemic depressed opportunities for lawbreaking), but rates remain down from three, four, and five years ago.
SF isn’t monolithic, of course, and a few neighborhoods can claim higher crime rates. For example, police data show a small rise in property crime since 2017 in the Taraval and Ingleside districts — but not in the Tenderloin, the Mission, or in the Southern and Central districts that cover downtown. Crime in the Park district, which includes neighborhoods like the Castro, the Haight, and Twin Peaks, is down slightly since 2017 but up a little since 2018; in all cases, the increase in reports is pretty minor.
But back to the puzzle at hand, which is the persistent counterargument that the numbers are wrong due to a wave of unreported crime. In SF’s neighborhoods, home buyers and renters should be the canary in the coalmine.
Citywide, the median price for a single-family home across 2022 was $1.78 million. That’s down slightly from $1.8 million in 2021, but up 25 percent from 2017. (See chart.)
Condominium prices have taken a recent hit — early this year, they were down 7 percent from 2020. But going back to 2017, those prices, like single-family homes, are in the black. (Data are compiled by the Compass Real Estate Group from the MLS.)
Do neighborhood prices map to more granular crime reports? The 94122 and 94116 zip codes cover much of the Taraval and Ingleside precincts where, remember, we have evidence that property crime is up a bit since 2017. At the same time, median home prices are still hundreds of thousands of dollars higher than they were the previous four years.
What’s more, price appreciation in these neighborhoods is much greater than the city as a whole, up 17 and 14.8 percent, compared with just over 6 percent citywide.
(Some sources, like the Compass SF Neighborhood Price Map, break down prices even more granularly, but Patrick Carlisle, an analyst at Compass, cautions against going into such fine detail. Many neighborhoods don’t see a lot of sales, which can make the data fluctuate wildly.)
‘People tend to be really bad at judging crime trends … they just assume their neighborhood is safer than the city as a whole.’ — Jeffrey Asher of AH Datalytics, a crime data analysis firm
We can consider rent prices too; however, two major sources of data don’t give a complete picture. The rent platform Zumper shows one-bedroom rents down quite a bit from 2017, from $3,400 a month to $2,955 at the end of 2022. But Zumper’s sample size is limited to what it lists on its website. The U.S. Census is a much deeper sample, but only goes up to the end of 2021. It shows one-bedroom rents citywide actually going up, from $1,836 in 2017 to $2,167 in 2021.
The two somewhat conflicting data sets certainly don’t support the notion that crime is driving people out of their homes in San Francisco. (Unfortunately, a comprehensive city survey doesn’t exist, although City Hall promises a renter database will be up and running any day now.)
Easy cherry-picking
It’s important to view these trends through a longer lens. When people are complaining on social media every day about break-ins and lawlessness, It’s easy to cherry-pick a few months of data to support any hypothesis.
But a few months of decline in housing prices, as we’ve seen earlier this year, more resemble the normal ups and downs of real estate than the product of a crime-riddled dystopia. When a typical SF home sells for $1.56 million, the bottom has not fallen out of anything.
Where there is depreciation in recent months — specifically, condos downtown, defined by the city as a triangle north of Market Street that includes the financial district — economists note that other factors, such as increased supply, are in play. As The Frisc reported recently, downtown and south of Market are where we’ve built almost all new housing the past couple years, so naturally we’d expect prices to slip.
“Plenty of other big trends — affordability, unemployment, remote work — also factored into peoples’ decisions,” says Warnock at Apartment List.
“The city is being affected by a sense of malaise that is being fed by a wide variety of economic, social, political and demographic issues, and how they’re being covered by the media,” Carlisle of Compass adds. He acknowledges that crime could be among those issues, but cautions that “unless it’s a huge, sudden economic or social event like interest rates doubling, the stock market crashing, a pandemic striking, it’s very difficult to pinpoint effects of single factors” on home values.
More than a dozen real-estate agents were contacted for this story to ask if home buyers were fretting about crime. Most said conversations take place, but they downplayed the effects on demand. “It comes up, but it always comes up,” says agent Jonathan Dearman of City Real Estate. “Usually people don’t worry about it unless it’s violent crime or an area like the Tenderloin.”
Only one agent called crime a real problem. Proof Real Estate’s Craig Ackerman also called San Francisco “atrocious” and “bankrupt.” (The latter is not accurate, but the city does face a major budget shortfall.)
If San Francisco were really Deadwood with nicer architecture, our markets would be going to hell in very clear ways. Instead, what folks may believe — crime is bad, no matter what the statistics say, because our “dark figure” is unusually high — is not what they’re seeing when they go house- or apartment-hunting.
“People tend to be really bad at judging crime trends, [so] they just assume their neighborhood is safer than the city as a whole. Generally, people are worried about what’s happening outside” their street or block, Asher at AH Datalytics notes. Public opinion may go negative, but home values remain mostly stable.
Criminologist Kevin Wozniak tells The Frisc in an email that Americans’ beliefs about crime are more likely to be affected by things like visible poverty, public disorder, and, unfortunately, race, than they are by actual crime trends, and he corroborates Asher’s opinion that those who don’t encounter serious crime in the day-to-day simply assume their circumstances are exceptional.
For fear of crime to meaningfully impact people’s behavior, it would have to have a greater impact on more people’s lives — which means it would actually have to go up.
Adam Brinklow covers housing, development, and more for The Frisc.