The fine citizens of San Fran aren’t sharing their wealth.
Via FOX News
It was, the mayor of San Francisco said, a “shocking start” to the year for a city amid a technology boom with soaring rents and construction cranes, fashionable restaurants and gentrifying neighborhoods.
In January, four young men sitting in a stolen car were gunned down in a trendy neighborhood near City Hall. Ten days later, a mother was shot dead outside her home in front of her three children. In another, a blood-spattered woman staggered into a restaurant seeking help for bullet wounds, and a man was found shot dead in an SUV outside.
With the homicide count climbing to 11, fears and tensions have been stoked between those coming to the city for high-paying jobs and longtime residents in neighborhoods that were once predominantly minority. Most of the murder victims were young black men, and police are investigating their ties to gangs.
Newly arrived residents decry the violence outside their pricy apartments, while some black community leaders complain police are not putting enough resources into solving homicides labeled as “gang related.”
Mattie Scott, a black community leader whose 24-year-old son was slain in the same neighborhood in 1996, said after the Jan. 6 quadruple homicide that police and city officials aren’t making violence in the area a priority.[…]
The income gap between San Francisco’s wealthiest and poorest residents was growing the fastest in the country, according to a study by the Washington D.C.-based Brookings Institution last year. Tech jobs in the city have increased by 56 percent over the last five years and unemployment has plunged below 4 percent. But that success has caused a severe housing crunch and rents have skyrocketed. The median monthly rental for a one-bedroom apartment is $3,120 according to data gathering company Priceonomics.
“It really is a tale of two cities,” said San Francisco public defender Jeff Adachi, who has represented indigent criminal defendants in for nearly 20 years. “The economic disparities are profound.”