San Francisco just took home a top prize it didn’t want.
The liberal bastion, which has a looming $1.4 billion budget deficit and has been struggling post-pandemic, was listed as the worst-run city in the United States, according to a new WalletHub study.
The survey considered everything from the effectiveness of local leadership to the quality of city services. Thirty-six metrics, grouped into six service categories, were compared against the city’s total per-capita budget. San Francisco came in dead last among 148 of the largest U.S. municipalities.
WalletHub looked at financial stability, education, health, safety, economy, infrastructure, and pollution. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale. It also calculated an overall quality of city services score for each city based on its weighted average across all the metrics. WalletHub divided the quality of city services score by the total budget per capita dollar amount to come up with a score per dollar spent that it used as its overall rank.
For San Francisco, that meant a less than impressive showing. Nearby Oakland, California, followed San Fransisco. Gulfport, Mississippi; New York City; and Flint, Michigan, rounded out the bottom five.
The top of the list was populated by mostly smaller cities. Nampa, Idaho; Lexington-Fayette, Kentucky; and Boise, Idaho, were the top three.
San Francisco has struggled since COVID-19.
The city also has problems related to homelessness, crime, and cash-strapped public schools. The downtown area of San Fransisco, once a tourist hotspot, has been hollowed out, with businesses opting to move to safer areas where retail theft isn’t as big of a problem and law enforcement isn’t hamstrung by local laws that let offenders go free.
Last year, a Gallup poll found that nearly half of the people surveyed believed San Francisco is unsafe and would not live or visit there.
Democratic Mayor London Breed, who is up for reelection in November, has offered up ambitious and costly plans for a turnaround but many believe it’s too little, too late.
Researchers also noted that big cities such as San Francisco, New York, and Chicago are harder to manage for mayors and much “more complex.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Associate Professor Cleopatra Charles at Rutgers University, who was involved in the study, cited vagrancy, poor public safety, aging infrastructure, and other environmental threats as hurdles draining city budgets.
“Many cities are in financial trouble due to lingering inflation, underfunded pension liabilities, and high costs of providing retirees health benefits,” she said. “We are on an unsustainable path.”