• Matias Augusto Travizano, 45, of Argentina died while descending Mount Shasta during rough conditions last Friday, September 12. Travizano and a companion had gone off course and were stranded on the tip of a glacier when he hit his head and slid 2,000 feet to his death. [SFGate]
• SF’s first televised Lowrider Parade and the "KING of the STREETS” Hopping Competition, which will be co-hosted by local legend Chuy Gomez, is taking place Saturday in the Mission in Celebration of Latino Heritage Month. [Secret San Francisco]
• Four people were shot in the East Bay town of Antioch around 10:20 pm Thursday in the area of "D" and West 19th Streets; two died at the scene, and two others were taken to local hospitals. [KPIX]
• A large, non-venomous ball python, which experts believe to be someone’s pet, is currently on the loose in the South Bay. [NBC Bay Area]

National:

• The air traffic control towers at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and Dallas Love Field lost all radar and phone communications Friday afternoon due to an outage at the local phone company. Six hundred fourty-five flights at DFW were delayed and 183 cancelled, and Love Field had 165 delays, as of 4:30 pm CT. [CNN]
• Trump signed a proclamation Friday requiring an annual fee of $100,000 for H-1B visa applications. He also announced plans to launch his new “Trump Gold Card,” which grants US citizenship with a $1 million processing fee, as well as the Platinum for $2 million. [CBS Washington DC]
• In a recent Pew Research poll, "How Americans View AI and Its Impact on People and Society," 53% of the respondents said they are concerned about AI technology and they want more government protections safeguarding how it’s used in their daily lives. [KRON4]
• A California federal judge representing 21 states and Washington DC won a temporary restraining order Thursday barring the US Department of Agriculture from collecting data on US residents who applied for SNAP. [Associated Press]

Video of the Day:

The year is 1998, and the goths are all gathered at an SF club called The Catacombs.

It's fairly bad news for California Governor Gavin Newsom that he has quite a bit of ground to make up if he plans to run for president in a couple years, according to a new Gallup poll. But Americans really don't like Elon Musk anymore.

Donald Trump most certainly will try to pass off a new Gallup poll as biased and "fake news," after it found that 57% of the country has an unfavorable view of him just seven months and change into his second presidency. And it's not like such poll numbers are going to keep the Donald up at night.

Governor Gavin Newsom, meanwhile, after spending a couple months edging more into the national spotlight, has 30% favorable and 41% unfavorable votes, with 28% either never having heard of him, or having no opinion. That's not terrific news as he prepares for a likely presidential bid, though with over three years left before the election, he has plenty of time to make his name better known, and better liked. (And 41% unfavorable is still 16 points shy of Trump's unfavorable count.)

That same poll found that Elon Musk is now the most hated person in America, with only 33% of respondents giving him a favorable rating, and 61% giving him the thumbs-down — a net -28% favorability rating. That's worse than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has a somewhat favorable rating among Republicans, but a net unfavorable rating of -23% among all Americans.

Pope Leo XIV, not surprisingly, comes out on top in this poll, which asked Americans to give their opinions, yea or nay, about 14 prominent US and global figures. The new pope has a 57% majority of favorable ratings, with only 11% unfavorable, for a net positive of 46% — with 31% of respondents having no opinion.

Joe Biden fares only slightly better than Trump in the poll, with 43% favorable and 54% unfavorable, and a net -11%. And all the members of Trump's cabinet who were named in the poll have net unfavorable ratings, including Marco Rubio (-16%), Pete Hegseth (-12%), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (-4%), and JD Vance (-11%).

Meanwhile progressive figure Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has only a net -4% favorability, with nearly a third of the country having no opinion of her; and Senator Bernie Sanders has a net +11%, with 49% viewing him favorably overall. That makes him one of the more well-liked figures in the country and the most well-liked American politician on this list.

This same poll was conducted in January, and since then, Americans' opinions of Musk and Rubio have soured about equally, with both falling significantly in public opinion over seven months. And Trump's favorability has shifted for about 7% of those polled, from positive to negative — he started the year closer to 50-50, with 50% giving him an unfavorable rating, and 48% a positive one.

As Gallup notes, "the dampened favorable ratings of key Trump administration officials since January are broadly consistent with the decline in Trump’s job approval rating over the same period, down 10 percentage points."

Related: That Tesla-Branded Diner Has Opened In LA, and Predictably It Is Being Yelp-Bombed

Top image: Elon Musk leaps on stage with Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally from behind bullet resistant glass at the Butler Farm Show fairgrounds on October 05, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania. This is the first time that Trump has returned to Butler since he was injured during an attempted assassination on July 13. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

The good news for mayoral candidate Daniel Lurie is that a new poll shows him 18 points ahead of London Breed in a head-to-head matchup. The bad news for him is that Breed’s still ahead by five points if you count all candidates, though ranked choice favors Lurie.

Last we checked on SF Mayor London Breed’s approval numbers, it was eight months ago, and Breed was at an awful 36% approval rating with 60% disapproval. Folks, it has only gotten worse. A new poll conducted in January has her job approval now down to 29%, with a 63% disapproval rating. But more troublingly for Breed, that poll is for November’s mayoral election, and it shows Levi Strauss heir and nonprofit founder Daniel Lurie beating Breed by 18 percentage points in a head-to-head matchup (46%-28%).

But remember, San Francisco does not have head-to-head matchups in our elections, we have ranked choice voting. And that creates a far more complicated picture.

For instance, when one counts all four declared candidates (plus the undeclared maybe-candidate former supervisor Mark Farrell), Breed is still on top with 26% of the vote. Lurie is just behind at 21%, Farrell is at 15%, and Supervisor Ahsha Safai comes in with 10%. A full 28% of voters are undecided.

But that doesn’t take ranked choice voting into account either. And according to the poll, the ranked choice numbers look very good for Lurie.

“Lurie also wins a plurality of second choice votes, giving him 40% of first and second place votes compares to 34 for Breed, which puts him in prime position to win the Ranked Choice voting contest in November,” the poll’s analysis says.

Politico points out an important detail — it’s an internal Lurie poll, which is to say, Lurie’s campaign paid for it. But that said, David Binder Research is a highly respected polling organization with a national profile. And the poll does not offer a true ranked-choice analysis; ranked choice gives us a first, second, and third choice of candidates, the poll only measured first and second choices.

But still, the poll was good enough for Lurie that his campaign blasted it out to reporters all over the city. And ten months from the election, Lurie is likely in the best spot of any candidate in the mayoral race.

Related: Daniel Lurie Makes Candidacy Official For SF Mayor, Says There's 'Hunger For Change' [SFist]

Images: (Left) DanielLurie.com, (Right) @LondonBreed via Twitter

Thanks to the willful exaggerations of Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Tucker Carlson, and the whole gang at Fox News and Newsmax, Republican-leaning voters are far more scared to visit San Francisco right now than Democrats.

A new Gallup poll finds that 74% of those surveyed who say they are Democrats or Democrat-leaning Independents think that San Francisco is still safe to live in or visit. Compare that to just 32% of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters who say the same thing.

Those other 68% of Republican voters have clearly bought the narrative of SF's demise, and while we would appreciate their tourist and convention dollars, they can also just fuck off to Nashville or Dallas or wherever until their cousin on Facebook tells them "Oh, San Francisco is just fine."

This vilifying of cities, and the project of convincing rural and suburban voters that the Democrats who run those cities are handing out fentanyl and destroying America, appears to be working, at least for Republican voters in red states. And it certainly doesn't help that recent "doom loop" coverage has gotten CNN and Good Morning America in on the game too.

Gallup found double-digit differences among partisans when it comes to the perception of safety in 14 out 16 cities that were asked about on the survey. And the polling outfit notes that this is a significant change since the last time they did this poll 17 years ago, in less starkly partisan times.

72% of respondents overall still believe Dallas and Boston are "safe" cities, while large numbers of both Democrats and Republicans believe that Chicago and Detroit are "unsafe."

San Francisco is in the middle of the pack, with the overall poll finding 52% still think the city is safe, and 46% saying it's not.

You can see on the chart, surprisingly, San Francisco comes out better than LA or New York in the poll, though you wouldn't know that from the outsized amount of national coverage SF's crime problems have gotten in the last year or two.

It should be noted, too, that Democratic voters are probably more likely to have lived in, or to be currently living in, an actual city with actual city problems, so they're not irrationally scared because of some news coverage.

Cities with violent crime rates that are far and away higher than San Francisco's, like Memphis and St. Louis, were not included in the Gallup poll — you'll see that neither SF, LA, nor New York City appear on this recent chart of violent crime rates per capita.

The partisan differences are stark, and they've also changed greatly over the last two decades where SF and Chicago are concerned. Gallup has done this poll seven times since 1990, but the last time all of these cities were included was in 2006.

Seattle and Minneapolis have also become less safe in the minds of many — perhaps partly because of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the many protests that followed.

"While Dallas and Boston have consistently enjoyed majority-level safe ratings throughout Gallup’s trends, Chicago has not since the early 2000s, and Detroit has never been considered safe by a majority," Gallup says.

And, they add, "Perceptions of city safety are heavily influenced by partisanship, which was not a factor in 2006."

Still, the practice of shitting on San Francisco for sport among Republican politicians goes back four decades or more, as Dianne Feinstein can surely tell you (on a good Dianne day).

Related: SF Chronicle Now Seems to Regret Amplifying the 'Doom Loop' Narrative It Heavily Amplified

Photo: Jose M/Unsplash

A new survey that the Chronicle conducted alongside a professional pollster in late June and early July found that San Franciscans are largely unhappy with how the city is being run, and they blame both the mayor and the Board of Supervisors about equally.

There's nothing too surprising about the poll numbers that came in Tuesday from this SFNext survey by the Chronicle in which "a random sample of 1,653 San Francisco residents age 18 and older was asked more than 90 questions about the state of the city." Who has time to answer 90 questions you ask? Well, they were offering $20 gift cards for people's trouble, and the survey was conducted both online and — probably for the very elderly — by telephone.

What the survey found was that 65% of residents surveyed think the conditions in the city are worse than they were when they moved here — with the percentage somewhat higher, 69%, among those who moved here before 2009. And that sentiment was pretty much the same across all income brackets and races, with homeowners about 8% more likely to hate everything than renters.

About two-thirds of city residents say they'll be sticking around in the city regardless, at least three years from now. But a little over a third, 37%, plan to move elsewhere within three years — but that may just reflect the always transient nature of this city, especially for the young and occupationally mobile.

And a majority of San Franciscans believe racism plays a key role in the city's inability to solve problems — with 62% saying racism figures into things at least a moderate amount, or a lot.

For as long as I've lived here — 22 years — San Franciscans have tended to not be fond of the Board of Supervisors, overall. It's kind of like Congress — you might like your representatives, but you likely hate the governing body and its contentiousness and inertia, taken as a whole.

That remains true in this survey, with only 12% of respondents saying that the supervisors are doing a good or excellent job. 48% said the board is doing a "fair" job, while 40% said they are doing a poor or very poor job.

"Whatever you’re doing — it’s not working," said one survey respondent, 36-year-old Mission resident Joy Kruth, with regard to dealing with the city's most urgent problems. "I feel the way a lot of other people do, which is, I don’t know where the holdup is … but I’m gonna blame it on all of you, because it’s not working."

A bit more surprising is the clear slippage in Mayor London Breed's popularity since her last election. Among the 1,600 people surveyed, it sounds like Breed could have a tough time getting reelected if the election were tomorrow, but that would likely depend on her opponents.

Breed did better than the Board of Supervisors with 23% — almost double — giving her a good or excellent approval rating. But a clear majority, 77%, rate her job performance as fair, poor, or very poor — with over a third, 35%, at the "poor" end of that spectrum.

Breed offered a pretty stock response to the survey results, saying in a statement, "It’s no secret San Francisco faces a number of challenges including the cost of housing, homelessness, addiction and mental illness, and public safety. I know the community is frustrated — I share their frustrations, too."

The mayor continued, "It’s why I am intensely focused on our economic recovery, building more housing, bringing MUNI back online, and keeping streets safe and healthy for everyone. I care about doing the work every day to meet the challenges of the city while also celebrating our successes."

Breed does love that word "challenges"...

Breed's office was quick to point out that the number of homeless did in fact go down slightly between 2019 and 2022, likely thanks to the city's progress on creating transitional and supportive housing. But that is a slow-moving train, and one could argue that once you've created the housing for the extant population who want to stay here, you will have a new batch of people arriving who also need shelter. (Homeless census data in the last decade has tended to suggest that a majority of those on the street are not new arrivals, with 71% in the last census saying their address prior to homelessness was in SF.)

Right, so, people in SF are unhappy, and think things could be better, and as Jason McDaniel, a political scientist at San Francisco State University, tells the Chronicle, "If I was on the ballot right now, I would be worried."

McDaniel also tells the Chronicle that it's probably time for some unity among the city's top leaders, and some cooperation on big policy ideas. But, McDaniel adds, "getting them to work together, row together and agree on a common thing, a common direction for policy, has not been something that the city leadership has been great at since I’ve been here."

SFNext Poll [Chronicle]

Top Photo: Gordon Mak

San Francisco has always been a bit of a transient city, a place where people come to work for a few years and maybe find good times or romance, and then leave for someplace cheaper and more boring when it comes time to "settle down."

Well, somewhere around 40 or 50 percent of people living here — people living here who respond to polls, that is — say they plan to leave in the next few years. And many of these people have told pollsters that the city's biggest problems these days are crime, homelessness, and "street behavior."

The SF Chamber of Commerce released results Thursday from their annual CityBeat Poll, which asks San Francisco voters a range of questions about the state of the city and their perceptions of it.

This year's poll, like last year's, found 70% city residents saying that quality of life in the city has declined. 80% of residents polled said that addressing homelessness needs to be a high priority for the city, and 88% said that the problem had gotten worse in the past few years.

71% also said that "street behavior" has gotten worse. And 80% of San Franciscans support expanding conservatorship laws and making it easier to forcibly commit the mentally ill for treatment.

Also, 76% of San Franciscans said that it should be a high priority for the city to increase the number of police officers in high-crime neighborhoods, and 60% supported prioritizing funding for police academy classes and recruiting new officers.

"San Francisco has suffered over the past year, which highlighted and exacerbated issues like homelessness, street conditions and safety concerns,” said chamber President and CEO Rodney Fong in a statement. "Public infrastructure and the ability to manage street conditions were also pushed to their limits, and unsurprisingly residents feel strongly about it."

The Chamber of Commerce unveiled a data dashboard earlier this year that charts out 311 complaint data in the city, and overall the data finds complaints trending downward about theft and homeless tent encampments since 2019.

This is just the latest poll by a local organization that has registered the growing public perception of crime worsening, and finding that many San Franciscans dream of escaping it all. As the SF Business Times reports, a recent survey by the Bay Area Council found that nearly half of respondents plan to flee California entirely in the coming years.

Dignity Health was the presenting sponsor of the chamber's poll, and a rep for Dignity, Mark Klein, spun the poll data about people wanting to leave for the Business Times this way: "They are voicing their intentions about moving. We still  have the ability to make changes that will keep them here."

Photo: Karam Alani

A new public opinion poll from UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS) found that former Vice President Joe Biden's lead over President Trump in California has eclipsed Hillary Clinton's lead over Trump around this time four years ago by 9 percentage points — breaking what was already a record for a presidential contest.

Among California voters who responded to the poll, Biden leads Trump 67 percent to 28 percent — an unprecedented 39-point advantage. And as the Los Angeles Times reports, Trump's approval rating among Californians, which has hovered in the mid- to low 30s since he was elected, has now dropped to 29 percent.

The reason, according to many poll respondents, has been Trump's gross mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, and the politicizing of what should never have been a political issue.

As Berkeley political scientist Eric Schickler, co-director of the IGS, tells the LA Times, "There was a question of whether [Trump's] support was already so low in the state that it couldn’t go lower. This shows the answer is no."

63 percent of California voters now say they "strongly disapprove" of the president's job performance, with 71 percent saying they disapprove overall. Back in January, a Berkeley IGS poll found that Trump still had 33 percent of California voters in his corner, with 67 percent disapproving.

And the poll may show a microcosm of what is occurring in other rural and suburban parts of the country where the president previously enjoyed some higher approval ratings, as the virus threat has reached these areas of the country in the last two months.

Trump has lost support in the hard-hit areas of the Central Valley and the Inland Empire of California, with a 7- and 8-percent approval-rating drop, respectively, since January. Meanwhile, Trump's lack of support among Democratic voters has remained fairly consistent through early this year — so this poll shows his support eroding among unaffiliated and Republican voters.

"There’s evidence nationally of a decline for Trump in more rural areas where the coronavirus has spread,” Schickler tells the LA Times, and this poll is "showing a similar thing here."

Still, Biden isn't a favorite among everyone here. The former Vice President gets props for potentially picking a California woman as his running mate — like Rep. Karen Bass of Los Angeles, or Senator Kamala Harris — but still only 56 percent of voters in the state say they have a favorable view of Biden.

Photo: Mark Makela/Getty Images

46 percent of Millennials want out of the Bay Area "in the next few years" according to a poll released today by the business-backed Bay Area Council, and although that may sound like good news to the old grayhairs who curse these phone-addicted youths, it's a serious problem according to the council's President and CEO, Jim Wundermann. In fact, he's using the results to make a plea for housing to keep the Millennials here.

"Losing our youth is a very bad economic and social strategy," Wunderman says. "Until we get serious about building the housing we need we’re going to continue seeing our region drained of the young and diverse talent that has helped make."

Millennials, a cohort measured here as 18 to 39 year-olds, cited the high cost of living (55 percent) as the number-one problem, followed by traffic (41 percent), and housing (39 percent). Homelessness and poverty/crime was also a reason they cited (30 percent) for dissatisfaction here.

"We saw a lot of young recent college grads or people who recently completed graduate programs come to the Bay Area and we added 650,000 jobs in just a few years and now those same people are entering their 30s and they're starting to think long-term about things like starting a family or building out their household,” Wunderman said. Another report, from last year, showed 80 percent of local Millennials had given up on owning a home here, so that's out.

The Bay Area Council poll was conducted online by Oakland-based public opinion research firm EMC Research between January 24 and February 1 with a 3.1 percent margin of error, surveying 1,000 registered voters across the nine-county Bay Area. And it's an uptick from the past poll, which last year showed 34 percent of Bay Area residents saying they'd leave soon. Now that overall number is 40 percent, with Millennials leading the charge. This is going to be heartbreaking for some parents: supposedly 31.5 percent of Bay Area Millennials live at home, according to another poll.

Related: LinkedIn Map Shows Where People Flee To When They Leave The Bay Area

According to a new poll by pro-business policy group the Bay Area Council, 34 percent of Bay Area residents are "likely to move out of the Bay Area in the next few years," or so they say. For the study, conducted online, Oakland-based EMC Research polled 1,000 residents of the region from February 12 through March 9. Citing a variety of gripes familiar to all — housing costs, related cost of living, and traffic issues chief among them — 13 percent said they "strongly agree" and 21 percent said they "somewhat agree" that they'll move.

“Residents’ discontent is palpable, and we can’t ignore it,” Bay Area Council president and CEO Jim Wunderman told the Business Times. “Traffic is horrific. Our housing shortage is pricing workers, families and others out of their homes and out of the region. Together, these problems threaten to erode our economic vitality and diminish our quality of life."

The Bay Area Council poll says that 40 percent of Bay Area residents consider the region to be on the wrong track — a figure that's actually lower than the 51 percent of San Franciscans who felt the city was headed in the wrong direction according to a Chamber of Commerce poll conducted during roughly the same timeframe. For further perspective, consider that previous regional polls from the Bay Area Council showed higher faith in the area's direction: Last year, 55 percent of respondents said we were on the right track, and in 2014, 57 percent of them were optimistic.

Meanwhile, 54 percent of poll respondents said they had no designs to leave the Bay Area. And while complaints were registered across incomes levels and generations, it was residents with household incomes of over $125,000 who felt most strongly that the area was headed in the right direction — though that was just 46 percent of them.

In a summary of the results, the Bay Area Council writes that, "Those who've lived in the region for five or fewer years were the most likely to say they would leave." Ironically, if simplistically, recent transplants bear much of the popular blame for an increasingly steep cost of living, which respondents identified as the top problem facing the area.

Just last month several sources were floating the idea that young tech workers might start fleeing the Bay Area, citing job searches for growing tech hubs in other regions. And seeming to address that population, Bay Area Council president and CEO Jim Wunderman wrote in a statement that "losing even a fraction of that number (2 million residents) and the talent they represent because we failed to deal with our most pressing issues would be very bad."

Related: Eighty Percent Of Bay Area Residents Think Traffic Won't Get Better
Are Tech Workers Starting To Flee SF For Jobs In Cheaper Towns?

Ed Lee is in the red. The Chronicle reports that numbers previously omitted from a recent Chamber of Commerce poll conducted by David Binder Research are fairly damning for the mayor's camp.

Why were the figures previously left out, other than the fact that they apparently weren't good? As the Chamber of Commerce's Jim Lazarus told the Chronicle, his organization just releases those numbers “we think (are) most relevant and important to the public.” In keeping with that attitude, we aren't provided an exact figure on the Mayor's disapproval, but we do learn that something north of 50 percent said they disapproved of Lee.

That might not be a huge surprise — this is the same phone-conducted poll of 500 San Francisco voters that showed 51 percent opposed to the direction in which they saw their city headed.

Those who did approve of the mayor numbered fewer than ever before, somewhere in the low 40 percent range. Meanwhile, a single digit percentage of respondents meet Lee's moves with "strong approval," and voters were split 45 percent to 45 percent over whether the mayor was likeable, a drop from twice that likeability percentage held in 2014.

Concerned citizens like those polled, citing homelessness followed by affordability as major issues facing the city, appear to hold the Mayor accountable for San Francisco's woes. On top of that, consider that Lee can't appear to give a speech without being confronted by police violence protestors — his January inauguration included.

Nonetheless, just as homelessness and affordability are no newfound crises, the numbers of those criticizing Lee are in keeping with trends. A survey released in December by a different group, Oakland's EMC Research, showed Lee's disapproval rating outweighed his approval rating. That was a first then, with the 49 percent who disapproved of the mayor nearly representing a majority.

Anyway, maybe it's time for Lee to take another business trip — Rio sounded divine.

Related: Mayor Ed Lee Goes To Rio On PG&E's Dime

You know how we're always making fun of The Advocate when they pump out that click-bait list every year where they try to say some city like Dayton, Ohio is gayer than San Francisco? Well here's why: It is patently, comically wrong, as a huge new Gallup poll confirms. Yes, San Francisco beats every other metropolitan area with a whopping 6.2% homosexuality (and bisexuality and trans people), and the next most LGBT-filled metropolis is tiny Portland, at 5.4%.

As the Washington Post reports, the poll included interviews conducted over two years, and covers entire metro areas, including suburbs and exurbs (the SF area would have included Hayward, for instance.) Therefore, "The distinctions between cities at the top and bottom here also might be more pronounced, Gallup suggests, if this survey looked only at central cities and not metropolitan areas."

See the full ranking here, via the NYT.

Also, there's a dig at Alabama, given that the poll confirms that the Birmingham metro area is statistically the least gay in the country, at 2.6%.

The difference between the largest and smallest gay populations among the 50 largest metros in the country is only a few percentage points — Birmingham comes in at at the bottom at 2.6 percent. But the list of cities that appear the least gay-friendly here is noticeably full of Southern and Midwestern cities in parts of the country where gay rights have not yet expanded as fast as they have in places like San Francisco (San Jose is an exception here). Birmingham's appearance at the very bottom is notable given the very public intransigence of public officials in Alabama lately on marriage equality.

Given the presence of Hartford, Connecticut high on this list, you can expect The Advocate to choose them for #1 next year. And we will, once again, laugh and laugh and laugh.

In a recent poll of 501 likely voters commissioned by Ed Lee's re-election campaign and conducted by Oakland's EMC Research, 65% of respondents expressed a favorable opinion of "the local technology industry." By contrast, 20% registered an unfavorable opinion and 15% didn't have an opinion. In a followup question, 68% of those polled said they want Ed Lee to support the growth of the industry.

So, does this survey, as highlighted by the Chronicle, call into question the dominant narrative of the last two years that San Franciscans think tech is ruining the city? Some have been quick to point out that the poll of current San Franciscans naturally excludes those who've been forced by circumstance to leave the city. It also doesn't ask for opinions about tech's influence on culture or other aspects of life in San Francisco.

One thing's for sure: Everyone agrees that the cost of housing is the biggest problem facing the city. But, “Tech isn’t the bogeyman here,” Sean Clegg, a consultant for Lee’s re-election campaign, told the Chronicle. "It’s like blaming the ocean for the sea level rising.”

An end to knee-jerk tech bashing will likely make room for more nuanced questions about the real effects of the tech industry and its workers on our city. But is the poll confirmation of an attitudinal shift, or has the tech hate just been exaggerated in the media because the haters and their Google bus protests are louder and showier?

Not every company is an Uber, nor is every Stanford grad a "Stanford asshole." But, certainly, the city is changing, a lot of people fear or dislike that change, and the very obvious place to point the finger is at the booming industry that has brought the most new faces here in the last few years. And perhaps San Franciscans, at least the ones who can still afford live here, are learning to love tech again after all.

Last year, 65% of likely voters said they had a favorable opinion of Mayor Ed Lee according to the Chronicle. His approval rating has sunk before to 49%, but earlier this year was reported as high as 73% by the Chronicle (in a poll criticized by the Bay Guardian).

Now a SurveyUSA poll commissioned by KPIX 5 shows that Lee has slid to 47% approval, with the same percentage of respondents saying the quality of life in the city is getting worse. That's up from 31% from when the same question was asked asked in 2013. 35% disapprove of Lee and 18% responded they weren't sure.

SurveyUSA interviewed 500 people this month and the margin of error is 4.5%. Respondents found the worst problem in SF to be the cost of owning a home, with housing expenses a widely held concern.

Yes, it's not much of a slump for Lee, but compared to the ridiculous heights of Lee mania, things are decidedly down. Is that what you call a correction?

Anyway, SFist's own highly scientific-ish poll showed Mark Leno, who was totally running against Lee until he definitely wasn't, beating Lee handily. The Chronicle calls another challenger hard to find, but maybe one will turn up if Lee's approval continues in this direction? No polling yet on whether Lee is still "2 Legit."

According to a new poll commissioned by business-sponsored, public-policy advocacy organization the Bay Area Council, a large majority of San Francisco voters don't actually believe shuttle buses are a symbol of the city's problems. Also, according to the people who paid for the study, the media is full of crap.

The poll surveyed 500 likely San Francisco voters who were kind enough to pick up the phone when Oakland firm EMC Research called to ask them if they had a minute to answer a few questions. The survey covered to the hot topic du jour: commuter shuttles, tech industry at large and the crumbling city of San Francisco. Of those 500 voters:

... overall, 57 percent have a favorable view of the shuttles, and only 18 percent have a negative view. At the same time, 67 percent of voters support allowing commuter shuttles to use a limited number of SF MUNI bus stops, while 70 percent support allowing shuttles as long as they conform to the kinds of regulatory measures that are included in an 18-month pilot shuttles program currently underway in the city.

A full 72 percent of those folks also support "charging shuttles on a cost-recovery basis" for using Muni stops and two-thirds of them oppose banning them from Muni stops completely, which sounds about right. Bay Area Council CEO Jim Wunderman—who was also a big supporter of billionaire yacht racing—lays the blame on the news media, saying in a statement: "Given the many news stories that theorize that San Franciscans are rebelling against the technology boom and shuttle buses, we were surprised to see the opposite is true - San Franciscans indeed embrace tech and the buses."

As for the tech industry as a whole, the poll also asked those 500 people with telephones if they think tech and commuter shuttles are responsible for larger issues like housing affordability. In that case, 67 percent disagreed that "commuter shuttles are ruining the character of San Francisco." And 63 percent don't believe that "commuter shuttles are a symbol of San Francisco's problems." Which is true. The real problem is rent. Just don't tell that to San Francisco's growing class of anti-shuttle, warrior-poets who rely on the buses to pay the bills.

Finally, if you can't handle the dry poll release (below) perhaps this video commercial prepared by the Bay Area Council will be more your speed:

Bay Area Council Poll [pdf]

Previously: 33 Percent Of San Franciscans Think S.F. Is Getting Worse, Says Dubious Poll

According to the annual CityBeat poll conducted by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, a full third of San Franciscans think the quality of life in the city is on the decline. The cost of home ownership also ranked as the #1 concern of local voters, beating out "homelessness/street behavior" for the first time in years.

In addition to home ownership and homelessness, San Franciscans' biggest concern is, as you might have guessed, the rising cost of rent. On a hyperlocal level, however, the vast majority of people think their neighborhoods are either improving (30%) or at least staying the same (53%). Hardly anyone (15%) thinks their neighborhood is actually getting worse.

Of course, these Chamber of Commerce polls are hard to take seriously. The sample size is a mere 500 people, all of whom were surveyed because they were willing to speak with someone from a research firm on an actual landline phone. (Like anybody has those anymore, much less wants to talk on them.) The survey, which has a margin of error of plus/minus 4.4%, also claims a mere 51% of San Franciscans support a $0.02 tax on sugar sodas, a bill that requires support of two-thirds of the city to pass. Supervisor Scott Wiener, who is pushing for the tax, told the Chronicle the poll was a fluke.

On the bright side for the Chamber of Commerce, 250 of their poll respondents — an even 50% — think the city is "going in the right direction." And for what it's worth, the Chamber of Commerce promised to work toward the goal of making San Francisco more affordable, for both workers and businesses.

The full results of the poll can be found here [PDF warning].

Previously: San Franciscans Love Mayor Lee, Says Insignificant Chamber Of Commerce Poll
[Chron]