A portrait of frustration and resolve

One word keeps coming up when San Franciscans reflect on the state of a city they regard as a better place to live than all the alternatives.

Frustration.

The paradox between residents’ loyalty to the city and their frustration with so many aspects about it was a recurring theme in an annual poll released last week by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. It found that 64 percent of San Franciscans regarded the city as “a better place to live than most other places.”

By overwhelming margins, respondents stated that availability of housing is getting worse, congestion is getting worse, crime is getting worse and homelessness and street behavior are getting worse.

These conclusions did not surprise some of the officials elected to address these problems. “It jibes with everything I hear from people,” said state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco. “People love living here and want to be here, but are frustrated with certain things in the city.”

Mayor London Breed anticipated — and agreed — that homelessness was the city’s No. 1 issue.

“I see what you see,” she said at a chamber event Tuesday. “I’m frustrated by what you’re frustrated by.”

The frustration crosses ideological lines.

“I think what San Franciscans are feeling is frustration with the lack of action coming out of City Hall, which is something I feel myself and agree with,” said Supervisor Hillary Ronen, a leader of the progressive faction. “Ask anyone in this building — with all the so-called political divides — and we will all tell you what the problems are, and we’ve been complaining about them for years. Homelessness. Clean streets. Affordable housing.”

Ronen said one source of the frustration is that the scale of the solutions offered at City Hall too often don’t match the magnitude of the problem. In the case of homelessness, she cited the battle over whether to establish conservatorships that would apply to just a few mentally ill homeless individuals and a triage program that would serve a small percentage of people living in their vehicles.

Worth doing? Yes, in my view. Changing the dynamic of homelessness in San Francisco? No, Ronen rightly noted.

“These are big problems that need big solutions,” she said. “I feel like we’re working around the margins and not really projecting those big ideas.”

The positive takeaway from the poll is that it suggested frustrated San Franciscans are receptive to remedies that would have been difficult if not unthinkable to achieve in the past. For example, 77 percent of the respondents would support safe injection sites for drug addicts, a 10 percent increase from the previous year’s poll. The unavoidable misery and health hazards on the streets — people shooting up in plain sight, the discarded needles strewn about — are having an impact.

Perhaps the most profound and promising measure of public resolve was reflected in attitudes about housing and development.

“I think at some point people reached the end of their rope on housing and are open to trying new things,” said Wiener, the Democratic state senator who has been trying to break some of the political and regulatory hurdles to development since he was on the Board of Supervisors. “There are certain ideas about housing that even five or 10 years

ago would have fallen like a lead balloon.”

Nearly 4 in 5 San Franciscans said they would support a policy to “maximize construction of all housing types” — a significant signal to a city too often stalemated in a tug-of-war between developers trying to optimize high-end housing and advocates pushing for higher levels of “affordable” units set aside for low- and middle-income households.

Wiener certainly took note of the 74 percent support for rezoning around transit stops for higher-density housing. He had seen polls taken during last year’s city elections that showed such support at closer to the 50 percent level. His proposal last year to force cities to allow more such transit-oriented development (SB827) stalled under the weight of concerns about displacement and loss of local control. He is back this year with SB50, narrowed and recalibrated to address some of the gentrification concerns.

He also believes that public sentiment is moving in his direction, not just in San Francisco, but in areas of the state suddenly feeling the pangs of unaffordability. A new statewide poll by the Edelman Trust found that 72 percent of Californians found the cost and availability of housing to be a “very serious’’ issue, nearly approaching the 76 percent mark in the Bay Area.

The Edelman poll concluded that the cost of housing is the No. 1 threat to the California economy, and 53 percent of the respondents considered leaving the state because of housing costs.

Wiener said it is not surprising that people “struggling with housing” would consider their options. But he cautioned against underestimating the resiliency and resolve of local residents.

The 64 percent of San Franciscans who maintain that this is still a better place to live than most others would attest to that.

“People choose to live here despite the high housing costs, despite the challenges of homelessness and addiction, despite the congestion — despite everything,” Wiener said. “People choose to live here and to work very hard and to overcome obstacles to make a go of it here.”

John Diaz is The San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial page editor. Email: jdiaz@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JohnDiazChron