Leadership Quote by George Moscone

“Crime is an overhead you have to pay if you want to live in the city” is the kind of line that tries to turn panic into pragmatism. Moscone, a politician who governed San Francisco at a moment when American cities were being sold as ungovernable, reaches for the language of budgets and business: “overhead” isn’t tragedy, it’s a cost of doing life at scale. The phrasing is strategically unromantic. It refuses the suburban fantasy that safety is a default setting and frames urban living as a trade-off: density buys you opportunity, culture, anonymity, and friction; you don’t get the first without some of the second.

The subtext is a defense of the city itself. In the 1970s, “crime” was becoming a political superweapon, a shorthand for disorder that could justify disinvestment, aggressive policing, and racialized narratives about who belongs. Moscone’s sentence tries to blunt that weapon by downgrading crime from moral apocalypse to manageable risk. It’s also a quiet rebuke to voters who want cosmopolitan benefits without accepting the messy human mix that produces them.

There’s rhetorical gamble here. Calling crime “overhead” can sound cold, even callous, as if victims are a rounding error. But the intent isn’t indifference so much as triage: keep the public from treating crime as proof the urban experiment has failed. Moscone is asking constituents to tolerate complexity long enough to govern it, not flee from it.