Last week, San Francisco’s polarizing district attorney, Chesa Boudin, was removed from office in a recall election, marking the culmination of a campaign that had been gaining momentum for more than a year. It felt like a referendum on the near future of cities and how they should be run, particularly global cities in the western world with high costs of living and associated problems like homelessness. The Boudin recall, despite being entangled with culture war narratives and political partisanship, also ties together several more substantial debate threads: the urban housing crisis, the role of policing and the limits of its effectiveness, the tech industry’s relationship to the cities in which it’s concentrated, and the enduring difficulty of separating the media’s portrayal of a complex situation from conditions on the ground.