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I was hoping for a lamp post hanging with some baseball bat pinata action, then a cannibal barbecue for the homeless.
Woot! Looks like democracy has worked, a little bit.
Remember the massive campaign for Covid fraud that started exactly the day after Trump's second impeachment failed?
Ha! It looks like pro-crime SF district attorney Chesa Boudin will indeed be recalled by a 2:1 margin.
He was backed by arch-villain George Soros, but it wasn't enough.
The Chronicle reported: “The downtown area, the city’s primary economic driver, is teetering on the edge, facing challenges greater than previously known, new data shows. The wounds suffered by the economic core are deep, and city officials have yet to come up with a plan to make the fundamental changes that some economists and business leaders argue could make the area thrive again.” Office vacancy is up nearly 300%; convention attendance in the city is down nearly 90%.
That account matches statistics on office vacancy. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that office attendance in San Francisco is down 52% from what it was before the coronavirus pandemic. ...
The left-wing Atlantic published a chilling essay this week by San Francisco native Nellie Bowles about how the town became a “failed city,” one in which Good Samaritans cannot even call an ambulance for an injured homeless person without being confronted by “advocates” who urge the patient not to go to the hospital.
“[T]he reality,” Bowles wrote, “is that with the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city. It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results.”
While voters have awakened to the reality of left-wing governance, the verdict is that it will take more than one recall to solve the city’s problems.
How San Francisco Became A Failed City
... Because yesterday, San Francisco voters decided to turn their district attorney, Chesa Boudin, out of office. They did it because he didn’t seem to care that he was making the citizens of our city miserable in service of an ideology that made sense everywhere but in reality. It’s not just about Boudin, though. There is a sense that, on everything from housing to schools, San Francisco has lost the plot—that progressive leaders here have been LARPing left-wing values instead of working to create a livable city. And many San Franciscans have had enough.
n a cold, sunny day not too long ago, I went to see the city’s new Tenderloin Center for drug addicts on Market Street. It’s downtown, an open-air chain-link enclosure in what used to be a public plaza. On the sidewalks all around it, people are lying on the ground, twitching. There’s a free mobile shower, laundry, and bathroom station emblazoned with the words dignity on wheels. A young man is lying next to it, stoned, his shirt riding up, his face puffy and sunburned. Inside the enclosure, services are doled out: food, medical care, clean syringes, referrals for housing. It’s basically a safe space to shoot up. The city government says it’s trying to help. But from the outside, what it looks like is young people being eased into death on the sidewalk, surrounded by half-eaten boxed lunches. ...
I used to tell myself that San Francisco’s politics were wacky but the city was trying—really trying—to be good. But the reality is that with the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city. It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results. ...
To understand just how noteworthy Boudin’s defenestration is, please keep in mind that San Francisco has only a tiny number of Republicans. This fight is about leftists versus liberals. It’s about idealists who think a perfect world is within reach—it’ll only take a little more time, a little more commitment, a little more funding, forever—and those who are fed up. ...
San Francisco saw 92 drug deaths in 2015. There were about 700 in 2020. By way of comparison, that year, 261 San Franciscans died of COVID. ...
During his campaign, Boudin said he wouldn’t prosecute quality-of-life crimes. He wanted to “break the cycle of recidivism” by addressing the social causes of crime—poverty, addiction, mental-health issues. Boudin was selling revolution, and San Francisco was ready. In theory.
But not in fact. Because it turns out that people on the left also own property, and generally believe stores should be paid for the goods they sell. ...
A 2020 tweet from the Tenderloin police station captured the frustration of the rank and file: “Tonight, for the fifteenth (15th) time in 18 months, and the 3rd time in 20 days, we are booking the same suspect at county jail for felony motor vehicle theft.” ...
The city’s schools were shut for most of the 2020–21 academic year—longer than schools in most other cities, and much longer than San Francisco’s private schools. In the middle of the pandemic, with no real reopening plan in sight, school-board meetings became major events, with audiences on Zoom of more than 1,000. The board didn’t have unilateral power to reopen schools even if it wanted to—that depended on negotiations between the district, the city, and the teachers’ union—but many parents were appalled to find that the board members didn’t even seem to want to talk much about getting kids back into classrooms. They didn’t want to talk about learning loss or issues with attendance and functionality. It seemed they couldn’t be bothered with topics like ventilation. Instead they wanted to talk about white supremacy. ...
For so long, San Francisco has been too self-satisfied to address the slow rot in every one of its institutions. But nothing’s given me more hope than the rage and the recalls. “San Franciscans feel ashamed,” Michelle Tandler told me. “I think for the first time people are like, ‘Wait, what is a progressive? … Am I responsible? Is this my fault?’”
But there is a fairly straightforward kind of order beneath the chaos: an illicit market economy operating in plain sight. The Tenderloin is home to two sprawling, overlapping transnational organized crime networks—one centered on drugs and the other on theft—which thrive in that neighborhood because of the near-total absence of the enforcement of laws.
Crowded onto its street corners and inside the tents congesting the sidewalk, countless petty criminals play their roles in a structured and symbiotic criminal enterprise. Its denizens fall into four main groups: the boosters, typically homeless and addicted, who steal from local stores; the street fences who buy the stolen merchandise; the dealers who sell them drugs for the money they make from the fences; and, at the top of the stack, the drug cartel that supplies the dealers and the wholesale fences that resell the goods acquired by street fences. Each has a role to play in keeping the machine moving, and the police know exactly how to disrupt it.
Experts say the city could, in fact, arrest and prosecute its way out of most of the problems in the Tenderloin if it chose to. It thrives, instead, as a zone of lawless sovereignty in the heart of a major American city—the criminal version of the area commanded by Seattle anarchists in the so-called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, in 2020. Where those extra-legal districts were eventually dismantled, the Tenderloin’s structure is entrenched. ...
“Everyone knows what’s going on. The cops, mayor, and D.A.,” said Tom Wolf, a recovering addict. “Everyone knows it’s organized and cartel-backed. They just don’t think it’s worth it to stop it, because nothing’s going to change anyway. They’ve surrendered." ...
During his tenure, Chesa Boudin resisted calls to prosecute these dealers, instead referring to them as victims of human trafficking. (Boudin, whose replacement is to be named by Mayor London Breed, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) ...
Like drug use and drug dealing, shoplifting has been effectively decriminalized in San Francisco, and some chains have reduced their presence in the city. California’s Proposition 47, passed in 2014, reduced shoplifting of less than $950 in goods from felonies to misdemeanors. On top of that reduction in severity, Boudin scaled back prosecution of these crimes.
Together, Prop 47 and the DA’s non-enforcement policy have removed any incentive for police officers to make arrests for shoplifting, which, in turn, has made it far less likely that retailers will even call the police in the first place. For that reason, it’s difficult to estimate the actual scale of the problem. But you get a pretty good sense how normalized it has become.
Today, in San Francisco, you can walk into a Walgreens, a Safeway, a Target or a CVS, take hundreds of dollars of products off the shelf in front of customers and employees, walk out the door, and then come back a few hours later and do it all over again. “We’ll see the same folks go into multiple retailers, multiple times a day,” said Ben Dugan of the Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail. “The stores are their ATMs.” ...
Taken together, the dealers, boosters, and fences comprise a vast illicit industry that generates the cash that pays a Mexican drug cartel to import narcotics into San Francisco’s streets. Those drugs kill two people a day directly. The organized robberies and thefts they spawn create thousands more victims, from targets of muggings, burglaries, and home invasions to working class, elderly San Franciscans whose local pharmacies keep shutting down or reducing hours, to retail employees who are laid off as those stores are closed.
Ostly, who was fired by Boudin the day after he took office, believes the rampant criminality in the Tenderloin is “ninety percent because of Boudin.” Tung, who ran unsuccessfully in 2019 against Boudin, said, “San Francisco has completely lost the deterrent effect of prosecution. You have to have some reason for people not to commit crime. People are weighing what’s going to happen, and in San Francisco, nothing is going to happen to you—not if you sell drugs, even if you mix them lethally, not if you break into cars, stores, homes.”
fewer than a third of workers are back in the office in San Francisco, where the occupancy rate hovers around 31 percent.
Business leaders sound the alarm over San Francisco’s post-pandemic fate
Mark Calvey Jun 21, 2022
Business leaders are increasingly concerned about San Francisco's fate as more workers and companies embrace remote work.
San Francisco must take dramatic action to stem the outflow of residents and businesses, as remote work has cut deeply and permanently into the workforce who used to flood into downtown every day, according to a new report.
Advance SF, working with the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, is calling on San Francisco to pause new taxes and regulations as the city seeks to recover from the pandemic’s economic fallout. The group also wants the city to conduct exit interviews with companies that have left San Francisco to learn what factors went into their decisions to leave.
“We are working to get a discussion going about the cost of living and working in San Francisco, because the cost has become so high,” Wade Rose, president of Advance SF, told me Tuesday. “If you’re a tech startup and you can hire an excellent engineer in Columbus, Pittsburgh or Salt Lake City for $70,000 a year, and you have trouble finding similar high level of talent for $300,000 a year in the Bay Area, you’re gonna think long and hard about Columbus, Pittsburgh or Salt Lake City.”
Construction of more workforce housing is also a priority for Advance SF, a business-backed group that was formerly known as the Committee on Jobs. Advance SF is placing a greater focus on safety and quality of life issues in San Francisco, given that problems tied to those issues hurt tourism and spur workers and companies to avoid coming into the city. Advance SF is also looking beyond the traditional downtown area of the Financial District to include the South of Market Area and along Market Street to the Castro neighborhood.
San Francisco is Another Portugal -- Worst Covid Wave Ever
Never-ending Chronic Covid grips city
Igor Chudov
8 hr ago
The icon of liberalism, as well as a bastion of “support for science” San Francisco, believes in vaccines. It is over 90% vaccinated. ...
San Francisco's COVID situation is replicated in thousands of highly vaccinated places. I wrote about Portugal, showing how the country with “no one left to vaccinate” is gripped by endless waves of Covid. ...
Ba.5 is just starting to become predominant in San Francisco, unlike in Portugal where it dominated since a month ago, and that is not a good sign for a beautiful coastal city whose residents keep catching endless cases of Covid.
Do you feel sorry for San Franciscans, who get ill so often? I do.
Couple fined $1,500 for parking in own driveway
Just another typical day in San Francisco
I once got a ticket in SF for not curbing my wheels.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/couple-fined-1500-parking-driveway/story?id=86181089
Couple fined $1,500 for parking in own driveway
They should deal in fentanyl and meth. Then the San Francisco police won't bother them.
Onvacation says
I once got a ticket in SF for not curbing my wheels.
I once got a ticket in SF after leaving the parking spot with meter still not expired. They got around the requirement to prove that the car was still parked at the spot when the ticked was issued by writing "vehicle too high to read VIN". The fucking truck is bone stock and not lifted a single inch.
Eric Holder says
Onvacation says
I once got a ticket in SF for not curbing my wheels.
I once got a ticket in SF after leaving the parking spot with meter still not expired. They got around the requirement to prove that the car was still parked at the spot when the ticked was issued by writing "vehicle too high to read VIN". The fucking truck is bone stock and not lifted a single inch.
I always get a lawyer and fight tickets. It's worth the costs.
San Francisco restaurant owner says he has to clean off graffiti every day only to find his business covered in graffiti again the next day. The city then fines him for having graffiti.
Welcome to California.
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1550250060910305280?cxt=HHwWgICxmfCNzIMrAAAA
San Francisco restaurant owner says he has to clean off graffiti every day only to find his business covered in graffiti again the next day. The city then fines him for having graffiti.
Welcome to California.
Has video.
San Fran has spent $500,000 to figure out which $3,000 trash can to use in the city. Vote on which one is the most colossal waste of money.
One of the most frustrating aspects of America’s necessary and important criminal justice reform debate is the cavalier attitude with which (usually, though not always) well-off advocates living in posh suburban enclaves or luxury city high-rises push policies whose downside risks will be borne by a tiny slice of our most vulnerable citizens, who live in places most of those advocates wouldn’t dare walk through by themselves on a summer night.
... while emptying prisons and cutting back on policing may not change a whole lot in neighborhoods like DC’s Georgetown, New York’s Scarsdale or LA’s Beverly Hills, they could wreak havoc in Brooklyn’s Brownsville, Chicago’s Austin or Baltimore’s Belair-Edison neighborhoods. Yet the troubling disparities illustrated by the drastically unequal distribution of violent crime in America are largely ignored by activists and the media.
In fact, those who do call for more attention to be given to the violence in America’s most dangerous neighborhoods in cities like Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, New Orleans, Philadelphia and St. Louis are often chastised for doing so. We’re often accused of fearmongering and distracting from the fact that nationally crime is quite low, relative to modern peaks.
1337irr says
Eric Holder says
Onvacation says
I once got a ticket in SF for not curbing my wheels.
I once got a ticket in SF after leaving the parking spot with meter still not expired. They got around the requirement to prove that the car was still parked at the spot when the ticked was issued by writing "vehicle too high to read VIN". The fucking truck is bone stock and not lifted a single inch.
I always get a lawyer and fight tickets. It's worth the costs.
That works well in many counties even in the bay area. However I'm 99% sure in SF judges do not look at any evidence or paperwork, unless the case gets media attention they rubberstamp everyone guilty as...
Jul 27, 2022, 5:00pm PDT
Prologis CEO Hamid Moghadam feels no one is safe in the company’s hometown of San Francisco after he was robbed at gunpoint by several men.
The June 26 incident, until now not publicly reported, highlights rising concerns over crime and other challenges facing the Bay Area and adds to worries more residents and companies will opt to leave the region.
In a wide-ranging interview this week, Moghadam shared with me how the experience has made him more vocal in urging San Francisco’s leadership to make public safety their top priority. Moghadam founded Prologis (NYSE: PLD), the world's largest industrial landlord, in the city in 1983.
The robbery occurred as he pulled his car up in front of his house in tony Pacific Heights, a neighborhood that is home to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and other luminaries. ...
The possibility of the company’s departure also came up in the letter he sent shortly after the robbery to San Francisco Mayor London Breed, the city’s Board of Supervisors and Gov. Gavin Newsom about his robbery and urging them to place a higher priority on public safety.
“I recognize we live in an urban environment, but the level of crime, including violent behavior, has become absolutely unacceptable,” Moghadam wrote. “Obviously, the majority of voters feel this way, which is why they voted to recall our district attorney.
“Ten years ago, we acquired a larger company that was headquartered in Denver, but I insisted we keep our headquarters in San Francisco. Today, I am not sure I would make the same decision,” Moghadam wrote. “It is now difficult for me to tell potential candidates that they should move to San Francisco. We pay some of the highest taxes, local and state, in the nation yet we have no sense of security. Protecting public safety should be the government’s top priority — that is the foundation to a successful city.
“I am deeply concerned that our city may be so far down the path toward decline that we may never recover — or at least not for a long, long time,” Moghadam wrote. ...
“If you're paying so much for housing and paying such high level of taxes, you expect some basic government services, like public safety and being able to walk down the street without being accosted by homeless people or having to walk over human excrement to get to your office, which I do every day,” Moghadam said. “When a community develops a reputation for being unsafe or just a really awful environment to go to a meeting, it loses business and it’s hard to bring back.”
“You walk around the streets of San Francisco and it looks literally like a third world country. It’s just terrible,” said Moghadam, who the Business Times honored last year with its Most Admired CEO Lifetime Achievement Award. “We're spending a ton of money, so it’s not a money issue.”
Prior to the robbery, Moghadam said his involvement with civic issues focused on slowing the migration of businesses out of San Francisco, specifically citing the loss of Charles Schwab headquarters to the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The Bay Area also saw Tesla, McKesson and Oracle move their headquarters to Texas in recent years.
1337irr says
Eric Holder says
Onvacation says
I once got a ticket in SF for not curbing my wheels.
I once got a ticket in SF after leaving the parking spot with meter still not expired. They got around the requirement to prove that the car was still parked at the spot when the ticked was issued by writing "vehicle too high to read VIN". The fucking truck is bone stock and not lifted a single inch.
I always get a lawyer and fight tickets. It's worth the costs.
That works well in many counties even in the bay area. However I'm 99% sure in SF judges do not look at any evidence or paperwork, unless the case gets media attention they rubberstamp everyone guilty as...
Parking tickets do not go in front of the judge in SF. All you get is "administrative review" with SFMTA "hearing officer".
Seattle business owners are installing 1-ton concrete blocks on city streets to prevent some of the 13,300 homeless people in the Dem-led city from camping out on the sidewalks
One-ton concrete blocks have been installed on Seattle's sideways in a bid to stop RVs and homeless tents being put up
The blocks are so heavy that they can't be moved without specialized equipment - making them burdensome for the city to remove
Despite it being illegal to place ecology blocks, sidewalks or parking spaces, anonymous residents continue to plant them in the city
... But now, parents say they have had to resort to conducting 'sweeps' of public parks to make sure there are no needles on the ground before allowing their kids to play on swing sets as the encampments continue to grow.
'How do we get to a place where we think that's normal and a part of life in Seattle?' one resident asked Fox News.
When San Francisco resident Marcia Saephan found her car broken into, she also found a flyer on the windshield from the thief.
The flyer says,
I don't want to STEAL anymore! But I still have to bills to pay. Can you help me please?
After that the thief listed ways that victims could send them money: Cash App, Bitcoin, and PayPal.
The downtown areas of San Francisco; Cleveland; and Portland, Oregon, have all had slow recoveries from pre-pandemic levels of activity, according to a new study.
The once-popular neighborhoods have seen a sharp decline in recent years, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley found using GPS location data from 18 million cellphones, then comparing activity from before 2019 to activity from March through May of this year.
San Francisco only has 31% of the activity downtown compared to its pre-pandemic levels, putting the city in last place of the 62 cities measured, the study found.
Department of Justice’s probe into public corruption in the city and county of San Francisco.
August 25, 2022 Judge William Orrick Sentenced Mohammed Nuru to 7 years in Prison.
Mohammed Nuru in January pleaded guilty to what federal prosecutors described as “a staggering amount of public corruption” during his time leading the city’s Department of Public Works. Federal prosecutors said that over a 12-year period, Nuru accepted more than $1 million in money, international trips, jewelry, restaurant meals and other goods and services from city contractors and developers in exchange for preferential treatment and confidential information about city business.
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