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MAY 5, 2022
Folks Flee California For Two Years Running
It’s a trend worth noting, and it may continue if cities there continue to be dystopian landscapes.
The death of San Francisco
There are no children here
S.F. population fell 6.3%, most in nation, to lowest level since 2010
The contest that politicos will be watching is an up-or-down recall vote for San Francisco’s district attorney Chesa Boudin. It would be a major upset if he kept his job. He might be deposed in a landslide, as was San Francisco’s zany school board, or lose more narrowly. The results will help reveal progressive force at the polls come November.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-population-fell-6-3-most-in-nation-to-17199403.php
S.F. population fell 6.3%, most in nation, to lowest level since 2010
Ha! It looks like pro-crime SF district attorney Chesa Boudin will indeed be recalled by a 2:1 margin.
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.
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