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raise taxes or austerity
Bay area is so bad I move there for any price. Weather is the only reason it hasn't turned into a Detroit.
https://wolfstreet.com/2024/01/21/status-of-the-housing-bust-in-san-francisco-lowest-price-for-any-december-since-2017-2019-silicon-valley-and-the-bay-area/
All that money is paid to grifters for their political support, and to expand the homeless population to justify yet further increased funding.
Here’s How Long It Took To Buy Locked Up Basic Items in San Francisco Stores ...
Aisle 10 inside the Safeway at Market and Church streets is lined with gleaming, locked acrylic cases stocked with everything from toothpaste and hand soap to sunscreen and K-Y Jelly.
But you can’t just go up to the shelf and grab what you want; you need to press a button to summon an associate to unlock the case. What’s more, the employee won’t even give the item to you. The staffer must put it in a basket and bring it to the register, lest you waltz out the door without paying.
Before I could press said button, a local resident named Danielle did. She and I waited three minutes and 31 seconds for our toothpaste, at which point a worker came over and hurriedly pulled two tubes of Crest off the shelf, put them in a shopping basket and walked away. ...
Two minutes and 34 seconds elapsed before a worker retrieved a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red for me. ...
Stores should go back to clerk-behind-counter model. You pay - you get your toothpaste.
The hardest thing you’ll ever have to comprehend in terms of San Francisco’s government is the city’s leaders aren’t incompetent. This is what they want.
At any given moment, on any given day, there are around 8,000 people sleeping on the streets of the city — one of the wealthiest, per capita, in human history. Once acquainted with the basic facts of the crisis, including the incredible sum of money dedicated to solving the problem, the average San Franciscan concludes the city must be run by morons. How else, with billions of dollars, have city leaders failed to provide a few thousand temporary beds? Even with supportive services, the numbers don’t add up. This is because the average person assumes the small cabal of activists who run the city’s bloated homeless industrial complex want to temporarily shelter and rehabilitate the homeless. They do not. In fact, they are ideologically opposed to the concept. The goal of San Francisco’s activist government is to provide every person who moves to the city with a free, one-bedroom apartment for the rest of their life. City funds are largely allocated to this end. Once placed, this “permanent” solution costs money every year, and every year more people move to the city looking for free housing. The problem compounds.
While the project was never sustainable, the city’s sheep-like wealthy tax base has recently fled for the suburbs. Now, billions of dollars and a decade later, with more people living on the streets than ever, the government faces an impending $724M deficit, with around ten thousand more people reliant on funds, for “free” housing, that could easily cease to exist. This is a ticking time bomb.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the people discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy–to be followed by a dictatorship.
18th century Scottish lawyer Alexander Fraser Tytler:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the people discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy–to be followed by a dictatorship.
San Francisco’s Brand Is on Life Support. City Leaders Lack Courage To Act
by Hank Plante
Published Jan. 30, 2024
Brands die. Just ask Lord & Taylor, Blockbuster or the California Republican Party.
Even city brands die.
If it’s not dead already, San Francisco's brand is clearly on life support. It happened because officials allowed 4,400 people to destroy it. That’s the number ofunshelteredhomeless people in the city’s official 2022 point-in-time count, and they have essentially held the city’s reputation hostage. ...
A series of district attorneys who didn’t believe in prosecuting criminals didn’t help. DA Terence Hallinan had the worst record in the state in the late 1990s, winning convictions in only a third of his cases. His replacement, Kamala Harris, refused to seek the death penalty for a cop killer, drawing widespread condemnation from police and a rebuke from Sen. Dianne Feinstein at the funeral of the officer, Isaac Espinoza. George Gascón famously became the co-author of Proposition 47, which lowered the penalty for smash-and-grab thefts under $950 to misdemeanors. And Chesa Boudin, who was kicked out of office by voters in 2022, never seemed to realize that voters expected him to be a public prosecutor, not the public defender he once was.
Nor did it help when Mayor London Breed announced cuts of $120 million from the police and sheriff’s department budgets in 2020. The cops got the message. Who could blame them for feeling disrespected and less aggressive about fighting crime? ...
The city certainly cleaned up many streets by enforcing anti-camping laws during last year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference. But permanently doing those things would require city officials to admit their progressive policies have failed.
I’m not convinced the city’s current political leadership has the courage to do that. San Francisco politics are tribal; many leaders are too afraid of looking “conservative” in a liberal town if they take a tougher approach. But the public backlash is real, and it may be the spark the city needs to stop hugging criminals, even if local politicians are the last to realize it.
I spoke with a lady today that formerly lived in the Bay Area of California where she worked as an RN at an Oakland hospital. Just the other day, she spoke with a fellow RN that still works at the same hospital. Her friend told her that the hospital just put out a very strong warning for all hospital employees, stating that they should not leave the premises for lunch, due entirely to the extremely high crime in the area.
The decay of that entire area is alarming, and almost hard to believe.
Take for example the Xerox building in Washington, DC. In times of major financial disruption, an asset like the Xerox building can get temporarily “stuck.” At the time of sale this month, the Xerox building was at least 40% unoccupied. It was not even earning enough to pay its bank loan. Worse, they couldn’t get any replacement tenants because the rent was too high, which it needed to be to pay the bank loans.
The building couldn’t attract new tenants with lower rates, because then its existing tenants would demand lower rents too, and it would be a financial death spiral.
The building couldn’t attract new tenants with lower rates, because then its existing tenants would demand lower rents too
Target Clerk Unwittingly Tells Newsom Retail Theft Is His Fault
When Newsom asked a clerk why she didn't intervene upon witnessing a theft, she blamed the governor, not realizing he was in front of her.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom got some unexpected feedback about the state’s shoplifting laws during a trip to Target.
The governor recounted the incident on a Zoom call about mental health that was recorded and shared Wednesday on X by Gabriel Lorenzo Greschler of The Mercury News. Newsom described his conversation with a clerk who saw a person walk out of the store with an item, noting the worker didn’t recognize the governor at first.
“As we’re checking out, the woman says, ‘Oh, he’s just walking out, he didn’t pay for that,’” the governor recalled. “I said, ‘Well why didn’t you stop him?’
“She goes, ‘Oh, the governor’ — swear to God, true story, on my mom’s grave — ‘The governor lowered the threshold, there’s no accountability.’ ...
Newsom then referenced that, at $950, California has the 10th-lowest threshold nationally for prosecutors to charge alleged offenders with a felony, before expressing frustration about his own transaction total.
Mark Farrell Will Run To Be San Francisco’s Mayor Again, Sources Say
For a brief window of time, Mark Farrell was mayor of San Francisco. Apparently, that six months running City Hall wasn’t enough.
Multiple sources have confirmed to The Standard that Farrell—a San Francisco native who also served seven years as a supervisor for the Marina District—will challenge Mayor London Breed in November’s election. Farrell is expected to make a formal announcement in the next two weeks.
Farrell, 49, has been recruiting people to appear in his campaign ads, according to sources. Among those contacted was a business owner from the city’s Asian American community, which accounts for one-third of San Francisco residents. Farrell also has been receiving help from Margaux Kelly—a top exec for the nonprofit TogetherSF and one of his former supervisor staffers—to arrange meetings and coordinate his schedule, according to a City Hall source.
San Francisco experienced historic office vacancy and a major uptick in subleases in the early months of 2023, a testament to the office market's struggle to recover amid a wave of tech layoffs and the normalization of remote work.
The space recorded as vacant in the first quarter spiked to 29.5%, up nearly 2 percentage points from the end of last year and nearly 10 points from a year ago, according to real estate firm CBRE.
At 26.6 million square feet, there's more than eights times as much vacant office space as there was in early 2019 before the pandemic, when the city's office vacancy rate was in the low single digits. Believe it or not, that's enough to fill 18 Salesforce Towers.
The space recorded as vacant in the first quarter spiked to 29.5%, up nearly 2 percentage points from the end of last year and nearly 10 points from a year ago, according to real estate firm CBRE.
White liberal billionaires and the Blackrock's may buy up cheap commercial RE in San Fran, and then force a positive change within the local government which will lead to increases in property values.
Inside the Far Left Billionaires' Push to Maintain Control of San Francisco ...
Supervisor Dean Preston, who has used his perch on the city council to push for abolishing prisons and police, seized upon the news to claim that it confirms a “right wing takeover” of San Francisco. Preston, who is facing reelection, promised to “fight back” against “dystopian conservatives.”
Yet the groups and individuals named as conservative donors, like Michael Moritz and Garry Tan, are virtually all Democratic moderates with a history of donating to liberal causes. The issues these donors have zeroed in on are traditionally associated with political moderates, like restoring algebra to public middle school – the classes were removed by city leftists for racial equity reasons – hiring more police officers in the midst of a crime wave and street addiction crisis, and encouraging new construction to bring down the price of housing.
What’s more, beyond the absurdity of painting these mainstream goals as some type of fascist plot, the subtext of the trio of news articles is the false assumption that big money only flows to the moderates. In reality, the city’s hard left wildly benefits from millions of dollars from its own faction of wealthy donors – many of whom are slum lords and heirs of family wealth who have radically transformed San Francisco with years of advocacy and electioneering.
A Chamber of Commerce survey found that 72% of voters believe that the city is on the wrong track, compared with only 22% who said the opposite. The number was slightly improved from the 77% figure in the Chamber’s survey back in May, but still a far cry from the 46% who believed the arrow was pointed downward in 2019.
AD says
White liberal billionaires and the Blackrock's may buy up cheap commercial RE in San Fran, and then force a positive change within the local government which will lead to increases in property values.
Yes, while cutting in those local officials with a piece of the action. Once you see bulk buying, you'll know the fix is in.
We can’t trust SFUSD to reinstate eighth-grade algebra. Voters must weigh in
San Francisco’s school board meant well when it dropped eighth-grade algebra. But students have fled, and the district should learn its lesson.
... Yet in San Francisco, Algebra 1 has not been offered until ninth grade for the past decade. Our public schools stopped letting eighth graders take algebra in 2014 because of concerns about a racial gap in algebra completion rates.
It was a well-intentioned policy. The goal was to stop segmenting kids based on ability and keep all students together until everyone was prepared to take advanced math classes.
But the policy failed. A study by Stanford University showed the policy didn’t help kids who were behind in math. It only held back kids who love math. And we lost many of those kids when their parents pulled them out of public school.
We have a tale of two school systems in San Francisco. Nearly a third of our kids attend private school, compared with only 10% statewide, according to Private School Review. A policy against eighth-grade algebra is a big factor when families decide to leave public schools when their child reaches middle school.
We can’t trust SFUSD to reinstate eighth-grade algebra.
It was a well-intentioned policy. The goal was to stop segmenting kids based on ability and keep all students together until everyone was prepared to take advanced math classes.
A policy against eighth-grade algebra is a big factor when families decide to leave public schools when their child reaches middle school.
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