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HeadSet says
1337irr says
East Bay...doesn't count...not news.
When you say "East Bay," does that mean easter SF bordering the bay, or the area between Oakland and Fremont on the eastern bay shore?
The latter.
Man Accused of Stripping Naked, Flooding San Francisco High-Rise To Face Felony Charge
Written by Kevin Truong
Published Aug. 14, 2023
A San Francisco judge denied a motion to reduce the felony vandalism charges against a man accused of getting naked in his high-rise apartment building and intentionally flooding the property, causing millions in damages and leading to the evacuation and relocation of hundreds of his neighbors.
In addition to the felony vandalism charge, Michael Nien also faces a misdemeanor charge of tampering with a fire alarm. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
In explaining her decision, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Rochelle East cited the “scope of the damage and the impact on the other victims.”
“It would be hard to imagine what felony vandalism would be if not a case like this,” East said.
Early in the morning of Oct. 11, 2022, Nien allegedly got naked and ran up and down the hallways of his 418-unit apartment building at 100 Van Ness Ave. banging on the doors of his neighbors, according to a police report of the incident.
He then went down to the 11th floor and allegedly opened high-pressure pipes meant for use by firefighters and sent water pouring down on the lower floors. Emergency responders found Nien in what they describe as an altered mental state. He was naked, drenched in water and standing next to an open pipe.
Oz Erickson, the chairman of Emerald Fund, which owns 100 Van Ness, said the vandalism caused upward of $14 million in damage and meant that more than 200 residents of the property were forced out of their homes for months during the holidays.
Emergency responders found Nien in what they describe as an altered mental state.
How bad have things gotten in San Francisco?
A local guide now offers a “Downtown Doom Loop Walking Tour,” to “start at City Hall, and continue through Mid-Market, the Tenderloin, and Union Square. We will view the open-air drug markets, the abandoned tech offices, the outposts of the nonprofit industrial complex, and the deserted department stores.”
It’s no joke: Thanks to the woke policies adopted by the bulk of the city’s electeds, the “doom loop” — i.e., a vicious circle where bad conditions breed taxpayer and business exodus that clears the way for even worse conditions — is all too real.
Take crime. Under woke former DA Chesa Boudin, convictions for serious crimes and quality of life offenses dropped.
One jaw-dropping figure: Just 6% of those charged with dealing drugs from 2018 to 2022 have been convicted.
Now, Whole Foods has shuttered its flagship location, retail goods are regularly locked or chained up, and small business owners are assaulted for daring to stand up to street thugs.
Things have gotten so bad that Uncle Sam is officially scared: The Department of Health and Human Services office in downtown SF recently advised its employees to work from home rather than risk falling victim to street crime.
San Francisco ‘doom loop’ walking tour gets visitors ‘close and personal to the squalor’ — and it’s already sold out
That the building these workers will now be avoiding is named after Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) would be a hilarious irony, if it weren’t a tragedy.
Homelessness? Another massive problem. It’s up 35% since 2019, with about 38,000 individuals homeless on any given night.
The progressive response? A lawsuit by the Coalition for the Homeless that resulted in a federal injunction against clearing encampments.
Combine that with the city’s lax drug posture (a new diversion program by new DA Brooke Jenkins, for example, has been a miserable failure) and the result?
Open-air drug markets where dealers hawk fentanyl and other poisons as they prey on the vulnerable in total safety from real consequences.
No wonder famed comedian Dave Chappelle asked, “What the f— happened to this place?” in a recent show.
Iconic San Francisco Hotel Has Lost 90% of Its Value, Owner Says
The Chase Center. The Westin St. Francis Hotel. The Transamerica Pyramid.
These properties are among the most iconic in San Francisco, but what they also have in common is their owners are applying for dramatic cuts in their assessed values in a worrying sign for the city’s fiscal health.
At Chase Center, property owners are attempting to cut the city’s assessed $1.48 billion value for the stadium by some 58% to $635 million.
The owner of the Transamerica Pyramid, New York developer Shvo, which purchased the building in 2020, is seeking a 53% reduction in its assessed value from $485.5 million to $227 million.
The Westin St. Francis Hotel owners are applying for a more than 90% decrease in its assessed value of $787 million all the way down to $76 million.
A Los Angeles hotel sustained $11.5 million in damages while the city used it as a federally sponsored homeless shelter.
The city included the Mayfair Hotel in Project Roomkey, a federal initiative to turn California hotels into temporary homeless shelters. At the end of the hotel's time in the program, the city quietly paid the hotel's owner to cover damages from residents. Social workers assigned to the hotel lamented its condition in emails obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
"Participant in 1516 Threatened staff, Security, destroyed property. Screamed. Yelled cursed. Everything went wrong with her. Inside and outside the building," one social worker wrote. Another recounted how "a male in 1526 assaulted another resident in Room 726."
The Mayfair represents the latest instance in which state and local governments have paid a huge price to address the homelessness crisis in California.
San Diego in April requested state funds to buy three hotels at $383,000 per room to house its homeless population. The city saw homelessness hit record highs in the months leading up to the purchase.
Between September 2021 and June 2022, the city of Berkeley alone removed 75 tons of garbage, drug paraphernalia, and human feces from homeless encampments. With an estimated 535 people living on the street at the time, the city removed roughly 500 pounds of waste per homeless person per year.
In July, President Joe Biden's Department of Housing and Urban Development announced its investment of $3 billion into Housing First programs across the country.
It has come to this. San Fransisco is becoming such a crime-ridden hellhole that even the government is throwing in the towel. Just The News ran the very ironic story yesterday headlined, “* Workers at Nancy Pelosi Federal Building in San Francisco told to work from home due to crime.”
Welcome to 2023, where satirical websites like the Babylon Bee are forced to compete with real-life headlines that that one.
Earlier this month, officials at HHS advised hundreds of federal employees to work from home indefinitely rather than risk commuting to the downtown federal building, which has become a hotspot for street drug deals in recent months. There’s some kind of metaphor here, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Help is welcome in the comments.
“In light of the conditions at the (Federal Building) we recommend employees … maximize the use of telework for the foreseeable future,” HHS Assistant Secretary for Administration Cheryl Campbell wrote in an August 4th memo obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle.
If even the federal government is fleeing San Fransisco, what hope do the residents have? Get out while you can!
Ironically, the HHS memo reportedly was issued the very same day that Joe Biden called on his cabinet to “aggressively execute” plans for federal employees to return to their offices after working remotely since the COVID-19 pandemic first began. But not in San Fransisco, apparently.
So that’s the federal government’s plan to keep its employees safe. Evacuate San Fransisco.
Lenders have taken back a newly constructed condo project in Mission Bay by a prominent local architect that has sat vacant since its completion, an apparent victim of sluggish city processes and San Francisco’s challenging real estate market.
Avid Bank has assumed control of the building at 603 Tennessee St. from developer Sol Properties, according to property records, which listed the amount of unpaid debt on the property at $15.4 million.
Arcon Construction Group, the building’s general contractor, had previously filed a lien on the property claiming around $1.07 million in unpaid construction fees. ...
According to data from real estate brokerage Compass, median condo prices in San Francisco peaked in 2021 and have fallen annually since then. Median prices have still not recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Additionally, federal interest rates have dramatically increased over the last year, making financing prohibitively expensive for many.
San Francisco refuses to arrest criminals. San Francisco refuses to get the homeless off the street. It makes the coffee business difficult — because if you think a $4 coffee is theft, you haven’t seen what owners go through here.
The list of closed San Francisco businesses is an ever-growing document. In June, a beloved coffee shop called HRD Coffee in SoMa (South of Market) closed. It has been in San Francisco since the 1950s. Guy Fieri visited in 2010.
Again, the pandemic didn’t help. But neither did the city. The owner says he was refused permission to create a parklet for outdoor dining. The office-working lunchtime crowd disappeared in 2020 and never returned.
The owner said it better than I can show it: “I would love to remain in San Francisco as a business. But the question is, would any sane person?"
On a nearby street in SoMa, the Bay Area’s own Blue Bottle Coffee shut down its second oldest location in the city. Whole Foods — another favorite in the Bay Area — closed its massive Market St. location after just a year being open.
Most Starbucks cafes in the City by the Bay have done away with chairs. Starbucks can’t admit the cause of this outright (for political reasons) but everyone knows why: chairs in the cafe are an invitation for drug-addicted homeless people to indefinitely occupy the space. The same is true with bathrooms.
Council meeting in affluent San Francisco neighborhood descends into chaos as residents protest turning hotel into homes for 100 homeless people
San Mateo officials want to place 100 homeless people in La Quinta hotel
Hundreds of Millbrae residents packed out a meeting to protest the plans
They drowned out speakers with booing in scenes akin to a sports stadium
The controlled demolition of San Fransisco continues. A video clip making the rounds this weekend shows a San Fransisco woman who reported an unpleasant encounter with an unpleasant individual while shopping:
https://twitter.com/KyleKashuv/status/1688432633745666048
One can forgive her for asking her assailant the ridiculous Karenic question, “did you just spit in my face??” Although the type of person who will spit in your face is clearly unlikely to engage in a reasonable debate about it, she was shocked after all. A more compelling issue is that one wishes to ask whether she voted for the policies that created the environment where random men spit in her face in the first place.
One suspects that she did.
The thug’s threat to “rape” her constitutes the crime of assault, and spitting in her face is battery, both of which in normal times would have resulted in a arrest and prosecution. But note very well that the woman in the clip doesn’t even mention police. She never even called them. Why not?
Maybe because she knows that, after sixteen rounds of “defunding,” and after watching thousands of low-level criminals be not prosecuted, police won’t — or can’t — do anything about it?
Inside San Francisco’s Illegal Dumping Crisis: Buckets of Feces, Endless Trash
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12436929/Nordstrom-Rack-store-robbed-california-flash-rob.html
See above link. Not San Fran, but southern California again getting hit with thug flash mobs robbing stores like Nordstrom and Macys.
.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12436929/Nordstrom-Rack-store-robbed-california-flash-rob.html
See above link. Not San Fran, but southern California again getting hit with thug flash mobs robbing stores like Nordstrom and Macys.
.
The crackdown comes as the city grapples with high rates of car break-ins, with San Francisco seeing over 22,000 reported last year, according to SFPD data.
The crackdown comes as the city grapples with high rates of car break-ins, with San Francisco seeing over 22,000 reported last year, according to SFPD data.
That's 60 a day, and those are only the ones reported to the feckless polic
Wonder how much California car insurance rates have been affected by this.
https://t.me/gatewaypunditofficial/34806
This is as cowardly and disingenuous of a statement
Next, some news from the controlled demolition of San Fransisco, in two recent New York Post headlines.
First, from August 25th (last Friday):
Guess how many of the people who looted the San Fransisco Nordstrom location have been arrested? I’ll give you a hint: fewer people than were arrested for San Fransisco mask violations. Actually, it was zero. Zero arrests.
Next, four days later, yesterday’s headline (Monday):
A sad day indeed. And not just because the San Fransisco store was considered Nordstrom’s “flagship” store and had been operating for 35 years.
Why don’t they just rip off the band aid and go ahead and make shoplifting legal in California?
The good news is Nordstrom’s departure will depress real estate prices even more, allowing oligarchs a chance to buy the insanely-valuable downtown properties up for pennies on the dollar, after which the City can suddenly begin prosecuting its brownshirts, I mean criminals, again. It’s like Lahaina, except slower.
But wait! There’s a ready solution to all this crime that’s destroying our once-grand cities! Smart cities. Or Fifteen-minute cities, or whatever you call it. Where everything you need is located right where you live, right in your own high-rise prison, I mean skyscraper.
Who wants to bet we’ll be hearing about turning San Fransisco into a smart city soon?
The good news is Nordstrom’s departure will depress real estate prices even more, allowing oligarchs a chance to buy the insanely-valuable downtown properties up for pennies on the dollar,
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