Posted on 05/12/2020 11:11:01 PM PDT by LibWhacker
n January 8, London Breed, San Francisco’s mayor, was sworn in for her first full term. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi congratulated her in a tweet, saying, “I look forward to working with you to continue San Francisco’s proud tradition of standing as a guiding light for progress across America.” I don’t know what definition of “progress” Pelosi is using, but any candid observer would rate the city a catastrophe. Mayor Breed was inaugurated on the same day that I moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles, after ten years working at the cutting edge of science and technology.
Even before the current Covid-19 pandemic, San Francisco was a deeply troubled city. It ranks first in the nation in theft, burglary, vandalism, shoplifting, and other property crime. On average, about 60 cars get broken into each day. Diseases arising from poor sanitation—typhoid, typhus, hepatitis A—are reappearing at an alarming rate. Fentanyl goes for about $20 a pill on Market Street, and each year the city hands out 4.5 million needles, which you can find used and tossed out like cigarette butts in parks and around bus stops. The city’s department of public works deploys feces cleaners daily—a “poop patrol” to wash the filth from the sidewalks.
This is just a brief summary of the lack of hygiene and common decency. A reasonable person might declare an emergency, but in her first official act, Breed swore in Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s new district attorney, before a packed house at the Herbst Theater. “Chesa, you have undertaken a remarkable challenge today,” said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a congratulatory video message. “I hope you reflect as a great beacon to many.” Boudin’s résumé boasts of a stint working directly for the late dictator Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, who turned a once-rich nation back to the dark ages. “We will not prosecute cases involving quality-of-life crimes,” Boudin promised during his campaign. He must have witnessed the success of that policy in Caracas, which was voted the world’s most dangerous city in 2018.
Even the sights and sounds of the city suggest a certain derangement. When the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system was first built in the 1970s, its designers failed to understand the acoustics between wheel, track, and tunnel. Since the nineteenth century, competent railroad engineers have known that a tapered, flanged wheel will handle turns better and generate less noise. For some reason, BART designers ignored this design in favor of a cylindrical wheel with a straight edge. Years of wear and tear have degraded the screech into a mad howl. According to a recent count by the San Francisco Chronicle, BART has lost nearly 10 million riders on nights and weekends because of the noise, grime, and lack of safety. It doesn’t help that it has also become a de facto shelter for drug addicts and the mentally ill.
Today, it’s nearly impossible to build anything in San Francisco. Infrastructure projects balloon indefinitely. In 2001, the city proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness, one of the main arteries. Nearly 20 years later, the new lane’s opening is slated for 2021; Van Ness remains a mess of potholes, equipment, and detours. It wasn’t always this way. In the 1930s, the Golden Gate Bridge was built in three and a half years. To commemorate its completion, as an encore, the city created an artificial island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Treasure Island took under three years to finish.
The city no longer builds housing, either. Due to the nation’s tightest zoning rules and land-use restrictions, developers struggle mightily to put up new apartments and houses. Even after getting permission to build—following years of scrambling through a dysfunctional approval process—it costs about $700,000 to construct a single new apartment unit. Consequently, the cost of housing has skyrocketed. The median price for a one-bedroom rental is the most expensive in the nation, at about $3,700 per month. To buy a single-family home, a family needs $1.5 million, on average—and they’d better be a cash buyer.
But the culmination of local incompetence and misplaced priorities has to be the blackouts and fires. The monopoly utility, PG&E, began rolling blackouts this past autumn to prevent sparks in dry and windy weather. Millions went without power for days. Many of the company’s electric lines contain components that go back to the 1950s; some date to the 1920s. These parts have ignited 1,961 fires since 2014, according to the company. The 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest in California’s history, was caused by a broken hook on a tower. It killed 85 people and torched 150,000 acres; a year later, near Sonoma and Napa, vineyards burned among 190,000 acres, and 22 people were killed. Smoke drifted over San Francisco and choked its residents for weeks. For the duration, San Francisco became one of the most polluted cities in the world. People now stock up on air filters and masks every October for the season of ash.
San Francisco is a city overwhelmed by its own stupidity, but painful adjustments are coming. For the seventh straight year, more people have left California than have moved in. Tech companies are reconsidering the importance of being in San Francisco. Oracle, for example, has moved its yearly conference to Las Vegas. After nearly 50 years, Charles Schwab is moving its headquarters out of town. And in a recent earnings call with investors, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, said that the company planned to have a more distributed workforce in the future and be less concentrated in San Francisco. With tech companies operating remotely while their employees shelter in place, how many of these workers will return to their San Francisco offices after the Covid-19 crisis subsides is an open question.
“For the future to have power over the present, it has to be different from the present,” Peter Thiel said in a recent interview with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution. “The future has power because it is a time that will look different.” San Francisco is trapped in the past. The future will be built elsewhere. I left to find it.
What a tragedy that happened to that once-beautiful city.
We went there a couple of times and listened to the seals barking on the rocks just off the coast, rode the trolley
Poor San Francisco
San Francisco is one of the most beautiful cities ever to have been built, and to see its current decay is truly heartbreaking.
San Fagcisco: America’s Most Proud Outdoor Insane Asylum. A Byproduct of Nancy Pelosi and Gavin Newsom. Democrat Destruction at its Finest.
Add Elon Musk and Tesla to the list of those moving their headquarters out of California.
SF is one of those cities I would like to visit, but until I don’t have to worry about needles and feces all over the place, I have no desire.
We are NOT all in this together unless you are a commie, I mean Democrat!(People better think about these cute catch phrases thrown around by our communist MSM, words actually have meaning). Small brains get washed first!
Just wait....in 2024, Newsom will be the (D) nominee for Potus (with almost certainly, a woman "of color" as VP, since translucent women will be out of the question).
During Trump's 2nd term, the (R)'s better be grooming someone just as strong as Trump....cause we're going to need them!
....and the demographics will have changed that much more by then, making another (R) presidential victory that much more difficult.
Nuke it from space, just to be sure. And get that ahole mayor and commie attorney Chesa Bouding. They represent just how low SF has gone and the people who voted for them deserve whatever they are going to get. Feel sorry for the trapped poor (usually minorities who are treated like cattle by the Dems) and elderly who can’t leave.
Karma can be a nasty payback master.
I lived there for almost a year in 1979. We paid $600 a month for a little garden apartment on California Street & Buchanan, which was part of an old Victorian house that was remodeled by our two gay landlords, Richard & Roy. Dianne Feinstein’s daughter got married at the Jewish temple down the street that summer, which I remember only because our already precious parking spaces were taken by all her guests. We took our puppy to beautiful Lafayette Park around the corner every day and made friends with all the “parents” at the dog park. We had a great time living there, and it saddens me to hear what a hellhole it’s become.
So this guy left San Fran Sicko because it sucked so bad. Then he moved to El Lay. WTF! You can’t fix stupid.
This guy is a stupid liberal. He is sad because the leftists have taken over and ousted the liberals. What does he expect? He created them. Anyway, he's wrong about the fires and pollution. The problem in California is too little fire and too little pollution. The rest of the country puts up with some smoke in spring to prevent out-of-control fires in the summer and fall. In California they have banned fire. There are never any fires. The smoke he smelled was not real smoke because stupid liberals in Butte county do not allow 150,.000 acre fires. Max fire size is 6,000 acres.
Forget about it. The opportunity to visit the historic San Francisco has long passed. That San Francisco no longer exists. And it’s not coming back either.
In 1976 I became reacquainted with the woman who is now my wife, in San Francisco. We dined on fresh abalone at Scoma’s on Fisherman’s Wharf, commuted on the cable cars to business meetings in Market Plaza, tasted the wines in Napa Valley, and strode though the tall Redwoods of Muir Woods. We left San Francisco a year later, driving a rented U-Haul across the Bay Bridge, with the serendipitous strains of Tony Bennett singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” playing on the radio.
We never went back, and never intend to, either. It is now a hollow shadow of the city it once was. I have only been back even to California but once since then. I was ‘California Dreamin’ in the ‘60s but now the whole state is California Daemon.
I was last in the Bay Area in 1993 to commission a refinery control system. Even then the Hard Left was tightly wound. After that I refused any California project.
“The median price for a one-bedroom rental is the most expensive in the nation, at about $3,700 per month. To buy a single-family home, a family needs $1.5 million, on average”
That can only be because of demand, or we could say buyers willing to pay that price. If SF is such a dump then why is real estate commanding such high prices?
Regarding the design of the Bart train wheels, there must be another side to that story.
I went to SF last summer to see family that live north of the city across the bridge. San Rafael area. Very nice time.
Went into the city for our last day and arrived during a large parade for the gay people. My daughter in law made a statement that we were behind enemy lines. Very strange.
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