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San Francisco, solid blue city of -- empty storefronts and missing young people
American Thinker ^ | 01/12/2020 | Monica Showalter

Posted on 01/12/2020 9:59:32 AM PST by SeekAndFind

San Francisco is getting to be a hellhole and not just because crooks are having a field day, or a vast homeless army has prompted new tech 'innovations' in poop-map apps.

It's actually becoming a city with a hollowed out look, redolent of some place like Steubenville, Ohio or maybe Utica, New York, during the bad years, empty storefronts and missing young people. So much for the trope that leftwing cities, with their walkable boulevards full of food trucks, handmade crafts, knitting shops, bookstores, artisan cheese shops, gourmet restaurants, and cafes are more lively and liveable than rightwing places. For awhile, that did seem to be the story. But it's coming to an end. Sure, there's vast wealth. But despite California being in an economic boom, the place is starting to look like Venezuela. 

The U.K. Guardian of all places has a haunting report:

It the beginning of this decade, one beloved block in San Francisco had a taqueria, a flower shop and a bookstore. Sparky’s diner, a favorite final hangout for night owls, queer teens and the blackout drunk, was open round the clock.

Today, this block of Church Street just south of Market has the kind of abandoned storefronts that are usually a shorthand for declining mill towns, not centers of the tech future. But all those closed shops are emblematic of today’s San Francisco, where even in upscale areas, the city’s economic boom can look surprisingly like an economic crisis.

What this represents is a strange, second-wave gentrification, in which an influx of well-heeled residents means not Blue Bottle coffee shops and Kinfolk-inspired interior design stores, but emptiness.

Nobody mentions that maybe people don't want to shop in some place where a drunk is puking in the doorway and the district attorney doesn't want to prosecute, so the pukes ...


(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; News/Current Events; US: California
KEYWORDS: bluezones; businesses; exodus; sanfrancisco
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To: SeekAndFind

The Professional Association I belong to was thinking of having our convention in SF. The Hotel sales mamange told us that everything is fine in San Francisco and the news stories were way overblown. The people we talked to are in complete denial as to the crisis in SF.

We voted to have our meeting in Phoenix.


21 posted on 01/12/2020 10:23:09 AM PST by EC Washington
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To: SeekAndFind

Everything run by liberals eventually becomes a hellhole.


22 posted on 01/12/2020 10:23:25 AM PST by KevinB ("Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." - Charles Darwin)
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To: SeekAndFind

San Francisco is a beautiful area.

Rich people like to live in beautiful areas.

The problem is, the rich don’t like having all those other people around.

So, they sit in their fortified estates and make life miserable for everybody else in the area to make them move out.

Too much riffraff on their beaches and roads.


23 posted on 01/12/2020 10:23:28 AM PST by blueunicorn6 ("A crack shot and a good dancer")
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To: Extremely Extreme Extremist

“It’s amazing that a liberal city like SF can produce two powerhouse teams, the Giants in baseball and the 49ers.”

The Giants haven’t done squat since 2014. Now they have a Muslim who has never played the game heading up baseball operations.

And I am a lifetime Giants fan.


24 posted on 01/12/2020 10:23:31 AM PST by ConsCA
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To: SeekAndFind

Public employees benefit greatly from Prop 13.


25 posted on 01/12/2020 10:23:58 AM PST by Brian Griffin
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To: dfwgator

They haven’t played there since Kezar, when SF was still a vibrant, proudly American city.


26 posted on 01/12/2020 10:24:32 AM PST by NohSpinZone (First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers)
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To: SeekAndFind

The real estate in that market is owned by the wealthy elites, the well-financed, or the children heirs, the latter and most of whom cannot afford the property taxes, so they sell to one of the first two. The abandoned retail reflects the inability of the working class to afford local rents or mortgages, so they split town. Soon, the elites will sell as their quality of life there becomes intolerable, due to the emigrating service class. We are watching this frog boil in real time, in many prog dominated cities. Meanwhile, investors like me, in Denver, make top dollar on our rehabs from those refugees.


27 posted on 01/12/2020 10:24:40 AM PST by LittleBillyInfidel (This tagline has been formatted to fit the screen. Some content has been edited.)
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To: SeekAndFind

There’s so much money from tech companies that everyone else cannot afford San Francisco. Just imagine trying to start a restaurant with $15 minimum wage.


28 posted on 01/12/2020 10:25:15 AM PST by MinorityRepublican
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To: blueunicorn6

RE: So, they sit in their fortified estates and make life miserable for everybody else in the area to make them move out.

So, this tells me that the only people who LIVE in San Francisco are the 1%?

And when they sell their property, they only sell to the 1%.


29 posted on 01/12/2020 10:25:16 AM PST by SeekAndFind (look at Michigan, it will)
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To: Extremely Extreme Extremist

>>> It’s amazing that a liberal city like SF can produce two powerhouse teams, the Giants in baseball and the 49ers.

Pitchers, catchers, tight ends . . .

That was too easy.


30 posted on 01/12/2020 10:26:04 AM PST by Jeff Chandler (BLACK LIVES MAGA)
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To: blueunicorn6

Regarding rents, at any time, there are 15 or 20,000 vacant apartments. A huge reason is the owners don’t want to rent, they don’t want to be slaves to rent control or they just want the property value to increase. There is one building in the Russian Hill area that is completely vacant - it probably has 30 or 40 units.


31 posted on 01/12/2020 10:26:59 AM PST by ConsCA
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To: mewzilla

[[Albany screws with the real estate marlet with its STAR program. Makes it easier for geezers, harder for young families to stay. Not a recipe for a healthy, growing state.]]

Yeah, the geezers who worked their entire life to build a life and pay off a home only to see confiscatory taxes threaten the loss of it. Taxes need to be lowered statewide. School taxes are becoming untenable. Upstate is intentionally being depopulated. A welcoming business climate need to be encouraged and fracking needs to have started yesterday.

All of which will never happen.

The classic Dem state. A wealthy elite and a welfare class they support. The middle class gets destroyed or works for the government.


32 posted on 01/12/2020 10:27:04 AM PST by headstamp 2 (There's a stairway to heaven, but there's also a highway to hell.)
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To: SeekAndFind

After WWII, SF was somewhat sophisticated and eclectic.

By the late 60s, SF was dropping as depicted in the Dirty Harry Movies, showing the dichotomy between the left and conservative crowd or just simple normalcy.

By the late 80s, SF was just recognized for having some wealthy portions, and generally no sophistication whatsoever. Homosexuality was normalized. Military was being run out of the Bay Area.

By the 2000s, indigents and illegal aliens were promoted and declared as a sanctuary city even when they murdered people.

2020s don’t indicate any sign or turnaround other than further degeneracy and collapse.


33 posted on 01/12/2020 10:32:31 AM PST by Cvengr ( Adversity in life & death is inevitable; Stress is optional through faith in Christ.)
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To: SeekAndFind

San Francisco can’t die fast enough.


34 posted on 01/12/2020 10:33:05 AM PST by FLT-bird
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To: headstamp 2

In SF there are people that will PAY YOU to beat the crap out of them. One woman won a lawsuit against the muni. After an accident she became a nymph. Then there’s Sister Boom Boom. Those days are fewer now. Gotta be depressing.


35 posted on 01/12/2020 10:34:35 AM PST by DIRTYSECRET (urope. Why do they put up with this.)
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To: Ouderkirk

We were in Utica New York about 7 years ago. We were camping nearby and went in to the City on a Friday for dinner because hubby had read that some hole-in-the-wall fish place had a great fried fish dinner.

We’re all pretty street smart, and we were pretty well scared at 6 pm on a summer afternoon. Hubby even asked our friend: do you have your gun? Which he did not, btw.

What a dump of a city. It makes Newark, NJ look like Paris France. It must be really a delight in the winter.

Sorry Uticans who may read this, but your city is a mess.


36 posted on 01/12/2020 10:35:55 AM PST by jocon307 (Dem party delenda est!)
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To: ConsCA

and how far away from downtown is the 49ers stadium? It looks from Google to be 50 min from the Embarcadero with no traffic which I assume means it is often a a lot longer.


37 posted on 01/12/2020 10:36:30 AM PST by Stingray51
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To: SeekAndFind

Clearly in NYC that is the case. You watch the news and anytime the interview any “person on the street” about anything, car crash, fire, crime, they’re foreign born. Doesn’t matter how they are, what color they are, nothing. They are not Americans. Sometimes I think my brother in the last American in NYC.


38 posted on 01/12/2020 10:37:50 AM PST by jocon307 (Dem party delenda est!)
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To: Stingray51

Isn’t it in Santa Clara down the peninsula?


39 posted on 01/12/2020 10:38:19 AM PST by olesigh
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To: SeekAndFind

Perhaps people should take a good look at the reality. While the economy is booming in the country, The Los Angeles regional food bank distributes 300,000 meals a month, but that, says its director, Michael Flood, is only a fraction of what the hungry 1.4m people in the county need.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/10/27/why-one-of-americas-richest-states-is-also-its-poorest

There are an estimated 553,742 people in the United States experiencing homelessness on a given night, according to the most recent national point-in-time estimate (January 2017). This represents a rate of approximately 17 people experiencing homelessness per every 10,000 people in the general population.

As of January 2018, California had an estimated 129,972 experiencing homelessness on any given day, as reported by Continuums of Care to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

If you do the math, that puts almost 24% of all the homeless in the US in the state on any given day. It doesn’t take an Einstein to determine that all those mouths to feed and the problems with drugs, crime, and just plain filth, is exactly what a third world country contains. And the only people to blame for this is their leaders over the last 80 years, and their anti-USA attitude of destruction. Problem was it didn’t happen the way they wanted as the other 49 are not running to their relief. And they wish to have other states turn out like this? Again, it doesn’t take an Einstein and they certainly don’t have one.

rwood


40 posted on 01/12/2020 10:40:07 AM PST by Redwood71
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