Posted on 09/24/2023 7:01:45 AM PDT by george76
City’s new landmarks are struggling office buildings and a shopping mall losing tenants..
As it rolls toward downtown San Francisco, the California Street cable car passes the gothic Grace Cathedral and an 8-foot tall statue of Tony Bennett. Then riders start to see the city’s newest landmarks.
Among them is 650 California Street, a 34-story office building that has defaulted on its mortgage. Further on is 101 California, whose second-biggest tenant left last year and whose biggest is slashing staff and office space. Go around the corner, and Embarcadero Square is for sale for $90 million. Its owner bought it for $245 million in 2018.
Walk down Market Street, and you will hit San Francisco Centre, the city’s largest mall. An owner’s name was pried off the wall when it stopped loan payments, but traces of the logo remain. Last month the retailer Nordstrom closed its five-story flagship store there.
...
San Francisco’s downtown properties were some of the most valuable in the country. Buyers loaded up on debt to get a piece of the booming city. Now vacancies are approaching twice the national rate... Owners are on the hook for nearly $12 billion of office bonds...
As landlords watch their loans mature, they will have a difficult time paying them off without willing lenders. Banks are already pulling back from making loans to office landlords, and commercial mortgage-backed security issuance plummeted this year.
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About half of the retail stores at Union Square, the city’s downtown shopping district, have closed, and government revenue has declined. Ridership last month on Bay Area Rapid Transit was down 61% compared with 2019.
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The owners of San Francisco Centre handed the keys over to lenders after falling occupancy rates and low foot traffic at the city’s largest mall.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Gee, I wonder why?
Getting all the little people off the roads and beaches.
Caption under the last photo: "Higher interest rates have taken a toll on real-estate values on California Street in San Francisco." Blame it on the interest rates.
Nearly 400 comments overwhelmingly address the filth of human waste in the streets and crime causing the decline of a once world-class city.
First thing these retired teachers from that horror of a state do is to run for political office. They're building a base the way wetbacks and ragheads do, and the misery keeps on in perpetuity.
This scenario is happening in almost all big cities run by lunatic Democrats. In LA, Chicago and NYC, huge office complexes and shopping venues have 30-40 % vacancy rates Ridership on mass transportation is way down. The new reality is that given the wondrous communication capabilities of the new technologies ( based on the silicon chip), it is no longer absolutely essential for most office workers to congregate in central locations. These office and retail complexes have so declined in value that owners find it preferable to walk away rather than renegotiate high intrest loans/mortgages that they ae unable to carry. As real estate values decine and less people work or shop, tax revenues plummet. The collapse of the criminal justice system, horrible public education, political misrule and non existent sevices and the new technological realities are eroding cites. Soon the political battles will feature cries of racism as Republican Congresses refuse to finance huge subsidies.
“Neither a lender nor a borrower be.”
Operating a business on borrowed money is a bad idea for the borrower and the lender. Something I learned in the oil patch back in the Carter years.
Didn’t San Fran Nan just buy a palatial estate in Florida?
The Death Spiral will continue until the city cleans up the drugs, crime, and sidewalk shat.
Just think if they would have just given campaign donations “wink, wink” to the Democrats in power perhaps a lot of the policies that created this situation would not have been created.
The Democrats own this. We know what the problem is but it is clear the Democrats want what is occurring to continue.
The Communist Control Act of 1954 “summary” (per Wikipedia) can be read below.
I argue that since the Democratic Party is made up almost totally of people who are ADMITTED communists, or people who tend to actively support and promote communist concepts or people who “lean” communist, WHY isn’t the Democratic Party outlawed pursuant to the Communist Control Act of 1954?
Make no mistake, what has happened to SFO is a direct result of Democratic Party policies ergo, in reality, the Democratic Party is a communist party and thus illegal.
Communist Control Act of 1954
Great Seal of the United States
Long title An Act to outlaw the Communist Party, to prohibit members of Communist organizations from serving in certain representative capacities, and for other purposes.
Acronyms (colloquial) CCA
Enacted by the 83rd United States Congress
Effective August 24, 1954
Citations
Public law 83-637
Statutes at Large 68 Stat. 775
Codification
Titles amended 50 U.S.C.: War and National Defense
U.S.C. sections created 50 U.S.C. ch. 23, subch. IV § 841 et seq.
Legislative history
Introduced in the Senate as S. 3706
Passed the Senate on August 12, 1954 (85-0)
Passed the House on August 16, 1954 (305-2)
Reported by the joint conference committee on August 19, 1954; agreed to by the Senate on August 19, 1954 (79-0) and by the House on August 19, 1954 (266-2)
Signed into law by President Dwight Eisenhower on August 24, 1954
My district office was at 1 California St back in the early and mid 70s. I was usually in the field, but I really enjoyed time between jobs when I got to go to the office. It was a wonderful place back then (except for the horrendous Embarcadero Freeway on the waterfront which is now gone).
I don't know who to blame, but I'm sure that making it a sanctuary city didn't help. Who's ever in charge is doing a horrible job of running a once-beautiful city, but you residents are electing these people so I assume this is what you want. Enjoy your rot, cuz I'll never visit again.
Where’s Nancy?
I’ve heard multiple stories about the Pelosi Florida real estate purchase. The most prolific story says it was a hoax.
Didn’t some tour company start giving ‘death tours’ of SF or something, where they took you around and showed you what a dying city looks like?
I always think of the mouse utopia experiments conducted by John Calhoun from the 1950s to the 1970s. In these experiments, mice were provided everything they needed. But, as their population grew, their behavior became more and more erratic. They were stressed because most mice they encountered were strangers and they had no social support structures. They lost interest in survival and the colonies always went extinct because they weren’t having babies.
People in cities live mostly among strangers. It is not surprising, therefore, that they also feel stressed and their behavior becomes more and more erratic. It is in cities where we see most anti-survival behavior: rampant abortion, LBGTQDESPRN behaviors, drug abuse, etc. The voting patterns in the cities is probably a result, not a cause, of the social decay we observe there.
People living in more rural areas tend to have more robust social structures and less aberrant behavior. So, as the cities become more dysfunctional, the rural areas continue to thrive.
It’s not surprising that BART ridership is down. The last time I took BART a few years ago, it was a haven for homeless bums. The BART stations in SF were filthy nests of drug addicts. Downtown around Market Street stank so strongly of marijuana that I was afraid I would pop positive on my next drug test (I was active duty military at the time). It is sad to see such decline in what was once a beautiful city.
For some odd reason, people have no great desire to travel to a city that reeks of urine, has human waste on the sidewalks, where you are attacked by violent and lazy vagrants, where you can’t find an open drug store, where most of the rest of the quality downtown stores have closed, where you can’t lock your rental car bc the criminals will bust the windows, and where there is a general stench in the air that smells worse than Joe Biden.
So sad, too bad.😂💩
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