They say that a person trapped in quicksand sinks more rapidly the more they wildly thrash about. I am reminded of the government of San Francisco and its prevailing policies toward business, crime and the homeless.
A recent piece in The New York Times, “What Comes Next for the Most Empty Downtown in America,” described San Francisco as having “perhaps the most deserted major downtown in America.” Most of us can recall that just five years ago, San Francisco was renowned for a thriving, bustling downtown and exorbitant rents for office rentals. Today, it has a 27 percent vacancy rate, six times the pre-pandemic level, and the pricey shops and fashionable bistros that served the downtown are hurting and going out of business.
The vacancies are not limited to just business properties, but also include residential properties, which were also known to have stratospheric rents. According to a KRON News piece, 15 percent of the homes in San Francisco are vacant, the highest rate of major cities in the U.S. Vacancies total 61,473 homes, an increase of nearly 52 percent from 2019 to 2021.
What happened?
Many are quick to lay the blame on the pandemic and remote work, which clearly caused a lot of businesses to downsize. It doesn’t, however, explain the residential vacancies and the employers who left town. While a few tech workers may have chosen to follow their employers to more welcoming locales, most workers and companies have left San Francisco for other reasons.
The exodus of employers from both San Francisco, and from California generally, has been thoroughly reported, as companies opt for lower taxes and fees, less regulation, and a friendlier business climate.
The workers? Only five years ago, San Francisco was a very sought-after place to live, and many tech workers chose to commute from their San Francisco homes to suburban Bay Area worksites, often in dedicated commuter buses like those provided by Google. Natives complained of all the “tech bros.” With remote work now available, why would those workers leave town, after having paid so much and endured such long commutes to live there?
Well, San Francisco is in a self-inflicted downward spiral fueled by its bizarre policies. Rampant crime and the homeless population are the most prominent problems. Residents no longer bother to report crimes like auto burglary, vandalism, shoplifting, and many assaults, since the police will not respond. Large portions of downtown San Francisco stink and are covered with tent encampments, needles, and piles of feces, while the government passes out free needles and provides sites to inject drugs.
People report harrowing incidents of assaults or threats by the aggressive homeless. Few incidents illustrate the dystopian state of the city more than the much publicized video of the homeless man at Walgreens casually filling his bag with looted goods as the store security guard stood by, not wishing to risk liability for physically interfering with the thief. Walgreens is now closing most of its San Francisco stores, complicating the ability of many of fill their prescriptions. People do not feel safe.
Even famously liberal San Francisco showed signs that it may be losing its patience when the voters ousted a district attorney who prioritized prosecuting the police over prosecuting criminals. Earlier, voters threw out out three progressive members of a school board who focused on renaming schools named after “racist” figures like Abraham Lincoln and John Muir, instead of reopening the schools after the pandemic. They had antagonized much of the Asian population by accusing them of “white supremacist thinking” for their striving, and had decided it was most “equitable” to eliminate merit-based admissions at the city’s most prestigious school. Still, the crazy ideas persist.
What else is causing vacancies? Well, many landlords are opting to give up rental income and leave their properties vacant, driven by the continuing eviction moratorium and rent control. Who wants to be forced to continue housing a tenant who won’t pay rent and may be trashing the premises? Displaying the sort of brain-dead thinking that drives away business, politicians are now considering an onerous “Vacancy Tax” to force landlords to rent, arguing that this will cure the homeless problem. What landlord wouldn’t be delighted to have meth and fentanyl enthusiasts permanently ensconced in their property?
An article in Fortune magazine has pronounced San Francisco as the “worst run city in the U.S.” Cities run on emotionally appealing, but predictably disastrous policies, tend to fail. The city is following an evolution in which it attracts the creative but clueless, who transform a city according to their humane, naive notions of what society should look like, find that it doesn’t work, and then depart for new locales to repeat their municipal malpractice.
The struggles of cities like San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle provide a cautionary tale. I hope that San Luis Obispo stays out of the political quicksand.
John Donegan is a retired attorney in Pismo Beach, who lived in San Francisco back when it was safer, fun, and smelled better. Send a response to letters@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Jan 19-29, 2023.
keep on voting for democratic politicians, and this is what you get.
What an absurd take. San Francisco is not in demise. LOL. I was just up there for 2 days working and it was just fine to me. I don’t know why the media is going to such lengths to disparage that city get a grip.
The City obviously has its issues. It’s low hanging fruit. But, if asked whether I’d rather live in New York or Chicago or Dallas or Washington DC or Miami, I know I’d much rather live in SF. I’d even take Seattle and Portland over those other cities.
I know, I know, Mr. Donegan wants us to believe that if the Republicans were in charge, things would be ever so much better in our beloved Cali. It ain’t so. Last time the R’s got their hands on the state government they ran it into the ground. Neither Wilson nor Arnold could figure out how to get the state out of debt. It took Jerry Brown, scourge of the right, to make this state right. Look it up.
Anyone watching Fox News has seen the same two buildings burned in downtown Portland from eight different angles for the last three years, so they think the whole city is in flames.
This is an interesting article that restates what has been publicly lamented recently even by the left-leaning San Francisco Chronicle (see Sept 17, 2022 opinion piece by Noah Arroyo). However, I took Mr. Donegan’s metaphor about “thrashing about in quicksand” differently than he probably intended. It seems that — no matter who is or has been in charge of the civic government — any large city in America is experiencing problems that have inevitably worsened due to increased homelessness, crime, and cost of living (Mr. Donegan failed to mention drug use). In other words, the situation is becoming so dire across the land that, whether one “thrashes about in quicksand” or not, large cities like San Francisco are sinking in decay (or at least trending that way). Political preference may slow the rate of decline, but not the direction.
The causes of this are many and varied, including, at the top of the list, the refusal of political opponents to work together toward what we used to call “progress.” Add to this list near the top, regardless of political party, economic inequality at historic levels all across the country. The political and economic power of America’s entrenched economic elite now, according to the World Inequality Database, own 18% of America’s wealth. That figure was 7% in 1978 (see New Yorker mag “Trust Issues,” Jan 23, 2023, page 32). You can add additional causes at your pleasure.
If this is still democracy, it is more the end of it than its flourishing. Mr. Donegan has raised a warning flag we all should heed, no matter our political persuasion.
I have to disagree with Mr. Biezad’s well-considered thoughts. I believe that the drug problem is not the result of too little wealth being spread around, but of too much affluence. “Affluenza”, as it were. We have only to look at Hollywood to see that having money is no defense against addiction and self-destructive behavior, and in fact, seems to encourage it . Drugs and intoxicants have always been available, but the majority of the population was too preoccupied with struggling to support themselves to survive to have the time and money to indulge themselves in such pastimes. Today, far more people are bored and idle, and have enough money to buy drugs, a dangerous combination. For many, ambition and striving are denigrated. We have a public culture which celebrates rebellion and “live for the moment”, and we have a vast social safety net which will care for you if you mess up. And we have a public school system which, instead of requiring rigor and high standards, engages in social promotion to advance incompetent students, and which is more concerned with having the students like them, than in beating the skills they will need to succeed in life into them, and enduring their predictable whining. Not only do such students graduate without the necessary skills, but they have never developed the self-discipline needed to succeed in whatever livelihood they choose. Many parents are too immature themselves to put any effort into raising children. Faced with no future which lives up to the glories depicted in our popular culture, they choose destructive self-gratification.