What ails San Francisco isn’t fiscal problems. The city is not in danger of going bankrupt like Detroit did in 2013.
What San Francisco is dying from is a historically bad case of myopia. It’s not just the politicians who can’t see what everyone else in America sees. Nor is it the city’s comfortable elites whose cynicism knows no bounds. They don’t worry about unaffordable housing because they can afford it. They don’t worry about the mentally ill homeless population urinating and defecating on their streets. They certainly don’t worry about them attacking their families either. The untouchables never touch the lives of the city’s rich. And that’s one reason San Francisco’s fentanyl crisis, homeless crisis, housing crisis, looting crisis, and hotel and office building occupancy crisis aren’t seen as the existential disasters they truly are.
The city’s largest mall — Westfield — is going bankrupt. The high-end retailer Nordstrom is moving on as well. Hotels are being shuttered, and office vacancies are an astonishing 30% and not getting any better. Downtown is emptying out, and moving in are other retail concerns: drug dealers and prostitutes.
An ABC News reporter has now been advised against appearing live in downtown San Francisco for his Good Morning America segment due to the rise in crime.
Chief national correspondent Matt Gutman reported on the news that Westfield Mall would be shutting down, one of the latest in a series of major store closings in the city. Though the shopping center cited a decline in sales and foot traffic as the reason, Gutman noted that San Francisco was at risk of becoming a “so-called zombie city” due to a rise in robberies and the ongoing fentanyl crisis.
In fact, Gutman remarked that his crew had been told not to film live in that area of downtown San Francisco because of the location being “too dangerous” at 4 a.m.
“The mayor noted that several metrics of crime are actually flat or down. But it is worth mentioning that we are not at Union Square or the Westfield Mall this morning because we have been advised it is simply too dangerous to be there at this hour,” Gutman said at the end of his report.
“That’s saying a lot there,” host Michael Strahan commented back in the studio.
Indeed, Mayor London Breed has enraged many of her radical left supporters for actually trying to do something about the rampant drug use in the open and other lawlessness. When she spoke about it during a public safety meeting, she was booed off the stage.
“Compassion is killing people,” she said. “We have to change what is happening on the streets. It’s too easy getting drugs, they are dying under our watch, we have to do better.”
But Breed’s denial extends beyond blaming excess “compassion” for the city’s plight.
“Well, here’s the thing, San Francisco is a major city and it has challenges. But let’s back up a little bit. You are talking about people leaving the city but not the people who are staying, expanding, coming to San Francisco,” Breed said.
The kind of permissiveness encouraged by Breed and her hard-left cohorts that has brought San Francisco to the edge of this cliff is now being condemned? Are they really so blind and delusional that they don’t accept their role in this catastrophe? Or are they going to end up blaming “racism” and wash their hands of the responsibility for coddling criminals, refusing to prosecute crimes, and allowing dangerous, mentally ill homeless people to run wild in their streets?
There has got to be accountability before the city can make any progress toward recovery. But for a political class in such denial that Breed blames too much “compassion” for the city’s woes, that doesn’t seem possible.
