Crime is so out of control at San Francisco’s Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building that one GOP senator says that (like the former Speaker?) it ought to be “shut down until it is no longer a threat to public safety.”
The jokes practically write themselves, but fortunately, you have me here to help them along.
Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst said Wednesday, “With at least five other federal facilities within the San Francisco area where taxpayers and government employees could interact face to face without fearing for their lives, I am calling for the offices and workers within the Speaker Pelosi Federal Building to be relocated.”
According to the Washington Times, the Pelosi Building has become “something out of a post-apocalyptic horror movie, with muggings common, occasional gunfire, and nearly 150 drug overdoses and 33 deaths reported on the block surrounding the building in the first half of this year.”
Have they tried removing Pelosi’s official portrait?
Earlier this month, SFGate reported that the building “is now heavily guarded — yet seemingly empty.” Two months prior, federal employees “were told to work from home as much as possible,” despite most federal workers having been ordered back to their offices everywhere else.
More:
On five trips to the building over the past two weeks, SFGATE has observed officers with the Federal Protective Service — effectively the police arm of the Department of Homeland Security — stationed outside. On one trip, SFGATE saw five officers milling around on the sidewalk just outside the building, with six federal police cruisers parked in the vicinity.
All for a building with few workers actually working in it. A San Francisco Standard story from September reported that the Feds had cleared out the Pelosi Building’s usual crowd of vagrants and drug dealers “to ensure the safety of federal officials in San Francisco to discuss the security of their employees.” They had to make the building safe enough to hold talks about how to make the building safer. If that isn’t the perfect summary of everything wrong with Washington, then I’ll forego my lunchtime martini. [Editor’s note: Steve has no plans to forego his lunchtime martini.]
Among the recent security improvements is a new fence “along part of the building that blocks people from sitting on a concrete ledge where drug dealers were often seen.” As originally designed and constructed, the building received a Design Award from the AIA San Francisco chapter for its open spaces and environmentally friendly design. At least some of that open space is now fenced off because of drug dealers, and that environmentally friendly design forces workers “to seek to relieve the heat by opening windows, which not only sends papers flying but, depending on their proximity to the opening, makes creating a stable temperature for all workers near impossible.” Having lived there, I can tell you with near certainty that creating a heat problem in San Francisco is only slightly less difficult than making it snow in Miami.
Managers’ offices, however, do enjoy both heat and A/C because of course they do.
But other than the vagrants, the drug dealers, the risk of physical violence, the double standards, and the comically hapless climate control, the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building is a lovely place to work.
While the building was completed in 2007, it wasn’t named the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building — that just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? — until late 2022, just as Speaker Pelosi’s second speakership was drawing to a merciless close. The renaming was somehow slipped into an end-of-session omnibus spending bill. No one knows how that got in there, honest.
A local source described Nancy’s namesake as an “asymmetric, metal-sheathed structure that seems considerably taller than its official 18 stories” that has “polarized architectural critics, with some dazzled by its novelty and others underwhelmed by its fortress-like quality and, well, perceived ugliness.”
Could Pelosi have possibly picked a more appropriate structure to slap her name on? Only Paul Pelosi could say for sure.
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