Tag Archives: San Francisco

San Francisco & Silicon Valley Housing Markets Puke Huge Price Drops, as Startups, Crypto, Tech, Social Media Make Total Mess, by Wolf Richter

Posted on December 20, 2022 | Leave a comment

High end housing is getting shellacked. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

In California overall, prices dropped year-over-year, as sales collapsed, supply more than doubled. No dear, this isn’t just a seasonal dip.

San Francisco and Silicon Valley are now in the solid leadership role of the housing bust playing out in California with sales collapsing and prices heading south from the peak in April at an astonishing pace.

Just about everything that could come together came together. After a two-year outflux of workers due to working from anywhere, there came the collapse of the startup and crypto scenes, starting in 2021 and continuing unabated, leading to the early entries into my pantheon of Imploded Stocks. In early 2022 came the spike in mortgage rates. In mid-2022 came the downturn in employment at Big Tech. By that time, the Fed had been hiking its policy rates relentlessly, and Quantitative Tightening had kicked off. This was punctuated over the past two months by the chaotic dismantling of the workforce at Twitter and its ecosystem.

Local budgets have fallen into deep deficits – though most are still flush with cash from the pandemic funds received from the federal government and the state.

Vacant office space that is on the market for lease and sublease continues to balloon, while landlords have started to file for huge reductions in assessment values to lower their property taxes, which is going to cut revenues further.

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San Francisco DA Announces Innovative New Plan To Arrest People For Breaking The Law

Posted on July 15, 2022 | Leave a comment

From The Babylon Bee:

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA — San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins announced a bold new direction for the DA’s office Friday when she put forward an innovative new plan to arrest people who break the law.

“This may seem like a radical idea,” began Jenkins, “but I think that if someone breaks the law we should prosecute them and throw them in prison so they can no longer harm others.”

Jenkins’ revolutionary idea has received zero pushback from a community that is reportedly tired of being raped and murdered. Though unproven, the plan is expected to make the streets of San Francisco cleaner and safer, as well as boost the dwindling tourism market.

“I love San Francisco,” said longtime resident Joey Gladstone. “But I’m not a fan of being defecated on by a hobo who thinks he’s legendary Trojan warrior Hector while my wife gets mugged by another hobo. I really hope this brave plan to put people in jail pays off!”

Legislators have voiced support for the district attorney’s office, calling the idea an incredible breakthrough for the criminal justice system.

“I can’t believe no one has thought of this before!” commented CA State Senator Scott Wiener. “What a great idea! Arresting criminals… fascinating!”

At publishing time, CA Governor Gavin Newsom admonished San Francisco Mayor London Breed for allowing a radical DA to lock up misunderstood criminals.

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San Francisco Couple Gets $1,500 Fine For Parking In Their Own Driveway, by Tyler Durden

Posted on July 5, 2022 | Leave a comment

This story on Zero Hedge currently has over 179,000 hits and 600 comments because it’s even more absurd than the headline. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Things really seem to be going “uphill” in San Francisco. A couple from the city, who has parked in the same spot “every day for the last 36 years” was ticketed $1,542 for parking in their own driveway this month.

As many people do, the couple lives on a hill in a city where parking is always at a premium. The couple has been parking in the carpad in front of their house – which they say has been there since the house was built in 1910.

But now the city planning department is saying it is “illegal to park in the front yard of a house” and threatened further tickets should the couple – Judy and Ed Craine – continue to park where they have been.

“We always use the carport,” Judy told ABC 7 San Francisco. “Parked in that driveway every day and every night,” Ed added. “We got this email saying we can’t park in the pad anymore. I said what, that’s crazy.”

Judy continued: “It was very surprising, to say the least. I wrote them back saying I thought this was a mistake.”

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The Deeply Satisfying Destruction of the Ruling Elite, by Scott McKay

Posted on June 25, 2022 | Leave a comment

Undone by their own stupidity and corruption. From Scott McKay at spectator.org:

They’ve earned every humiliation that’s coming to them

In February, far-left San Francisco underwent a political shock quite appropriate to a city used to the ground shifting under its feet. But the recall election in which three members of the local school board were blown out of office should be reverberating across the country as a warning of a massive earthquake to come.

What happened in those recalls, which saw woke leftists Gabriela López (sent packing by a 75-25 count), Alison Collins (79-21), and Faauuga Moliga (72-28) all clobbered by more than 70 percent of the voters, was an even more demonstrative example of what happened in the Virginia elections last fall. Namely, that disgusted public school parents rose up to punish the politicians who have politicized and poisoned their kids’ education.

How? Critical race theory, transgender advocacy, and Branch Covidian hysteria, which have become the three main sacraments of left-wing public education’s new religion. It turns out that even San Franciscans won’t take it anymore.

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Posted in Education, Government, Politics, Propaganda

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The Criminal Order Beneath the ‘Chaos’ of San Francisco’s Tenderloin, by Leighton Woodhouse

Posted on June 20, 2022 | Leave a comment

There is an order to the carnage of San Francisco’s Tenderloin, but nobody seems interested in disrupting that order. From Leighton Woodhouse at realclearinvestigations:

The epicenter of the political earthquakes rattling San Francisco’s progressive establishment is a 30-square-block neighborhood in the center of downtown known as the Tenderloin. Adjacent to some of the city’s most famous attractions, including the high-end shopping district Union Square, the old money redoubt of Nob Hill, historic Chinatown, and the city’s gold-capped City Hall, it is home to a giant, open-air drug bazaar. Tents fill the sidewalks. Addicts sit on curbs and lean against walls, nodding off to their fentanyl and heroin fixes, or wander around in meth-induced psychotic states. Drug dealers stake out their turf and sell in broad daylight, while the immigrant families in the five-story, pre-war apartment buildings shepherd their kids to school, trying to maintain as normal an existence as they can.

(AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
Ousted: San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin.
AP

“If you happen to be walking through the Tenderloin and you feel unsafe, imagine what it feels like to live there,” said Joel Engardio, head of Stop Crime SF, a civilian public safety group. “The Tenderloin has one of the largest percentages of children in the city. It’s untenable, inexcusable to ask them to confront this hellscape.”

“The Tenderloin is out of control,” said Tom Ostly, a former San Francisco prosecutor who used to work there and lives nearby. “It has never been worse than it is now.”

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Economy, Government, Immigration, Investigations, Politics, Propaganda

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What If San Francisco Does Not Recover? By Rich Cibotti

Posted on March 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

Stupidity can destroy great cities such that they never come back. From Rich Cibotti at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

San Francisco looks worse now than I’ve ever seen it. Like any major city, San Francisco had bad areas before 2020 – those rough areas you knew to avoid – but you could go anywhere else, basically unmolested. Today is something entirely different.

The streets are dirty. Homeless encampments, trash, and excrement can be found all over. Car break-ins are so frequent that it has basically become a non-government-imposed tax for people who come here. Of course, some areas are much worse than others, but almost all areas of the city suffer from this decay, and it is appalling.

Every year, the city seems to find new ways to dig deeper and deeper toward ruin. But what happens to San Francisco if it really does not recover? What if the financial woes, homeless encampments, rising crime, and dwindling police force are the new normal for this once great city?

Whether or not politicians want to admit it, San Francisco is in a very precarious situation. Big Tech is gone, and it’s not coming back. Of course, some companies will keep a building here or there, but tech has realized they can work anywhere. Why would anyone want to put up with onerous San Francisco regulations and taxes? Once you pay this high cost of entry, you still must deal with squalid conditions just to get to work. Instead, why not stay in your pajamas with a nice shirt or top on and fire up the Wi-Fi at home?

The pandemic caused many offices to transition into working from home or some form of hybrid model. Now that many companies and their workers realize working from home can be effective, why wouldn’t these companies keep it permanently? Why continue to pay a premium for San Francisco office space?

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“A Disaster In Plain Sight” – Why San Francisco Is Doing Nothing To Curb Brutal Fentanyl Crisis, by Tyler Durden

Posted on February 7, 2022 | Leave a comment

San Francisco used to be one of the most beautiful cities on the planet. It’s doing everything possible to turn itself into a hellhole. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

The San Francisco Chronicle just published a lengthy multimedia report about the most devastating public-health crisis currently afflicting the city. And no, it’s not COVID-19. It’s the rash of super-potent synthetic opioids like fentanyl that are causing a surge in deaths among the city’s vast homeless community, as well as among others.

Nearly 3/4ths of the thousands of drug overdoses that have been reported in the City by the Bay have involved fentanyl; for the last two years, Fentanyl has been killing far more people in San Francisco than COVID. It’s not even close, really.

In San Francisco, roughly 1,310 people died from drug overdoses in 2020 and 2021. That’s more than double the roughly 710 people who have died from the virus in the city since the start of the pandemic.

The city’s fentanyl death toll would be higher if it wasn’t for narcan, the antidote now used more than 500 times a month to yank people back from the brink of death.

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Victory! San Francisco Mayor Promises Crackdown on Drug Dealing & Crime, by Michael Shellenberger

Posted on December 17, 2021 | Leave a comment

If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, then a liberal politician reversing course and asking for money for the police is a politician who doesn’t want to get mugged in the next election. From Michael Shellenberger at michaelshellenberger.substack.com:

London Breed says city must be “less tolerant of all the bulls**t that has destroyed our city,” and demands more money for cops
San Francisco Mayor London Breed announcing a police crackdown on crime and drug dealing

After Black Lives Matter protesters last year demanded that cities “Defund the Police,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed held a press conference to announce that her city would be one of the first to do exactly that. Breed announced $120 million in cuts to the budgets of both San Francisco’s police and sheriff’s departments. A spokesperson for the police officers’ union warned the cuts “could impact our ability to respond to emergencies,” but the police chief assured the public that the cuts “will not diminish our ability to provide essential services.”

Yesterday, Breed reversed herself in dramatic fashion, announcing that she was making an emergency request to the city’s Board of Supervisors for more money for the police to support a crackdown on crime, including open air drug dealing, car break-ins, and retail theft. The plan contains much of what the California Peace Coalition, which Environmental Progress and I cofounded last spring, has been demanding, including in a series of protests by parents of homeless addicts, parents of children killed by fentanyl, and recovering addicts.

San Francisco Mayor Breed and other San Francisco politicians have for years promised to crack down on drug dealing and crime, and things have only grown worse over, so skepticism is merited. Already, progressives in San Francisco have denounced Mayor Breed’s plan, which she announced with the support of just two members of the city’s 11 Board of Supervisors, and without the apparent support of the city’s District Attorney.

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Posted in Collapse, Crime, Government, Politics, Propaganda, race relations

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Why Crime Is Out Of Control in San Francisco, by Michael Shellenberger

Posted on November 29, 2021 | Leave a comment

There’s a weird theory, now completely discredited by the woke contingent, that if you don’t punish crime you get more crime. From Michael Shellenberger at michaelshellenberger.substack.com:
This oped was originally published in The Wall Street Journal on November 28, 2021.

When Chesa Boudin ran for San Francisco district attorney in 2019, he said crime was caused by poverty, wealth inequality and inadequate government spending on social programs. He called prostitution, open drug use and drug dealing “victimless crimes” and promised not to prosecute them. The result has been an increase in crime so sharp that San Francisco’s liberal residents are now paying for private security guards, taking self-defense classes, and supporting a recall of Mr. Boudin, with a vote set for June 2022. Retailers like Walgreens and Target are closing stores in the city, citing rampant shoplifting. Last week, a shockingly organized mob of looters ransacked a downtown Louis Vuitton store.

Mr. Boudin and his defenders say crime in San Francisco has actually declined under his watch. The store closings had little to do with shoplifting, they insist; Walgreens announced in 2019 it would close stores as a cost-saving measure. And after the Louis Vuitton looting, Mr. Boudin talked tough on Twitter : “Standby for felony charges. Indeed, some crimes did decline, but for Covid-related reasons, while many other offenses increased. The pandemic crimped tourism, which meant fewer car break-ins and less shoplifting, but both are now on the rise. Car break-ins were 75% higher in May 2021 than in 2019, before the pandemic.

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The Bay Area Has Become An Absolute Paradise For Violent Criminals, by Micheal Snyder

Posted on July 6, 2021 | Leave a comment

San Francisco becomes increasingly less habitable. From Michael Snyder at theeconomiccollapseblog.com:

Over the past couple of decades, northern California has prospered more than any other area in the country.  In fact, the two wealthiest metropolitan areas in the entire nation are located in northern California.  But even though the region is absolutely swimming in cash, crime is completely and totally out of control and violent criminals are having a field day.  We have never seen the sort of crime wave in the Bay Area that we are seeing now, and it seems to be getting worse with each passing month.

Let me give you an example of what I am talking about.  According to the local CBS affiliate, the number of car break-ins has risen “by more than 700 percent in some parts of the city”…

Car break-ins have skyrocketed in San Francisco, increasing by more than 700 percent in some parts of the city. With more people visiting after county and state restrictions were lifted, thieves are taking advantage of tourists by breaking into rental cars.

“Sucky end to our vacation but what can we do,” said Kaitlin Lore, visiting from New Jersey.

The politicians running the city don’t like to admit this, but San Francisco is dealing with an absolutely massive epidemic of street drug abuse.

The addicts that endlessly wander the streets are constantly looking for more drug money, and they have discovered that tourists are easy targets.

So I would not recommend making San Francisco your next vacation destination.

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