We've been posting on the plight of the homeless in San Francisco for over a decade and on the false front of California's economy for longer than that and it is good to see the reality finally seeping into the nation's conscience/consciousnesses.
From Curbed (New York Magazine), May 10:
What it’s like to live in a city that no longer believes its problems can be fixed.
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In the spring of 2019, Marc Benioff surveyed his kingdom and it looked good. He stood on the top floor of the Salesforce Tower, the tallest building in San Francisco, named after his company, then the largest employer in San Francisco. You could see every part of the city and out across the bay. The UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital and the Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland (to which Benioff had donated $250 million). The site of a 200-bed Navigation Center for the homeless (which Benioff had defended in the face of other rich — but less rich — San Franciscans who tried to fight it off). The city looked sun-kissed and thriving from this view: the elegant Golden Gate Bridge, Twin Peaks, the surreal green of the Marin Headlands.
“It’s cool up here, right?” said Benioff. “And the vibe. Are you getting the vibe, too? There’s, like, a vibe.”
There was indeed a vibe.
That Friday afternoon, like every Friday afternoon in those days, Salesforce employees and their families promenaded on the top, or ohana, floor of the building — ohana means “extended family” in Hawaiian; appropriating Hawaiian culture was still considered corporate okay — drinking the free espresso drinks, marveling at the tremendous view.
Benioff’s PR team brought him water and Diet Coke and made sure the big man’s chair was not in the sun. “You can see that helicopter is about to land with a child going to the NICU?” he said, pointing south toward the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. “Can you see it? It’s just about to land on top of the medical center … There’s only one helicopter landing pad in the entire city, and it’s on the top of the Children’s Hospital for kids who have to get to the NICU, which is the neonatal-intensive-care unit … So that’s what just happened.”
But that was a lifetime ago, before the pandemic, when we were still debating if you could have good billionaires. Since that time, Salesforce has laid off 9,000 employees and ditched nearly a million feet of office space. Meta has laid off 21,000 employees and ditched 435,000 feet of office space in San Francisco. Now, late one morning this dark spring, next to the Salesforce Tower, the Salesforce Transit Center — designed by César Pelli’s firm and opened in August 2018 to serve as the city’s main bus hub —was empty, as in truly vacant, save for a security guard in black Dickies and a yellow-and-black jacket walking in circles on the poppy-tiled floor.
A week earlier, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article: “Cities Are Struggling. San Francisco Could Be in the Biggest ‘Doom Loop’ of All.” The phrase “doom loop” was recently repopularized by Arpit Gupta, a finance professor at NYU, in a paper he wrote last year with two Columbia B-school professors called “Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse,” about the consequences for American downtowns of workers remaining remote.
The doom-loopy vision laid out for downtown SF was not pretty: Workers don’t return, offices remain empty, restaurants shutter, transit agencies go bankrupt, tax bases plummet, public services disappear. According to research from the University of Toronto, cell-phone activity in downtown SF is 32 percent of pre-pandemic levels. That number is 75 percent in New York.
The night the Chronicle published its doom-loop article, Manny’s, an event space in the Mission, hosted a public discussion on what to do about the death spiral. The panelists tried to sound optimistic. “We just need to fix San Francisco’s dysfunctional permitting system!” “We can find an affordable way to turn some of the office space into housing.” “We should fund artists to repopulate downtown!”
Five days later, Cash App founder Bob Lee was killed. Immediately people invested in the doom-loop narrative started mouthing off. “You know, where he was killed used to be a good part of San Francisco,” Lee’s friend Jake Shields told me, as he told anybody who would listen in those first few days. Shields, an MMA fighter, had moved to Las Vegas. Lee had moved to Miami. Everyone with brains had left. Never mind the fact that violent crime rates in San Francisco were pretty low, lower than in most American cities of comparable size, lower than in San Francisco in years past. SF was a cesspool! — that was the doomers’ argument. City leaders, along with the rest of the populace, were “too compassionate, like so compassionate that they do not care.”
The result, according to Shields, was not just an office apocalypse. It was unmitigated, spiraling, homicidal doom. “You can do whatever you want. You can shit in the streets,” Shields said. “The logical next step is to start killing people.”
A woman with smart eyes and a dirty sweatshirt, 50-ish, drunk, approached me near the corner of Market and 4th Streets. We shared the sidewalk with Urban Alchemy crews made of formerly incarcerated people now dedicated to bringing peace and compassion to the streets, stunned tourists, official San Francisco Welcome Ambassadors in their orange jackets, and young Evangelists with microphones and a taste for filibustering — “We can die tonight, and if we die in our sin, and if you die in your sin …”
“You seem like an intelligent woman,” the drunk woman with smart eyes said.
I said, “You too.”
Our whole conversation was a series of understatements.
“How does it feel to live in San Francisco?”
“You have to deal with people, and people have their own personalities.”
“What’s difficult about life in this city?”
“There’s a lot of temptation. You have to deal with yourself.”
“How did you end up here?”
“My mother died — she had a stroke. And my father, he had a temper. He said, ‘Yeah, I don’t like you.’”
On Market, near 6th, a security guard stood in front of Blick art supply. He’d just ejected a man who had been smoking fentanyl inside the store, a man his bosses suggested he should refer to as “an unhoused guest.”
The guard, who described himself to me as “a cis white male who stands six feet tall,” had previously worked security one block east at the Anthropologie. But that, he said, was just for show. He wasn’t even supposed to try to stop shoplifters who, at other stores on Market Street, filled up bags, or sometimes even suitcases, with food they needed to feed themselves or their families or merchandise to sell on the black market on Mission Street. But here, the guard told me, his co-workers’ pay depended on sales. His job was to make it tolerable for customers to shop.
Elsewhere in San Francisco, wisteria was blooming, crazy fragrant blooms, like lilac on MDMA....
....MUCH MORE
Regarding Bob Lee's death, because our source, The San Francisco Standard, was very straightforward in their coverage, we were as well:
"Former Square CTO Bob Lee Stabbed to Death in Downtown San Francisco""Finding Bob Lee’s Killer: Former Cops Explain How SF Homicide Investigations Unfold"
It's been almost nine days since Mr. Lee was stabbed to death and since the San Francisco Standard was the first media we saw with the story, we keep returning to them. April 12, 2023...
As it turns out, this was not a case of wilding or random violence but instead a rather tawdry Babylon by the Bay drug-fueled-underground-scene-type-crime-of-passion.
Related:Michael Crichton On Speculation By (and in) the Media
