First up, Good Morning America reporter Matt Gutman who "was a Jerusalem-based reporter for seven years, covering every major conflict in the Middle East." (ABC reporter biography) reporting from San Francisco:
"The Mayor noting 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."
If you recall, during the time Matt was reporting on the Middle East in the early 2000's, Israel was one of the world's suicide bombing hotspots, 40 in 2001 including the HaSharon shopping mall (5 dead, 100 wounded), the Dolphinarium discotheque (21 dead, over 100 wounded), the Sbarro restaurant (15 dead, 130 wounded) the Haifa bus no.16 (15 dead, 40 wounded) and then in 2002 the bus bombings really got going though the deadliest was at a hotel, the Passover bombing (30 dead, 140 wounded) and on into 2003 with 23 bombings and over 140 dead and despite all that, downtown San Francisco is too dangerous to venture into.—(all stats: Wikipedia)
The international comparisons bring to mind the 2018 post on a UN official's visit, to the Bay Area:
You may have seen the story.
The UN's special rapporteur on Adequate Housing has been jet-setting around, Mexico City, Mumbai, S.F., documenting what she sees:
“In Mexico City, I visited a low-income settlement that had been moved by the city onto empty land near a railway line,” [Farha] said. “They had no running water. They stole electricity.” The camp was noisy and dangerous. She noted that the camp in Mexico is virtually identical to those she visited in Oakland, including the Wood Street and 23rd Avenue encampments....The above snip is from the East Bay Express reprinted in Curbed San Francisco.
Curbed has had one of the most impressive series on the situation of any major media.
There's the January 22 piece we used for the headline which wraps up with:
After her trip to the Bay, Farha headed out to assess conditions in LA, an errand she told the East Bay Express she dreaded after observing encampments here.
Yeah, we're no doom-loopers come-lately, no sirree. We've been trying to point out the pathologies for many years. It goes back to 2009's Our Best Short Idea--San Francisco: "The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S.".
And from Slate, May 26:
The Ticking Time Bomb in America’s Downtowns
The sad state of office buildings could cause something called the “doom loop.” Yes, the doom loop.
They call it the “debt wall,” and it is not the kind of wall that protects you. It’s the kind that might collapse and crush your village, or into which you might crash your car. Specifically, it is $1.5 trillion in commercial real estate debt, owed to banks, pension funds, and insurance companies before the end of 2025, and secured by a national portfolio of office, retail, industrial, and multifamily properties that may not be worth what they were five or 10 years ago when those loans got made.
The country’s downtown office buildings, as you may have heard, are in particularly dire shape. The return to the office has stalled, and many once-vibrant business districts have fallen on hard times. According to data from the brokerage Colliers, almost all of the biggest office buildings in downtown Los Angeles are underwater on their loans—meaning, their owners owe more to the bank than the buildings are currently worth. L.A.’s office towers have, on average, more than $230 in debt per square foot, Bloomberg’s John Gittelsohn reports, and the only building to sell this year went for $154 per square foot. That’s a lot of water. The city’s biggest commercial landlord, the Canadian property giant Brookfield, has defaulted on more than a billion dollars of loans this year.
I asked Tomasz Piskorski, a property market expert at Columbia Business School, why we should care if some downtown mogul—or better yet, the shareholders in a publicly traded Canadian office company—takes a haircut on their trophy building. For that matter, why should we care if they have to hand over the keys to the bank? He gave me three reasons: First, because city property taxes will decline with the value of their office districts, prompting the so-called “doom loop”—the downward double-helix of revenue-strapped public services and diminished urban activity, each worsening the other. Second, contagion from abandoned office buildings will spread to retail (no daytime shoppers), restaurants (no daytime diners), and street life (no happy hour!), draining the vitality of urban neighborhoods.
Third: Widespread defaults on loans backed by commercial real estate could prompt a crisis at shaky regional banks, prompting tighter credit, bank runs, and ultimately, a financial meltdown.....
....MUCH MORE
Just before Slate published their story Curbed had this on May 10:
