San Francisco Is Digging Its Own Grave
By Todd Strandberg
I watched a series of videos by a YouTuber who monitors the financial health of California cities. He went down various streets in San Francisco and showed how nearly every major retailer has left the heart of the city.
Just a few years ago, the city had some of the richest areas in the nation. Market Street was the Broadway of the West Coast. It is a major thoroughfare in San Francisco. It begins at The Embarcadero Plaza in front of the Ferry Building at the northeastern edge of the city and runs southwest through downtown.
Union Square was the teeming commercial hub of the city. Many major hotels and department stores were packed into the area surrounding the actual square. Numerous upscale boutiques, restaurants, nightspots, and galleries occupied the spaces tucked between the larger buildings. At the intersection of Powell and Market streets, tourists have long huddled to view one of the city’s most unique sites, the manual cable car turnaround.
The Embarcadero Plaza must have cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build. Only the most luxurious tenants could probably afford the high rents. The whole complex is now almost empty.
Two key things turned San Francisco into a hell hole. The homeless people moved in, and the city allowed people to steal from stores with little or no consequences. The fuel for the bad behavior is drugs. About 90% of people who live on the street are on drugs. Addicts shoot up right in plain view of cops, and they throw the used needle onto the pavement.
One grossest sign of San Francisco’s decline is poop. It is everywhere. Some people have created websites that show areas where people have relieved themselves. I saw one map that showed a poop incident about every 10 feet. It gets regularly cleaned up, but you can’t walk two blocks without stepping on 50 locations where someone has done their business in the past.
Many corporations are part of the problem. Walgreens has reached the point where it does absolutely nothing to stop theft. At first, its employees were allowed to stop criminals. Because of past violent interactions between workers and criminals and resulting lawsuits, employees who attempt to prevent the theft of merchandise will now face termination.
Walgreens has lost a huge amount of money in the San Francisco area. It kept the stores open because of pressure from liberal groups that blame racism as the motivation for closing stores. When you have mobs of black people storming a store and nearly cleaning it out, it’s time to lock the doors for good.
At first, Walgreens was robbed a few times a day. Now they are robbed several times an hour. Some reporters with CNN were amazed to watch a Walgreens get robbed three times within five minutes. They were puzzled why many of the items were padlocked.
I watched local newscasts from Fox, CBS, ABC, and NBC, and they were all stumped over why San Francisco was falling apart. The homeless were ignored as being part of the problem; they were the victims of some greater cause. It is difficult for me to understand how someone can be labeled as a victim when one person is brandishing knives at others while another individual is indiscriminately throwing feces in every direction.
Residents are urging the city to take action, as individuals residing in tents on a particular street have obstructed the sidewalk. The department responsible for maintaining order said they can’t do anything. A lawyer for the city said that because these people were “involuntarily homeless,” their taking over public property is not a crime. The times when the city makes it look like they are cleaning up a street are a sham. The homeless pack up their tents and just come back a few hours later.
San Francisco’s homeless crisis is very destructive to law enforcement. Cops don’t bother to do their job because they don’t get any real results. If they arrest someone for a major crime, they’ll be back on the street in short order. When these people are ordered to appear before a judge, most don’t even bother to show up.
If the police can’t do real work, they will pretend to be on the job. One video showed a policeman guarding a Starbucks. One woman had two officers escort her through a drug store; when she tried to drive home, she discovered that someone had blocked her in. She told the two cops, and they got into an argument with the guy who was working on his engine. The guy didn’t listen to the cops because he knew they wouldn’t arrest him.
The worst thing about the situation in San Francisco is that it has become a template that other cities can copy. I think most of the problem is demonic, but the moral implosion is partly the result of monkey see, monkey do. To have a city taken over by homelessness and crime doesn’t require any action. To turn a city into another San Francisco, the citizens can just stop doing anything, and nature will take its course.
The majority of news broadcasts presenting potential resolutions to San Francisco’s decline focused on the involvement of federal assistance. Since the 1960s, we have poured about $3 trillion down a rat hole, which is commonly called the War on Poverty. The real problem with the city is a lack of morality. Every society that has turned its back on godly principles has ended in destruction. There is a slight possibility that revival will sweep over the land. We are so close to the tribulation hour, I think the best option is to pray for the rapture.
“Take care lest you forget the LORD your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today” – (Deut. 8:11).
– Todd