Every day this week so far, I’ve seen a headline and story about the ongoing crash of San Francisco. It’s a shame, I liked the city a lot when we visited not too many years ago. Our annual trips used to be centered around or involved major iconic American cities. We subsequently felt like we had adopted the city after experiencing it. Those days are likely over. For San Francisco, I’m sure there are ‘safe’ places, but it’s not wise for an outsider to guess and take risks. The parts and sectors of a city are interconnected. If one community becomes blighted, the rest suffer. If there is no law, there is no hope, and in San Francisco, there is no law.
I could rehearse all the present woes, from the homelessness, drug addiction, to the massive vacancy rates in its downtown buildings, all directly caused or exacerbated by the maturing fruit of wokeness and devotion to Democrat far left values, but you see the same news I see if you view conservative outlets or follow conservatives on Twitter/X. Instead, I’ll jump ahead, speculate a little, and draw a description of what a next level collapse of a city like San Francisco would look like.
We’re watching several of our most important cities teeter on the edge of ruin but so far they all seem to hold together some minimal level of function. What would it look like if one of them goes beyond that and falls into a death spiral, a municipal sepsis that can’t be stopped? San Francisco may be the closest thing to that stage. The small building blocks fall first and have been doing so for years, and then comes the larger pieces. The downtown is gutted, first from ludicrous Covid restrictions, then rebellion among the young workforce, and finally, full panic over crime. Every week, another national retailer is leaving for good. That’s happening now. The first tier of wealth has already left, the second is packing their bags and their companies to leave, and the third tier is making plans and may already be too late. The police, already decimated physically and spiritually, largely abandon all enforcement and what remains among them are there only for symbolism, the paycheck, and the bribes. The entire city government apparatus can do nothing but mouth platitudes about diversity, equity and inclusion, climate change, racism, and white supremacy. Their rhetoric is fully divorced from any conditions on the ground as they’re functioning in an illusory non-reality, soaking up the legacy cash and wealth of the city. While the real estate market has already been gutted, at some point, the bottom totally falls out, first commercial, then the middle class, then the well-heeled. The later is still very expensive by heartland standards, but suddenly everyone is underwater, nevertheless, listings soar. At some point ‘nice’ neighborhoods start to wake up to bodies in the street from the night before and panic sets in. The less well-off neighborhoods ostensibly and counter-intuitively seem to stabilize but only because cartels and gangs have taken over all ‘policing’ activity and are now governing whole neighborhoods. City leaders even brag about the stabilization, taking faux credit, and all seems well until the turf wars start. ‘Small’ mass executions start to take place and are covered up by the press while the families cry and march in the street, but then the brutality rises when beheadings start and are done in such a way as to deliberately get noticed city wide. People stop marching in the streets. It gets so bad that even the homeless start to leave. There are plenty of safer places to be homeless close by. By now, foreigners are snapping up greatly reduced real estate with dark money. They buy homes, apartment complexes, retail, even high rises. They can afford to sit on most of it with no redevelopment. They quickly buy their way into the government and election cycle and puppets start to occupy key posts. Tourism is gone, tech has relocated, all who remain live in fear, stuck between mortal danger and bankruptcy. San Francisco is now only a name, but it is otherwise gone.
San Francisco may be the first to go, or maybe it will be someplace else? New York is on the verge of a plummet on its current trajectory, Philadelphia is being overrun by lawlessness and drugs, murder is spiking in Democrat run cities everywhere. This is the full flower of a one-party leftist woke ‘utopia’ as it becomes fully realized to the people that chose it’s course.
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