Spiraling in San Francisco’s Doom Loop; What it’s like to live in a city that no longer believes its

[mountaineer]

A reporter tried to debunk the horror stories about San Francisco, but couldn’t because they’re true. “Some of the street addicts were rotting, literally: their decomposing flesh attracting flies.”

Spiraling in San Francisco’s Doom Loop
 What it’s like to live in a city that no longer believes its problems can be fixed.
By Elizabeth Weil
May 10, 2023

  ...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.  ...

Read full article at Curbed

[Free Vulcan]

It's just symptomatic of a nation that's splitting along red/blue state ideology and city/rural attitude, ethics, and morality.

Problem is city people will forever vote for Rat leadership till it's all in flames and crumbling into dust, and if they don't the votes will be stuffed to make it so.

The solution is to find your safe place, hunker down, and be as self-sufficient as possible.

[Weird Tolkienish Figure]

Stop blaming the politicians blame the voters who elected them.

[DefiantMassRINO]