Karlamangla asks Barron:
You write about the “doom loop” idea — that San Francisco will spiral downward because all its problems are interwoven. But downtowns across the country have struggled after pandemic lockdowns. Why do you think that narrative has persisted so strongly in San Francisco?
The narrative? Barron answers:
The most obvious answer is that things are actually going wrong. San Francisco faces multiple overlapping problems: Work-from-home policies emptied out the office buildings downtown, there’s a fentanyl crisis, and homeless services are grossly inadequate — the shelter system runs more than 4,000 beds short, for example. But many American cities are dealing with similar challenges.... Why does San Francisco attract all this vitriol, which is so disproportionate to the conditions on the ground? I think it’s because San Francisco holds a special place in American media and politics — everything that happens there is magnified. It’s a symbol as much as a city.
A symbol of doom.
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76 comments:
It’s bad policies. The incentives are wrong.
Couldn't gain access. But it is apparent that they are stuck in denial. They will never say, our policies failed. We resign.
These are the people who want to make America like California. They see nothing wrong with an entire nation filled with mini-SFO urbanities where optimism goes to die in a haze of fentanyl and xylazine.
These people are not just enemies of the United States, they are enemies of the last 5000 years of urban civilization itself. Yes. It is OK to hate them.
It's pretty funny that after Joe Biden desperately begged Xi for a summit meeting, which meeting Xi used to scold the dotard, that somehow the Federal Judges allowed the streets of San Francisco to be cleaned up until the whole downtown looked like a stage for Flower Drum Song, and as soon as Xi left, it was back to its old fetid self.
One of the main reasons people pick on the city though, is that San Francisco is the epicenter of not just liberalism, but vast wealth, and somehow, those billionaires don't get taxed to solve the problems. San Francisco should be the symbol of what liberalism can accomplish at its best, and guess what? It is.
Another reason why San Francisco takes center stage is because it's a genuinely beautiful city which many Americans have taken wonderful vacations to. In that sense, it's not Detroit or Milwaukee, which may be suffering as badly or even worse. In San Francisco, the disastrous policies seem more like an act of intentional political vandalism.
San Francisco is the end result of more than a century of conflicting ideals:
1) A "Barbary Coast" culture of anarchy that began circa the 1849 Gold Rush and creation of California as a state. Open drug use and sex were popular back then too. Opium dens, Chinese prostitutes, etc. Did you ever see the landmark strip club with lightbulbs as flashing nipples?
2) It attracted (along with Greenwich Village) the gay community as draftees moved through military conscription and out of the country during the 20th century wars. Inadvertent consequence of the military draft...
3) It consciously moved away from a nuts-and-bolts shipping port economy toward tourism and entertainment in the 1960s, as shown by the backlash against the huge freeway beltway (that era fully ended with the freeway collapse in the 1989 earthquake).
4) Wealthy NIMBYs control all California coastal communities. All of them. They mainly care about their personal lifestyles, wealth, and neighborhoods, and they want/create discomfort for everyone else so they'll go away and reduce growth pressures. See Santa Barbara, see Carmel-by-the-Sea, etc. The Silicon Valley tech companies made NIMBYism worse by bussing employees an hour south to Silicon Valley proper.
When you can have a conversation, like this, and nobody mentions even the CEOs are dropping acid, you're not just a city with a problem, but a nation with one.
"Why do you think that narrative has persisted so strongly in San Francisco?"
Aw, do you really have to ask that question?
Because it's run by Democrats who are intent on fundamentally changing. And not for the better.
RideSpaceMountain nails it. There’s not much more to say except Neolithic hunter-gathers would be outraged by San Francisco as well.
People working from home is part of the problem, but likely not the biggest part. The perception (and reality) of rampant crime keeps people away, both tourists and locals alike. Conferences are being canceled. Businesses that directly service customers are hurting from reduced foot traffic, theft, and the demand for higher labor costs. The filth from drug addicts and homeless people adds to the problems. The lack of law enforcement just makes everything worse. Face it, why would anyone want to go there? I flew into San Francisco on a business trip earlier this year. In all likelihood, that will be the last time I ever go there. The customer I was visiting is in a city north of SF. If I ever have to go there again, I’ve found a smaller airport closer to my destination that I’ll use to avoid San Francisco.
The problem isn’t that they’re short 4000 beds for the homeless. If they added 4000 beds they’d attract even more homeless. SF’ homeless problem won’t change until their policies do.
I'm going with it's the human poop in the streets.
My brother moved to SF in the early 80s. SF then was the most beautiful city in America. Now it is wrecked. Liberalism destroyed SF. And the Dems, per usual, won't admit their errors.
I’m guessing it’s because they have to live under the rules forced on them buy the overwhelmingly conservative suburban and rural portions of the state.
San Francisco is the place where liberalism and libertarianism shacked up and went to die in a drugged out haze.
One of the main reasons people pick on the city though, is that San Francisco is the epicenter of not just liberalism, but vast wealth, and somehow, those billionaires don't get taxed to solve the problems. San Francisco should be the symbol of what liberalism can accomplish at its best, and guess what? It is.
That's gonna leave a mark.
In my mind, it's pretty simple what has happened to places like San Francisco, Chicago, other major cities and our nation as a whole - hubris, self-interest and corruption by our elected officials (I refuse to call them "leaders").
JFK once said: "Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country."
Today's elected officials are little more than grifters who have turned JFK's statement ass-backward. They seek ever-higher office to suck the life out it like a vampire, only to leave the drained remains for the taxpayers to clean up. I'm disgusted by officials who leave office with far greater personal wealth (and family wealth) than when they entered office.
In my mind, it's pretty simple what has happened to places like San Francisco, Chicago, other major cities and our nation as a whole - hubris, self-interest and corruption by our elected officials (I refuse to call them "leaders").
JFK once said: "Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country."
Today's elected officials are little more than grifters who have turned JFK's statement ass-backward. They seek ever-higher office to suck the life out it like a vampire, only to leave the drained remains for the taxpayers to clean up. I'm disgusted by officials who leave office with far greater personal wealth (and family wealth) than when they entered office.
Wince said...
I'm going with it's the human poop in the streets.
11/30/23, 7:37 AM
THIS. It did get cleaned up for Xi, though. Not for its inhabitants...just the Communist dictator they were trying to impress.
An ouroboro progression.
Does the article mention the absolutely disastrous changes to criminal laws pushed by Newsome, who vowed to “end homelessness” when he ran for mayor of SF, and the other democrats? When violent criminals don’t face consequences cops stop arresting them. They created Gotham City and the jokers are running wild. That they add insult to this injury by doing a fake cleanup for a visiting dictator is maddening. The whole damn state is turning into a sub-slum of Frisco while these guys hold a microscope to this one city.
Has there ever been a greater city than Detroit?
What?
Sorry, I am a time traveler from 1955. I didn't realize.
San Francisco's problems did not just start with the covid experiment. As I'm sure I've written here many times, I used to go to SF multiple times a year over many years for business. I went from staying downtown regularly, to staying in Tiburon- north in Marin County a few years ago because the City had been going south for years and finally got to the point where I just didn't want to deal with it.
I quit staying in the City, by choice, easily 2-3 years before covid hit. So...around 2017-18. I got tired of having to walk around the addicted, the mentally ill, the homeless- while walking down streets, or trying to get into the offices in which I had meetings. Seeing someone shit in the street did not help. Seeing the needles and/or 'leftovers' from groups of addicted homeless as I'm trying to get from one office to another just got to be too 'otherworldly'. Having a crazy man lunge at me, screaming and spitting was 'just part of the ambience' I was told. The frequency and volume of things that should not happen in a civil society just kept increasing. And people seemed to view it as 'cute', as part of being a San Franciscan. So...I would do my work in the City, then at day's end, head north out of the City.
Tiburon was still part of civilization. Look- I grew up in Detroit, spent a lot of time in Chicago, Cleveland, and many other cities. This thing going on in San Francisco was different. It wasn't just crime. It's not even that it's a 'tough city'. Chicago, Detroit- those are tough cities. This is a decaying of the very essence of civilization. It's collapse by design. Government approved and incentivized.
Policies and incentives have created this, by design. It's not by accident. It didn't just happen. And Gavin Newsom was the Mayor overseeing much of the decline. That is before he became Governor to spread his vision throughout the state. Follow the policies and see who has benefitted.
It's pretty funny that after Joe Biden desperately begged Xi for a summit meeting, which meeting Xi used to scold the dotard..
Which leads me to wonder if Xi picked San Francisco for the summit.
SF is FUBAR? Anyone seen my shocked face?
The word for it is anarchy.
Another word is intentional
I like to picture the Cookie Monster saying: Me Want Fentanyl.
That’s the way San Francisco. You are not the problem. You are the solution. Not only should you not have to change, but you should be attracting every like minded progressive to move there and enjoy the utopia that was created.
What I don’t understand is why are you letting those towers of capitalist greed sit empty? Can’t you tear them down? And failing that, maybe turn those once office building that held poor workers in miserable conditions into new homes to rectify that 4000 home shortfall? Can’t you do that, so Texas can send you more people rather than sending them to Chicago and New York?
Maybe it’s due to the ghost of Kathryn Steinle seeking justice.
At tonights debate we'll learn from Gavin N that all is well in SF and Cali in general.
Temujin: "The frequency and volume of things that should not happen in a civil society just kept increasing. And people seemed to view it as 'cute', as part of being a San Franciscan."
This is as neat a summary of the basic problem as I have seen. I'm reminded of that Jefferson Airplane song about SF: "We Built This City on Rock and Roll." The whole sex, drugs and rock and roll 60s thing was centered in San Fran, and having drug use as one of your main cultural attractions at both the high and low end of society is not going to end well. We are starting to see the same thing in other places that have embraced legalized drugs, Portland, Seattle and the front range of Colorado.
The problem is simple. Simple minded leftists, libertarians, and for shorthand leftitarians don't know the first thing about the consequences of open borders and drug legalization. They're like swaddled babies. Who do they think pays for the social services to take care of these zombies? It ain't rich people. It comes out of the payroll taxes, including putative future medical care that middle and working classes pay into for decades, at dear cost.
So have your little social experiments, you dolts. Your types are always financially protected from the damage you create for the rest of us. Maybe start trying to think rationally for the first time in your merry little lives.
I lived in SF in the mid 1980's during the AIDS crisis. It's political leadership, like the electorate, were always certain they know best, unswayed by reality. SF was the only city I have ever lived in that had its own foreign policy, so SF has always believed and demanded to be the center-of-attention. When things were good, it is a plus, but when the dogma of utopian unrealistic expectation results in crap, not so much. Unable to look inward for the cause, they look outward to blame others.
Maybe it’s a parental dynamic.
I know conservatives resist the idea of government as parents. But if that was true, how did government get to have the kind of power over our lives, we have granted them?
San Francisco is the black sheep that allows our parents to punish the good upstanding brothers and sisters.
Through an unusual set of circumstances, I found myself at age twenty-eight, alone, with four days to kill wandering the streets of San Francisco. Had little conception of what the city had to offer in those pre-internet days. I'll never forget cresting a hill and for the first time seeing the bay, the bridge, and a fairy-tale park off to my left. The city was suffused with blue, gold, and pink color and glowed under a slightly misty sunshine; I had stepped right into a Maxfield Parrish print.
The city was mystical and magical. I feel blessed to have seen it then, in the before times. THAT's why San Francisco gets singled-out for it's fallen, chaotic, dangerous state.
I love the passive voice. "Cities are struggling since Covid"
Really? All cities? Regardless of policy choices?
There's always an explanation as to why some cities are worse than others, and it's always structural issues when it's large democratic run city.
San Franscisco is among the WORST major U.S. cities in terms of fast decline. Why?
SF is not in decline. People are so dumb. The Rich and powerful could solve the crime/homeless problem - if they wanted. But don't want to. So, the real question is why?
SF is one of the richest per capita of any big city in the USA. Its quite small, and its natural location is unbeatable. Again, get rid of the crime/homeless problem and it would be the best city in the USA.
My feeling is the SF rich and powerful use the crime/homeless problem to keep tourists and average 'muricans away. They are almost insulated from it, and the neighorhoods they live in are clean and safe.
Problem is, then they move out and start doing it to another nice place. They've already started transforming Arizona.
tim in vermont said: San Francisco should be the symbol of what liberalism can accomplish at its best, and guess what? It is.
You nailed it, man. Good work.
"Stick said...
SF is FUBAR? Anyone seen my shocked face?"
The classic definition of FUBAR is Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. For places like San Francisco, Fucked Up Beyond All Repair also fits. To fix San Francisco, many things need to happen, most of them simultaneously. Unfortunately, the people there would not vote for any of those things, so the problems will continue to grow. What you permit, you promote.
Just read Rigeldogs comment about having visited San Francisco in the pre-internet days, and remembered that I did that to. In 1980 I was teaching school in New York and in the summer bought a month pass on Greyhound and went to San Francisco for 3 or 4 days. Have read so much about what San Francisco is like now, that I had not really connected it to the city I visited 43 years ago. It was just as wonderful as Riegeldog says. Each street held a treasure, whether it was a small cul-de-sac with lovely plantings, the hills, China Town, what a fabulous place it was then. It even had sort of a red light district with a few seedy strip clubs, but even that block or two was not threatening. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. Not in San Francisco. What a waste, what vandalism, what contempt for humanity. The days of ancient Rome repeating themselves, yet this time the Huns are within our walls.
Like TreeJoe above, the thing that stood out to me was the passive voice.
Democrats like Newsome have run San Francisco for multiple decades They have run the state government now for close to two decades. They are the people responsible directly, and the voters for them indirectly.
At tonights debate we'll learn from Gavin N that all is well in SF and Cali in general.
Yep. That's the progressive response to...
San Francisco should be the symbol of what liberalism can accomplish at its best, and guess what? It is.
Just ignore what your lying eyes are telling you.
One almost has to admire how hard they worked for that honor!
"SF is not in decline."
Yeah, must be some other reason that corporations are handing their properties back to their banks.
Not honor… “distinkshun” is more like it.
It's San Francisco and sh.t runs down hill. Down from Knob Hill to the Bay
Perhaps because it was ground zero in the hippy scene and some want it to fail for that reason alone.
But if I had a ton of disposable cash, I'd be investing in SF commercial real estate and hotels.
Nothing lasts forever, and those properties are cheap and getting cheaper.
I want the city to thrive because it was magic when I was younger.
If it does come back I will buy a place on Russian Hill. I've always wanted to do that...
It's Pool Mood spelled backward.
Think about it...
"...homeless services are grossly inadequate — the shelter system runs more than 4,000 beds short..."
Fox Butterfield is that you?
(I miss Taranto's Best of the Web.)
rcocean said...
SF is not in decline.
There is a sliver of truth in that SF has already declined so much that it might seem as if there is not much farther to go before it is a ghost town. But it is dystopian now and like most "rich" cities the rich only occupy a small part of it. The middle class and working poor are paying the price. With no pharmacies within city limits and fewer actual services available to the middle class and working poor the city does seem like a ruin.
Everything else in his idiotic comments was so ignorant it really doesn't rise to something worthy of refuting. Perhaps you are too stupid to realize how much "the rich" rely on all the "little people" to keep things running. And the normals are fleeing the city and this state in droves.
1. Any proposed improvements are hurtful to some group or another, so nothing gets done.
2. SF spends over $1 Billion per year on homelessness alone - and it only gets worse.
Two Eyed Jack at 8:25
I presume you are being serious, for yes Detroit was a great city. Referred to in the 20s as the Paris of the Midwest. Its decline and fall has been so comprehensive the last two or three generations would be incapable of believing it was ever anything of value. Looking at the rail terminal, the library and the general architecture is enough to make one pause, and then weep, and finally to be angry as we recognize that all of these great cities have fallen through intentional policies. Evil is afoot.
Rcocean is mostly right. SF is not just its south of Market or Tenderloin downtown. If you live in Pacific Heights or the Marina or Telegraph or Nob Hills or even in the western communities life is OK and there is no shit in the streets and no bums to leap over. Still as has been shown the ugly bit can be cleaned up over night if so desired.
"homeless services are grossly inadequate — the shelter system runs more than 4,000 beds short, for example."
Demand for free stuff exceeds supply? Well, *that's* never happened before, has it?
San Francisco is progressing: one step forward, two steps backward.
" Why does San Francisco attract all this vitriol, which is so disproportionate to the conditions on the ground?"
Proably because it doubles down on failure. As if failure was a virtue.
rocean
All of California is in decline.
They don't understand the definition of "doom loop". The loop comes from policies to fix a problem, or rather a symptom of the problem, that end up making the situation spiral out of control.
Analogy 1 in business. Sales are down, which causes net profits to drop. The solution to get profits up is to cut product costs by using cheaper substitutes. Now you have an even lower quality product that causes sales to drop further.
Analogy 2 is like the jet that loses elevator control. It may increase altitude until it stalls, then goes nose down and accelerates, it then rises again. It goes through this up and down sequence (the loop) until it eventually hits the ground.
The real problem with San Francisco and all the other failing cities in the US and elsewhere stems from one thing, primarily: The inability to recognize and process reality by the people running those cities.
I don't know why it is that it's happened, but we seem to have bred the ability to recognize objective reality out of the "leadership class" we put in charge of these things.
They come up with these brilliant ideas like "Yeah, we know how to solve the homeless problem... Give us a billion dollars a year in the Puget Sound metroplex, we'll fix it..."
Then, after a decade-plus of them having that money and implementing all their programs, what do we have? Cities free of the scourge of vagrancy and homelessness? No? Why the hell do these charlatans still have jobs? How are they still influencing policy and running government/non-government agencies and programs? Objectively, they've failed.
They're unable to look around and acknowledge that fact. In their heads, all their wonderful ideas are working, right? The fact that we've got exponentially more homeless on our hands, that businesses and people are moving the 'eff out of downtown Seattle because of the problems with them, and all the rest of it? They're blind to it, and keep on doubling-down on the stupid.
This is why San Francisco is dying, along with all the rest. The people running everything are worse than the public in The Emperor's New Clothes, and there's no little boy out there to point out that the Emperor is wandering the streets waving his little wing-wang in everyone's faces. It's insane, on the face of it.
And, it's everyone's fault, because who keeps on re-electing these idiots that are responsible for all this? Who falls for the BS about "human compassion", while the Degradation Industrial Complex hands out free needles and feeds these dregs of society?
Yeah, we do. Look in a mirror, and despair. The fact that the majority of these city governments haven't been either run out of town on a rail or lynched is a source of ever-increasing wonder to me.
Y'all ignored me. Here's the SF most know about. It lasted about two years. Hard drugs wiped it out as fast as it started.
Here's authentic acid-laden SF culture by 1977, when Jim Jones was at the height of his powers, and there was still one year before Harvey Milk's murder poisoned everything, further, for locals: it was still a celebration.
Flash forward to this 1999 review of my efforts:
"Crucially, the Crack Emcee's work (he also put out the underground tape Newt Hates Me a few years ago) is a product of its geography — pretentious San Francisco — yet speaks to issues far beyond the local. San Francisco has long pimped the lie of its being highly cultured, tolerant, progressive, livable, yet its class and racial lines, its poverty and desperation, are sharply evident. The influx of Silicon Valley wealth has stripped away the city's cool façade, laying bare the San Francisco that lives beyond the city's streetcars, sourdough and shopworn hippie myths. This is the San Francisco you hear in the Crack Emcee's music — the city of shadowy and blatant racism; the city of overcrowded, dirty streets where the have-nots of every hue, accent and sexuality struggle endlessly just to get close enough to the surface of the water to maintain the fantasy of someday raising their heads above it. S.F. = America."
Dave Chappelle described SF as an outsider would by 2004, only observing blacks isolated to Oakland. If he'd lived there, as I did, he would've known about SF's unseen ghettos, like San Francisco's "Most Isolated Neighborhood" Bayview-Hunter's Point, or The City's destruction of the Fillmore District's successful Jazz scene, that killed any sense of hope by destroying all trust. Of course, I wrote songs that reflected living there, because that's what I do, kinda like an old blues musician in the south, but not, because they were never doing drugs with one of Gavin Newsom's top aides to make-up the shit.
I'd say, though slightly inaccurate, if you haven't read Season of the Witch ("San Francisco history that many would like to forget.") then you can't even hope to understand it, from the outside looking in.
Sigh: Operation Midnight Climax: How the CIA Dosed S.F. Citizens with LSD
Negativland is a band named after what San Francisco locals call the Bay Area suburbs. Put on some headphones (I repeat: put on some headphones) and listen to the culture produced - it's Frank Zappa-level brilliant, yes, and unlike anything, made anywhere else, in the world - but it's so out-of-this-world it's describing a place tourists to the Bay have never been to, or seen, and likely never will. Unless dragged into it, because they're Halter Stupid.
I've never had to tell anyone they're not God outside of San Francisco. But I have, more than once, and the fact that one of them was my wife is especially disconcerting. Not to anyone else, clearly, but I didn't need it. I think it unmoored The City, as much as it undermined my marriage, and nerved me.
America's played a bad trick on us.
Michael said...
SF is not just its south of Market or Tenderloin downtown. If you live in Pacific Heights or the Marina or Telegraph or Nob Hills or even in the western communities life is still about partying - starting around 4AM when all the tourists are gone and everybody's asleep - with addictive addicts who split their tongues, hide their tattoos, piercings, and devil horns, but fuck like bandits. Who else can afford Burning Man?
Trust me - I was a minor celebrity there once - I know the landscape.
The Cultural Lesson: If you don't take care of your lower classes, they will take care of you.
Yes, Steven Wilson, I am serious.
I have lived in both the Detroit and SF Metro areas and will be able to single out points of interest among the ruins to visitors in the future.
Problem is, then they move out and start doing it to another nice place. They've already started transforming Arizona.
LOL. Better take a good look at your school system, MSM, and social media before blaming California retirees for Arizona's problems.
Detroit with ocean views.
Oh, bilge. As soon as Soros has bought the real estate he wants, he'll pull the rug out from under all those Commies he put in office and fire the place back up again.
If there IS a nefarious plan for SF, it is to chase out all the working- and middle-class people who had insisted on hanging on in what was by FAR the most beautiful city in North America, but were / are perceived as being in the way of oligarch Nirvana.
I think that was also one of the additional reasons for the Floyd riots being allowed to destroy so much: depress the real estate values and trigger middle-class flight, and then those with cash can buy up the best properties on the cheap. Once that is accomplished, the homeless get the boot and the criminals get locked up.
But real estate prices didn't crash enough (yet...that's coming soon), and it turns out that getting rid of the homeless and the criminals is a lot harder than encouraging / allowing them.
San Francisco is, surprisingly, NOT run by tech money. All the political power players in the city are long-time California real estate people: the ones whose assets just keep inflating when no one is allowed to build anything anywhere. I think the big question is whether or not those folks can put the toothpaste back in the tube now that the homeless / criminal masses are politically "organized" by the NGOs and government agencies that make all their money "providing" them "services" (and doing so poorly).
The parasitic mass may not be easily dislodged by the newer generation of oligarchs who don't have the abilities of people like the Dalys in Chicago (which has fallen apart because, rather than unifying the African Americans of the South and West sides with the white ethnic Catholics and big money people of the North and Lakefront, the way he was supposed to, Obama moved up and out so fast that the Daly machine and with it white political power in the city got steamrolled by the managerial incompetents from the South Side).
I have lived in and loved both SF and Chicago, and it is horrible to see what has happened to these two incredible cities over the past 15 years.
And yes, "liberals get what they vote for," but at least in Chicago, liberals didn't vote for what they're getting now: they voted for the "City that Works" competence that the North and Lakefront Democratic machine had always delivered (in its own corrupt way, of course, but the snow really did get plowed and the criminals got smacked down when they left their designated neighborhoods). But Obama and his people sold Chicago the same false promise of racial harmony that they sold to the country as a whole and then cashed out for immense private wealth while allowing the old Harold Washington / Jesse Jackson machine--which is whence Michelle Robinson's father's power came--to grab all the levers of power without knowing how to drive the machine.
"SF spends over $1 Billion per year on homelessness alone - and it only gets worse."
That's how it works. If SF spent $2 billion, it would have twice as many homeless. If it spent $4 billion it would have four times as many. The market for bums is like any other - when you use increased spending to demand more bums, the market will miraculously increase the supply.
'Referred to in the 20s as the Paris of the Midwest.'
Is this supposed to be a compliment?
Doesn't seem like a high bar...
What fascinates me is the virtuosity of our media overlords in packaging this catastrophe as the product of insufficiently enormous government compassion.
The key is not to notice that they have no actual policies that have an actual chance of working.
But don't worry. The rich will buy their way out of discomfort.
Ampersand said...
"The rich will buy their way out of discomfort."
And how.
New York Times. Bahaha.
The Prof got it exactly right. SF or Chicago aren't "hell holes" if you're rich or well-to-do.
Look at all the people who fled NYCin in the 70s, 80s, and 90s and sold out. The rich and well-to-do stayed, snapped up the real estate, and then when Guiliani and Bloomberg reduced crime and cleaned things up, they made a fortune as real estate skyrocked.
Its obvious to me, there's a plan to keep Portland from being a haven for middle class people fleeing CA. Hence all riots and craziness.
"I think that was also one of the additional reasons for the Floyd riots being allowed to destroy so much: depress the real estate values and trigger middle-class flight, and then those with cash can buy up the best properties on the cheap."
Wildfires can work this way, too.
I recently decide to do a road trip.
I drove from Seattle to Vegas in one day to spend four days anchored on the F1 race.
And then we spent a week taking our time while driving the coast from LA to Seattle. There is insane traffic in LA and San Fran. Even way outside of the so-called rush hours.
In the big Hannity debate we were told that three quarters of a million people left CA to go to other states. Well, my anecdotal experience is that CA needs to get rid of at least ten times that number. The traffic in LA and San Fran was something that is impossible to understand w/o seeing it: you can have six lanes in one direction and it's still snail pace starting and ending twenty miles from the cities. At one point in San Fran It took forty five minutes to go half a mile, and I was using all the apps to get the best route, and there was no accident or construction......just a ton of people.
I suppose Bannon would say that the problem is the illegal population in CA. Bannon tells me that we've recently had eight or ten million illegal invaders. So.....CA losing a fraction of a million of legal Americans but gaining many millions of illegal invaders does net out to a massive gain of population.
And we are told that employers love hiring illegals because the employers can abusively get a lot of work out of the illegals for little pay when compared to paying for an actual US citizens that have rights. Hence the states w/ the largest numbers of illegal employees will have an efficiency advantage.
OTOH, maybe the red states can lower minimum employee rights such that legal US employees can be paid wages as low as illegal employees. In that situation, the US gov subsidizes the employer. Cause the very lowly paid employees get gov food and gov insurance and earned income tax credit and such from the Gov. Somehow free market capitalism in America includes the US Gov paying a bunch of benefits to a bunch of Walmart employees while the owners of Walmart have secured hundreds of billions of personal wealth.
Sheesh.
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