What the Hell Happened to San Francisco?

It wasn’t that long ago when people all over the country were moving to San Francisco and other areas of Northern California, dreaming of living the good life, with great weather and fine neighbors. Now we’ll concede that some portion of the city’s reputation was forged from PR campaigns, vacationing Americans who didn’t see the whole picture, a mythological 1960s origin story, and hell, maybe even “Full House.” But there’s no doubt that however overblown the city’s reputation was a few short years ago…well, it ain’t the city it used to be.

These days, you have a major Chicago-based medical association pulling their annual 15,000-attendee convention out of San Francisco because the place is turning into an unsafe garbage dump. Oh, did we say “garbage?” We meant feces. Because that’s what mysteriously showed up on a sidewalk in San Francisco last week: A 20-lb bag of human excrement. This is what the city looks like today.

Now the questions: Why has it happened? What can be done about it? And are there other cities getting ready to follow the same path to ruin?

Along the lines of that last question, an article in the New York Post on Sunday wondered the same thing. Namely, is New York, with its light-on-crime approach under Bill de Blasio, headed for the same fate?

“Human waste-related complaints in San Francisco have skyrocketed 400 percent from 2008 to 2018, according to data from the city’s 311 system,” reported the NY Post. “In 2017 alone, more than 21,000 reports were received, due in part to the thousands of homeless people living throughout the city without regular access to restrooms.”

In an interview with Fox News, Republican business owner and congressional candidate Kimberlin Brown Pelzer said she was ashamed of what her city had become.

“I’m third generation California, born and raised, and this is not the California I came from or knew for that matter,” she said. “I have people coming into my stores on a regular basis stealing items that my employees are later finding on Craigslist and the police can’t do anything about it. They say they won’t show up because, where do you send a ticket for someone who is homeless? They simply don’t show up any longer. And they’ve made crime okay in the State of California.”

Sadly, this appears to be the way some liberals like it. One will recall that, during Giuliani’s New York heyday, there were plenty of celebrities, Democrats, and hipsters pining away for the crime-ridden Big Apple of the 1970s. You would hear the term “Disneyfied” more than one might like to recall. These days, with proactive Broken Windows policing having run afoul of political correctness, that misguided nostalgia may indeed bring back the dirty, dangerous New York of the past.

And, apparently, San Francisco will be right there with it.