In a rational world, a mayor of a city that’s dying would look to reverse the symptoms. If you’re overweight and having all sorts of health issues you don’t switch from cake to ice cream, right? You lose the weight, exercise, eat better, and hopefully decrease all those health issues like diabetes, circulatory system problems, etc. Not in Liberal World
San Francisco mayor proposes tearing down Westfield Mall and other shuttered downtown retailers
San Francisco’s mayor Thursday proposed remaking the city’s struggling downtown by tearing down abandoned retail space, including the city’s Westfield mall, and building new structures to reshape the struggling city.
“We can’t completely rely on retail in downtown restricting what happens in downtown anymore,” Mayor London Breed told Bloomberg’s Technology Summit in San Francisco on Thursday.
Yeah, they just can’t rely on all those business which generate jobs, revenue, and tax money, eh?
Breed’s comments come as San Francisco faces empty offices, a cratering commercial real estate market, and an exodus of retailers from its once-bustling downtown area, especially as pandemic work-from-home policies saw many residents leaving for less expensive parts of the country.
San Francisco has also come under fire recently by politicians, business leaders and locals for a perceived uptick in retail thefts, though it’s not clear that crime has grown significantly more serious, according to industry watchers.
It’s not perceived, and people in SF have long complained about things like car thefts, break-ins, poop in the streets, homeless everywhere, garbage all over, and now they get people committing low level crimes openly.
Breed argued that an overall shift to online shopping post-pandemic has contributed to declining foot traffic in the area.
“You can convert certain spaces. A Westfield Mall could become something completely different than what it currently is,” she said.
“We can even tear down the whole building and build a whole new soccer stadium. We can create lab space or look at it as another company in some other capacity,” she added.
Cool, a soccer field. With poop, homeless, druggies, and drug needles all around it. And people won’t want to go there. Who’s going to pay to build it? Where’s that money coming from with a declining tax base? By the way, has she considered that San Francisco doesn’t own the property? Where’s the money coming from to purchase, then develop it?
Rather than focusing on getting the crime and homelessness problems under control, the aloof and out-of-touch London Breed chooses to talk about building a soccer stadium or create “lab space” whatever that means.
how about buying some of that property and converting it into an insane asyl….uuuuhhhhh….. mental health facility???
or a jail for the repeat offenders?? or a drug detox/treatment center??
no homeless, no junkie, no drug dealer would come within blocks. and the workers would be the typical middle class joe six pack types S.F. is so lacking in.
yea, didn’t think so no good idea ever survives a single democrat politician
William Teach: building a soccer stadium or create “lab space” whatever that means
Lab space refers to business park facilities suitable for biotech and tech companies. In midtown St Louis, a “science” district encompassing Washington University, University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis and St Louis University Medical Centers was created with public-private financing with facilities and investments to support tech start-up companies. It’s a very successful district containing laboratory space, offices, apartments, retail (IKEA and City Foundry STL), restaurants and open spaces.
Just east of the technology corridor is the brand new Major League Soccer (futbol) stadium, CityPark! Every game a sell-out! Inter Miami (with Lionel Messi?) is playing here in July… tickets start at $229/seat.
The times they are a-changin, and cities need to change with the times. Cities need affordable housing. Policing. Fewer guns. Jobs. Transportation. Education. Healthcare. Poverty relief.
Amazing the foolishness and apparent lack of reality these big city Democrat Mayors have. She is a product of governmental largesse. The school system is really an indoctrination system. The money tree that they use is coming to an end.
Read the long, long article in The Atlantic from a recovering progressive on the decay of San Francisco and hope for the future.
The “recalls” she describes is of the uber-progressive prosecutor Boudin and the uber-progressive school board members!
The message: Don’t let ideology get in the way with America’s balancing act – a nation that cares for its people AND assures maximum freedoms.
Big cities have needed theses items (with fewer guns being replaced with fewer criminals) for decades. About the amount of time democrats have been in charge. They’ve been preaching the same shit but their policies have created ghetto (and now barrios), crime, gun violence, racial disharmony, fleeing jobs, poor transportation, rined education and politicized healthcare and their idea of poverty relief is to bring in 250k illegals a month and give them free shit. Their idea of affordable housing is failed rent control and building crack houses. And lately they’ve been all in for Defunding the Police. So what does all that tell you?
The times are changing and if cities don’t change to something other than the same old leftist pabulum they will all look like Detroit or worse.
CarolAnn,
Large American cities have had problems from day 1. Impoverished ghettos (only the members differ – Irish, Italian, Jewish, Black, Hispanics) have existed in the US for a long time, mostly a result of housing discrimination and poverty.
Some thrive, some have cratered, losing population to the ‘burbs.
About 18% of Americans live in rural areas.
Carol,
The Dems have decided that brown people are much put upon and therefore they feel it is best for their politics to stop arresting and trying to control brown criminals. They fully realize that they are destroying the country, and don’t care.
OK, to be honest I favor the plans to destroy what they have downtown and expensively build something else to fail. My approach to the problem may be a bit different from what the Left claims it wants, but the sooner, and more, resources are wasted the sooner it will all collapse. The key point is that no one with half a lick of sense will get financially involved with the transition.
Subotai Bahadur
Failure is not only an option, it is the ONLY option.
Actually, failure is the goal for leftists. Can’t build a commie utopia unless you destroy the racist, sexist, White, Christian republic. Best way to do that is bring in as many illegals as we can and print and spend till we collapse. If you can bring in enough 2nd and 3rd world trash we can also become 2nd and 3rd world trash. Mission accomplished for the American radical left.
The objective of the American reactionary right (MAGATs, Proud Boys, far-right etc) is to destroy today’s America and rebuild it as an authoritarian right-wing “paradise”.
What in the world are you talking about? Republicans have no control over anything that happens in San Francisco at the City, County or State level. The destruction of one of America’s great cities is totally on Democrats. But I am guessing you already knew that.
Fairly typical: the left combitch that conservatives are ‘authoritarians,’ but it wasn’t Republicans — well, there were a few — who were issuing draconian executive orders shutting down economies, declaring some workers non-essential, mandating face masks and experimental vaccines, the latter on pain of losing your jobs, closing schools, setting up tattling websites and government phone numbers to enable the Gradys Kravitzes to report their neighbors if they weren’t wearing masks or had too many visitors, sending city inspectors to make sure that restaurants allowed to open were enforcing face mask and vaccination orders, and sending the state police to record license and vehicle identification numbers on cars in church parking lots on Easter Sunday.