NANCY PELOSI'S DEMOCRAT CONTROLLED CITY OF SAN FRANCISCO - "It ranks first in the nation in theft, burglary, vandalism, shoplifting, and other property crime. On average, about 60 cars get broken into each day. Diseases arising from poor sanitation—typhoid, typhus, hepatitis A—are reappearing at an alarming rate. "

Pelosi is a ghastly creature. She and her ilk – Feinstein, Boxer, 

Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom – have effectively destroyed 

California and they did it on purpose. They strive to import as 

many illegal migrants as possible; they've created and fostered the 

homelessness and let it fester. California is now a socialist disaster 

and the further destruction of the economy is just what they've 

wanted.  PATRICIA McCARTHY

San Francisco is a disaster about which Nancy Pelosi she cares nothing.  It is a city ravaged by drug abuse, homelessness, rampant crime and all the other scourges of leftism.  She lives extravagantly in her gated mansion.  She lives a life of wealth and privilege in city suffering a civilizational collapse created and orchestrated by her own party.  She revels in it.  She has become a near-billionairess by way of politics of the most corrupt variety.  She is indeed a cancer on the body politic. PATRICIA McCARTHY

"They will destroy America from within.  The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion. They have nothing but contempt for us who must endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gangs, drug dealers and human traffickers.  These people have no intention of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY

 

FLEEING SAN FRANCISCO: A DEMOCRAT

CONTROLLED CITY IN MELTDOWN

https://www.city-journal.org/thousands-leaving-troubled-san-francisco?utm_source=City+Journal+Update&utm_campaign=e0606917d6-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_05_15_02_40&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6c08930f2b-e0606917d6-109360857

America’s Havana

Thousands say ciao to San Francisco.

Michael Gibson

Spring 2020 

California

Cities

Economy, finance, and budgets

On January 8, London Breed, San Francisco’s mayor, was sworn in for her first full term. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi congratulated her in a tweet, saying, “I look forward to working with you to continue San Francisco’s proud tradition of standing as a guiding light for progress across America.” I don’t know what definition of “progress” Pelosi is using, but any candid observer would rate the city a catastrophe. Mayor Breed was inaugurated on the same day that I moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles, after ten years working at the cutting edge of science and technology.

Even before the current Covid-19 pandemic, San Francisco was a deeply troubled city. It ranks first in the nation in theft, burglary, vandalism, shoplifting, and other property crime. On average, about 60 cars get broken into each day. Diseases arising from poor sanitation—typhoid, typhus, hepatitis A—are reappearing at an alarming rate. Fentanyl goes for about $20 a pill on Market Street, and each year the city hands out 4.5 million needles, which you can find used and tossed out like cigarette butts in parks and around bus stops. The city’s department of public works deploys feces cleaners daily—a “poop patrol” to wash the filth from the sidewalks.

This is just a brief summary of the lack of hygiene and common decency. A reasonable person might declare an emergency, but in her first official act, Breed swore in Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s new district attorney, before a packed house at the Herbst Theater. “Chesa, you have undertaken a remarkable challenge today,” said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a congratulatory video message. “I hope you reflect as a great beacon to many.” Boudin’s résumé boasts of a stint working directly for the late dictator Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, who turned a once-rich nation back to the dark ages. “We will not prosecute cases involving quality-of-life crimes,” Boudin promised during his campaign. He must have witnessed the success of that policy in Caracas, which was voted the world’s most dangerous city in 2018.

Even the sights and sounds of the city suggest a certain derangement. When the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system was first built in the 1970s, its designers failed to understand the acoustics between wheel, track, and tunnel. Since the nineteenth century, competent railroad engineers have known that a tapered, flanged wheel will handle turns better and generate less noise. For some reason, BART designers ignored this design in favor of a cylindrical wheel with a straight edge. Years of wear and tear have degraded the screech into a mad howl. According to a recent count by the San Francisco Chronicle, BART has lost nearly 10 million riders on nights and weekends because of the noise, grime, and lack of safety. It doesn’t help that it has also become a de facto shelter for drug addicts and the mentally ill.

Today, it’s nearly impossible to build anything in San Francisco. Infrastructure projects balloon indefinitely. In 2001, the city proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness, one of the main arteries. Nearly 20 years later, the new lane’s opening is slated for 2021; Van Ness remains a mess of potholes, equipment, and detours. It wasn’t always this way. In the 1930s, the Golden Gate Bridge was built in three and a half years. To commemorate its completion, as an encore, the city created an artificial island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Treasure Island took under three years to finish.

The city no longer builds housing, either. Due to the nation’s tightest zoning rules and land-use restrictions, developers struggle mightily to put up new apartments and houses. Even after getting permission to build—following years of scrambling through a dysfunctional approval process—it costs about $700,000 to construct a single new apartment unit. Consequently, the cost of housing has skyrocketed. The median price for a one-bedroom rental is the most expensive in the nation, at about $3,700 per month. To buy a single-family home, a family needs $1.5 million, on average—and they’d better be a cash buyer.

But the culmination of local incompetence and misplaced priorities has to be the blackouts and fires. 

BLOG: PG&E IS WAR PROFITEER DIANNE FEINSTEIN'S BIGGEST BRIBSTERS.

The monopoly utility, PG&E, began rolling blackouts this past autumn to prevent sparks in dry and windy weather. Millions went without power for days. Many of the company’s electric lines contain components that go back to the 1950s; some date to the 1920s. These parts have ignited 1,961 fires since 2014, according to the company. The 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest in California’s history, was caused by a broken hook on a tower. It killed 85 people and torched 150,000 acres; a year later, near Sonoma and Napa, vineyards burned among 190,000 acres, and 22 people were killed. Smoke drifted over San Francisco and choked its residents for weeks. For the duration, San Francisco became one of the most polluted cities in the world. People now stock up on air filters and masks every October for the season of ash.

San Francisco is a city overwhelmed by its own stupidity, but painful adjustments are coming. For the seventh straight year, more people have left California than have moved in. Tech companies are reconsidering the importance of being in San Francisco. Oracle, for example, has moved its yearly conference to Las Vegas. After nearly 50 years, Charles Schwab is moving its headquarters out of town. And in a recent earnings call with investors, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, said that the company planned to have a more distributed workforce in the future and be less concentrated in San Francisco. With tech companies operating remotely while their employees shelter in place, how many of these workers will return to their San Francisco offices after the Covid-19 crisis subsides is an open question.

“For the future to have power over the present, it has to be different from the present,” Peter Thiel said in a recent interview with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution. “The future has power because it is a time that will look different.” San Francisco is trapped in the past. The future will be built elsewhere. I left to find it.

Michael Gibson is a cofounder of 1517 Fund, a venture-capital firm in California.

Free Booze, Pot, and Smokes for San Francisco’s Homeless

A new city program tries to make quarantine comfortable—for some.

Erica Sandberg

May 11, 2020 

Covid-19

California

San Francisco officials deny direct involvement in a controversial program, funded by private sources, that provides free alcohol, cannabis, and cigarettes to homeless people living in the city’s hotels during the Covid-19 outbreak. After news about the special deliveries was leaked and caused embarrassment on social media, the city’s Department of Public Health issued a statement claiming that “rumors that guests of San Francisco’s alternative housing program are receiving taxpayer-funded deliveries of alcohol, cannabis and tobacco are false.”

Except they’re not false. DPH, which administers and oversees the program, is staffed by city workers, including doctors, nurse practitioners, nurses, social workers, and security personnel. The department manages, stores, and distributes the substances. Employee time is involved. Thus, the program is financed by taxpayers, even if an outside group provides some of the funding. According to DPH spokesperson Jenna Lane, the philanthropists who helped purchase the substances wish to remain anonymous.

The program’s primary purpose is to keep homeless people, the majority of whom are addicts, out of harm’s way during the pandemic. By getting their substance of choice delivered, the thinking goes, the guests may be more apt to remain in their government-funded rooms. Another purpose of the program is to protect the public against the spread of coronavirus. The city doesn’t want homeless people who should be staying in their rooms roaming the neighborhood in search of the substances, potentially infecting others.

“Managed alcohol and tobacco use makes it possible to increase the number of guests who stay in isolation and quarantine and, notably, protects the health of people who might otherwise need hospital care for life-threatening alcohol withdrawal,” says Lane.

Lane concedes that the provision of substances is not necessarily meant to save people from dangerous, unsupervised detoxification. The homeless are screened to determine what substances they would prefer to have on hand and might be uncomfortable without. “Many isolation and quarantine guests tell us they use these substances daily,” says Lane, “and this period in our care has allowed some people to connect for the first time with addiction treatment and harm reduction therapy.” But DPH has not made clear which addiction-recovery services are offered and whether anyone has used them. In any case, “harm-reduction therapy” is about reducing the negative consequences associated with drug use, not about recovering from addiction.

The details of the free-substances program—to the extent that they have been disclosed—are fascinating. Alcohol is served with meals (those, too, are provided at no cost to guests), and the DPH, in consultation with doctors, determines how much each person gets. Does a physician write a script for a daily dose of five Sierra Nevadas, seven shots of Tito’s, or a fine bottle of Sangiovese? And who does the shopping? The DPH doesn’t say.

DPH workers assist in purchasing cannabis for guests who prefer that drug. Ostensibly, the purpose is for medical use, though physicians are prohibited from prescribing cannabis, and insurance doesn’t cover it. In California, the average price for an ounce of median-grade marijuana is $207.

Guests who enjoy a good smoke receive cigarettes, divided up by medical staff and handed out in Ziploc-type bags. The number they’re allotted is “determined by physicians who calculate the minimum possible to achieve the public health goals of isolation and quarantine,” says Lane. When questioned about whether these guests receive premium or generic brands, Lane said that doctors determine the quality. Almost all hotel rooms in San Francisco are normally smoke-free, but these rules have apparently been suspended, at least for the city-funded guests.

One would think that DPH would require that guests gifted such substances remain quarantined, but the city is merely requesting that they do so. “The City of San Francisco is asking guests of isolation and quarantine sites to remain in their rooms,” says Lane. “DPH is managing the use of these substances so a guest does not have to leave to obtain them.” Security guards aren’t monitoring doors, and no one is locked in.

The program ensures the protection of neither the homeless hotel guests nor the general public. San Francisco taxpayers are footing the bill for people to drink, smoke, and get high while living in a hotel for free. It’s no surprise that the Department of Public Health and its mysterious donors sought to keep details of the program on the down-low.

Erica Sandberg is a widely published consumer-finance reporter based in San Francisco and the author of Expecting Money: The Essential Financial Plan for New and Growing Families. As a community advocate, she focuses on homelessness and crime and safety issues.