SAN FRANCISCO >> Politically liberal San Franciscans are used to living cheek by jowl with open drug use, feces-infested streets and petty crime. But a surge in home break-ins and brazen shoplifting has some residents feeling that the city they fell in love with is in decline.
Caitlin Foster is among San Francisco shopkeepers who have repeatedly had to clear away used needles and other drug paraphernalia outside the bar she manages. And after too many encounters with armed people in crisis, the Seattle transplant’s affection for her adopted city has soured.
“It was a goal to live here, but now I’m here and I’m like, ‘Where am I going to move to now?’ I’m over it,” said Foster, who manages Noir Lounge in the trendy Hayes Valley neighborhood.
A series of headline-grabbing crime stories — mobs of people smashing windows and grabbing luxury purses in the downtown Union Square shopping district and daytime shootings in the touristy Haight-Ashbury — has only exacerbated a general feeling of vulnerability. Residents wake up to news of attacks on older Asian Americans, burglarized restaurants, and boarded-up storefronts in the city’s once-vibrant downtown.
The pandemic emptied parts of San Francisco and highlighted some of its drawbacks, including a laissez-faire approach by officials to open drug dealing just steps from the Opera House and Symphony Hall. Parents despaired as public schools stayed closed for most of last year as nearby districts welcomed children back to the classroom.
“There’s a widespread sense that things are on the wrong track in San Francisco,” said Patrick Wolff, 53, a retired professional chess player from the Boston area who has lived in the city since 2005.
San Franciscans will vote in June on whether to recall District Attorney Chesa Boudin, a former public defender elected in 2019 whose critics say he’s too lenient on crime. His supporters say there’s no crime surge, and that corporate wage theft is a more pressing issue than cases like that of a San Francisco woman finally arrested after stealing more than $40,000 in goods from a Target over 120 visits.
“Where’s the progress? If you say you’re progressive, let’s get the homeless off the street, and let’s get them mental health care,” said Brian Cassanego, a San Francisco native who owns the lounge where Foster works.
Cassanego moved to wine country five months ago after stepping out one day to find a man who “looked like a zombie,” with his pants down to his knees and bleeding from where a syringe was stuck on his hip. A woman cried out nearby in shock.
“I went upstairs, and I told my wife, ‘We’re leaving now! This city is done!’” he said.
While crime overall has been trending down for years, reports of larceny theft — shoplifting from a person or business — are up nearly 17% to more than 28,000 from the same time last year. Requests to clean dirty streets and sidewalks are the majority of calls to 311, the city’s services line.
San Francisco’s well-publicized problems have served as fodder for conservative media outlets. Former President Donald Trump jumped in again recently, releasing a statement saying the National Guard should be sent to San Francisco to deter smash-and-grab robberies.
Elected officials say they’re grappling with deep societal pains common to any large U.S. city.
A high percentage of an estimated 8,000 homeless people in San Francisco are struggling with chronic addiction or severe mental illness, usually both. Last year, 712 people died of drug overdoses, compared with 257 people who died of COVID-19.
LeAnn Corpus, an administrative assistant, said a homeless man set up a makeshift tent outside her house using a bike and a bed sheet, and relieved himself on the sidewalk. She called the police, who came after two hours and cleared him out, but at her aunt’s home, a homeless person camped out against the backyard for six months despite attempts to get authorities to remove him.
“This city just doesn’t feel the same anymore,” said Corpus, a third-generation native.
In Hayes Valley, business owners tired of seeing garbage strewn about and the city not doing anything to address the issue banded together to lease enclosed trash cans from a private company, said Jennifer Laska, president of the neighborhood association.
After the lease expired, the association managed to get the city to agree to buy and install new public garbage cans designed to keep trash in and pilferers out. That was four months ago.
“We’re still struggling just to get the trash cans actually purchased,” Laska said.
© Copyright (c) 2021 The Monterey County Herald
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Sane people form governments to only accomplish collectively that which they cannot accomplish individually. To attempt to do for individuals that which by God’s plan they were designed to accomplish on their own begins the socialist fall from grace and American prosperity. Socialist trained Democrats of the criminal persuasion only join government to steal collectively at a level they never could accomplish as individual thieves. Just watch the news or shots of the Congress in action and tell me I’m wrong. Our Founders understood this which is why they put checks and balances of three branches of government which Democrats now treat those Constitutional walls of protection they now seek to tear down , just like those protective walls on our American southern borders. Whenever they become the majority they seize power over the branches of the American tree of liberty, now overburden in their criminality, that soon snaps at the first ill wind brought on by their proffered forces of human nature ,,,,called greed, whose damage to the political environment makes the recent tornadoes in Kentucky look like a calm spring day at the Derby. When the forces of the government Collective are used only for a party Collection, it’s time to vote in a different party when the government designed job of personal protection gets put aside in favor of party power collection.
THEY VOTED for this.. They made their bed, NOW LIE IN IT!
Under the reign of the Democrat Party = “Rule and Ruin”.
Just look how screwed up our country has become in just a year
under the Democrat Party rule.
THEY WANT the whole nation, to look like SF.
No sympathy for the citizens of san fran pissco. If any of them had a brain, they would have voted the democraps out of office years ago.
The problem they have there is… it’s to strict.. they need to be more liberal…not enough liberalism…quadruple down on that wonderful liberalism and everything will be just peachy …trust me.
Yeah—Yeah—Yeah—are you ready to see the light and understand the problem yet? Let’s start with Gavin Newsom and work our way on down the political ladder. Your politicians suck—they are incompetent and they embrace an ideology that caters io ineptness and irresponsibility. Your elected representatives in Congress—Pelosi and Schiff—what are they doing about it? Let’s see—they bashed Trump for four years and promoted a fabricated Russia collusion fairytale along with two unjustified impeachments. Neither of them are worth a damn—do you not see that?
And are you such a devoted Democrat that, if you move, you are going to take their idiot policies with you and end up ruining wherever you go? You need to look long and hard in the mirror because both the problem and the answer to it are staring you right in the face. Deal with it or shut up about it.
AND UNTIL They start enforcing the bloody law, they won’t stop it.. Just putting more cops out there, won’t do JACK< until and UNLESS THE PUNISHMENTS GET harsh as hell!!
Very well said.
They are just democrat owned lambs being taken to slaughter. Unfortunately they will keep voting the same type into office believing everything being fed to them. Can’t fix stupid.
“But a surge in home break-ins and brazen shoplifting has some residents feeling that the city they fell in love with is in decline.”
Well, only to the degree that Pompey declined after Vesuvius erupted.
Pompey,,,The Roman Version of Sodom and Gomorrah, now revisited in American San Francisco where if you can find 10 righteous men, they won’t be voting Democrat or holding positions of high office. If a mob in San Francisco breaks into your home like in Biblical Lot’s time, it won’t be your devilish daughters they demand to have relations with, but the visiting Angels disguised as men. Pillars of salt are now the rage there, and the political flavor of the day.
Ever see that Tommy Lee jones film, Volcano, where one ERUPTED UNDER LA??
There’s days i would LOVE TO SEE that happen for real, BOTH in LA and in San Fran!
Hahahahahaha