Another week and another business is pulling out of the formerly great city of San Francisco. Well, two businesses actually, though they are owned by the same parent company. The Hilton San Francisco Union Square Hotel is the largest in the city. The Parc 55 Hotel is the fourth largest. Both are owned by Park Hotels & Resorts, which is stopping payments on a massive loan for the two hotels and allowing them to go into foreclosure. It is simply no longer safe or profitable to operate such an operation in San Francisco. The CEO of the company described the move as a “very difficult, but necessary” decision. (National Review)

The owner of two of San Francisco’s largest downtown hotels is stopping mortgage payments and going into foreclosure on the properties, stating that the city faces “major challenges” and that reducing exposure to the market is in the best interest of investors.

The Hilton is San Francisco’s largest hotel, and Parc 55 is the fourth largest.

CEO Thomas J. Baltimore Jr. pointed to record-high rates of office vacancies in San Francisco as well as “concerns over street conditions.” (Which is rather charitable way to put it.) He also stated that the hotels have lost most of their convention business because organizers no longer see the city as a desirable place to host large events.

This was from Michael Shellenberger, the author of San Fransicko.

San Francisco’s tourism board launched a $6M ad campaign to overcome the city’s global reputation as a drug and crime-ridden hell hole. Six days later, the owner of two of the city’s biggest hotels announced it was abandoning them because it lost faith that the city can recover. pic.twitter.com/uaZRXWpD3R

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) June 6, 2023

The city has been described as being in a “doom loop.” Is anyone honestly surprised that reputable businesses are fleeing? The homeless outnumber the street vendors by a huge margin at this point. People are overdosing on the sidewalks. You can’t park your car on the street for ten minutes without having it broken into. (As one CNN crew learned the hard way while trying to film a segment on crime in the city.)

The real tragedy in all of this is that it didn’t have to be this way. Every one of the cascading problems that are currently turning San Francisco into an abandoned slum was completely avoidable. They wanted to decriminalize almost everything (including drug abuse) and defund the police in the name of “justice reform.” They wanted to be a sanctuary city. (How’s that working out for you?) So they put all of those policies in place.

This is happening in many parts of California today. They spent so much time fussing over reparations that nobody seemed to notice that much of the state’s urban areas had become unlivable. And the voters of the Golden State keep electing the same pack of maniacs back to positions of power over and over again. I’ve long since run out of sympathy. People in San Francisco should pick up and move now if they have the financial ability to do so. Just leave the place to the drug addicts, the criminals, and the rats. When San Francisco finishes this stage of its evolution and looks indistinguishable from Baltimore, don’t say that you weren’t warned.