This is what you call an admission against interest. Elizabeth Weil, the author of this very well-written piece makes it clear that a) she lives in San Francisco and b) knows San Franciscans hate it when east-coast outlets write about the city’s impending doom. In fact she goes further than that, saying she intended to debunk the whole doom loop idea and then found that she just couldn’t do it.

There’s always some story in the east-coast press about how our city is dying. San Franciscians hate—HATE—these pieces. You’re a stooge and a traitor for writing one. When I set out reporting, I wanted to write a debunking-the-doom piece myself. Yet to live in San Francisco right now, to watch its streets, is to realize that no one will catch you if you fall. In the first three months of 2023, 200 San Franciscans OD’ed, up 41 percent from last year.

It’s hard to describe how this piece is organized. I’d say that it wasn’t organized except I think disorganization is the over-arching theme here. The writer isn’t lost or confused, she’s just replicating what it’s like to live in SF these days. It’s a mixed narrative with moments that inspire her followed by unpleasant realities that can’t be escaped. Some of the worst reports about the messy part come not from official statistics but from a security guard working at an art supply store.

On Market, near 6th, a security guard stood in front of Blick art supply. He’d just ejected a man who had been smoking fentanyl inside the store, a man his bosses suggested he should refer to as “an unhoused guest.”…

Elsewhere in San Francisco, wisteria was blooming, crazy fragrant blooms, like lilac on MDMA. At Ocean Beach, runners stopped to marvel at an osprey hovering over the surfers. In Hayes Valley, recently rebranded Cerebral Valley, 20-somethings filled the AI hacker houses, eager to have the classic SF experience: getting rich while thinking they were saving the world. But none of that beauty, none of that wealth, was the guard’s reality. This stretch of Market Street was this three-block zone, four lanes wide, where he stood, alone, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., five days a week. The job was taking a toll…

It’s like a wasteland,” the guard said when I asked how San Francisco looked to him. “It’s like the only way to describe it. It’s like a video game — like made-up shit. Have you ever played Fallout?”

[…]

Meanwhile, the Blick security guard kept texting me videos. He needed someone to see what he was seeing out there, on his patch of Market Street, between Fifth and Sixth. Did I know how the black markets worked? Had I walked down Market Street at night? Did I know that some of the street addicts were rotting, literally: their decomposing flesh attracting flies. The Anthropologie, where he used to work, announced it would close. “What it really feels like living in San Francisco is that you’re lying to yourself,” he said. “Oh, I live in San Francisco. It’s so nice. When you walk by the junkies you’re like, They don’t exist. they don’t exist. You’re lying to yourself.”

The other pole around which this story circles is Marc Benioff the progressive founder of Salesforce, the city’s biggest employer. Weil writes how in 2019 there was a sense that technocrats could manage the problems with help from visionary billionaires. Benioff had given hundreds of millions to two children’s hospitals in the Bay Area. He’d given tens of millions to local schools. And then the pandemic hit and people started leaving the city. Some may eventually come back (SF’s population was down again this year) but what probably won’t come back are the workers downtown, many of whom now work from home at least part of the time.

A recent San Francisco Chronicle story pointed out that 31% of all of the city’s commercial real estate space is currently empty. That’s likely to get worse as more companies bail out of long-term leases. It means there are no workers to support downtown stores or to support the BART rail system that used to take them into work. The whole thing doesn’t work without a lot more well-off, employed people to keep it afloat.

And when you add to that the problems the art supply guard is talking about, you get fresh store closures every week. The retailers might be able to survive the decline in sales for a while, but not if they’re being robbed blind 10-times a day by homeless addicts and their employees are calling 911 at least once a day and literally finding dead bodies in the restrooms. This is a recipe for guaranteed failure.

This doesn’t mean that San Francisco is going to fall into the sea next week and never be heard from again. It’s a big city and there’s a lot still going on there. But people who minimize the scope of the problems really are lying to themselves. The city can coast along for a while but they’re already in trouble and things are likely to get a lot worse before they get better.

Update: Published today.

A man wearing a balaclava and pacing up and down a BART train this afternoon slashed a fellow passenger across the back with a meat cleaver, and caused more than a dozen other riders to scurry away in fear, according to a witness to the scene…

James Temple, a journalist who was in the car with the suspect, said the the victim was taken away on a gurney, seemingly in good spirits…

“I’m not gonna lie, man, it was pretty scary,” Temple said. “When you actually see someone walking up and down BART with a cleaver — it was scary, and I and everyone just wanted to get as far away from him as possible, which is hard to do on a BART in the middle of the tunnel.”