San Francisco from San Francisco Headlands and Golden Gate bridge, San Francisco, CA. (Photo: Kropic1/Shutterstock)
Can ‘Ruined City’ and ‘Ghost Town’ San Francisco Window Dress For APEC 2023?
City streets are ‘lined with tents, trash, graffiti, and broken windows, and perfumed with the smell of urine’
By Katy Grimes, November 6, 2023 2:30 am
With the upcoming Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in San Francisco, there is a frantic rush to clean up the city streets – the streets, the sidewalks and the many businesses which have been rotting under the burden of the filth from homeless tent camps allowed by city officials.
This has been going on for far too long, and now the urgency to clean up is laudable and laughable at the same time. Just who is San Francisco Mayor London Breed trying to impress? And why not clean streets up first for the taxpaying residents and business owners.
In July, San Francisco resident reporter Sebastian, a friend of the Globe, reported that Businesses along Van Ness have been struggling for years due to decaying street conditions and crime:
Frustrated by the lack of responses from the San Francisco Mayor’s and the Chief of Police’s offices, the Jaguar Land Rover San Francisco dealership on Van Ness and Ellis took the initiative to spruce up their neighborhood with urban gardening to fight crime which I wrote about:
https://beyondchron.org/my-walk-down-troubled-van-ness/
They installed steel planters on their Ellis sidewalk about 3 months ago which soon after was followed by their neighbors along Van Ness and Franklin.
And just like that, San Francisco’s new “Urban Garden District” was developed.
It stretches from Post to Turk between Van Ness and Franklin.
The planters are now in Myrtle, Olive (going up soon), Ellis, Willow, and Larch (more planters will be installed by the end of the month) alleys.
Larch Alley has the largest number of steel planters of all. They are on both sidewalks from Van Ness to Franklin.
Let’s take a tour of the new “Urban Garden District!”
Saturday, The Globe asked Sebastian, “Are the planters effective at keeping the tents off the sidewalk?”
“Yes, tents won’t come back to sidewalks that have planters on them like in Betty Yu’s video of Larch Street,” Sebastian said.
Betty Yu’s Tweet shows just how effective the plan terms are:
Dozens of planters have been placed on both sides of Van Ness between Eddy and Turk and on Larch Street @KPIXtv pic.twitter.com/cJi8mgNilV
— Betty Yu (@bett_yu) November 5, 2023
However, Sebastian says “Tents just move to the next block. And that’s why neighbors keep installing planters block by block like in Cathedral Hill until it becomes San Francisco’s Behlen Country Urban Garden District.”
He said a retirement home for priests on Franklin between Post and O’Farrell was broken into by homeless.
After the break-in, the retired priests installed planters.
San Francisco is slammed as ‘ruined city’ and ‘hell’ in Chinese media ahead of APEC summit – as city officials try to clean up the streets by blasting Star Wars theme to get rid of homeless people and open air drug markets
- Chinese media outlets have been branding the city of San Francisco a ‘total failure’ ahead of a visit from Chinese President Xi Jinping
- The California city has struggled in recent years with large scale homeless problems, and open drug use
- In an recent attempt to combat the ongoing issues, residents have also to start playin the Star Wars title theme to keep homeless people from loitering”
“Not single city in Bay Area wants to deal with it. When businesses and residents take action, it’s considered illegal by the politicians & LE (law enforcement). Even though the residents and businesses are the ones paying rents, business taxes, property taxes.
“They” [homeless] have every opportunity to break the law with zero consequences. And actually get rewarded.”
Last week, Sebastian said with APEC only 2 weeks away, one of the busiest thoroughfares in the City, Van Ness Avenue, Burger King and Tesla recently had their windows smashed again.
In an article he titled, Window Dressing San Francisco For APEC 2023, Sebastian says:
Most of my friends from Asia who will be coming to San Francisco for APEC are dying to see San Francisco’s bustling “Night Open-Air Drug Markets” they have been watching on social media and the news.
Why?
They have wonderful night markets and floating markets in Asia but they don’t have one-of-a-kind “Night Open-Air Drug Markets” like in San Francisco.
The Night Open-Air Drug Market at U.N.Plaza, 83 McAllister, Oct. 24
Vendors of open-air drug markets could be sentenced to death in some Asian countries like Singapore.
But in San Francisco, vendors of death are provided with sanctuary by the City.
Sebastian said that most of these Asian countries participating in the APEC have very strict laws on drugs.
“But pressures from Human Rights organizations are mounting and they want to relax their strict laws on drugs, they want to see the impacts of the drug crisis on San Francisco as they don’t want a drug crisis and open-air drug markets to happen in their countries.”
As Sebastian’s photo journalism and first hand reports show, San Francisco is the poster child for restrictions on illicit drugs.
APEC is going to be really interesting – especially with Mayor London Breed’s inability to take serious control of the homeless crisis, and subsequent drug crisis in her city.
The Daily Mail accurately summed up San Francisco:
“San Francisco has been blasted as a ‘ghost town’ and a ‘ruined city’ by Chinese media outlets, as city officials use the Star Wars theme to rid streets of homelesspeople. The beleaguered California city has been labelled a ‘total failure’ by some China-based outlets as the city prepares to host Chinese President Xi Jinping next week.
The city has struggled for years with rampant fentanyl use and fatal overdoses, and is on pace for its deadliest year yet.
As of October 29, the San Francisco Police Department reported homicides in the city are up 7 percent, robbery is up 14.4 percent and motor vehicle theft is up 8.3 percent.’
Read more first hand coverage at BeyondChron.
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While the current politicians cannot bring about enough change to make San Francisco livable again the city by the bay can be saved from its own self demise. San Francisco is emblematic of the broken California dream which is precisely why it needs to be turned around. You turn San Francisco around and it demonstrates that the entire state can be saved. This is not going to be an easy task to accomplish but it is doable. While it is easy to be pessimistic about the future now is the time to see the opportunity for the future and prepare to move forward. These autocratic self-enriching politicians are going to buckle under their own weight. Now is not the time to fully give-up and grow weary of doing good.
I believe the only solution is to separate the drug addicts from the drugs. Housing is not the answer because all you get is a drug addict in a dwelling but the addict’s only motivation remains the next fix. Long term incarceration for drug dealers and a secure border are essential. Also necessary is a complete dismantling of the Homeless Industrial Complex money scam.
Agree, Fed Up. Hope we see it and soon. Fingers crossed.
Bravo to the businesses and merchants who are attempting to survive the onslaught of drugs and homelessness in the City. They are following the Western tradition of cleaning up towns with a new sherif and a posse of citizens to make the town safe for its law abiding citizens.
Absent from this discussion? Every California Democrat politician.
The national and international media will mock and expose it all when they come to visit.
Could it be that the Chinese Delegates coming to San Francisco will actually be quite impressed with the destruction and waste of a once golden city?
The drug addled souls littering the street are actually a sign of success in the war waged by the CCP. We have a modern day opium war. It was done to China in the 1800’s.
The First Opium War was fought from 1839 to 1842 between China and Britain.
We now are in the fentanyl war. China manufactures it and it is brought in by the way of our open southern border by Mexican drug cartels. San Francisco is the epicenter of this war. A once thriving city brought down by Chinese fentanyl and the feckless San Francisco politicians who really are complicit in all this.
They can hose down, window dress the city with feed troughs disguised as urban street planters to no avail. A week after the world’s cameras are off the city streets it will be back to the business of crime and true destruction.
Hearts and minds will take longer to change and heal. It may just be too late to reverse course.
Meanwhile, Xi Jinping will break out the champaign on the plane back to China! No slow boats in this scenario.
Restore safe and secure elections and vote differently and then positive change may come to California and it’s major cities.
Agreed and per my comment above we need to completely cut the money flow between the corrupt politicians and their crony benefactors in the Homeless Industrial Complex
Sacramento is as much of a ruined and ghost town as San Francisco is? A YouTuber named Metal Leo, who has documented the decline of San Francisco under Democrat mismanagement, has just released a video documenting the decline of Sacramento and how almost all the stores and restaurants in downtown Sacramento along J Street are now closed and the streets filled with homeless tents (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYAkBXNyxUI0).
This will make you weep. It’s just WRONG that this should be happening. Blame the Dem/Marxists for this please.
But thanks for posting TJ.
Recall during the pandemic, sports venues and events worldwide solved this “problem” by putting images of people in the stands to make it appear as if humans were in attendance. Too, motorcycle and auto racing had huge electronic bill boards full of “fans” cheering at every turn with a camera angle. So, the problem has been solved for SF…just put images and video clips of fake people in and on all the boarded-up windows and other spaces for the “Newsom-blows-Xi” conference. There, SF, you’re welcome. Now, get to work with those images and screens!