Ow, I spilled coffee on my pants. Doom loop!
Thank you, Ron DeSantis, for raising awareness of San Francisco
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Back in the 2000s, Comedy Central reportedly considered creating a 24/7 news channel. The search for the submersible for gullible plutocrats would have been the perfect topic for a funny news channel. While CNN, et al, were trying to conjure real drama behind this “search and rescue” (LOL), to most people the submersible story was pure black comedy. We haven’t enjoyed so many spectacular jokes on Twitter and TikTok since Trump got COVID.
The mutiny in Russia also made for a highly comedic 24 hours, as serious as it all was. A klugey army of convicts YOLO’ed their way up the M4 freeway, shooting down Putin’s attack helicopters, until their leader changed his mind and shuffled off to Minsk. Or something. NOBODY KNOWS!
If live TV (that isn’t sports) still mattered for anyone under age 60, it would be a perfect era to make a funny news channel. We’ve all accepted the world is a dark, unstable, and increasingly chaotic place, and while Fox News and anti-woke hack comics are punching down, we could use a 24/7 outlet for punching up.
Also, Marjorie Taylor Greene, possibly our country’s next vice president, earnestly thinks her TV is spying on her and maybe trying to kill her. C’mon, this is pure comedy.
You know who’s aggressively anti-funny? Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who last week released a presidential campaign video he shot standing on a street corner in the Tenderloin, a neighborhood that’s been hit hard by meth and opiate addiction, which are obviously not problems that they have in Florida.
He removed his tie, because in San Francisco ties are for squares, man.
Governor DeSantis says that San Francisco has failed because of “liberal policies,” but he doesn’t say what he’d do as President or even what he might have done differently if he were running things here. And probably with good reason: Of the USA’s 100 largest cities, San Francisco is actually in the bottom third for rates of violent crimes like murder and aggravated assault. Five Florida cities rank higher.
To be fair, it’s bad practice to compare crime stats among cities or states, because they’re reported through a patchwork of various methods, crime definitions, and incentives to lie about them. But one thing we can count on to remain consistent across the USA: Republicans running in primaries (and also RFK Jr.) will bash San Francisco as the nightmarish future that woke people want.
As Governor DeSantis contends above, San Francisco is in a state of collapse. He’s not breaking any news here to the party faithful. For the past few years, they’ve been hearing that the streets are empty but for a handful of violent junkies. Cops don’t arrest anyone because all crimes are legal. All the good families moved to Boise, the tech workers moved to Texas, and the good companies moved to Nevada. The stores have boarded up. The schools have replaced American history with woke white-shaming and math with mandatory hormone therapies. Dogs are identifying as cats, and cats as parakeets. Christianity is highly illegal. Each month, seven percent of the remaining population accidentally overdoses on fentanyl when they’re just trying to clean the human poop off their steps.
In reality three things are simultaneously true:
For most people in SF, most days, life is pretty good. My family and friends love living here!
The city government is mostly dysfunctional and a few parts of town are dystopian.
Both national and local media are absolutely obsessed with (2), which actually makes (2) worse.
These contradictions make SF a complicated subject. And while some of SF’s struggles are more acute than other places, they’re also widespread American problems. Housing affordability, addiction, troubled policing: they’re likely also problems where you live, or not far from where you live. Six of the eight most abandoned downtowns are in the midwest.
I’m not going to use this space to explore what makes some problems more serious in San Francisco than other places. That is a gargantuan, college-course-sized topic about governance, public pensions, reluctance to build housing and infrastructure, the tech industry super-cycle, and even the weather. If you inaugurated Ron DeSantis as mayor of San Francisco for four years, he could barely do anything about any of those problems. Best he could do is clog the county jail with drug addicts until he lost the resulting lawsuits.
So I’ll avoid a dive into those root causes. Instead I want to try to cut through the noise and describe what it’s like living in a “Doom Loop.”
WTF is a Doom Loop? I’ll get to that in a minute.
“I’m so sorry about what happened to San Francisco”
In early 2020, just before the global you-know-what, SF was a full decade into a transformative economic boom. Housing prices were exploding faster than any other city on the continent, and comically bougie businesses were popping up. In spite of our purported “anti-business” politics, gentrification and displacement accelerated to ludicrous speed.
Who was responsible? Google, Apple, Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Lyft, Uber, Square, Stripe, Box, Dropbox, Yelp, Postmates, Salesforce, Slack, Eventbrite, Oracle, Workday, EA, Ubisoft, plus 5,000 tech infrastructure companies you never heard of, plus all the venture capitalists that funded ‘em.
Over the course of the ‘10s, you likely moved a lot of your personal spending to the black mirror in your pocket, and most of that cash flowed to companies in the Bay Area. Steve Jobs famously said Silicon Valley isn’t a place but a state of mind, and in the early ’10s, that state of mind got stupid rich and migrated north to San Francisco.
By 2015 or so, SF was in a foul mood, but for the opposite reason of today. Tech workers were bidding up rents on cruddy apartments in working class neighborhoods, further enabled by big tech companies offering free shuttles to their suburban campuses.
Culture clashes abounded: In one particular polarizing event, some Dropbox dudes fought with neighborhood teens over a soccer field. (“We reserved it on an app, bro.”) Anti-gentrifiers blockaded tech shuttles. A young woman wearing Google Glass got chased out of a dive bar in the Lower Haight, and then went on an oblivious media tour where she compared herself to Rosa Parks.
Amid this boom, downtown SF remained a safe space for tech industry, and people commuted in daily by the tens of thousands. Office rents skyrocketed, and BART was packed every morning. Although we already had all the tech tools to work from home, companies didn’t need to insist that employees come into the office.
And then March 2020 happened. SF was the USA’s first city to shelter-in-place for the novel coronavirus, and also the last city to reopen schools. (That latter part was a travesty.)
Three years later, downtown SF has not come back. If anything, things are getting dimmer. Wednesdays downtown now feel as empty as Sundays once did. Last week, I went to work in my seven-story office building, and I’m 99% sure I was the only person in the entire building.
Although a few lunch spots are thriving and even some cool new bars and coffee shops have opened, the loss of office commuters has devastated downtown retail. Most recently, Westfield, which operated a multi-story shopping mall, handed over the keys to its lender. (Our mayor has suggested replacing the mall with a soccer stadium, which is a phenomenal idea.)
The San Francisco Chronicle building sits right in the middle of this dark forest of vacant offices and storefronts. They call this downward cycle of abandonment a “Doom Loop,” and the Chronicle is obsessed with it. The poster child for this cycle is Detroit, which lost about two-thirds of its population since its post-war peak.
And some things indeed look pretty grim! Corporate tax losses are hammering SF budgets. Thousands of workers indeed moved to cheaper metro areas (primarily still in California) during the pandemic. The public schools lost thousands of students during their inexcusable extended closure. Drug addicts and mentally ill people remain on the street (mostly concentrated near where DeSantis shot his video), because drug treatment and mental health services can’t meet demand.
The cops are on a wildcat strike. Sometimes they watch burglaries happen. They stopped enforcing traffic laws around 2019. Theft is the new boom industry. You better leave your car doors unlocked, dude, or one morning you’re gonna find a pile of glass next to it.
Media coverage has made tourists too scared to come, so hotels are shutting down. And Union Square has another problem. The weekend before Thanksgiving 2021, a mob of thieves ambushed the Louis Vuitton store during business hours. Security video of the incident caught the attention of cable TV networks.
This type of mob-theft had become increasingly common around the USA, enough that federal law enforcement had identified the perpetrators as Organized Theft Groups. The Louis Vuitton incident was just one visible element of a larger racket that steals and resells retail items. If you’ve bought anything online, from a bottle of shampoo to a bomber jacket to a luxury handbag, you possibly own an item that was stolen from a physical retail establishment. Yes, even if you bought it from Amazon.
But because this crime happened in San Francisco, already the avatar of urban failure and home district of Nancy Pelosi, it was all over cable. Never mind that the same racket also hit the LV stores in Chicago and Miami the very same day, and other luxury stores across the continent.
It’s not that bad
So here’s the thing: SF is still kind of the same place it was in 2019. Businesses are still thriving in the neighborhoods. My kids are getting good educations in the public schools, and since around age 12, they’ve been transporting themselves on the bus. And random street violence is actually remarkably rare.
The lived experiences of San Franciscans don’t resemble what’s on cable TV or in the minds of CEOs who get chauffered into the office from their suburban estates. When rich tech guy Bob Lee got fatally stabbed at 2:30am a couple months ago, out-of-towners like Elon Musk idiotically assumed it was a random street crime. People who live here were immediately skeptical, because we just don’t have very much of that, especially in the neighborhood where it happened. And lo and behold, it was Lee’s drug buddy who allegedly stabbed him, based on a dispute over the stabber’s sister.
SF Gate recently interviewed tourists about their experience, and they were uniformly delighted and also baffled about what they were led to expect.
Toronto-based Teresa Carthy and her husband were similarly surprised to find their first visit to San Francisco far less apocalyptic than the news had led them to believe.
“We both took our wedding rings off, and now I feel bad about it because we’ve felt so safe,” Carthy said. “Sometimes the news skews your impression … but it’s quite the opposite.”
The reputation of SF is in tatters, because its supposed collapse has become a gleeful obsession on cable TV “news.” (Ironically, the Chronicle is now blaming “the media” and “pundits.”) Before pandemic, when I’d tell people where I was from, I’d usually get a wistful reverie. It would go like:
“So, where are you visiting from?”
“I live in San Francisco.”
(lights up) “Oh! I had a wonderful week there many years ago. We had the most delicious crab noodles. Everything is beautiful. You’re so lucky.”
Around 2021, the conversation started going like this:
“I live in San Francisco”
(makes a sad pouty face, like you told them your dad died in 9/11) “Oh. I’m so sorry. That used to be such a wonderful place. It’s so sad what it’s become.”
“Actually, it’s still pretty grea—”
“No, you’re wrong. I know what’s happening there.”
For the brave survivors who remain in the Cool Gray City of Love, things are actually pretty close to pre-pandemic normal. Hot new restaurants are opening and quickly fill up for months; concerts and street festivals are packed; and it’s still cold as shit in the summer.
Except for all the empty robot cars disconcertingly piloting themselves through intersections, the vibe in 2023 is a lot like 2019’s across most of the city.
And that’s why the Doom Loop narrative has become a joke, a “Thanks, Obama” style sarcastic remark. Safeway’s out of zucchini? Doom loop. RV parked near your house? Doom loop. Even the Chronicle has fallen into unintentional self-parody, as a columnist recently blamed the doom loop for someone digging up his flowers.
If you ask the average person in SF how they feel about thousands of young tech workers moving to Austin, or Fox News viewers being too scared to visit, you can probably guess how they’ll react. (By the way, California only ranks 14th in percentage of residents moving to Texas.)
Anyway, please come visit San Francisco if you like great food, America’s best baseball stadium, and wearing a hoodie in July. You’ll have a lovely time. Just don’t leave stuff in your car.
Great read Eric! Wish we could come back to SF sometime soon!
I wish there was mandatory hormone therapy for my teenaged sons instead of math.