The intrepid spirit of entrepreneurialism that made San Francisco and its suburbs into a hub of innovation was on display earlier this year when one of the city’s more inventive elected officials pioneered a “Doom and Squalor” walking tour of the city. Sightseers forked over $30, money subsequently given to nonprofits that don’t “actively degrade” the community, to survey the blighted landscape around Mid-Market, Union Square, and the Tenderloin district. The sensory feast to which they were treated included the sights and smells of sprawling homeless encampments, and an obstacle course littered with hypodermic needles and all the diverse fecal specimens the mammalian order can produce. “It’s fanning the flames and not offering concrete proposals nor recognizing the good work,” said one irritated local official. But this invitation to marinate in the “doom loop” in which the city was caught made its point.
For years, San Francisco’s elected and appointed officials retailed a self-serving fiction — the idea that their city’s sordid state was a fact of life. Sure, crime was on the rise, but only back to what locals should consider normal rates with the subsidence of the pandemic. After all, crime is just one of those “basic city-life experiences,” said former police commissioner John Hamasaki dismissively. Yes, flagship retailers were closing their doors at an alarming pace, a phenomenon attributable both to petty crime and the city’s rampant open-air drug use. But “it would be very hard to just patrol and arrest your way out of this problem,” one local reporter said. Of course, an epidemic of voluntary homelessness made residents feel unsafe. But as an antiseptic analysis of that condition by McKinsey & Co.’s analysts confirmed, the problem was multifarious. In the absence of creative and lavishly funded governmental initiatives, this already chronic condition would persist.
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