Last year, The Atlantic dubbed San Francisco a “failed city.”
Earlier this year, amid shuttering stores and a ballooning drug and homeless crisis, Elon Musk tweeted that the city feels “post-apocalyptic,” like a set piece for the zombie horror series, The Walking Dead. Writer Michael Shellenberger has dubbed the city “San Fran-sicko.”
Now, tourists and residents alike looking to get a first-hand look at the urban decay are in luck. A planned “Downtown Doom Loop Walking Tour” promises an up-close look at all the worst San Francisco has to offer: open-air drug markets, abandoned tech offices, deserted stores.
“You’ve read the headlines, you’ve seen the Tweets, now get close and personal to the Doom and Squalor of downtown San Francisco,” reads a description of the tour on Eventbrite.
The $30 tour is supposedly slated for 11 a.m. on Saturday, August 26, according to the Eventbrite post. The tour purportedly will start at City Hall and take participants on a 1.5 mile hike through Mid-Market, the Tenderloin District, and Union Square. “Sneakers advised.”
Along the way, the tour guide – described as an “expert” and a “SF native, political junkie, & opinionated loudmouth” – will help people understand “the policy choices that made America’s wealthiest city the nation’s innovative leader of housing crisis, addiction crisis, mental-health crisis, & unrepentant crime crisis.” According to the Eventbrite post, participants will learn how a city with a $14.6 billion annual budget became “a model of urban decay,” how it has successfully spent $776.8 million per year on police but has “no rule of law to show for it,” and how it manages to invest $690 million on homeless services and also “receive an official United Nations condemnation for its treatment of the homeless.”
There are a lot of unknowns about the tour – like if it’s even real.
San Francisco blogger Joe Kukura suggested it is “an elaborate troll job” by “some joker.” Other local media outlets have had no luck reaching the organizer, named on Eventbrite as only “SF Anonymous Insider.” The event description is “written in the tone of someone keen to score an appearance on Fox News, or that low-budget thing Tucker Carlson is streaming right now,” Kukura wrote for the SFist blog.
The event posting says the tour guide is an “urban policy professional, card-carrying City Commissioner overseeing a municipal department with an annual budget of over $500m, and cofounder of San Francisco’s largest neighborhood association.” The city has hundreds of commissioners.
There are few other details about the guide’s identity, other than he appears to be a man – or to at least identify as a man. It’s San Francisco after all.
The guide has allegedly “spent hundreds of hours on both sides of the government dais, shouting into the opposite abyss. (This event is the result of his own mental-health crisis.),” according to the Eventbrite description of the tour.
Media reports have suggested that San Francisco may be in an endless “doom loop,” a hollowed-out city where businesses are shuttering and residents, workers, and tourists are fleeing, replaced by criminals, drug addicts, and homeless camps on sidewalks and in parks.
The “doom loop” tour isn’t sitting well with some city residents and leaders. One resident told the San Francisco Chronicle that the tour was nothing more than a “bad publicity stunt.” A local community leader told the paper that the tour is “not really productive,” adding that it’s “harmful to walk around showing all the bad without any proposed solution.”
Another community leader told the San Francisco Standard that he intends to lead a free “counter-tour” at the same time, meeting across the street from the “doom loop” tour.
Del Seymour, co-founder of a job-training nonprofit in the Tenderloin, told the Standard that he plans to “celebrate the goodness” of his community.
“How dare you come to my community, beat down my community,” he said.