My City Should Not Be Just a Shooting Gallery
San Francisco, like many cities and towns across America, has become a shooting gallery. Last week it was my Bernal Heights neighborhood's turn. While it was still light, two men fired some 20 shots at each other, then got in cars and sped off. Bullets flew everywhere. There were still kids in the playground just feet away. The next day, an elderly neighbor was vacuuming out the shattered glass from her car windows. She showed me the bullet holes in her car.
The shootout followed closely behind a drive-by shooting into a crowd partying outside a nearby skateboard store. Our sons used to hang out at that store.
Over the holiday weekend, the occupants of two cars engaged in a mile-long shootout along the Embarcadero that ended at Fisherman's Wharf, a bustling tourist spot.
San Francisco has been ruled by a mayor and a district attorney and a police chief who got rid of progressive DA Chesa Boudin and promoted vocal law-and-order policies. How's that working out for us? Violent crime in the city is up "only" 4 percent so far this year. Only. That comes as scant reassurance when your neighborhood park is turned into a crime scene.
I will keep saying it until the voters cast her out next year. Mayor London Breed is an utter failure. She has no vision, no leadership for this once great, now terribly wounded city.
Breed talks tough on drug dealing in the streets and closes down the safe-use drug centers. Fentanyl overdoses in San Francisco have spiked this year. She vows to throw more cops at social problems, and the dystopia grows even worse.
Downtown San Francisco is a ghost town. Every week brings new announcements of store closings, including former linchpins of the district like Nordstrom's department store. Breed throws up her hands. Saving downtown is not in her job description.
She's good at thinking small. But San Francisco needs big solutions.
Breed was installed at City Hall by tech billionaires like Ron Conway. He and his wealthy cronies were supposed to make San Francisco a tech haven, a shining city of global capitalism on a hill. Instead, they looted and wrecked the place -- evicting thousands and exploding the wealth gap -- and then deserted it during the pandemic.
They ruined it. But we own it. We still live in what's left of San Francisco.
Now the AI creators are trickling back to San Francisco. Great. Just what we need -- even more robotic techies who live in an artificial world.
I've lived in San Francisco for over 40 years. I knew what it was like when it was affordable, when it was diverse, when artists and writers and teachers and social workers and nurses and waiters and shop keepers could live and work here. When the city had LIFE -- yes, the downtown, too.
My wife Camille and I used to throw big parties in our North Beach apartment (3 bedrooms, plus a deck that overlooked the Bay: $800/month). Poets and painters and musicians and filmmakers and photographers and fashion designers and magazine freelancers would crowd into our rooms. They're nearly all gone now -- pushed out by a city that changed drearily on them.
Before I die, I want to make San Francisco fun — and safe — again. To make it matter.
My neighborhood crime scene