San Francisco and the Pottery Barn Rule
It was Colin Powell who warned President George W. Bush about the disastrous invasion of Iraq, "If you break it... you own it." Well, it's official -- Mayor London Breed and her tech industry sponsors now own the broken city of San Francisco. This election week, Mayor Breed was hailed by the local media for all of her victories in the board of supervisors, school board and ballot measure contests (actually the votes in some of those battles are still being counted).
The tech takeover of San Francisco really began nearly a dozen years ago with Breed's predecessor, Mayor Ed Lee, and the Twitter tax break. But the resistance mounted by the city's progressive supervisors -- and by those citizens not evicted by the tech worker influx --delayed the inevitable for years.
Now, in the wake of progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin's recent recall and this week's municipal elections, we must concede: they own the city, it's theirs.
How's that working out for the rest of us? As I told tech billionaire Ron Conway at a recent public forum, not so good. Conway is the dark moneyman behind the tech industry takeover of SF. (To a question from the audience, Conway replied that he only saw Breed in person a couple of tImes since her election as mayor in 2019 and "only" texted her maybe 50 or so times. Only.)
The city that Breed Inc. has run for the past five years (she took over when Lee died of a heart attack in 2017) is a mess. A gaping chasm between rich and poor, squalor and suffering on the streets, the downtown district has become a ghost town, stores all over are still boarded up, the public schools are in disarray, etc.
And the Twitter tax break that was supposed to lure the tech industry? Twitter has been taken over by a madman who promptly fired half of the workforce (including people who actually made it run). The tech industry as a whole has been shedding jobs at a rapid clip, laying off tens of thousands in recent weeks. Suddenly San Francisco's bet on the tech industry no longer seems like a good thing.
In other words, the Breed tech boom has gone bust. And all that the mayor and her minions can propose is more law and order. She has no vision for San Francisco. And neither do her billionaire backers, like Ron Conway.
Breed Inc. claims to be a Democrat. But she's essentially an autocrat. And, the SF Chronicle announced today, she's coming for another critic -- progressive Supervisor Dean Preston, who's not even on the ballot for two more years -- next.
Breed and Conway are gloating now. It's their city. They broke it. They own it.
