The Lost City

This afternoon I took the below photo of public art in downtown San Francisco. A toddler with a gun. What's it mean? Who knows? What's the city mean these days? Who the hell knows.

I ate at a restaurant on Market Street. The owner said that Mayor London Breed has to go. His customers hurry home as soon as night falls. His employees are afraid to walk home in the dark. Business is still suffering.

Breed doesn't have a clue how to revive this once great city.

After lunch, I ventured deeper downtown. The rush-hour streets, crowded with people before the pandemic, are still nearly empty. Those stores that aren't boarded up have few customers or none at all. The tourists piling out of their car in front of a hotel looked dazed and confused: why is there nobody here?

But San Francisco is not in a "doom loop," insists the city's top economist. Tell it to the downtown retailers that have fled, the office building landlords that report less than 50 percent occupancy, or the tech conference organizers that have canceled their San Francisco gatherings and moved them to other cities.

District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, the other face of power in San Francisco, was also declared a failure this week by none other than the San Francisco Standard, the billionaire-owned news startup that has bemoaned the city's decline. According to the Standard, during her first year in office, law-and-order Jenkins has convicted fewer drug dealers than Chesa Boudin, the progressive DA she ousted, during his final year in office. Meanwhile, fentanyl overdose deaths are soaring to a record high. So much for her tough-on-crime approach.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. San Francisco desperately needs new leadership.

London Breed is up for reelection next year. Who will take her on? Who will pull the sword from the stone? Who will bring back the sunshine to our everlasting gloom?