Tourist Group to San Francisco Leaders: The City’s Disgusting, Clean it Up

San Francisco, once considered a jewel of the West Coast, has devolved into a literal toilet, buried under piles of trash, human feces, and what resident and writer Erielle Davidson calls the “excesses of its own liberalism.”

In 2017, San Francisco experienced 31,322 thefts from vehicles alone — that is, 85 thefts from vehicles per day — while an arrest was made in only 2 percent of reported break-ins. Most of the break-ins are attributed to organized gangs and often committed by those with prior felony convictions.

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In November of 2017 alone, 6,211 needles were collected while via the 311 App (the “concerned citizen” reporting app set up by recently deceased San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee), 1,498 requests were made to clean up human feces. The public defecation problem has become so intolerable in San Francisco that private citizens have built an online map to track the concentrations of poop in the city, so that pedestrians may know to avoid certain areas.

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San Francisco, one of the richest cities in the country and home to a booming center of intellectual capital, has suffered from the excesses of its own liberalism. Bloated and inefficient spending, combined with a gross shortage of housing only worsened by rent-control antics and a fat city bureaucracy, has left a city in utter disrepair.

Thankfully, the famous Bay Area city — whose mayor inexplicably just promised to veto a proposal to use $2.5 million of leftover Public Works cash to clean up city streets — has an advocate in the form of a man who’s entire job is to promote the city to visitors. And he’s having trouble doing that.

Joe D’Alessandro is president of S.F. Travel, the city’s visitors bureau. He’s received so many complaints from visitors lately he’s decided to join their call and demand city leaders step up and take command of a problem that, literally, stinks.

People injecting themselves with drugs in broad daylight, their dirty needles and other garbage strewn on the sidewalks. Tent camps. Human feces. The threatening behavior of some people who appear either mentally ill or high. Petty theft.

“The streets are filthy. There’s trash everywhere. It’s disgusting,” D’Alessandro said, adding he’s traveled the world, and San Francisco stands out for the wrong reasons. “I’ve never seen any other city like this — the homelessness, dirty streets, drug use on the streets, smash-and-grabs.

“How can it be?” he continued. “How can it have gotten to this point?”

Remember, this is the man whose job is to glorify San Francisco, which tells you something about how far the city has sunk.

D’Alessandro joins hoteliers and hospitality employees, representatives from the city’s business district, and conference attendees who hold their events there in the growing list of organizations and individuals warning San Francisco civic leaders they are in danger of losing their city to the crime and degradation if they don’t find solutions quickly.

Game Developers Conference, which drew 28,000 international gaming professionals to Moscone Center last month, found itself in the public eye after some tweets from frustrated conference-goers went viral.

An Australian gamer tweeted that San Francisco “is a dangerous city” and the conference should no longer be hosted here. He cited a mugging, credit card theft and the general feeling of being unsafe. Others chimed in with stories of car break-ins, a knife fight and assaults. One attendee tweeted that all the developers he’d talked to were “still shell shocked after this year.”

In short: San Francisco, you need to get your sh*t together (pun intended).

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