Wasting taxpayer dollars is what San Francisco does best
Zachary Faria
San Francisco is losing out on tax revenue as residents have fled the city over the last several years. Given how the city wastes money, it would be difficult to argue that it was a bad thing.
The city’s Department of Public Health paid researchers $500,000 to “determine the impact” of a “safe” drug consumption site called the Tenderloin Center “on the surrounding neighborhood,” according to the San Francisco Standard. Similar “safe” drug centers have, unsurprisingly, attracted drug addicts that make communities less safe, with residents having to walk over feces on the sidewalks and carry bats or tasers to protect themselves.
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The study, of course, found that the city’s drug center wasn’t harming the neighborhood, even though “calls to the one-block span in front of the Tenderloin Center increased by 126% this year — with an average of six calls per day — as compared to just an 11% increase citywide.”
How did researchers come to this conclusion? For the low price of $500,000, two people walked around the neighborhood once in 2018, 2019, and 2022. They also determined that the city should spend more money on more drug sites.
That farcical “study” is not even the most outrageous spending plan San Francisco has seen this year. The city had planned to spend $1.7 million to build one public toilet. The project would have taken three years to complete. The proposal was so embarrassing that even California Gov. Gavin Newsom condemned it, and it was eventually scrapped.
Again, the city was planning to go ahead with paying $1.7 million to build a single public toilet three years from now. City officials had even planned a public celebration for the project before it got mocked into cancellation. This was seen as something worth celebrating, with no self-reflection from anyone involved on the absurdly high price tag.
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It is telling that San Francisco leaders find this level of spending not just appropriate but applause-worthy. It also explains why some 116,000 people (or 2.5% of its population) fled the city in 2021. San Francisco officials are incompetent and wasteful. They are practically daring San Francisco residents to throw them out of office, or at least whatever residents don’t take the first U-Haul truck out of town.