Making San Francisco great again
Conn Carroll
Times are tough for San Franciscans these days. While the city was able to coast on the wealth of nearby Silicon Valley for decades, the consequences of giving complete control over the city to the Democratic Party have begun to take their toll.
The homeless have taken over most parks and public spaces. The sidewalks are littered with feces and needles. You can’t park without the windows being broken and the car burglarized.
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No wonder 77% of San Francisco residents think the city is on the wrong track and more than half say they want to leave.
Many businesses have already started to do just that. San Francisco’s downtown has become a ghost town as more firms allow employees to work from home, more retail and restaurants leave the downtown area, and more firms just pick up and leave the city entirely. Just this year, San Francisco has lost its most prestigious shopping mall, two giant hotels, and its largest movie theater.
But not everyone is leaving the city entirely. Some firms have found an island of sanity amid the wreckage that is Democratic-controlled San Francisco.
“It feels safer than downtown,” Rex Salisbury of Cambrian Ventures told Reuters. “There’s no open drug use in the Presidio. There are no homeless encampments … and that is because it’s the federal land and the federal police is a big part of it.”
A military base seized from Mexico during the Mexican-American War in 1846, the Presidio was an active Army base up through the 1990s when it sent units to serve in Operation Desert Storm. In 1994, the base was turned over to the National Park Service which has ably managed the bucolic grounds without interference from the city. The national park balances commercial and preservation interests, including a thriving office building.
“It’s a very calm and quiet space, something that I think instills creativity and stimulates people,” business owner Mathias Schilling said. “We take meetings outside and we walk around the big lawn here.”
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That the Presidio is able to maintain California’s natural beauty without homeless encampments, human waste, and open-air drug markets exposes the lie that San Franciscans have no choice in their city’s decline. The surrounding housing prices are just as bad for the Presidio as they are for the rest of the city.
What San Francisco lacks is the political will to let police do the job necessary to keep their city clean and livable. Former President Donald Trump once threatened to send 60,000 federal agents to Portland, Oregon, to end the unrest and clean the city up. The Presidio’s success shows maybe Trump wasn’t that crazy after all.