Driving from the airport to downtown, the sight that greets you off the highway is streets with empty storefronts — like broken teeth, jagged and sad
From 2004 until 2019, the responsibility to enforce law and order in San Francisco fell to District Attorney Kamala Harris and her protégé George Gascon. The result? By any estimation, it has been an ignominious disaster.
Even as you drive from the airport to downtown in this once great city, the sight that greets you off the highway is streets with empty storefronts — like broken teeth, jagged and sad.
In the Tenderloin District it gets worse, far worse, and it isn’t getting any better, in fact, much the opposite. The last time I was in the City by the Bay was in 2021, and I struggled then to describe the craven brutality of the homelessness and drug addiction. Let me try again.
Just off Union Square, I wandered down to the nice coffee house where I spent my mornings three years ago. It’s gone now. Boarded up. Out in front, addicts assembled under the amused eyes of security guards who seem to think this is normal.
Just up the block, the smell hit me first. It didn’t last time, but now, a fetid stench of human degradation that New Yorkers know only from an unfortunate subway car choice, simply hangs in the air. You can’t even smell the weed.