Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Your new neighbour could be Californian; Covid-19 and presumably Covid-19 lockdowns appear to be the final straw for people living in California’s filthy crime ridden big cities.
As many as 89,000 households have left San Francisco since March, the latest sign of an exodus spurred by the pandemic
AVERY HARTMANS DEC 2, 2020, 6:06 AM
As many as 89,000 households have moved out of San Francisco since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
That’s according to San Francisco-based site Public Comment, which worked with the United States Postal Service to track requests for a change of address between March 1 and November 1, 2020.
…
Some households relocated to neighbouring areas like Marin County and Oakland. For those who decamped the Bay Area entirely, they spread to cities and towns across the country. According to Public Comment, Las Vegas was the No. 1 destination, followed by Palm Beach County, Florida; Seminole County, Florida; the Denver region; and Beaverton, Oregon, a city just west of Portland.
…
The migration out of San Francisco may be due, at least in part, to some tech companies shutting their offices and no longer requiring employees to live nearby. In August, anonymous workplace chat app Blind surveyed 3,300 tech workers about living in the Bay Area the survey found that 15% had already left the area and 60% said they would leave if they could.
…
Read more: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/san-francisco-lost-89000-households-during-pandemic-usps-data-2020-12
The closest I’ve come to visiting San Francisco was a week in West Hollywood. At first we walked everywhere, but after my wife pointed out the group of gentlemen waiting to greet us in the shadows under a bridge on the road to Universal Studios, we decided to catch a cab.
So I completely understand people not wanting to live in big Californian cities, especially with the latest twist of the screw, harsh Covid lockdown rules issued by a hypocrite governor who struggles to follow his own regulations.
Likely they are selling out before property values plummet.
That would be … me. Last January, I retired in Sacramento, CA, and we began planning our move out of California. COVID made househunting …. problematic, and time-consuming, but with Zillow, Google maps and an EXCELLENT realtor, we bought a house sight-unseen in July and moved to the “Hill Country” area northwest of San Antonio, TX in August. The sale of our old house is currently in escrow, and I hope to have severed all ties to California before the end of the year.
Because I think – fear – that you are correct. Some of our friends back in the tarnished “Golden State” are having some difficulties selling their old places so that they CAN move east.
So Mr. Mitchell, do you understand WHY California is so bad? Do you understand the years of Democratic rule that has made this golden state unloveable? Do you realize that every problem California has is laid at the feet of the Democratic Party? I wonder.
Kenneth C Mitchell
I’m a Texan. I love the folks and the dirt. I hope Texas stays, “Texas” as new folks move this way. We welcome you. Please ensure you promote Texas values to those escaping Democratic controlled dirt. We’d like to keep all semblance of California out of Texas.
I’ll be out your way in February; to enjoy your piece of Texas. We do that several times a year. I reside in Southeast Texas. Home of the Lucas Gusher.
“Don’t California In Texas” is the same as saying “Don’t crap where you eat”. LOL
The problem for city governance of course is that the tax revenue flees to other locales, yet the spending remains. SF, LA, NYC, Seattle, Chicago are all in for really bad budget woes in the coming years. This new fiscal reality has yet to hit home on those city councils, run as they are by ignorant Democrat-Socialists.
They were all hoping for a Blue Wave in November’s election to sweep aside a Republican-controlled Senate so that Nancy, Chucky, and Dementia Joe could bail them out with a multi-Trillion dollar Federal COVID spending bill bailout. Now that’s not likely to happen if the GOP holds the Senate. Even in the House of Representatives, the Democrat’s majority differential with the GOP is going to be the slimmest margin in decades.
So the Blue states and these Progressive run schist-hole cities are in for some real pain, and the smarter residents are leaving now. They know it is going to get far worse before it can get better, if at all.
We have a recent wave of these fleeing left wing loons. They bring there virtue signalling with them along with the voting for exactly the same hell they are fleeing.
None of these refugees cite covid as the reason. Everyone cites the very urban violence they support.
A good dose of causal analysis might help them change their ways?
I’ve known people like that – they are incapable of causal analysis.
but they’ve mastered cognitive dissonance
Some random thoughts:
White flight … White folks are now a minority in California.
It doesn’t matter if 89,000 families have left as long as more families arrived, but …
From where prey tell? Let me guess.
All this is bad news for Silicon Valley. Richard Florida has the theory that young creative class would rather live in a congenial city than move to an uncongenial city just to get a better job. My guess is that California is becoming increasingly uncongenial. At some point Silicon Valley will have trouble attracting the talent it needs.
Liberal folks think diversity is automatically great, then when they discover it isn’t they leave … something like that. Am I a racist for pointing that out? Heck no! Some of my best friends are white.
One of the founding members of Silicon Valley, HP has recently announced it’s intention to move it’s corporate headquarters to Houston, TX.
One of the down sides of moving to Texas is the legal regime. In particular, Texas enforces non-compete clauses in employment contracts.
One of the reasons given for Silicon Valley’s success is that California does not enforce non-compete clauses. link Massachusetts had a huge head start in the computer industry but non-compete clauses meant that start-ups couldn’t get the talent they needed, so the start-ups fled to California.
The other problem is that Texas courts have been the favorite for patent trolls. link Having your headquarters in Texas would seem to increase your exposure in that regard.
Of course, the folks at HP know all the above and moving their headquarters is hugely disruptive anyway. They must think things are really bad in California.
On second thought, HP is an entrenched player. They probably like non-compete clauses.
Diversity of individuals, minority of one. That’s neither what they believe nor export.
I have lived in my quiet little East Bay Area suburb of Lafayette, CA since a wee lad in 1965. In the past past 10-years there has been a massive influx of extremely wealthy YOUNG people with young children fleeing San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley. There is simply no way they will raise their kids in the cesspool of the San Francisco urban zones. These young people used to mock suburbia … now they’re desperate for it. I find it amusing … except … they’ve brought their irrational leftist pop-psychology pop-politic nonsense here.
My son and family left Seattle over a year ago, and are they ever glad they did. (They waited until they were in their 40s to have children, and they don’t want their children — or themselves — subjected to the violence that can erupt there at unexpected times and places.)
As you point out Kenji, they also bring their voting preferences with them, along with an extremely naïve outlook on socio/politics.
They are oblivious to the fact that its their voting preferences that create the unlivable conditions from which they flee. They keep doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. That tells you everything you need to know about what our Public Schools and Indoctrination Centers we call college are producing.
For you, now would be a good time to sell while the market is high thanks to an overabundance of insane buyers.
Even the MSM can’t hide the the fact that San Fransisco is a petri dish for those below even the poor. At least the poor have a sense of personal responsibility and desire to thrive. Drugs and alcohol fuel many of the denizens but that doesn’t make it right. So what has SF done to correct the problem other than taking an attitude that it’s OK but doing nothing successful to correct it and only attracting more?
You can’t drive in SF… the one-way and no-turn streets trap you into driving long distances just to go around the corner (and now they’ve got streets where cars can’t even go… imagine the insanity of being trapped on a one-way street you can’t turn off of, only to come to a sign that says cars are prohibited beyond this point), and a lot of potholes are large enough to swallow a tire whole, and the roads are so rough that you wonder if you’ll need an alignment afterward, and you’ve got to watch out for the homeless who have a habit of getting ‘run over’ (feigning a car hitting them so they can sue you or get a ride to a warm hospital ER for the night), and you’re constantly worried about getting car-jacked. For the same reason and for the reason of insane road-raging drivers dodging potholes and pissbums rather than paying attention to traffic, you can’t ride a bike in SF. And of course, you can’t walk because you’ve got to constantly watch were you step, lest you step on a drug needle or pile of human feces… and if you’re looking down, you’re not looking at the street thugs who’ve got their eye on your wallet or cell phone.
SF is unlivable. I avoid it at all costs. I avoid even driving through it on the interstate. I’d much rather take the long way around to the south to get to the east bay.
‘San Francisco is poised to ban smoking in apartments and condos — but cannabis is exempt …
… [tobacco] can be smoked outside on public streets …’ (Los Angeles Times Dec. 2 2020).
A similar ordinance banning the use of toilets in apartments probably accounts for the use of the streets:
That’s hilarious 🙂
This made me laugh when I read the LA Times article:
My brother died of second-hand smoking, so I know it’s an issue, but this peed me off:
One person complains about smoking in an apartment below hers and San Francisco tries to ban everyone from smoking in the privacy of your own home! What about the smokers rights?
But wait, if you want to smoke pot, that’s ok.
(Life long non-smoker)
The “problem” being addressed is that ones smoke isn’t staying in the privacy of ones home, in the apartment environment, that smoke is drifting up into the adjoining apartment(s). It sounds like it’s the equivalent of noise ordinances – you can make as much noise in the privacy of your own home as you want unless that noise is entering the privacy of your neighbors home at an unacceptable level (usually when they’re trying to sleep).
The biggest problem isn’t that they’re trying to prevent smoke from your home crossing into someone else’s home, it’s that they’re treating smokers unequally – only tobacco smoke/smokers are so prohibited, pot smokers are given a pass. Look for this one to run into 14th amendment (equal protection) lawsuits from tobacco smokers.
Please. If second hand smoke was at all “dangerous”, there wouldn’t be any “second hand smoke” – due to the fact that the first-hand inferno inhalers would die rather soon after taking up the habit, and the survivors, seeing the stacks of bodies wouldn’t start in the first place.
I would bet that you think cloth facial ornaments “stop the spread” as well.
It doesn’t have to be “dangerous” to be an irritant and an annoyance. And yes, BTW, it can be dangerous to people with pre-existing breathing issues such as asthma. Why should my home be flooded with your smoke just because you live in the apartment below me? I’m not saying this particular law is good (as I pointed out, it’s got some constitutional issues just in the disparate treatment of tobacco vs pot smokers) but your freedom ends where the next persons begins. Show some consideration for your neighbors, don’t be as asshole. is that really too much to ask of people?
I would bet that you think cloth facial ornaments “stop the spread” as well.
Bwahahahaha. You non sequitur is nonsense. You can always tell when someone has no argument: when they make up stuff about the person they are arguing with.
And notice, in the post you were replying to, at no time did I use the word “dangerous” (or it’s equivalent) and I even put the word “problem” in scare quotes. peyelut, not only do you need to learn how to make an argument rather than make up stuff about those you attempt to argue with, you need to learn some reading comprehension, because you are arguing against I point I wasn’t making.
and thirdly, your analogy is simply laughable. The time scale of any purported “danger” is long (we’re talking decades here) and requires considerable exposure (one whiff of smoke, one time isn’t going to do it, it supposedly takes years of living and breathing in a cloud of such smoke). so no, even if you assume that second hand smoke is a “danger” that doesn’t necessarily mean that first hand smokers would be dying “rather soon” into “stacks of bodies “, just sooner than the second hand smokers (IE instead of, for a random example, 6 decades down the road like the second handers, they might die 4 or 5 decades down the road).
The human body is a pretty amazing thing and it can tolerate quite a bit of abuse before the accumulated affects of the abuse cause serious issues.
And BTW, given the timeframes of deaths of first hand smokers, there pretty much is those proverbial “stacks of bodies”, the smoking-cancer link is pretty well established, it’s just that those “stack of bodies” take *years* and *decades* to pile up.
Also, you are assuming the only “danger” is cancer leading to death. There are other dangers. Asthma attacks immediately springs to mind. In the United States, in 2017, 185 children and 3,379 adults died due to asthma. Smoke is a known “trigger” for asthma attacks. Asthma sufferers are cautioned to avoid asthma triggers if at all possible. Kind of hard to avoid the smoke trigger when the inconsiderate neighbor in the apartment below you is smoking like a chimney and his smoke is drifting unbidden into your apartment!
“My brother died of second-hand smoking, so I know it’s an issue,”
Redge please share the specifics of your brothers death and how it was determined that second-hand smoke caused his demise.
The WHO set about proving that 2nd hand smoke was deadly and after a decade of long exhaustive research was unable to provide any scientific evidence that normal day to day contact to 2nd hand smoke was deleterious to a non smokers health. That included studying non-smoking spouses of 2 pack per day smokers.
Don’t get me wrong I am not advocating smoking, it is terribly irritating to many non-smokers, but rather advocating for a world where the government stops manufacturing hobgoblins to save the innocent (“its for the Children”) against those evil citizens whose actions are harmful to the unsuspecting e.g. 2nd hand smoke much ballyhooed in the media to the point that the overwhelming majority believe that repetition equals scientific proof.
The success of these Regulatory mandates based upon scientific hypothesis is what has emboldened the Government(s) in the U.S. to strip away individual liberties for the good of the collective [ insert instead faceless bureaucratic elite]. Hence Climate Change (books have been written about the amount of control faceless bureaucrats can exert over the masses), COVID Lockdowns and mask requirements.
We stepped upon a slippery slope when a majority of non-smokers became complicit as Charles Everett Koop, a vehement non smoker, was handed the reigns as Surgeon General during the Reagan Administration and created the second hand smoke boogieman. And now with climate change and COVID we are on the verge of near total Orwellian control. It won’t be long before they tear up the Bill of Rights and replace it with the Demands of The Collective.
My brother was a life-long non-smoker, same as me. Other than our parents none of my family have ever smoked.
Our parents were both 60 a day smokers chain smokers. Both died of heart disease.
Back when smoking was allowed in pubs, he worked in a smokey pub most evenings.
His death certificate shows he died of lung cancer despite no family history of any kind of cancer. The autopsy showed his lungs were blackened by years of inhaling smoke from cigarettes.
I get what your saying, and it could be a coincidence that he never smoked and still got lung cancer, but I can only tell you what the doctors wrote on the death certificate and the what we were told about his lungs.
You are making the assumption that 100% of lung cancers are caused by smoking.
That is an assumption that can’t be supported by any known form of science.
It’s been decades since smoking was permitted in pubs, if his lungs were black, it was from something other than decades old exposure to second hand smoke.
@MarkW
He died over 10 years ago
I’m not making assumptions, we were told his lungs resembled a long term smoker as indicated on his death certificate
MarkW, you are the one clearly make assumptions here, not Redge.
1) He didn’t initially say when his brother died, you are assuming it’s recently, judging by you comment about “decades old exposure”. As he later clarified, no it wasn’t recent, it was over a decade ago.
2) He did not make “the assumption that 100% of lung cancers are caused by smoking”. He pointed out that there was no history of cancer in his family and he further pointed out the details that his doctor shared with him.
3) he even points out that “it could be a coincidence” but that he’s only “tell(ing) you what the doctors wrote on the death certificate “
There is no evidence that second hand smoke is harmful.
Seminole County was their number 3 relocation county. Uggh. Biden just won it, the first time a Democrat candidate for President did since 1948 even while Trump won the state. Please, just go back…
And Palm Beach County is No. 2. So there goes Boca Raton. 😕
Sacramento is considering three tax measures to paper over fiscal difficulties:
Wealth tax on assets in addition to income.
Departure tax for people trying to leave with their assets.
Retroactive tax for people who weren’t taxed enough the first time around.
Whew! JUST made it out!
There is a claim that over 690,000 people left California during 2019.
Because this post is about San Francisco (since March) there are a couple of questions that come to my mind.
Say, over each of the last 10 years, how many leave per year, and for both the State and the City, what might be called “excess” leavings?
I ask this because I personally know a couple of families that have left the Bay Area, but mostly because their lives progressed to where they retired from very good jobs and sold quite expensive houses. Think about college grads that got tech jobs in 1975. 45 years later they are at retirement age. Half the price of a Bay Area house will buy a very different life style in any other place (except parts of NY, NJ, & CT).
It is not that I disagree with the notion of this post – a lot of push factors – but there are also other things going on. The admonition, I think is to not get too thrilled with your pet hypothesis until you have examined and eliminated many others. [Some fellow known for playing bongo drums has been quoted as saying something such.]
Maynard G. Krebs??
In November last year, my wife and I stayed for three days in a famous Gilded Age Hotel on corner Market Street and New Montgomery Street and did typical tours of the City, similar to those which we had done decades before.
We won’t be going back.
In central San Francisco the homeless are inescapable and to understand what has happened may I recommend Heather MacDonald’s superb article from the New York City Journal, “ San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless”.
http://www.city-journal.org/san-francisco-homelessness
“For the last three decades, San Francisco has conducted a real life experiment in what happens when a society stops enforcing bourgeois norms of behaviour.The city has done so in the name of compassion toward the homeless.
The results have been the opposite.
Street squalor and misery have increased even as government expenditures have ballooned.
Yet the principles that have guided the city’s homelessness policy have remained inviolate: homelessness is a housing problem; it is involuntary; and its persistence is the result of inadequate public spending.
These propositions are readily disproved by speaking to people living on the streets.”
New Montgomery Street had homeless encampments stretching down the block.
The latest attempt by the City authorities to rescue declining businesses is the arrival of of ‘ Pit Stops’, mobile toilets to stop the build up of faeces and urine on the footpaths outside shops.
As local business owners will attest, they are not working.
My wife and I watched one homeless person stroll into the coffee/chocolate shop where we were sitting, walk along the wall which chocolate displays were covering and load up an armful of boxes, continue clutching his unbuckled trousers and walk out in full view of staff and customers.
No one intervened or commented.
I am not suggesting this great city has been reduced to that of a third world town,nor am I uncaring for homeless people, but San Francisco has a major problem which is visible to visitors and which is being ignored.
I last went to Frisco almost 30 years ago. While eating in a small Chinese restaurant, a “homeless” man came in with a cup of something in a Styrofoam cup, picked the sugar shaker off of a table and commenced to filling up the liquid with sugar, probably more than 1/2 a cup into an 8 to 10 oz. cup.
The owner attempted to get the sugar container back, but didn’t dare touch the guy. So even then, the bums were beginning to run the place.
I did have a good experience with a bum there. I was in line to buy cable car/bus tickets from a kiosk when he walked up and explained how the City owned kiosk was a rip off AND it would not give change. He told me just to get on the cable car and when the conductor came up to check our tickets, just ask to buy them. We saved around $10.00, as he explained we would. He seamed honest so I gave him $5.00 for the information. He was correct. The conductor was aggravated when he had to explain all the options AND make change. We saved MORE than the $10.00 on our 3 tickets so his service was well worth the “tip”. I think of those who didn’t believe him and stood in line to overspend on a city run scam.
That would be a minimum of 20% of the population of San Francisco if true. I call BS on that article.
The linked article (Public Comment) at the top of the story seems credible. Yep, it’s a big number.
One of the articles I linked in my comment above says California makes up for it’s massive out-migration with a similar international immigration. I leave it to you as an exercise to figure out where those immigrants are coming from. Anyway, the population of San Francisco probably won’t decrease.
Left wing liberalism has some massive failures. California is exhibit ‘A’.
Must have been rich to have 2 mule power and a wagon.
If you’re leaving San Francisco don’t forget to take the flowers from your hair.
No that’s only if you are leaving Fat Stan’s Disco.
Eric Burdon is going to re-release his hit “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”
No need to worry about them moving away they’ll still be voting in any and all elections from here on out as I’ve seen many examples of people posting their experiences of having filled all the required home change information and registering to vote from their new home only to find post election that they voted from their old home as well and of course you can guarantee the vote was for the right candidate!
Can’t remember who it was said we get the government we deserve, not sure if that can be said of these events.
I just hope that should things pan out a certain way Anthony is safe as people telling the truth about the corruption of science to politics are not popular and those with an axe to grind may feel emboldened.
James Bull
The illustration reminds me of a family photograph of the farmhouse on Coffin Road in Santa Clara half-off its foundations after the 1906 earthquake. It is in the middle of an apparent pond due to the torrential rains that followed the EQ, There is a buggy in the foreground with water half up to its axles.
America may be about to be Californicated by Dopey Joe and Kamalahoe. NOT MY PRESIDENT. God Bless US all. It is a good time to be old. Soon it will be a good day to die. (Chief Running Antelope, 1879)
I have a friend whose husband died before this CV19 thing became “a thing” that turned governing into dictatorshipping, and she’s said she doesn’t think she can sell her house because the neighborhood is so shabby. Blind to the reality of ‘get the H-E-double hockeysticks’ out of there. I feel some sympathy for her, because she grew up in San Fran, but only a small amount of sympathy, frankly. She could have had a better life in Colorado if she had moved a while back, after her loss.
I moved away from Chicago 16 years ago and glad I did. I hope the decay that has seized that once-fine city does not creep its slimy way out here into the hinterlands, because none of us want it.
The other side of that coin is that this nonsense – all of it – has grown in a hurry, as if it were a bubble of swamp gas, and while it’s explosive, it is also short-lived. Just sayin’….
Can anyone explain to a Brit, how the homeless situation in San Fran become so bad?
Not sure, but I think it had to do with the increase in apartment rental fees, and/or taxes on residential property.
Far leftists in charge of the city for decades.
Yes, the weather is good, you won’t freeze to death or die in the heat. They let you do what you want, you won’t be arrested for just about anything and give you dollars too. In addition the city is filled with people who will give you hand outs. It’s a bums Mecca.
From Herbert’s comment above:
Another thing is that the climate makes it easier to be a street person. I’m guessing that Minot, in the Great Plains just south of Canada, doesn’t have much of a problem with street people in the winter. Anyone with a hankering to be a street person will probably move to the west coast.
Herbert posted a link above to an article about it: https://www.city-journal.org/san-francisco-homelessness
It’s so-called “compassionate” policies that have continued to make things worse, and their only response to the failure of those policies is to double-down.
Low interest loans, IPOs: Resulting wealth drove up real estate prices.
NIMBYism: Home owners block high rises to ‘preserve the character of old neighborhoods’
Airbnb: Owners threw the tenants out and converted many units to AirBnB where people can stay and see ‘ how compassionate he’s and she’s of the world are.’ Progressive and compassionate California turned a Nelsons’ eye because it was profitable.
Big Pharma: Precipitated opioid crisis and homelessness.
BigPharma precipitated the opioid crisis? Any data to back that up, or is paranoia sufficient?
“OxyContin maker to plead guilty to federal criminal charges, pay $8 billion, and will close the company.” link
I take guilty pleas in American courts with a grain of salt. Lots of times innocent people will take a deal and plead guilty because otherwise there’s a real chance they’ll spend the rest of their life in jail with zero chance of parole. My guess is that, if the company hadn’t plead guilty, the government would have gone after the directors and executives.
Notwithstanding the above, I’m willing to believe that the directors and executives should have guilty consciences. (Yes, I’m sitting on the fence because I’m too lazy to dig into the matter properly.)
One word: Progressives
Being from Montana, I always wondered why someone could sell there 3-bed room house in California and buy a ranch in Montana. There was some structural reason for this but I could never quite put my finger on it until recently. In the early 1990’s, my Dad sold the last 160 acres of the ranch to a conglomerate. It turns out, the conglomerate consisted of a Hollywood movie star and the son of a national news anchor, both house-hold names. The farm was being bought with money from both coasts.
The reason for the disparity is largely due to trade and the use of non-US labor imo. California, the 5th largest economy in the world, receives over 14% of it’s GDP from trade and a huge amount from silicon valley corporations which rely on cheap off-shore labor. They really don’t need the fly-over states that much for their income other than for things like water and electricity. Recently I did a cost-analysis of the manufacture of an iPhone. It turns out, about every tax (sales, business, etc.) is more than the off-shore labor cost to assemble an iPhone. AAPL stocks return 614% in 10-years when including stock splits. Both coasts (Big Tech and Wall Street) and the governments who collect taxes have no reason to fix the problem. Any other thoughts?
Farmer said:
They really don’t need the fly-over states that much for their income other than for things like water and electricity.
You forgot food.
They’ve got wine, fruit, vegetables, rice, etc. Those workers at the bottom of the supply chain would love some wine I’m sure.
The problem is the domestic immigration will result in extreme liberal ideas spreading evening faster to other states.
Exactly. Leftist go home and reap what you’ve sown. we don’t want your extremely radical far-left nonsense ideas in the saner parts of the country.
In search of toilet paper.
I don’t think there’s much TP to be found in SF. From all the reports it’s pile of crap in the streets with no TP on the scene.
That’s why they are leaving.
Head South young families. There’s freedom in some of those states.
You assume they want freedom- and can actually use and maintain it.
From what I’ve seen, many of them are like the old Soviet citizens: don’t know what it is, can’t get their minds around it, and long for Government control like the good old days.
Could be. Good thing you will try to teach them what it means to be free.
Make life miserable, drive people out and pick up what is left on the cheap. There has to be a law against that somewhere or is there.
How long did Chicago take to deteriorate?
Before or after Al Capone and the Mob????
Considering the state of the city today, Al Capone and the Mob were the “good old days”!
A year ago I found a full-time remote job and moved to the Missouri Ozarks. I’ve never been happier. What I miss most is Costco. It’s a 2-hour plus drive to the nearest one.
The lockdowns haven’t had much impact here. A few places, mostly chains, require masks. Mostly it’s business as usual but I do see more people wearing face diapers when I’m out.
San Francisco Covid-19 Exodus – 89,000 Families have Left
Make sure to leave your piles of shist & marxist culture where you came from.
And as usual, they won’t make the connection between their voting habits and the regulations they dislike, so they’ll fight as hard as they can to turn their new homes into mirrors of their old home.
There are a lot of very wealthy families in SF and many if not most have second homes. This could be people waiting out the pandemic somewhere else.
I have noticed that it is the cities where large enclaves of progressives seem to congregate. Here in Texas, our cities are fast sliding into liberal enclaves full of progressive ideas born in California. As flight from California and other liberal areas continues, Texas is becoming more and more liberal. It is only a matter of time before they take over through elections and start increasing taxes and destroying the economy.
Once they destroy more states like Texas, they will move on to other remaining healthy states like a virus. Unfortunately, in a democracy you have to live with whatever the majority is convinced they want, so there is no stopping this. Most people are not deep thinkers, and can be convinced to do anything through social media and group think. If the liberals are willing to go around the constitution, pack the high courts, and rule through regulation then they eventually win. They already own the schools where their propaganda and rewriting of history occurs.
So the fall of San Francisco which has been going own for 30 years is just another sign that the disease is spreading – I just hope it takes another 30 years or more so I don’t have to watch this.
I saw the writing on the wall for California over 30 years ago, and fled 20 years ago. The problem now is that California refugees are now invading my new domicile, and will ultimately bring most of their problems with them. My next-door neighbor just sold his house to some Califonians for almost twice what it was worth a half-dozen years ago. We’re starting to think about where we’ll go next…
I’ve been to SF 3 times this fall on various errands. Its very apparent that many people have left town. At times it feels like a ghost town, empty streets with a few stragglers walking with their heads down wearing masks. Its a pretty depressing place this year. Apartments are readily available and you can always find a place to park. Very unlike normal conditions. We even grabbed an affordable, rent-controlled apartment near the water in the Marina District to have a place staked to stay to visit an expected grandchild (5 days in a hotel with $60/day parking costs more than a month’s rent). There aren’t homeless around there and I didn’t encounter any for three days of walking around enjoying the sights, food, parks, and shopping. Staying away from downtown, city hall, and the Tenderloin district had much to do with that. I saw the big homeless encampments from my car while driving in and out of town.
What I don’t like about SF is its crazy expensive. Groceries are sky high. Liquor is 25% higher than in LA. Breakfast at a corner diner is $25 per person. Cocktails are $17. Restaurants tack a $5.35 fee to every bill for health care. There’s a strong incentive to eat at home.
On other trips I’ve seen the drug users, homeless encampments, and insane people out on the streets. So yeah, I don’t stay in the downtown area any more. I’ve seen the gross, disgusting, and sad sights but usually don’t have any reason to be in that area.
The health care tax is for Restaurant worker’s health care, not a general tax. I had a fairly large group to dinner in San Fran some years back when it had just been implemented. It is only in the larger California cities. We were told it was mandatory, so I paid it, but later that night, after some due diligence, found that while it is mandatory that the restaurant pays it, it is NOT mandatory that they put it on customer bills… i.e., they could, as they should, pay it themselves for their OWN EMPLOYEES, or, as they did to me, try to pass it off similar to the sales tax. So, back in San Fran two nights later, I went back to the restaurant, asked for a refund of the tax, and asked the restaurant to pay it. I got to speak to the Head Waiter, the Manager, a whole bunch of folks, about how important the tax was for their health care, and my answer was “why, yes, it is important, so much so that the employer should pay it as part of his regular business expenses, as I do for my company. And, my customers on the other side of the country shouldn’t be paying your health care because you won’t.” After much back and forth, I finally told them that if they didn’t refund me the “tax” I would subtract it from the generous tip I had left. Whoa!!! did that get some traction, especially with the Head Waiter. The Manager refunded me the tax.
Bravo, good sir.