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Trash grabber amazon12/7/2023 The city’s downtown has experienced slumps before. “We just didn’t know that it was going to happen this fast.” People all around us were absorbed in their phones and laptops, poring over the day’s work. “We knew Westfield would be a challenge to deal with,” Dennis Phillips told me, in a loud café near City Hall. On her first day on the job, it was announced that the lender for the largest mall in the district, operated by the Westfield corporation, would retake possession of the property-a five-story retail center with spiral escalators, opposite the city’s most famous cable-car landing. Of one city, Livermore, she explained, “We had to create a ‘Right to Live Downtown’ ordinance that everyone moving into a residential building would sign, acknowledging they would not get upset that things weren’t quiet at 7 p.m.” Now she faced the inverse problem: a city worried that its downtown was too quiet. “It’s just a question of how long it takes.” A few weeks earlier, she had been appointed the executive director of San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development-effectively, the trauma surgeon for downtown-after a career spent bringing the downtowns of small, quiet, boring Northern California suburbs to life. One afternoon in June, I went to see Sarah Dennis Phillips, the official charged with rehabilitating San Francisco’s businesses. In late summer, the owner of Gump’s, an upscale shop that opened in the eighteen-sixties, released a testy open letter, threatening to close in response to “a litany of destructive San Francisco strategies, including allowing the homeless to occupy our sidewalks, to openly distribute and use illegal drugs, to harass the public and to defile the city’s streets.” Urbanists had already begun to circulate a paper by the economist Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh that traced a post-pandemic spiral of collapsing retail and declining safety leading to less public revenue and fewer public services-what he called an “urban doom loop.” The phrase became a shorthand around town, where many took it as Cassandra’s vision of their fate. In the past few months, Christian Louboutin, Lululemon, Nordstrom, Old Navy, and Williams-Sonoma all began an exodus from the area so did Office Depot and Whole Foods. Downtown San Francisco has seen its highest retail vacancy rate since 2006. The question is what caused so swift a change.Ī new story described widespread flight. In San Francisco, the nation saw its dreams, and now it thinks it sees its nightmares. Success across industries today is measured by virality, optimization, and unceasing growth. ![]() Universities spent millions to reorient themselves around the Bay Area’s style of thinking. For a long time, that envy inspired mostly emulation. “There’s a lot of pent-up envy of San Francisco from a lot of other cities that think of themselves as more important,” one local told me recently. It grew rich, and seemed to climb out of the Great Recession with both influence and a mandate. It invested in lush, landscaped parks, tree-lined boulevards, and world-class museums where there had been none. No city excelled at the assignment more than San Francisco. metropolis has been what’s often called urban renewal: transforming old frameworks into beautiful, dynamic settings for prosperous middle-class life. Since the end of the industrial period, the main path of the U.S. ![]() ![]() The change has been unsettling because the city’s broad project is widely shared. Now the same place is viewed as an emblem of American collapse. Kennedy, Jr., lamented the many Americans who “are on the precipice of ending up on a corner like this.”) Nine years ago, when HBO premièred the series “ Silicon Valley,” a deadpan comedy lampooning the Bay Area’s life-style blandishments and hapless global power, the city seemed to exist in a helium balloon, floating ever upward. (“It’s really collapsed because of leftist policies,” Ron DeSantis repined in his spot. Throughout the summer, Presidential hopefuls came to town to stand on grim street corners and record their horror for the cameras. ![]() In May, a local pet owner claimed that her Himalayan sheepdog began “wobbling” after eating feces possibly containing opioids and marijuana. “They took down the guardrails around personal responsibility,” the Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger declared on Fox News. Drug-overdose deaths are surging reports of theft on downtown streets, including an almost two-hundred-per-cent increase in car break-ins in 2021, have crossed the national media to censorious response. As the pandemic recedes, nearly a quarter of offices downtown are said to be vacant, the worst rate in the nation. In the past few years, accounts of San Francisco’s unravelling-less like a tired sweater than a ball of yarn caught in a boat propeller-have spread with the authority of gossip or folklore.
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