San Francisco has always been an ostentatiously liberal city, but today's brand of 'progressivism' is transforming it from a glittering, thriving coastal gem into a dangerous, hollowed-out shell of its former self. We've been covering the slide into madness and dysfunction for quite some time (residents have tried to course correct with a series of recall elections, but the rot is persistent) -- including earlier this month, when we highlighted the latest blow the city has sustained. We set the table with this description:
We've covered to coddling of out-of-control criminals, the backlash-causing attack on merit in education, and the closures of major brick-and-mortar retail locations in San Francisco -- from a popular a Whole Foods, to large department stores, to Walgreens and Starbucks franchise locations. San Francisco's streets are strewn with drug paraphernalia and human waste. Many are describing a potentially irreversible downward spiral in what was long considered one of the country's nicest and richest cities....Local leaders recently launched a glitzy, airbrushed, multimillion-dollar ad campaign to try to woo tourists back to the City by the Bay. Literally days later, this happened...
The subsequent reveal was a report that "the owner of two of San Francisco’s biggest hotels — Hilton San Francisco Union Square and Parc 55 — has stopped mortgage payments and plans to give up the two properties, in another sign of disinvestment in hard-hit downtown. Park Hotels & Resorts said Monday that it stopped making payments on a $725 million loan due in November and expects the 'ultimate removal of these hotels' from its portfolio." Why? The ownership group announced its assessment that "San Francisco’s path to recovery remains clouded and elongated by major challenges," which is a polite but clear euphemism. The San Francisco Chronicle story about this development notes that one of the shuttered hotels is located one block away from "Westfield San Francisco Centre, the mall where Nordstrom is departing, and the block where Banko Brown, an alleged shoplifter, was killed in a shooting outside a Walgreens in April," and that "nearby blocks are also full of empty storefronts."
Nordstrom throwing in the towel on a signature brick-and-mortar location, on the heels of Whole Foods doing the same, looked like a very serious one-two punch. A statement from the mall's management cited "unsafe conditions for customers, retailers, and employees, coupled with the fact that these significant issues are preventing an economic recovery of the area." And now, perhaps inevitably, the next shoe has dropped. The spiral of decay is profound:
Exclusive: Westfield stopped paying its $558 million mortgage and is surrendering its namesake SF mall, the biggest in the city, to lenders in the wake of Nordstrom's planned closure and plunging foot traffic (down ~42% from 2019) and sales (down ~1/3) https://t.co/APqyrnojkQ
— Roland Li (@rolandlisf) June 12, 2023
The owners of the Westfield San Francisco Centre mall have stopped paying their loan and are giving up the property to lenders, adding to deepening real estate pain in a city struggling to bring back workers and tourists after the pandemic. The mall, co-owned by Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield and Brookfield Corp., has $558 million in outstanding mortgage debt. Management will be turned over to a receiver. The move comes a month after Nordstrom Inc. said it was closing its store at the site, citing a drop in customer traffic and the changing dynamics of the city.
The mall is in the heart of San Francisco’s Union Square district, one of the downtown’s main shopping and tourist areas. Westfield San Francisco Centre is the city’s biggest shopping center and features the historic Emporium department store dome, rebuilt after San Francisco’s devastating 1906 earthquake and painstakingly restored for the mall’s 2008 opening. “Given the challenging operating conditions in downtown San Francisco, which have led to declines in sales, occupancy and foot traffic, we have made the difficult decision to begin the process to transfer management of the shopping center to our lender to allow them to appoint a receiver to operate the property going forward,” Molly Morse, a spokesperson for Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, said in the statement.
Just as we saw with the two major hotels, the ownership is simply walking away from this massive investment, defaulting on payments and handing the properties to lenders. They're just cutting their losses, evidently seeing doing so as the least painful option. I reacted to these developments with Stuart Varney on Fox Business Network. My main point is that this collapse isn't happening in a vacuum. It's happening as a direct result of terrible, destructive, "progressive" public policies:
My reaction to another red flag of decay in San Francisco, with @Varneyco https://t.co/gcjDwvmH16 pic.twitter.com/w5gjsaTyAR
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) June 13, 2023
San Francisco's left-wing government implemented extremely harsh COVID policies alongside extremely lax crime policies. The results have been predictably grim. Varney brought up Gavin Newsom, California's Governor who used to run the city of San Francisco, and who has presided over an unprecedented population exodus from the state. Newsom has been running a shadow campaign for president, implicitly pushing himself as a back-up plan to Joe Biden. He's been running around to red states to attack conservative leaders, and he appeared on Sean Hannity's Fox News program on Monday, clearly trying to impress his party's base with his try-hard culture war pugnacity and 'courage' to go into the belly of the beast and fight the right wing, or whatever. In the Hannity interview, he challenged Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (who is actually running for president) to a debate. But the results of that debate are already in, and they're lopsided:
DeSantis has already won this debate, moderated by the American people: https://t.co/YzEGa89ski pic.twitter.com/XWQfbgaThB
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) June 13, 2023
Under DeSantis, Florida's population has increased by more than 700,000 since the 2020 census, becoming the fastest-growing state for the first time in 2022. Under Newsom, for the first time in state history, California has lost population. More than half-a-million people have fled the formerly Golden State, with the population contracting for the last three years running. Newsom's desired debate is over. He lost.
