Restaurateurs are avoiding opening new establishments in the City by the Bay and there’s a good reason for their decision. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, numerous break-ins have occurred recently, plaguing restaurant owners. The Chronicle listed some examples:
Pine Tar Grill was burglarized three times in the first 16 months after it opened, costing the owner, Dave Martin, thousands of dollars and triggering his decision to close the diner. Martin told the Chronicle, “To balance everything out when it comes to the costs, I would have had to charge like $85 for a cheeseburger.”
Another example: bubble-tea chain Boba Guys has been hit with three break-ins in the past year, according to co-owner Andrew Chau. He stated on Instagram that San Francisco “is a shell of what it used to be — I’m a local, son of a retired Muni bus operator and Pacific Bell call center representative. I’ve seen this city transform into Gotham, and it makes me sad. It’s time for radical solutions that think long-term.”
Kim Alter, owner of Nightbird, attested that the restaurant had suffered from repeated vandalism attempts. She told the Chronicle, “No one wants to open a restaurant in San Francisco.”
Laurie Thomas, a board member of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association and the owner of Terzo and Rose’s Café, said some incidents of vandalism go unreported because the insurance deductible they would have to pay would be greater than the cost of the damage. She added that some owners believe the police will not take any action after a report. She asserted, “The more pressing issue is the physiological and emotional damage break-ins have on a staff. When this happens often, these places can feel unsafe. Female servers and bartenders carrying cash from tip outs, they all worry.”
In late October, President Trump targeted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) over the state of her home city, tweeting:
I can’t believe that Nancy Pelosi’s District in San Francisco is in such horrible shape that the City itself is in violation of many sanitary & environmental orders, causing it to owe the Federal Government billions of dollars – and all she works on is impeachment … We should all work together to clean up these hazardous waste and homeless sites before the whole city rots away. Very bad and dangerous conditions, also severely impacting the Pacific Ocean and water supply. Pelosi must work on this mess and turn her District around!
San Francisco has been plagued by all sorts of problems in recent years; as The Daily Wire reported in late September, “A group of residents in San Francisco have come up with a novel solution to inhibit homeless people from camping on their residential street: placing roughly 25 boulders on the sidewalk.”
Fox News reported in April 2019, “A new map pinpointing the locations where human feces are reported to have been found in the California city since 2011 shows San Francisco has a staggering problem with the stinky stuff. Nearly every city block has had a poop sighting in recent years as the city grapples with homelessness, according to data compiled by Open The Books.”
SFGate reported in July 2018, “Complaints about human waste around San Francisco increased by 400 percent from 2008 to 2018, according to 311. There were more than 21,000 reports made to 311 in 2017 alone.”