(PJ Media) Not too long ago, San Francisco was still a remarkably beautiful city, although even then it could change on a dime.
One could be in the midst of a leisurely stroll down a gorgeous street filled with chic cafes, turn a corner, and find oneself without warning in the middle of a large crowd of menacing homeless drug addicts.
Now, after decades of far-Left misrule that has picked up speed in the wake of the COVID hysteria, the city’s dirty, degrading, and dangerous areas are growing rapidly and taking the whole place over, and the city’s remaining sane people are fleeing. The end is near for the Golden Gate City: the day is approaching when its ruins will bear silent witness to the ways in which Leftism destroys human societies. In anticipation of that day, a luxury hotel chain is leaving town.
Park Hotels & Resorts Inc., which owns and operates the 1,921-room Hilton San Francisco Union Square and the 1,024-room, has announced that it is pulling out of Pelosiville, and can you blame them?
The inaptly named Thomas J. Baltimore, Jr., Chairman and CEO of Park Hotels & Resorts, announced Monday that it was going to stop payments on a $725 million commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) loan that is secured by the Hilton Union Square and the Parc 55. That means that unless someone steps in to take them over, those two hotels will close up, and their shells will become new monuments to the cost of electing Leftists to run cities.
Baltimore (wasn’t Joe San Francisco available?) announced, “This past week we made the very difficult, but necessary decision to stop debt service payments on our San Francisco CMBS loan.” His explanation for this was devastating: “After much thought and consideration, we believe it is in the best interest for Park’s stockholders to materially reduce our current exposure to the San Francisco market.”
Why, Baltimore? Did someone get misgendered? Not exactly: “Now more than ever, we believe San Francisco’s path to recovery remains clouded and elongated by major challenges – both old and new: record high office vacancy; concerns over street conditions; lower return to office than peer cities; and a weaker than expected citywide convention calendar through 2027 that will negatively impact business and leisure demand and will likely significantly reduce compression in the city for the foreseeable future.” Thomas J. Baltimore, Jr. is risking the wrath of the woke by making all this clear, but who can deny that he is actually understating his case?
All the points he made go back to the same root cause.
Why is San Francisco suffering from “record high office vacancy” and a “lower return to office than peer cities”? Because people don’t want to work in a place where they could have their car broken into and their possessions stolen, only to have police dismiss the incident as a “basic city experience.”
Why are there “concerns over street conditions”? Because in San Francisco today, people die of drug overdoses on the street virtually every day. At any given moment, people walking down the street could be menaced by violent drug addicts, and once again, the cops will do nothing.
Why is there a “weaker than expected citywide convention calendar through 2027”? Because no one wants to attend a convention in a city where there are actually maps to help people avoid stepping in all the human excrement that is all over the city sidewalks.
Baltimore concluded, “Unfortunately, the continued burden on our operating results and balance sheet is too significant to warrant continuing to subsidize and own these assets.” In other words, Goodbye, San Francisco.
Not only is the city dying, but the disease it is dying from is eminently curable. However, San Franciscans themselves generally seem to prefer the disease to the cure, as they keep re-electing Pelosi and other far-Left politicians who have made the city the literal cesspool that it is. If a politician arose who vowed to roll back socialism, clean up the streets, and reduce crime by institutionalizing the mentally ill, drug-addicted, and violent homeless people, he or she or xe (this is San Francisco, after all) would lose in a landslide.
