(Daily Mail) The desolate reality of San Francisco’s hollowed out city center has been laid bare by footage showing every store in an entire retail block shuttered and empty.
Lloyd Chapman of the American Small Business League visited the city’s once-thriving Union Square area at the heart of its retail district.
The prime real estate was once home to outlets including Uniqlo, H&M, Rasputin Records, and Lush, but all have disappeared in a city center plagued by crime, drugs and homelessness.
Unbelievable!’ he exclaims as his camera pans round the ghostly remains of former stores now defaced by graffiti.
‘This whole street is vacant, every store is empty.’
Nothing remains of San Francisco’s retail heart on one block where every store is empty
Lloyd Chapman of the American Small Business League said it was a marked contrast to the city’s glory days just a few years ago when it was a ‘Disneyland for adults’
The retail exodus is mirrored in nearby streets with 22 out of 33 stores now vacant in a three-block section of Powell Street from Market Street to Union Square, according to a survey by the SF Chronical.
And the entire Union Square district now has a record vacancy rate of 20.6 per cent, helping drive the city’s overall retail vacancy rate to a new high of 7.9 percent according to a survey last month by Cushman and Wakefield.
‘The decline in retail performance was primarily due to the worsening conditions in Union Square and the surrounding downtown areas,’ analyst Soany Gunawan wrote in the report.
Chapman’s eerie video has been seen by 500,000 people since he posted it to X
Assaults are up by 10 percent in Union Square’s police district so far this year and vehicle thefts are up by a third despite police setting up a new command center in the area.
Figures for most crimes have fallen across the city this year but Chapman claimed the damage has already been done after years of increases, pointing the finger of blame at California governor Gavin Newsom.
‘He has devastated California with his failed policies,’ the business leader tweeted.
‘San Francisco is a ghost town. Oakland looks like a refugee camp.’
California spent $24 billion tackling homelessness in the five years to 2023 but did not track if the money was helping the state’s growing number of unhoused people, a damning report revealed last month.
Homelessness jumped 6 percent to more than 180,000 people in California last year, federal data show. And since 2013, the numbers have exploded by 53 percent with the state accounting for a third of America’s entire homeless population.
It has contributed to California’s budget deficit of at least $45 billion, a shortfall so large it prompted Newsom to propose painful spending cuts impacting immigrants, kindergarteners and low-income parents seeking child care in a state often lauded for having the world’s fifth-largest economy.
California Governor Gavin Newsom recently admitted that the state spent $24 billion tackling homelessness in the five years to 2023, but did not track if the money was helping
A map reveals the major businesses which have left, or have announced they are leaving, San Francisco in recent months. Retailers like Whole Foods, Anthropologie, Old Navy, AmazonGo, Saks Off Fifth and now American Eagle are among those taking part in the mass exodus
