Whole Foods to close San Francisco flagship store a year after opening (interviews, ideology)
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Well, SF voters took a big step in the right direction when they recalled DA Chesa Boudin.
Really?
Quote:
While police have been presenting more arrests to the D.A.’s office since Jenkins was appointed, she is mostly charging those arrests at similar rates to Boudin — particularly when it comes to felony bookings, according to the data. Her charging rate for misdemeanors is close to Boudin’s, too, though it dipped in October; D.A. spokesperson Randy Quezada said the office didn’t know why, but an analysis of earlier years shows misdemeanor charging rates tend to vary more than felony rates. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/artic...n-17616925.php
It's very hard to tell if facts are not being ignored if/when those facts are not even mentioned. Especially if the idea is to make a case that is supposedly based on taking all facts into account in a properly balanced manner.
Perhaps you have facts and information that I don't, but the pandemic has posed a serious hardship on just about every "brick-and-mortar" store across the country. Significant enough to make all the other operating challenges more acute. In many cases, what was affordable and tolerable from a P&L standpoint before the pandemic became untenable over time even after the pandemic, because the pre-pandemic crowds never came back.
Take my two kids who work for companies in SF again for example. When they were in the city five days a week before the pandemic came along, they were the ones sometimes going to Nordstroms, Whole Foods, Target and CVS on any given day. Just like everyone else. Now, they're no longer in the city nearly as often or frequenting those stores, so what happens? The strain of lost business for those businesses causes all expenses to become all the more a challenge. Expenses like payroll and security. What's the city supposed to do about these problems? Problems before or after the 3% vacancy rate you note.
What are these social ills that have been caused by city policy or that can be corrected with city policy? "Just say no to drugs?"
Keeping a city clean is something of a no brainer. I agree, and I often wonder how hard it can be to have a clean up crew come by often enough to keep things clean, but SF does this already. I was on a busy street one morning in SF for breakfast and there was a crew power washing the sidewalk to keep things clean, but they can't come around every hour and not all cities are as easy to keep clean like others. SF spends more per capita on clean up than most cities that are cleaner, and private businesses spend a lot of their own money too, but not all cities have the challenges SF faces in terms of cost of living and/or the poor who live on the streets. The number of homeless. If it were all as easy as keeping the city clean (without budget issues), again SF would have no problem, but it's just not that simple.
I remember Phoenix to be very clean as well. Also so hot as to make being homeless a near death sentence. Fortunately while we were there we made use of the cooler temps in the mornings and evenings but spent our afternoons in the shade close to the pool or where there was air conditioning. Not really options for the homeless.
What is it that Phoenix is doing so different from SF? Or are we comparing "apples and oranges" here?
What Phoenix ( Dem run city) is doing differently is taking steps to ensure the problem doesn’t' get worse.
My thinking used to be with Cal. next door why live on the streets here? If for no other reason the weather in Cal is much better. However, AZ has become a major gateway for drugs entering the US. Half of the fentanyl seized last year seized in the US was in AZ. Streets drugs are cheap and readily available making smmer months here worth it.
Of course, there have always been homeless in Phx. However, the "Zone" has gotten way out of hand. Democratic city or not the leadership isn't blind. They see what has happened in SF, Portland, Seattle.
I think one difference between SF and Phx is local government understands many on the streets are there because of the poor choices. Here's an interesting channel where the homeless (many in the Phx area) are interviewed. https://www.youtube.com/@talesfromthestreets
Often those on the streets are there because of substance abuse. Yes, there are many with mental health issues (do enough meth and you are guaranteed to flip out.) However, ending up on the street because one lost their job/housing isn’t what the homeless (or those interviewed) appear to be saying.
Last year, with pandemic lockdowns in the rearview mirror, Whole Foods Market made a bet on a gritty San Francisco neighborhood. The high-end supermarket chain opened a giant flagship store in a part of the city that is home to both tech companies like Twitter and open-air drug dealing.
But the store was soon confronted head-on with many of the problems plaguing the area. People threatened employees with guns, knives and sticks. They flung food, screamed, fought and tried to defecate on the floor, according to records of 568 emergency calls over 13 months, many depicting scenes of mayhem.
“Male w/machete is back,” the report on one 911 call states. “Another security guard was just assaulted,” another says. A man with a four-inch knife attacked several security guards, then sprayed store employees with foam from a fire extinguisher, according to a third.
In September, a 30-year-old man died in the bathroom from an overdose of fentanyl, a highly potent opioid, and methamphetamine.
When Whole Foods announced in mid-April that it was closing the store, citing the safety of its employees, many in San Francisco saw it as a representation of some of the city’s most intractable problems: property crimes like shoplifting and car break-ins, an entrenched network of dealers selling fentanyl and other illicit drugs and people suffering from untreated mental illness wandering the streets. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/30/u...e-economy.html
There were a lot of other reasons they are closing that store, I've posted this before. The store hours change at the whim of whoever is the manager for the day. The system for parking vouchers sucks so bad that customers are utilizing the free parking in the garage. Employees have told customers not to buy the 'hot food' because most of it has been there for more than one day. Work from home has reduced their customers who would ordinarily go there for lunch.
I am sure that theft and annoyances caused by homeless people played a big role in their decision to close but that is NOT the only reason. And if the City built more shelters then the police could remove the people who are squatting on sidewalks. The new DA with all her promises of a safer San Francisco is just laughable, arresting people for possession of drugs won't make a dent in the problem, it will just fill the jail so that jailers will have to other offenders to make room for a bunch of junkies who will not have an epiphany about drug use or sales and turn their life around because the DA made them sit in jail for a few months.
There were a lot of other reasons they are closing that store, I've posted this before. The store hours change at the whim of whoever is the manager for the day. The system for parking vouchers sucks so bad that customers are utilizing the free parking in the garage. Employees have told customers not to buy the 'hot food' because most of it has been there for more than one day. Work from home has reduced their customers who would ordinarily go there for lunch.
I am sure that theft and annoyances caused by homeless people played a big role in their decision to close but that is NOT the only reason. And if the City built more shelters then the police could remove the people who are squatting on sidewalks. The new DA with all her promises of a safer San Francisco is just laughable, arresting people for possession of drugs won't make a dent in the problem, it will just fill the jail so that jailers will have to other offenders to make room for a bunch of junkies who will not have an epiphany about drug use or sales and turn their life around because the DA made them sit in jail for a few months.
Give her a year. Nothing changes. Come election time the voters will have their say.
Oh I don't think it's the DA, she's probably as good as the next one will be. Getting a 'tough on crime' DA was a fantasy sold to the public, implying that all SF has to do is get a really tough DA who will arrest everyone including people who litter or spit on the sidewalk, and then everything will be fine. But SF's problems are far more complex than that and the real problem is the abject failure of the city to not build low-income housing and homeless shelters.
Oh I don't think it's the DA, she's probably as good as the next one will be. Getting a 'tough on crime' DA was a fantasy sold to the public, implying that all SF has to do is get a really tough DA who will arrest everyone including people who litter or spit on the sidewalk, and then everything will be fine. But SF's problems are far more complex than that and the real problem is the abject failure of the city to not build low-income housing and homeless shelters.
Time will tell. My guess is in the not-too-distant future the Asian community will get serious about flexing itsr political muscle.
Ultimately it will be up to them to clean up the city.
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