Far-left governance has been a disaster of some magnitude everywhere it has been tried.
While politicians talk a good game, the proof is obvious as lawlessness becomes the norm and residents and businesses flee.
Now the London Breed San Francisco crime surge has just claimed yet another victim.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed simply isn’t effective.
That’s the verdict from those who know her best, the residents of her once-great but declining Left Coast city.
The problem starts at the top
According to a recent poll, 66% of voters disapprove of the Mayor’s job performance.
What is driving her strong disapproval is that 39% say drug use and public safety was their top concern, with homelessness coming in second at about 28%.
Needless to say, with a situation like this, the city is no place to raise a family and no place to run a business.
Nordstrom has announced it is packing up and leaving the city, and this isn’t just your run-of-the-mill store that has clones in hundreds of shopping malls across the country.
This particular Nordstrom store was a 312,000 square foot, five-story department store and a major hub in the Westfield shopping mall.
According to CNN, when the company originally announced the store’s eventual closing a spokesman said, “dynamics of the downtown San Francisco market have changed dramatically over the past several years, impacting customer foot traffic to our stores and our ability to operate successfully.”
Now that the store has finally closed its doors, the mall’s owners are also walking away, CNN reported of the situation that’s very likely to lead to the same eventual death spiral that has stricken other malls in recent years.
But Nordstrom is just the latest in a growing list of retailers leaving town.
Corporate America, flawed as it is, knows when to pull the plug on a hopelessly unprofitable situation and that vibe is getting ever stronger in San Francisco.
Rampant criminal activity and pervasive drug issues have also led to the closure of Saks off 5th, Old Navy, Whole Foods, Office Depot, H&M and Banana Republic among others.
Other companies moving out of the city include Meta, Twitter and PayPal.
A convenient scapegoat for failed leadership
CNN reports that the most recent store closure is a huge hit to the city.
The outlet blames “flexible work-from-home policies, resulting in many white-collar workers filtering out of the city” but never returning for the current business collapse.
But COVID hit everywhere and many other places across the country have bounced back.
Now, three years later, office vacancies in San Francisco have reached a 30-year high.
Unless or until Breed (or her eventual successor) figures out a way to reduce the crime and increase public safety it’s hard to see how the fate of the city’s five-story Nordstrom store isn’t replicated again and again.
Stay tuned to Blue State Blues for any updates to this ongoing story.
