The Washington Post updates the condition of the city by the bay which has more billionaires than any other location on earth and also more bums and winos crapping in the street.
San Francisco seems to be what you get when the piratical tradition of Gold Rush Capitalism somehow managed to interbreed with Hippy Dippy Gay Leftism.
Michael Feno stands outside Lucca Ravioli, his beloved pasta emporium on Valencia, a vestige of old San Francisco, puffing on a cigar while posing for pictures, his customers in tears.
Living in this city’s radically shifting landscape, veterinarian Gina Henriksen found comfort by telling herself, “Thank God, Lucca is still here. If Lucca goes, I’m going to have to leave San Francisco. What do we have left?â€
Lucca is no longer here.
After 94 years, doors shuttered on the last day of April. The parking lot sold for $3.5 million. A three-building parcel, including the store, listed for $8.3 million and was purchased by — need you inquire? — a developer.
A few blocks away, in this neighborhood of shops hawking $2,600 electric bikes and $8 lemonade, Borderlands Cafe — a throwback with plants cascading from the ceiling — closed the same day after a decade in business.
Owner Alan Beatts couldn’t retain staff, even with a $15 minimum hourly wage. Who can live on $15 an hour in this city transformed by innovation?
How can Alba Guerra, co-owner of nearby Sun Rise restaurant, continue to charge $10.95 for the housemade vegan chorizo platter after her rent spiked 62 percent last year to $7,800 a month?
For decades, this coruscating city of hills, bordered by water on three sides, was a beloved haven for reinvention, a refuge for immigrants, bohemians, artists and outcasts. It was the great American romantic city, the Paris of the West.
No longer. In a time of scarce consensus, everyone agrees that something has rotted in San Francisco.
Conservatives have long loathed it as the axis of liberal politics and political correctness, but now progressives are carping, too. They mourn it for what has been lost, a city that long welcomed everyone and has been altered by an earthquake of wealth. It is a place that people disparage constantly, especially residents.
Mike-SMO
As I recall, San Francisco was a declining city during the “Hippy” days so you could buy something old and set up a household or business for “Chump change”. Then “prosperity” and Lucca’s ravioli is $30 per plate.
As an alternative there is the New Lucca’s near the BART station in Union City. [Oakland and Newark were too expensive.]
Prosperity has its costs. Ask NYC how that works.
Those cities have the ultra-wealthy living next to “desolation row”. Everyone else rides the trains.
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