WHO DESTROYED SAN FRANCISCO AND WHY? PART ONE VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
https://victorhanson.com/who-destroyed-san-francisco-and-why-part-one/
It should have been impossible to wreck San Francisco.
It is the world’s most naturally beautiful city, with perhaps the most ideal bay, harbor, and ports of any coastal metropolis.
San Francisco is America’s premier window on the East. It serves as the natural conduit of commercial and cultural exchanges with the rising wealth of Asia and its dynamic economies in China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. During World War II, the Bay Area was the shipping point of supply to the Pacific Theater. The same role was true of the Korean and Vietnam wars, and could be again if China were to invade Taiwan.
The weather is mild year long. Mountains and shoreline are side-by-side. It is the gateway to the wine country of Napa, Mendocino, and Sonoma counties.
A mere decade ago, San Francisco downtown commercial property was among the most coveted and high-priced in the nation.
Prior generations had left behind once state-of-the-art clean and efficient mass transit. They built five majestic bridges across the 1,600 square mile sprawling bay and estuaries that connected the city and its environs to millions of suburbanites.
The city has access to the state’s main freeways that head out eastward, northward, and southward. Our ancestors long ago solved San Francisco’s water problems by importing vast amounts of potable water in aqueducts from the distant Hetch Hetchy and California Water Project mountain reservoirs.
Silicon Valley had slowly crept into San Francisco, suppling it with some of its trillions of dollars in market capitalization. Not long ago, some of the nation’s major corporations were based in the city itself, including Craigslist, the Gap, Levi Strauss, Lyft, PG&E, Charles Schwab, Salesforce, Twitter, Uber, and Wells Fargo.
Two great universities—UC Berkeley and Stanford—bookended the city. Both from their top-ranked graduate and professional schools turned out yearly scores of Bay-Area topflight engineers, computer scientists, doctors, lawyers, and business leaders.
Four Bay-Area California State University campuses—in San Francisco, Vallejo, Hayward, and San Jose—graduated thousands of teachers, nurses, businesspeople, and vocational professionals. The Bay Area Community College Consortium claims 24 of the state’s best junior colleges in the greater Bay Area region.
In other words, San Franciscans inherited one of the most successful, multi-tiered, private and public higher education system in the nation.
San Francisco was of course also famous for its role in sparking social change from the Haight-Ashbury/Winterland days to the Gay liberation movement to the Green/Sierra Club/Planet Earth days. At one time, the city’s cable cars, Golden Gate Park, Zoo, Palace of Fine Arts, Fisherman’s Wharf, Ghirardelli Square, and Pier 39 drew in over 25 million tourists each year. Hollywood saw San Francisco as one of its favorite film sites.
It is that majestic inheritance that an arrogant, ignorant, and incompetent current generation of San Franciscans destroyed. The present hubristic elite took their inherited wonderland and, in a decade, finally turned it into a moonscape. And it was such a dystopia that many who created it soon wanted no part of it, and so headed off to Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and Idaho where they sought a pristine city to work their magic of destruction all over again.
The current elite certainly did not deserve the beautiful and functional city that they inherited from far better generations—only in their utopian egotism systematically to ruin it, rendering it now more unlivable than a Detroit.
Watch any on-site, live shots from films of the last seven decades, from the 1950s onward until the last decade—Vertigo (1958) to Bullitt (1968) to even Blue Jasmine (2013). And the incidental city shots reveal little trash on the streets. No blocks of empty windows appear on screen. Hordes are not seen living in filth in the sidewalks. Passersby seems normal and even well dressed.
Of course, film crews of those eras were not subject to serial smash-and-grab car break-ins, the swarming of stores, exempted and routine shoplifting, unpunished carjacking, and no-bail, same-day release of arrested violent offenders.
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