Warning Signs

Having worked in San Francisco for 25 non-consecutive years, I can attest to its positives: great restaurants, well-known landmarks, decent public transportation once you know the routes, and beautiful weather (fog days have lessened, perhaps due to global warming).

However, I'm more and more grateful that I don't live in the City. The traffic is bad, often dangerous, and the prices for everything have become astronomical. Worse, "unacceptable" crimes and behavior have become commonplace.

Photographed but not caught. Note covered-up plate
on the thief's VW (SF Chronicle)

The Smash-and-Grab
Undeterred by car alarms, thieves smash windows with impunity:

The car with no plates pulls up. Out jumps a passenger with a small tool — available online or in any hardware store — that’s intended to help people break windows if they’re stuck inside their own car.

You just press the tool against a window, and a spring-loaded spike shatters the glass. Because it doesn’t shake the car, alarms don’t go off. The thief grabs whatever is handy and returns to the getaway car...

Heat maps of where last year’s 30,000 police reports were taken in San Francisco show car break-ins are concentrated in tourist hot spots — from the Beach Chalet to Fisherman’s Wharf, from the Academy of Sciences to, yes, Lombard Street.

Drug Use and Human Feces

Originally the problems of the Tenderloin and South-of-Market districts,

Jennifer Wong's siteused to map
sidewalk fecal concentrations.

Reports of improperly discarded syringes have jumped 41 percent since last fiscal year, according to a recent city controller’s report. Complaints about feces have increased by 39 percent, with every district seeing a rise in the calls.

Priorities
Meanwhile, San Francisco has declared itself to be a Sanctuary City (and spearheaded the drive to make California a Sanctuary State) and imposes a multitude of business taxes.

As of this writing house prices continue to rise, despite the reduction of favorable tax treatment for expensive houses in the recently enacted Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

The warning signs are widespread. I don't know what may trigger the fall; perhaps it will be rising interest rates, dropping tech stock prices, or fed-up tourists, but it would not be surprising to see a collapse, and an exodus of individual and business taxpayers, in San Francisco's near future.