Speaking of California, the opposite of the state of OC is the state of San Francisco. I declared Portland dead last month. San Francisco is in the ICU:
Hotel rates are up everywhere but in San Francisco. Time was, San Francisco would top the 10 best places to visit list. Now it's on the downswing. In a remarkable example of understatement: "Conventions—previously a major driver of group travel—have still not returned to pre-pandemic levels, a problem some attribute to a decline in street conditions and worries about public safety." Lol, ya think?
If visitors are fearful, imagine what it must be like for residents. This story of Eli Steele getting his car broken into is remarkable.
And of course, we have the well known dynamic of business exodus (Nordstrom, Old navy, Whole Foods, Westfield Mall) and related population exodus (tech focused).
None of this is surprising to anyone who has been paying attention to urban dynamics since the turn of the century. What I will never understand is how deeply people delude themselves about it. Everybody speaks of it as if it were temporary, just a downturn that will correct itself with maybe a clever policy machination or two. It won't. I'm from Detroit; a dying city doesn't turn around. At best you might manage to cordon off a small downtown segment -- sports team complex, a casino, a key museum might attract some short term visitor money -- and keep it going as a lifeline. If smart attentive people are elected you may tread water for a year now and then. But in no way will the city ever recover. Smart, attentive people have already left the city, so electing smart, attentive people gets less and less likely.
My advice to you: Have no delusions, your city is not coming back. Get out while the gettin' is good. Your life will be better for it.
One of the best decisions I ever made was to settle in the Ann Arbor area. A mid-size city that is buoyed by the enormous University of Michigan and has been fairly recession proof, Ann Arbor has grown from about 200k when I first moved here in 1978 to about 330k today. It is statistically very safe, especially for residents who all know where the few points of low income housing are and know where to avoid the homeless. It is also wealthy, which has kept the undesirables from the east priced out of living here. (That was tongue-in-cheek. The city immediately to the east is Ypsilanti, which is not particularly safe. Further east is Detroit.)
But there are concerns. Recently there has been a spate of violent crime. Broadly speaking, what little violent crime there usually is in Ann Arbor centers around the aforementioned low-income housing spots and the homeless. The homeless are a particular problem in Ann Arbor because downtown we have something called the Delonis Center. Delonis is, to put it glibly, a five-star homeless shelter. Most homeless shelters are horrible places and can be outright dangerous in themselves. Homeless come from far and wide to shelter at Delonis, and that gives Ann Arbor an outsized portion of crazies in the streets. It is kept somewhat under control because if they are caught committing crimes or harassing people they can get booted out of Delonis and have to go back to some hellhole, so there is incentive to behave, but let's face it, your standard homeless guy is not a rational actor. Delonis has been a source of controversy over the years and the balance of wanting to do good and be humane versus public safety and commerce has had its share of challenges.
Being good, woke, liberal folks, the city council has responded to this by forbidding the police to stop vehicles for minor offenses like a broken tail light or tinted front windows (forbidden in MI) because that's racist. (Evidently today is the day for me to glib.) It sounds appealing on the face of it. I mean, I've been pulled over because some cop thought my license plate was too worn and old to be read. But having seen what well intentioned efforts to curtail police power have done over the years -- from New York City to Portland to San Francisco -- one wonders whether the frustration of a penny-ante annoyance may not be the lesser evil. Maybe this is a one time thing and Ann Arbor is not going down the road of reacting to crime by just letting it happen, like San Francisco has. But I worry. Ann Arbor leadership is full of righteous demagogues just like San Francisco. It's filled with activists who will happily watch things be destroyed in the name of their deluded notions of fairness. Maybe, just maybe, it's a coincidence that it coincides with a crime uptick and it's not a baby step toward degradation.
But like I said. I worry.
