A town in America where people are like zombies | Info

At the end of last year, two academics investigated the connection between working from home and the increase in crime.

Iconic cafe Joe & The Juice, which has always been in demand, has more employees than customers on a Wednesday morning. Three waiters, a lonely couple staring at a laptop and two colleagues who stopped by for coffee. Here and there a worker rushes through the street, hurrying to work, writes a Daily Mail reporter who made a report from the ruined city.

The financial district is an area filled with the headquarters of tech giants like Uber, Airbnb and Twitter, but there are simply no people. The beautiful city by the bay has for years been an unavoidable destination on the American west coast flooded with tourists, but now it is possible to see him in a different guise.

The economic consequences of the pandemic and the flight of people they turned San Francisco into a ghost town. Although the telecommuting trend is the root cause of the city’s woes, the situation has been further exacerbated by an extreme left-wing local government that has concentrated on encouraging technological development and turned a blind eye to crime, drugs and homelessness.

Starting salaries in this city were around $200,000 a yearwhich attracted many developers lured by tax breaks in Silicon Valley. Soon, rents in San Francisco became too expensive for most people who simply moved out of the city. While it was critical for other industries to bring staff back to the office, tech companies realized that they didn’t need office workers and that developers could write code at home.

San Francisco is financially dependent on the tech industry located downtown. Late last year, two New York academics investigated the link between working from home and the city’s rise in crime. The decline in the number of people working in the city center has led to a reduction in local spending. This had a negative impact on the financing of city services from the tax revenues of residents, shops and restaurants, which is why the number of police patrols on the streets was reduced. Due to the lack of local self-government funds, the city was increasingly deteriorating and fewer and fewer people wanted to live there or to visit him. Many businesses are struggling to survive, further weakening the city’s appeal to residents and tourists. San Francisco is in a vicious cycle, all stemming from the seemingly innocuous shift to working from home.

In addition to the thousands of residents who voluntarily moved out of the city, thousands of workers were laid off in the latest tech industry crash. Elon Musk alone fired more than six thousand employees at Twitter last week since he took over the company six months ago. With the average rent still over $3,000 a month, the nurses, waiters, chefs or firefighters who lived there before are sure not to return.

“My neighbors are lawyers or developers and they all work from home. Restaurants close earlier, bars are dead before midnight, there’s just less people eating and drinking in town, which affects my business a lot,” restaurateur Sam Habr told the Daily Mail. . Meanwhile, San Francisco’s population is shrinking and its coffers are emptying. In July 2022, the city recorded its lowest population in this decadeand, currently, 808 thousand people live there, compared to 870 thousand who lived only two years ago. In the next two years, a deficit of 780 million dollars is predicted from the city coffers.

The large tax increase needed to finance the project, analysts say, will be the last straw, although some fear that the point of no return has already been reached. There is no exact data on how many companies have closed, but a record 29.5 percent of business premises are now empty. A large number of cafes and restaurants have disappeared, not because the owners do not have enough customers, but because they cannot find staff in such an expensive city. Workers are made even more difficult by the sea of ​​homeless people and drug addicts who were left alone by the police.

Pharmaceutical giants such as Valgreens and CVS closed stores in the city after California passed a law that reduced the theft of goods worth less than $950 from a felony to a misdemeanor. Tourism fell by 16 percent compared to the level before the pandemic.

If all that wasn’t reason enough for developers to keep working remotely, famous CEO Bob Lee was stabbed to death in a smart neighborhood just around the corner from Google’s local headquarters. Mayor London Breed has rebuked critics who blamed the killing on her administration for assuming he was killed by a homeless man when his colleague did it.

An additional problem is that addicts flock to San Francisco because they are drugs are easily available, and the police do nothing. It was last year 620 people died from overdose. Drug abuse is also widespread in public areas, so many addicts gather in the Tenderloin district. The streets there are dirty with human excrement, and drug addicts can be seen “stabbing” themselves in front of police vehicles. Armed carjackings, shoplifting and aggressive theft are not uncommon.

Millionaires step cautiously around the street tents, and drug addicts lie next to the windows of luxury stores. Whole Foods, a high-end grocery chain, also closed its doors last week due to staff safety concerns. Recently, an addict died of an overdose in the premises of their toilet.

The store was located near the headquarters of Twitter, whose owner Elon Musk wrote only a day earlier: “The center looks like a zombie apocalypse. The atmosphere of the city is corrupted by the fear of crime, mostly associated with unpredictable drug addicts. People do not go out into the streets without tear gas, and some are armed and knives.”

(WORLD)