Tag Archives: Mayor London Breed

How’s it going in San Francisco? Another large firm plans to leave the city

In July 2022 San Francisco Mayor appointed Brooke Jenkins as District Attorney. She promised at that time to “fight the city’s lawlessness.”

Apparently she’s not fighting hard enough to keep KPMG (accounting firm renting 100,000 square feet) in downtown San Francisco.

From Daily Mail:

KPMG moving out of $400million ‘KPMG building’ in downtown San Francisco with nearby besieged mall loses another tenant as doom loop continues

“Accounting firm KPMG is set to move out of its $400 million namesake building, another high-profile exit from San Francisco’s beleaguered downtown.

The consulting and accounting giant first leased space in the 25-story office tower when the building opened in 2002.  Its name hangs above the entry to the skyscraper where the company currently occupies more than 100,000 square feet. It comes as shoe store Alto prepares to exit San Francisco Centre, the city’s biggest mall, next week.

Businesses and residents have fled downtown San Francisco since the pandemic with groups blaming crimehomelessness and work-from-home keeping people from downtown. 

Nearly 100 retailers in downtown San Francisco have closed since the start of the pandemic, a decline of more than 50 percent, according to a recent report. 

KPMG, a large accounting and financial firm, originally took 90,000 square feet at 55 Second St. in a 10-year contract, marking the second-largest office deal of 2003. It has since grown its footprint to span nearly one-third of the 380,000-square-foot building, leading to it being widely known as ‘The KPMG Building’.

The company is now considering ending its two-decade-long relationship with the building, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s the latest tenant looking to exit the downtown area. 

Now, another business is set to leave the area’s largest shopping center as Aldo moves its store from the San Francisco Centre. The mall lost Adidas last Saturday, as well as other recent losses including Hollister, Lego and J. Crew.”

Read the whole story here.

DA Brooke Jenkins isn’t trying hard enough to fight the “lawlessness” when the statistics from her first full year (2023) indicate that less than 50% of those arrested had cases filed against them and the “filing rate” and “action taken” rate are both declining.

With statistics like that, I guess San Francisco can expect more businesses to leave.

DCG

San Francisco, failed city part 3

We all know that democrat-run San Francisco is a failed city. The homelessness, crime, locked up store shelves, open-air drug use, poop-covered streets, stores closing, and the list goes on and on.

Yet I never did expect this headline:

San Francisco Bay boaters forced to fight off ‘pirates’ as seafaring bandits ravage community

Thieves are getting very creative in California. From the Fox News story:

“Residents living on houseboats and yachts in the San Francisco Bay resorted to physically fighting off seafaring bandits who are ransacking their ships, former harbor master Brock de Lappe said.

Another woman said she rescued a man whose sailboat drifted into the bay without a motor or any way to get back to shore after one of the “pirates,” which is what the resident call the burglars, cut his boat line during an argument. 

“The open shoreline of the (Oakland-Alameda) estuary is littered with sunken wrecks and derelict, end-of-life vessels, and crime has risen to truly intolerable levels,” de Lappe said during a municipal meeting. 

Since the summer, burglars have been using small boat homes to raid yachts and houseboats in the Oakland-Alameda Estuary, which is populated by marinas with over 3,000 slips, to steal anything of value.  Then they either sink the ships or dump whatever is left of the boats miles away in the Oakland Harbor or along its shorelines. 

Mary Spicer, who founded a group of volunteers that has been cleaning the estuary since 2017, canceled their cleanup this year “because of safety concerns” from a particular homeless encampment, where she said there have been violent incidents. “Unfortunately, I don’t feel comfortable bringing children to the site until those are addressed by the city of Oakland,” Spicer said.”

Read the whole story here.

I sound like a broken record:

DCG