The city of San Francisco recently hired a new tourism official to combat the growing perception that San Francisco is descending into lawlessness and is overrun with rampant homelessness.
In recent years, the California city has earned a reputation for embracing woke soft-on-crime policies with enormous downstream effects
The San Francisco Travel Association announced last week that it hired Scott Beck, who serves as the current head of Toronto’s tourism department.
Beck has stated his goal is to shift the pervasive narrative “about San Francisco as a monolithic experience, when it’s clearly not.” Beck also claimed that the media’s portrayal of the city is inaccurate.
“San Francisco is one of the marquee cities of the world for U.S. and international travelers, and I am thrilled to be joining the team at San Francisco Travel to continue to showcase everything it has to offer,” Beck said. “A strong tourism industry is vital to the city’s economy, local businesses and neighborhoods, and I am passionately committed to helping steward San Francisco’s ongoing tourism recovery.”
While Beck claims San Francisco isn’t a decaying city, local business owners share a much different sentiment. The American Tribune has constantly reported on various prominent businesses that are fleeing the city due to the deteriorating conditions of the Bay Area.
Recently, a luxury department store that had been in business for nearly 166 years announced it could be forced to close its doors. The owner blames lawlessness and a “litany of destructive” policies for ruining the city and hindering business operations.
“Gump’s has been a San Francisco icon for more than 165 years,” the owner of Gump’s luxury department store, John Chachas, said in an open letter to officials. “Today, as we prepare for our 166th holiday season at 250 Post Street, we fear this may be our last because of the profound erosion of this city’s conditions.”
“Equally devastating have been a litany of destructive San Francisco strategies, including allowing the homeless to occupy our sidewalks, to openly distribute and use illegal drugs, to harass the public and to defile the city’s streets,” he explained, labeling it a “tyranny of the minority,” he added.
Investigative reporter Katie Daviscourt recently called out the abysmal conditions of the city, outlining how many no longer feel safe in San Francisco. She noted that businesses are leaving in droves due to rampant crime that goes unchecked.
“You see the mass exodus of businesses now these are huge retailers being absolutely ransacked daily by thieves, open air drug use, homeless vagrants attacking the people working at these businesses who have had to pull out,” she said.
Daviscourt even highlighted the personal testimony of an immigrant who claimed the city’s conditions are worse than that of Middle Eastern countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, known for being war-torn. “But what is most striking to me was recently, a Muslim immigrant from Afghanistan, whose business was ransacked. He said that San Francisco is now worse than Iraq and Afghanistan,” she said.
Even Elon Musk weighed in on the state of the city, claiming Twitter employees in San Francisco no longer feel safe amid the lawlessness around them.
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