Why San Francisco Will Remain An Overpriced Slum

You don't need to be a fan of American Apparel to appreciate how bonkers this bunch of Frisco nutters sounds. Frankly, it's hard to imagine why anyone would care enough about American Apparel one way or the other to be exercised over the prospect of them moving into your neighborhood, especially if the neighborhood is a slightly dumpy borderline slum with a fair sprinkling of empty or underused storefronts.

This would seem to be even more true at a time when businesses and jobs are evaporating like what's left of the Sierra snowpack, but not in the kneejerk, reactionary world of the San Francisco "activist" community, which strives at any cost to preserve the status quo even when (especially when) the status quo is just plain crappy. And after all, why do they need new businesses in the Valencia Corridor when right around the corner on 16th Street there's already a thriving trade in heroin, stolen goods, and muggings? That's the "real" Frisco that these nutbags romanticize, and as long as they hold sway, it's the only Frisco you're ever likely to get.

P.S. Here's another example: a group of activists, many of whom don't even live in the neighborhood, fighting to maintain the Tenderloin as a containment area/wildlife preserve for crackheads, beggars and lunatics, despite the fervent protests of local residents, many of whom are hardworking immigrants trying to raise families in the area. Particularly obnoxious are the comments from rich bitch (rich by Tenderloin standards, anyway) lawyer Sue Hestor who dismissed local residents trying to improve the neighborhood as "yuppies" who "moved into a low-income area and want it to be a high-income area" and the actions of left-wing fratboy-cum-thug Chris Daly, who much to San Francisco's embarrassment is a City and County Supervisor who "represents" his constituents by stifling any efforts to enforce quality of life laws or to maintain minimal standards of civil behavior on the streets. An architect's proposal to plant 400 trees was shot down because, activists claimed, she was trying to "sanitize" the area.