San Francisco residents and business owners decried the city’s growing drug and crime problem, with some describing it as a “Zombie apocalypse.”
One resident, Seema Gokhale, told Fox News that life in the city is “post-apocalyptic.”
“It honestly feels like I’m in a place that’s been in a zombie apocalypse. It’s like a dystopia. It really feels like a dystopian reality right now where I see boarded-up storefronts. I see people defecating on the streets,” Gokhale said.
According to a new report from the San Francisco Controller’s office, almost half of the city’s commercial sidewalks had feces on them in 2021 and 2022.
“I walk by people regularly, and it feels horrible,” Gokhale said because drug addicts have “needle tracks all over their arms and legs and toes. I see people with rotting limbs because they’re living on the streets.”
Gokhale, who is part of the D5 Coalition, said she is “trying to improve conditions in District Five, which includes the Tenderloin, Hayes Valley, the Fillmore District, and parts of Alamo.”
“It really feels post-apocalyptic. Something needs to be done. We have to make this a livable place. I describe it as a hellhole right now. If I wasn’t a homeowner and hadn’t grown up in the area and there wasn’t a strong job market in the area, I would leave,” Gokhale said.
One resident who owns a security business in San Francisco says he has trouble recognizing the city he grew up in, which now resembles a “Zombie apocalypse”
“It went from a family-friendly city to just rampant robbery, theft, assault. It is lawlessness out there, and there’s a lot of homelessness.”
“The mindset is changing for the Asian community there. They’re probably realizing that the leftist [policies] are not working, and it’s eroding away family values,” he explained.
Watch
A glimpse of the zombie city San Francisco.
This is what the progressive liberals and the Democrats are selling. pic.twitter.com/bvV2UfaUs2
— Avatans Kumar 🕉 (@avatans) May 28, 2023
According to The New York Post:
Tony Hall is a former city councilman and business owner who told Fox News Digital that the city has taken a nosedive in recent years.
“Within the last four or five years, definitely within the last ten years, the city is just a shell of what it historically has been,” Hall said.
“I mean, this is out of control. Anybody who says it’s not is not in touch with the real world. And we have a lot of elected people here that are telling us ‘no,’ the level of crime that we are experiencing in San Francisco is not unlike any other spot in the country. False, totally false.”
“This is a once a very great, thriving metropolis. It’s now just a wasteland. Come here and look around at the businesses. Look at the shops that are close to the small neighborhood businesses that are boarded up. Thirty percent of the office retail space downtown is now empty,” he said.
“There are very few shoppers down on the historic Union Square, one of the great shopping areas of the country. And I’m sorry to report that because, like many people that live here and consider ourselves natives, we love this city. We hate to see it going this way, but it’s due to total mismanagement.”
CNN did a recent special that focused on the city’s homelessness and drug problems, which one local Democratic politician said was an “absolute hit job” and an unfair assessment of a city.
“It was pure clickbait, and it presented only one side and did not represent any of the massive amounts of good happening in San Francisco,” California State Sen. Scott Weiner told Fox News Digital.
“And it was an absolute hit job, and I guess CNN has been struggling with its ratings, so it platformed Donald Trump to drive up ratings. Now it’s doing a hit piece on San Francisco because people tend to be drawn to that.”
Weiner said the “vast majority” of the city didn’t have the issues like those spotlighted by CNN while acknowledging areas like The Tenderloin, South of Market, and The Mission were affected by open-air drug markets.
Source: San Francisco Residents Say the City Has Descended into a Dystopian “Zombie Apocalypse”