Mayor Lee is turning San Francisco into a Dickens novel

[KamaAina]

http://www.sfexaminer.com/mayor-lee-is-turning-san-francisco-into-a-dickens-novel/

It’s 8:20 on Tuesday morning, and Division Street is awash with reporters, cops and people from the Department of Public Works. The tent city that sprang up when Mayor Ed Lee pushed the homeless out of downtown for the Super Bowl has been completely dismantled, except for a few folks holding out. In their place, police barricades have been put up to keep people from setting up camp. A billboard right above the last holdouts has a photo of a mansion and the words “Win this San Francisco Dream House or Choose $4 Million in Cash.”...

This is Mayor Lee’s San Francisco: A city where mid-Market paper unicorn companies, which offer their well-paid employees unlimited daily food, are given corporate handouts. Meanwhile, a few blocks away, St. Anthony’s struggles to feed the needy a single meal each day. It’s a city where nuns who run a soup kitchen in the Tenderloin were facing eviction until Tony Robbins, of all people, swooped in to save the day. A city with a $9 billion budget — home to 147,400 millionaires, according to Forbes — and yet one where people survive by eating out of the trash can in front of my apartment.

Mayor Lee likes to think he’ll be remembered as “The Tech Mayor.” But assuming he makes it through his entire term without being indicted, he will actually be remembered as the mayor who let San Francisco become a Charles Dickens novel. Except, if this economy continues where it’s going, this Dickens novel will begin: “It was the best of times, it was the burst of times.”

And Lee will wake up one day and realize he sold out the greatest city in the world to a bunch of bratty, tone-deaf companies that no longer exist.

[arcane1]

1. "a bunch of bratty, tone-deaf companies that no longer exist"

[randys1]

2. I told you a long time ago my lawyer friend in SF hates Lee. Now I see why

[pennylane100]

3. I thought the super bowl was held in Santa Clara.

[KamaAina]

4. Indeed it was. Over 40 mi. (65 km) south of SF.

But Santa Clara is a small (by California standards, anyway) city of less than 100,000. It has very few hotels. Even next-door San Jose doesn't have as many as one might expect in a city of 1 million. So many people stayed in SF, and many of the associated events, like "Super Bowl City" and the "NFL Experience", were in SF.

[Baobab]

5. I used to go for walks in the morning, and I would see well dressed older people fishing food out

of restaurant garbage.