A new, sold-out tour has emerged in San Francisco, promising to provide visitors a glimpse of the “urban decay” that has taken hold of one of America’s wealthiest cities.
The “Doom Loop Walking tour” promises an up close and personal view of “open-air drug markets, the abandoned tech offices, the outposts of the non-profit industrial complex, and the deserted department stores” that make up downtown San Francisco.
“You’ve read the headlines, you’ve seen the Tweets, now get close and personal to the Doom and Squalor of downtown San Francisco!”
The anonymous tour guide, a self-proclaimed “political junkie and opinionated loudmouth,” is a “card-carrying City Commissioner” and co-founder of one of the city’s largest neighborhood associations. The guide glibly declared the tour was created as a “result of his mental-health crisis” after spending hundreds of hours on both sides of the government dais, shouting into the opposite abyss.”
Organizers from SF Anonymous Insider are charging $30 to take tourists from City Hall to SoMa to see the city’s “squalor.” https://t.co/HxCRhk632m
— The San Francisco Standard (@sfstandard) August 9, 2023
Promising tourists they will find no better expert, the guide assures that patrons will discover the “policy choices that made America’s wealthiest city the nation’s innovative leader of housing crisis, addiction crisis, mental-health crisis, & unrepentant crime crisis.”
In neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Tenderloin District homelessness, drug abuse and crime reign supreme. There, drug users abuse substances out in the open, businesses use incense to cover up the stench of human excrement that litter the sidewalks and broken glass from car windows litter the streets, the Financial Times reported.
Shoplifting has become such an issue that grocery stores and drug stores have been forced to either shutter their stores or alter their operating hours to deal with the rising crime. One such Walgreens in the Richmond district is reportedly hit by shoplifters 15-20 times a day. To cope, Walgreens has been forced to put locks on their freezers, one of the hardest hit sections of the store. (RELATED: San Francisco Walgreens Robbed On Air During CNN Segment)
“How can a city with a $14.6 billion annual budget be a model of urban decay? How can it spend $776.8 million per year on police and have no rule of law to show for it? How can it spend $690 million on homeless services and receive an official United Nations condemnation for its treatment of the homeless (“cruel and inhuman”; “violation of multiple human rights”)?” the tour guide posited.
The 1.5-mile tour will take visitors from City Hall through the city’s Tenderloin district, Union Square and Mid-Market with all proceeds “donated to a non-profit that does not actively degrade its community.”
Sneakers are “recommended.”