I was last in San Francisco about three years ago.  Back then, the City was already degrading.  In the years since then, with help from COVID, the Bay Area has degraded even further.  This is what leftism does to communities.

The San Francisco Bay Area is meant to be a jewel-like place sitting on the blue-green Bay, surrounded by natural beauty and crowned by a city once renowned for its natural and architectural beauty.  I know these things because I grew up in the City and spent most of my life living in or near it.  There are few things more ravishing than to stand at the Marin headlines overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, the San Francisco Bay, and the San Francisco skyline.  If there's no fog, it takes your breath away.

San Francisco used to be beautiful even on closer inspection.  The Marina District offered beautiful 1930s-style Art Deco architecture, the lovely Presidio, and the vast green swathe of the Marina Green on the Bay.  By the 1980s, Golden Gate Park had finally been repaired after the damage the Hippies caused.  Fisherman's Wharf, Chinatown, and North Beach were all touristy, but they were relatively clean, safe, and great fun.  And San Francisco's Union Square Area and theater district were fun, provided you didn't wander too far west into the Tenderloin.

For a while, in the 1990s, thanks to the money the tech titans were pouring into the City, it got even more sparkling and lovely.  But then the hard-left policies took over.  By then, I'd moved to Marin to raise my family, so I wasn't paying attention to what was going on in San Francisco.  Still, when I went there on errands, I noticed increasing numbers of homeless wherever I looked.  They'd always been in the downtown area, but now they were camping all over the place.

Even though I'd heard about the poop maps, San Francisco's decay didn't really strike me under three years ago, when a friend and I were in theater district one evening, walking back to our car.  We were on the edge of the Tenderloin but heading to a street that used to be safe enough.  In the 1990s, it might have a handful of homeless people, so we weren't worried.

However, as we started down the street, my friend and I realized that it was wall-to-wall humanity: no tents; just dozens of people on both sides of the street, sitting and lying there in their vomit and excrement, with needles scattered about.

When I'm near the homeless, I don't look at them because the paranoid ones get set off if you make eye contact.  My friend, however, grew up in a small town and believes that you must recognize the homeless as human beings (which is very decent for the ones who aren't paranoid).

For that reason, she was walking down the street saying, 'Hello.  Hi.  Hello," to everyone we passed.  It was too late for me to shut her up or stop her, so I just tried for the powerful martial arts walk.

Eventually, we made it safely down the street, at which point my friend turned to me, clutched my arm, and said, "I've never been so frightened in my life."

As I said, that was a few years ago.  For more on San Francisco in that period, you can check out Tucker Carlson's American Dystopia series, which you can find on this page.

Unbelievably, the Bay Area has gotten even worse.  Yesterday, I got this email from a friend:

Went to chat with a friend of mine at my old workplace in Oakland this weekend. It's in the railyards and there are large homeless encampments nearby.

OMG. Take whatever crazy Mad Max/RoboCop/district 9 dystopian movie you care to imagine. Then amplify the chaos about three times.

Fights. Fires. Cars & RVs burned out all over. It used to be a bit of "urban camping." Some even used to have jobs. But not this current mob. I've seen pics of Brazilian and Indian shanty towns that are neat and civilized compared to this lot. Unbelievable.

So how did we get here? Rumor has it that this is the direct result of the state redirecting resources to illegal immigrants. Don't know if it's true. Whatever it is, it's bad.

What a s--- show. My head is exploding. I've never seen anything close to this kind of squalor and dangerous degradation before.

As I said to my friend, three years ago, I walked through Purgatory.  Just three short years later, my friend found himself walking through Hell.  This didn't happen by accident.  This is what Democrats do to the places under their control.

Image: Homeless encampment in Oakland. YouTube screengrab.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.