Richie Greenberg, former independent mayoral candidate in San Francisco, California, said on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with host Joel Pollak that the majority of the city’s residents have “no hope for a return” to the normalcy of its “pre-pandemic” status quo.
Greenberg linked ongoing layoffs by the world’s largest technology companies in and around Silicon Valley to San Francisco’s worsening economic circumstances. He noted that small businesses in San Francisco were further harmed by lockdowns and shutdowns imposed by the state and local governments across California, ostensibly to reduce COVID-19 transmission.
“Some of the biggest tech companies in the city and in the country are laying off tens of thousands of employees,” he remarked, “and then with a permanent work-from-home plan for other tech companies, there’s no hope for a return to normal for years and years.”
Greenberg added, “There’s a lot of pressure now being put on Mayor London Breed to find a way to revive our downtown. At this point, myself, my colleagues, and a majority of other people here in the city don’t believe that it’s going to come back in its pre-pandemic state.
“We don’t even know when it could ever come back to that point,” he emphasized.
San Francisco’s city council is mostly controlled by “Marxists,” “anarchists,” and “far-left liberals” who impose “pro-crime” and “pro-criminal” policies, Greenberg stated. He highlighted the status quo of the Tenderloin, a neighborhood in the city known for its high volume of drug addiction, vagrancy, destitution, and homelessness.
“It just getting worse and worse,” Greenberg said of criminality and lawlessness across the Tenderloin, ignored by law enforcement, and commensurate increases in the brazenness of those committing crimes in public view.
He continued, “We have data that just came out — again — in the last couple of days showing more drug overdoses. The dealers on the street don’t even care if there are security cameras. They don’t care if there are police walking by. They don’t care about anything openly. They don’t even hide their faces at this point. There are hundreds of active 24-hour-a-day drug-dealing dealers. Whatever it is you want, they can get for you, operating in the Tenderloin area and elsewhere.
Drug dealers and drug users operate “unabated,” 24 hours a day,” and in an “open market” in the Tenderloin, he repeated.
Breitbart News reported on San Francisco’s city government’s consideration of a race-based “reparations” policy to issue lump-sum payments of $5 million to eligible black city residents.
Such a “racist” government program, Greenberg held, would further damage San Francisco’s prosperity by driving away businesses and reducing the establishment of new businesses.
He said, “There’s no way anyone would want to move or open a business and relocate a corporation to this city if this went through, because that would show them that [the city is] willing to have either [increased] property taxes or some special business tax assessment to be used to pay these kinds of so-called reparations.”
A “reparations” program “would absolutely decimate our city,” he concluded. “People would leave.”
Breitbart News Sunday broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Eastern.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.