 [American Thinker] San Francisco is getting to be a hellhole and not just because crooks are having a field day, or a vast homeless army has prompted new tech 'innovations' in poop-map apps.
It's actually becoming a city with a hollowed out look, redolent of some place like Steubenville, Ohio or maybe Utica, New York, during the bad years, empty storefronts and missing young people. So much for the trope that leftwing cities, with their walkable boulevards full of food trucks, handmade crafts, knitting shops, bookstores, artisan cheese shops, gourmet restaurants, and cafes are more lively and liveable than rightwing places. For awhile, that did seem to be the story. But it's coming to an end. Sure, there's vast wealth. But despite California being in an economic boom, the place is starting to look like Venezuela.
The U.K. Guardian of all places has a haunting report:
It the beginning of this decade, one beloved block in San Francisco had a taqueria, a flower shop and a bookstore. Sparky’s diner, a favorite final hangout for night owls, queer teens and the blackout drunk, was open round the clock.
Today, this block of Church Street just south of Market has the kind of abandoned storefronts that are usually a shorthand for declining mill towns, not centers of the tech future. But all those closed shops are emblematic of today’s San Francisco, where even in upscale areas, the city’s economic boom can look surprisingly like an economic crisis.
What this represents is a strange, second-wave gentrification, in which an influx of well-heeled residents means not Blue Bottle coffee shops and Kinfolk-inspired interior design stores, but emptiness.
Nobody mentions that maybe people don't want to shop in some place where a drunk is puking in the doorway and the district attorney doesn't want to prosecute, so the pukes ... and homeless camps and other quality life issues --- affect the quality of life. In San Francisco, the well-heeled locals can always order online.
But it goes well beyond that. The city has chased out its poor people. And it's happening worst in disproportionately blue states. Taxes, minimum-wage hikes, greenie regulations, freezes on new construction, rent control, all supposedly to help 'working families' have all had one unintended consequence - hitting the poor as hard as possible, driving them to move out.
After all, anyone with a six- or seven-figure salary in some lawyer or tech job has no problem buying or renting a house in San Francisco. But these aren't the people who going to be manning the cash registers in some low-margin business on the first floor. Housing costs have been driven so high by leftist taxes, environmental regulations, and NIMBY-ism that the low-margin shops, the startups, and poor are the ones who in the end bear the brunt of all the 'reforms.'
There's no place for the working poor in a blue city whose entire economic model is premised on taxing 'the rich.' New Yorkers have told me that this empty storefront effect was first seen in Michael Bloomberg's New York, by the way, home to similar unintended consequences from the same supposedly help-the-poor policies. 
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I'm afraid no additional evidence is needed.