San Francisco bans tobacco smoking inside apartments…but pot is OK
Meanwhile, San Francisco rents are plummeting.
There is even more bureaucratic insanity that is being implemented by law in California.
Officials in San Francisco have banned renters from smoking tobacco in their apartments. However, smoking a marijuana joint inside rental units is perfectly fine.
The Board of Supervisors approved the new law in 10 to 1 vote, making San Francisco the largest city in the country to adopt the tough measure against tobacco smokers, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Lawmakers originally proposed to ban marijuana smoking in buildings, but they reversed their position after cannabis activists protested that it was the only legal place they could smoke.
San Francisco is now one of 63 California cities and counties implementing such a smoking ban.
Those against the ban argued that it infringed on their rights inside their homes. Supporters said it’s important to protect the health of nonsmokers — particularly low-income residents who live in dense apartment buildings.
…The Department of Public Health will be responsible for enforcing the new law. Under the ordinance, the department must first try to educate violators and help smokers quit. Repeat offenders could be fined $1,000 a day but can not be evicted for a smoking violation.
In related news, the average apartment rents in San Francisco are now down more than 25 percent since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
In November, median rents in San Francisco stood at $2,054 for a one-bedroom apartment and $2,377 for a two-bedroom – down 3.4 percent for the month and 24.5 percent since March, according to data from ApartmentList.
It comes as fears of density in the pandemic, harsh lockdown policies, and sharply rising violent crime all contribute to a mass exodus from expensive coastal cities, hollowing out rents.
Meanwhile, more affordable mid-size cities have seen rental markets heat up, with Boise, Idaho leading the pack with median rents up 9 percent since March – though they are still less than half of the prices in San Francisco.
To turn around a phrase from the famous “Field of Dreams”: If you destroy it, they will leave.
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All those prayers to San Andreas, and this is what we get?
San Francisco…. A work free drug zone.
Pot smells a lot worse – these days, most pot smells like skunk.
They left wants you stoned and sexually and perversely active. The better to lure you into slavery.
If everyone’s lighting up blunts then that covers up the smell of the human feces that literally blankets the sidewalks.
Even better; if enough people are constantly stoned they don’t care or even notice they’re knee deep in s***. Which keeps the sanitation department workers happy; fewer calls about s*** on the sidewalks. Which, let’s face it, they’re not going to respond to anyway. Why would they? They’re royalty.
Fun San Francisco fact 1: The average RETIRED city worker gets a pension check that’s more than the average private sector worker who is still working.
Fun San Francisco fact 2: Good luck finding a private sector worker in San Francisco. There aren’t many of them and they’re getting fewer in number practically by the hour.
Fun San Francisco fact 3: Try opening a private business in San Francisco. To increase the fun factor try opening a business that involves food service. You’ll spend years trying to navigate the state, county, and local regulations and, Hell, for all I know throw the California Coastal Commission into the mix for an added layer of government strangulation. I know that people do open businesses in SF but as far as I can tell it’s impossible unless your name is Pelosi or Feinstein, or you’re connected with the Pelosis or Feinsteins, or you’re paying off the Pelosis and Feinsteins.
Keep in mind that at some point in during your navigation of the regulatory maze you will have to have a signed lease in hand. I’m not sure if you need to have the lease (or ownership of the property) in hand to start the process but at some point you’ll need it. So you’re going to be paying rent on a useless, empty space for what could easily stretch into two or more years before you’re allowed to use it (basically to start a business you need to be already stinking rich and just looking for an expensive hobby).
Keep in mind that SF lurched so far to the left that Gavin Newsom couldn’t survive politically. He became too “reich wing” and, shudder! Was a capitalist.
He did open a business in San Francisco and apparently did well. Which is now the kiss of death in SF politics. How did he manage to do that? It helps that his aunt was married to Ron Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s brother-in-law. With connections like that even I could be successful in business in San Francisco.
Fun San Francisco Fact 4: I don’t know all that much about Gavin Newsom because he disgusts me and I don’t want to waste my time learning about him. But apparently he has the same blue collar roots as Joe Biden. Entirely made up.
He apparently had a close personal relationship with Gordon Getty. Yes, that Getty family. Gordon Getty says Newsom was like a son to him. He bankrolled Newsom’s first business, then backed his other ventures. If you have the Getty family fortune behind you then, sorry, you’re not going to convince me you’re a self-made millionaire who pulled yourself up from the mean streets by your own bootstraps.
Newsom’s first business was a wine boutique that did wine tasting in addition to sales. Somebody in the SF government decided that wine is a food, therefore Newsom was in the food service industry, so he needed to install a sink for a mop.
A $27,000 sink. To mop up a carpeted space. I’m familiar with this species of Kali bureaucrat. I don’t know anyone who successfully started a business in SF, or even tried. I do know a guy who bought a lot east of San Diego and attempted to get all the permits to try and build a custom home on it. Bureaucrats working for the state and county really don’t want people building homes so they pour over the laws and regulations looking for any excuse to stop that sort of activity. They declared it an Indian heritage site. They never looked at the property; they just declared it. So he had to hire an archeologist to conduct a detailed study of the land and report that, no, there wasn’t a single arrowhead or any other artifact on the property. Then they declared it a federally protected wetland, which also of course means you can’t build on it.
Again, they didn’t bother to look at it. It’s not actually hard for regulators to declare a piece of land a federally protected wetland. Basically if during most years you’ve got a puddle that lasts more than x number of days it’s a wetland. But this property was in semi-desert. In the mountains. It was practically on a 45 degree slope. When it does rain out there there’s no place for water to form a puddle. The rain hits the nearly concrete-hard sun-baked dirt and immediately runs off. So he had to hire another specialist to do another detailed survey of the property and confirm the land was, in fact, not a wetland.
Every time this guy knocked down one B.S. excuse after another the regulators would invent another one. Then he’d knock that down, which involved laying out cash to hire a state/county certified specialist to prepare a report (the bureaucrats and these certified specialists HAD to be related; more on that in a minute). Then they’d throw up another roadblock. I worked with the guy on a defense contracting project for two years and he was spending tens of thousands of dollars on regulatory compliance (in addition to the hundreds of thousands he spent just purchasing the property) and in two years he never got far enough along with the process to break ground.
Another friend of mine, a general contractor, bought some property within the city limits of some anal retentive town in San Mateo county (just south of San Francisco). His plan was to subdivide it into four properties, build homes on each, then sell the properties and make a killing.
Wrong. In this particular town in San Mateo county you can’t develop a property without first doing a tree survey. They’re all about conservation, doncha know. Then you have to convince these SF libs to approve your plan to cut down each tree. So he pays a state/county (and possibly city) certified specialist to do the tree survey and file the report.
In order to build the homes he wanted to construct he had to cut down something north of twenty trees. He was able to get the necessary officials to agree to let him cut down the trees. But that was just the first step. Then he needed to get permits to cut down each tree. And he couldn’t just cut the trees down himself, which as a general contractor he was quite capable of doing. No, to get the permits he had to hire an approved specialist to fell the trees. The county had a list, and you couldn’t get the permits unless you had a contract with one of them (again, this is such a sweet racket you just know the approved contractors are related t to the bureaucrats). And these guys could basically charge whatever they wanted. I believe at the time the going rate was something like $2K per tree. So after paying for the lot, and then paying the permit fees, filing fees, etc., now he’s looking at another $40k to have the trees removed. He just couldn’t do it. So, like my co-worker in San Diego he held title to a piece of property that was absolutely useless. Clearly the guy should have done his due diligence, but he had been doing general contracting in the county for a couple of decades and he thought he was up to speed on the laws. Had the property been outside the city limits he could have done it. No wonder he got the land for a bargain price. You could own the title to the place. You were allowed to step foot on the place. But you couldn’t do anything with it other than hike on it and pay taxes.
He couldn’t even unload the land. Nobody is going to pay much money for the privilege/headaches of owning some land in trust for the people of Kali in perpetuity.
So how did Newsom get SF to drop the $27k sink requirement? Gordon Getty, you may have guessed, is a high-powered mover/shaker/bundler/financier/campaign bankroller in Kali Democrat party politics. And his aunt is married to the brother of Nancy Pelosi’s hubbie. Somebody in city hall didn’t recognize the name Newsom. Had his name been Getty or Pelosi they wouldn’t have messed with him in the first place. I guarantee you that when somebody from Pelosi’s office, or somebody working for another Kali dem that Getty owns, made that phone call Newsom had a dozen messages on his answering machine by six a.m. the next morning begging for his forgiveness.
Fun San Francisco fact 5: When Newsom ran for Mayor of SF he cited his problems opening a wine boutique in the city as an example of the kind of regulatory madness he was going to eliminate. But as SF turned into a feces encrusted workers paradise and few remaining subjects of SF decided that private sector employers were something to destroy Newsom changed his tune. For the sake of his political future.
Gavin Newsom or a member of the Pelosi/Feinstein crime families can open a business in SF. YOU, on the other hand, can not. And if for some stupid reason you start a business in some other part of the state and start making some money the next thing you’ll notice is Richard Blum (Feinstein’s “investor” husband) sitting in your office demanding a chunk of it if you want to keep it.
On the uptick, it is a step in a good direction. Ingesting the fumes of burning vegetable matter cannot be a good thing for the pink, delicate tissues of a lung.
Tobacco may rot your lungs, but pot will rot your lungs and your brain.
Half the country voted to empower the vile Dhimmi-crats to perpetuate and expand this kind of petty, infantile, and utterly insane totalitarianism, on a national scale.
If you’re stupid enough to support Dhimmi-crats, you shouldn’t be surprised when they predictably implement their insane agenda to micromanage and control every facet of individuals’ existence.
In other news:
Heroin, si; hydroxychloroquine, no.
I’m surprised that the leftist jackal California Legislature hasn’t instituted a total State wide ban…
I spent 17 years in HOA management in the State of California… This topic, (banning tobacco use in private residences) was being discussed ad infinitum, for the last 3 years I was working…
Never a decision by our elected officials… Kick the can down the road for miles… It will get resolved after they retire and they can spend their sunset years living off a fat pension and the HUGE slush fund paid for with yearsp of blowing moneyed interests…
How about enforcing the current building codes in the state? Hell yeah, they are too onerous, but when built correctly, they prohibit the issues of neighbours smelling ANYTHING… The issue then becomes moot…
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It’s not an issue of neighbors smelling anything.
It’s an issue of: tobacco bad; pot good;
If they were concerned about neighbors smelling smoke, then they would ban pot as well, as its smell travels just as far; smells just as bad; and is as hard to get out furniture and clothing as tobacco.
We have hundreds of these demented liberals moving to my county. Not only do the profess the same policies they are running from, they believe themselves superior after a months residence.
To a person, every single “family”, in quotes because they are never actual families. They are white younger couples or older white couples, always childless are here because of URBAN VIOLENCE. The first question they ask the realtor and the home inspectors is if we have urban violence. The second question is a whispered question as to the “black population”. They then buy homes sight unseen.
The Titanic is sinking and these fools are shuffling the deck furniture.
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Can one imagine a non-liberal, non-commie SF? A good thought!
Yes, I can imagine it… San Francisco is where the “Vigilence Committees” were formed…
Back in the good old days…
Does this law PREVENT landlords from banning pot smoking?
If I was a landlord, I would ban both cigarette and pot smoking, because the smell of pot is just as hard to get out as the smell of tobacco.
But then, I could see a city like SF actually telling landlords they can’t ban pot smoking.