San Francisco’s Recovery From Covid Response Jeopardizes Its S&P Credit Rating
Meanwhile, San Francisco threw a party for the opening of its new $1.7 million public restroom….showing if you are going to go down the drain, do so in style!
The last time we checked on San Francisco, its famous bay became the site of a secret geoengineering experiment.
While the test may not have produced more rain, Golden Gate City still faces plenty of doom.
Legal Insurrection readers will recall San Francisco had some of the most draconian local lockdowns during the COVID pandemic.
The slow recovery has led S&P Global Ratings to change its outlook on San Francisco’s debt from stable to negative.
San Francisco’s sluggish recovery from the pandemic, coupled with growing budgetary expenditures, threatens to deteriorate the city’s ability to repay its debt, according to S&P Global Ratings.
The outlook on the city-county’s outstanding general obligation and appropriation debt was cut to negative from stable this week by the ratings company. The weakness in the city’s commercial real estate market and tourism activity were factors that drove the move, S&P said. Adding to the city’s burdens, San Francisco’s budget expenditures outpaced revenue growth in fiscal 2023.
“We believe management will be challenged to make the cuts needed to restore it to budgetary balance during the outlook horizon, which could lead to rating pressure if the city’s general fund reserves decline precipitously,” S&P said in a release.
Persistent work-from-home habits, inordinately expensive real estate, homelessness and crime are colliding to threaten the city’s growth and its spot among the world’s top-tier metropolises.
The iconic ratings agency hasn’t downgraded the city’s credit rating, which is still at “AAA.” However, this indicates that the fiscal future is cloudy with a chance of pain.
This forecast aligns with very troubling developments in the real estate market.
The city’s housing market, in particular, has been hit hard over the past year, with prices plummeting and homeowners fleeing in droves.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon didn’t mince words when he compared San Francisco’s woes to those of New York City, calling the Bay Area “in far worse shape.”
“I think every city, like every country, should be thinking about what makes an attractive city,” Dimon told Maria Bartiromo in an interview on Fox Business.
“It’s parks, it’s art, but it’s definitely safety, it’s jobs and job creation, it’s the ability to have affordable housing. Any city that doesn’t do a good job will lose its population.”
San Francisco is failing on all fronts and in turn, its housing market is quietly crashing.
Once-luxurious properties are now listing and selling for massive discounts just to attract buyers.
The is a lengthy list of reasons for San Francisco’s metropolitan collapse.
- Anti-Israel protesters targeting the bridges, shutting down traffic.
- Violent offenders allowed to walk the streets, and beating 94-year old women because of her race.
- San Francisco’s famous poop maps.
- The city’s experiment with “safe injection sites”..which has resulted in drug addicts outnumbering high school students there.
But the cherry on top of this failure sundae is the $1.7 million public toilet.
San Francisco closed the lid Sunday on the saga of a $1.7 million public restroom. To commemorate the commode’s installation, residents celebrated at a “potty party” they called the Toilet Bowl.
Lookie-loos lined up in the Noe Valley Town Square to give the loo a whirl. A band played songs including “Sloop John B” by the Beach Boys. (“This is a song about a john!” the band leader explained.) Children sipped lemonade and ate chocolate cupcakes while they tossed bean bags into plastic training potties on the ground.
San Francisco may have been a laughingstock over the news that it planned to spend $1.7 million to construct a single public restroom with a sink and toilet, getting skewered by late-night comedians and inspiring the “it” costume at Halloween parties.
This shows that if showing if you are going to go down the drain, do so in style!
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Comments
Fiddling while San Francisco burns.
Ahem – it’s San Francisco… ”
FiddlingDiddling while San Francisco burns.Wink wink nudge nudge
Just downgrade them to Junk and discourage people loaning them money.
NYC established in the 70s that the law says that full faith and credit doesn’t mean full faith and credit (see Municipal Assistance Corporation), so I’m surprised that anybody buys blue city debt at any interest rate.
A restroom that surely won’t turn into a drug den.
…and a cruising destination.
Perhaps it is a pay toilet?
Well, Taxpayers paid a million dollars…
Is that the straight poop?
Blocks of SF are open air latrine nowadays. smh
IKR — why pay when you can s–t on the sidewalk for free?
It’s beyond SF to cart off its bum poop, so they opened a restroom in hopes the bums would deliver instead? Optimists!
“San Francisco may have been a laughingstock over the news that it planned to spend $1.7 million to construct a single public restroom with a sink and toilet”
Nonsense. Public restrooms are a fine way for municipalities to launder money.
Back in the 2000s, our local cowboy town had two “permanent” residents that lived in their own little hobo camp in the (usually) dry river under the bridge. One was mentally challenged, but the other was practically urbane, a hobo by choice, who collected cans to eat. When he died, to everyone’s surprise, he left $245K to town charities, managed by his own foundation. One of the stipulations in the will was that a portion of the money had to be used to construct a public restroom in the postage-stamp park at the bridge, for the convenience of his long-time friend.
Through great good fortune, there was exactly enough money in the bequest for the town to “make sure it was done right” by tearing it down twice and starting over, to correct deficiencies such as “the tile was not right.”
(No one ever saw the companion actually use the restroom. About three years ago, he fell ill enough to be hospitalized, the hospital ran his prints to ID him, and he was reunited into the custody of his brother in Scottsdale, who had been looking for him for 20 years.)
Built to please NV residents, but wholly useless as a defecation depot.
|t|t|t|t|t| S |…….
——————-/—/ |
Snail shell entry. No locking door. Plate steel dividers. A grated floor shit-weir for hose-downs.
Time to update the old classic:
“I left my poo in San Francisco ….”
More than likely someone else’s came back with you on your shoe.
The Commercial real estate market is very bad. Covid and the lingering impacts of the foolish policies enacted during ‘Rona Mania’ are crippling it. Remote work has left property managers wth fewer leases. The loans the banks hold on these properties are shaky at best. When/if the banks are forced to mark to market their ‘assets’ gonna drop like stone…which makes them insolvent…which creates a bank run as depositors shift funds out … which impacts the stock price valuation of the Banking industry, financial services companies…which causes the Fed Reserve to do ‘something’. End tightening? Maybe. Heck the bailout funds for banks have already been run down by the earlier issues last year.
Bottom line is when, not if IMO, the commercial real estate market and its financial backers are finally forced to mark to market for the true value of these properties it could be very ugly for many people across the Nation who don’t personally have any direct ties to commercial real estate.
Adam schiff got his car broken into and his luggage stolen from parking garage in SF. lol
That is all right because we can be almost positive that it was done by a DEI/Affirmative Action “protected class” member. So in California it was not a crime.
Subotai Bahadur
Didn’t Pelosi pay off all of SF debt a few year’s back?
I worked for electrician contractor in SF and Marin- We did a lot of wiring upgrade work on faulty old home circuits in Noe Valley.
Residents were very wealthy, and in return, Gerard extracted a lot of wealth for services rendered. He was honest and highly competent. Just expensive. Lots of super wealthy gaymen couples.
The older houses were really well maintained on the outsides – but look inside the guts of the house and .. ay, caramba! 14gauge stranded wire pulled through abandoned ancient 1/2 brass gas pipe, loops of mice-gnawed wire, 1/2 of rat droppings on floor behind behind poorly built attic firewalls.
I always thought it all a metaphor about wealth.
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