'Doom and Squalor': San Fran Commish to Hold Walking Tour, Show City's Decay for $30

This is real.

A San Francisco native billed as a political junkie & opinionated loudmouth —but who is also reportedly a city commissioner —is charging $30 dollars for a Downtown Doom Loop Walking Tour of the crime-ridden city.

Here are the details from the event’s site:

You’ve read the headlines, you’ve seen the Tweets, now get close and personal to the Doom and Squalor of downtown San Francisco!

How can a city with a $14.6 billion annual budget be a model of urban decay? How can it spend $776.8 million per year on police and have no rule of law to show for it? How can it spend $690 million on homeless services and receive an official United Nations condemnation for its treatment of the homeless (“cruel and inhuman”; “violation of multiple human rights”)?

The tour will start at City Hall, and continue through Mid-Market, the Tenderloin, and Union Square. We will view the open-air drug markets, the abandoned tech offices, the outposts of the non-profit industrial complex, and the deserted department stores.

Discover the policy choices that made America’s wealthiest city the nation’s innovative leader of housing crisis, addiction crisis, mental-health crisis, & unrepentant crime crisis.

You will find no better expert. Your guide is an urban policy professional, card-carrying City Commissioner overseeing a municipal department with an annual budget over $500m, and cofounder of San Francisco’s largest neighborhood association. He has spent hundreds of hours on both sides of the government dais, shouting into the opposite abyss. (This event is the result of his own mental-health crisis.)

Total walking distance 1.5 miles. Sneakers advised.

Proceeds will be donated to a non-profit that does not actively degrade its community.

Not everyone is happy with the walking tour.

“Why would anyone pay $30 to walk around areas they can see for free?” Randy Shaw, executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, told The Standard in an email. “If people want to see the highlights of the Tenderloin’s history and tour the national Uptown Tenderloin Historic District, they can join a weekly tour put on by the Tenderloin Museum.”