Can San Francisco Have a Quick Comeback ? | Tony Hall

San Francisco was a glorious city. What made San Francisco was its culture, its people. They were benevolent, they were fun-loving, and all that's gone. And what happened? We've got an abnormal amount of street crime. It's in your face. People are fearful. San Francisco's lost over 100,000 people in the last three years, yet the homeless population has grown by three times and we're spending ten times as much money as we did 20 years ago. Something's wrong. My guest today is Tony Hall. He's San Francisco's former county supervisor. He's going to talk about why San Francisco is losing its unique culture and if it's possible to get its culture back. We're being asked to, guess what, you are going to have to live with a good portion of the population being homeless. You are going to have to live with the crime that comes out of the drug world. You're going to have to accept this as a way of life. I don't accept that. It might be a little bit exaggerated. Not exaggerated at all. If they don't take bold approaches to correct their problems, San Francisco will be just like Detroit in the 60s and 70s. I'm CMA Karami. Welcome to California Insider. Tony, it's great to have you back on. Welcome back. CMA, it's like coming home. Listen, again, before we start in, thank you for what you and your crew are doing to inform Californians. It's so important. Your show is informing Californians as to the real-life solutions, not only to our problems, but solutions. Without that, nothing will change for the good, and I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, Tony. We want to talk to you about San Francisco. There's been a lot of news about San Francisco, and we cover it because we care about the city. Some people might be covering it because there's hype in the news, but we really care about the city. Can you tell us what's going on? There's been some retailers that went out of business, and then it caused the shopping center to go out, and there's a couple of other buildings. What's happening there? Well, you mentioned people love San Francisco. I'm one of those people that dedicated my life to it. I love it. I've raised my seven children there. I love the city, the culture, everything about it. It's history more than the way it's going today. What's happening today is it's on an accelerated decline because a lot of people have heard stories, most of them true, some of them not true. Why is it declining? In my opinion, and I've got a long history with that city, both in public service and in private service, the problems are man-made. We've got an abnormal amount of street crime. Not that other cities don't have it, but in a little city like San Francisco, it's in your face. People are fearful. We have corporations and businesses that can no longer make a living in that city. As you know, most chain operations, Nordstrom, Target, drug companies, CVS, Walgreens, their profit margin is very little. And when you start stealing, some of those operations work on a profit margin of 3% to 5%. If you allow people to go in and steal at random, there goes their profit. So they're saying, look, we'd rather not operate in an area where we're not going to make any profit. They're moving out of town. That's what's happening between crime, the homeless on the streets in San Francisco, not that they're the cause of all the crime, but the very fact their presence is deterring people from coming to that city. Those are your two major things. Corporations, be they woke or not, don't want to deal with that. They don't want to deal with it. So they're leaving the city. That's why they're leaving. A lot of residents are leaving because they figure it's just not worth it anymore to raise my kids. They can't play on the street unless they're in certain very protected suburbs, not suburbs, neighborhoods. What we see on the ground in San Francisco, what is causing it? Why do we see this homelessness? Why is this place out of control? It might be a little bit exaggerated, but there's also a lot going on. It's not exaggerated at all. What you can see in San Francisco is the result of bad policy. When I was on the Board of Supervisors 20 years ago, we outlaid less than $200 million per year. Our budget was less than $3 billion a year. It's now $14.6 billion. And regardless of what they tell you, we're spending about $2 billion a year on homeless services, $2 billion, for a homeless population that went three times bigger now than it was, that has grown three times bigger than when I was on the Board. Then we had 7,000 to 9,000 a year. And a lot of this can be debated by who's doing the count, but San Francisco today has about 20,000 to 21,000 homeless people living in that city. Why, when we're spending the kind of money? We're spending four times more per homeless person than any city in the country, which probably translates to any city in the world. When you devise programs that are not self-sustaining and you open the door, these programs, we're going to give you food, housing, and medical. Those services cost anywhere between 7 and 10 times what it is to give them just the cash. So now we're talking about our doors are open to the homeless throughout the country. So they're coming. They're coming to San Francisco. Of course they're coming. Because we're hearing a lot of them are from different places. They're often 80% of them are from out of town. Now, I've got a solution. I'll run that by you. But 80% of them are out of town. We're spending on a budget of $14.6 billion for a population in San Francisco that has moved from 950,000 down to 831,000, and our population has shrunk because businesses and people are leaving. Yet the homeless population has grown by 3 times, and we're spending 10 times as much money as we did 20 years ago. Something's wrong. And we're not doing anything for the homeless. The way to do this, the way to handle this problem, CMAC, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, this is something I've studied for 25 years. We are going to have to put a limit on how many homeless people we treat. Have you thought that weight gain, fatigue, stiff and achy joints, or digestive discomfort that are often mistaken for signs of aging are probably caused by us eating healthy foods? According to Dr. Stephen Gondry, a cardiologist and heart surgeon, these beautiful products hide toxins that lead to leaky gut. The good news is that this can be easily fixed from your own home. It's very simple. You just have to know which foods are actually healthy and which contains the hidden toxin. So you can go find these yourself at gutcleanseprotocol.com slash californiainsider. That's gutcleanseprotocol.com slash californiainsider. After years of research, Dr. Gondry has decided to release an informative video to the public, free. It will show exactly which foods you need to avoid. Go find that video at gutcleanseprotocol.com slash californiainsider. Now let's go back to the interview. When you mention homeless, essentially what we're seeing in the footages that we see and from the people that we've talked to on the streets, it's usually young people on drugs. Like, is that... A big portion of it is. A good... Yes, some people are just out of luck. Some people are in a hard time. Financial challenges. Yes, so not all of it. But those are from San Francisco, right? The ones that are out of luck, mainly... No, they're from all over the country. They still come there. California CMX services one-third of the homeless in the nation. We have an excess of 180, 190,000 homeless people. A third of all homeless people in the country are in California. Is it because we are providing the help and they're coming here? Providing. We're not providing help to get them out of homelessness. We're providing the wherewithal to keep them alive. What we're being asked is to accept the homeless industrial complex as a facet of life. We're being asked to... Guess what? You are going to have to live with a good portion of the population being homeless. You are going to have to live with the crime that comes out of the drug world. And we can get into that as another problem. You're going to have to live with that. You're going to have to accept this as a way of life. I don't accept that. If we can't do anything about it, this is not a civilized society. It's not an advanced, educated, civilized society. The proper way to treat the homeless in San Francisco and it would be a good lesson for the nation to say, okay, we're going to treat our homeless people from San Francisco, or at least San Francisco if not the larger Bay Area, let's limit it to 10% of our population, say 9,000 and below, and treat the root causes of homeless. So let's take that $2 billion we're spending and spend it on them and treat the root causes, whether it's drug addiction, substance addiction, mental illness, whatever it is, let's correct that problem and give them a path out of homeless into regular lifestyle. That's humane. That's the real humane approach, not this stuff where we're opening our arms to the world and we're doing everything. That's why we've got 15,000 people living on the street up there. Some people are saying the situation in San Francisco is exaggerated in the media. I was actually on the plane with someone that said their friend lives there. She was from the Bay Area. Her friend lives in San Francisco, and she said people are happy there, the young people. Is it that you come here very concerned? Is it that the people that are happy right now and they're happy with the situation, they're not seeing the future? Well, I would say that person you talked to on the plane, in all due respect, doesn't know what she's talking about because San Francisco's lost over 100,000 people in the last 3 years. All you got to do is walk downtown San Francisco. The only people I see that are really happy are the people from the tents, the homeless camps, or the drug addicts that are out in La La Land. They're happy as hell. No, she's wrong. She's wrong. Families are striving because of the expense to put their kids through school and make a living. The downtown property owners that I talked about, the city fathers, they're beginning to get worried. The politicians that are sucking the blood out of the people that want to fund them are even getting worried because they see the tide changing. No one's happy up there. People, I'm happy when I go there. I'm around my family and friends. Yeah, if that's what she's talking about. But no, San Francisco is a changed city, and anybody that's been there in the last 6 months will tell you this isn't the city that I knew. And it can be again. Yeah, it's got everything going for it, but it's not going to be until people wake up. The direction that San Francisco is going, if nothing changes, you've been in the city for many years, you've been watching the government, you've been watching the policies, what is it going to look like? San Francisco, if nothing changes, if they don't make bold, and I mean bold moves, if they don't, if the city fathers, again, the property owners, the businesses, the corporate people that are headquartered up there, even the mom and pops, the people raising their families out in the districts, if they don't weigh in, get together and elect a mayor and a slate of the Board of Supervisors. It can't be a mayor alone, because you have to have the Board of Supervisors, you have to have so many votes to really change that town. It's got to be a new approach. If they don't take bold approaches to correct their problems, San Francisco will be just like Detroit in the 60s and 70s. It'll be just like parts of Cleveland and ghost cities in this country. That's where it's going, and that's a shame to happen anywhere, much less a city as once great as San Francisco. If we can't come up with the bold moves to correct these problems that are man-made and created by the politicians that live there, then we're not worth our salt. Do you think that's going to happen? Because San Francisco still has a very beautiful location and weather and all that, right? Do you think...? I hope it, I certainly hope it does. More than anything, I hope it does. But you understand we have to treat the problems. If we're going to treat homelessness, let's treat the root causes for the people that are our responsibility, not the 3 quarters of the people from Boston and other parts, from all over the world. There's people living on the street there from all over the world, from Afghanistan, from Mexico, from Venezuela, all over the world, living on the street, living on the largesse and the benevolence of the San Francisco taxpayer. We've had a wonderful tax base compared to L.A., San Diego, some of the eastern cities. Our tax base has been phenomenal. So we've had a lot of fat, and a lot of people can propose foolish programs. But that day is drying up. Now, Tony, you have a big history in the city. Like, you lived there many years. And can you tell us what was San Francisco like? Because we all remember San Francisco being the Paris of the West. San Francisco, CMAC, was a glorious city. Glorious. I say that because it was one of the cities in the world. It was an unusual city. Extreme beauty. But what made San Francisco San Francisco was its culture, its people. They were benevolent. They were fun-loving. They were outgoing, not like in L.A. They didn't live their life outside. In fact, San Francisco was a much more older cosmopolitan city than Los Angeles, where I spent years growing up. San Francisco was magic. And what made it magic was its people. And the people in government really cared about the people they served. And that, it had an unbelievable amount of fraternal organizations, both faith-based, some of not just social organizations that tended to the needs of the poor, that tended to the needs of the needy. And all that's gone. They've died off. The younger generation is not as social. Well, San Francisco, the average San Franciscan you could spot a mile away. You just had a different demeanor about them. When I first went to San Francisco in 1964, I was offered a job as an investigator for the retirement system. My cousin ran the retirement system, told me to go up there, take a test for it. I passed the test, and I was hired as an investigator. And through that position, I was able to meet the mayor at that time, George Christopher. He had just finished his term, second term, I think, maybe his third term as mayor, and people that ran the city. I was very interested in doing public administration. That's what my degree from UCLA was. And I'll never forget, I interned him his last month or two, interned for his office the last month or two of his mayorship. Tremendous man. Probably the best mayor we've ever had, one of the best. But he taught me this. I'll never forget it. He said, if you want to serve the public, if you want to go into public administration, learn how to read a budget. Learn how to read a budget. Know how to allocate resources and direct personnel. And everything you do, I'll never forget, he said, do it for the benefit of the public at large, regardless of race, color, creed. You're going to hear me say that a lot in this interview today. That was George Christopher's philosophy. Never do anything for one person that you can't do for the other. Serve the city. That's why I thought he was such a great man. My cousin, Dan Matrosi, who was a wonderful department head, several different departments, but wound up running the retirement system in San Francisco, which I think you might know is a very large department. He did a lot of public lecturing, and he used to talk about four things, H-I-L-P, hope, honesty, integrity, loyalty, and pride. And San Franciscans had a lot of pride. They didn't acknowledge people from L.A. as being on the same scale. They looked almost down their nose at that time at people from New York. San Franciscans had class, they loved a good time, and they loved everybody. I remember going to that city and thinking, wow, you know, coming from L.A., you didn't go in certain areas, you did this, but San Franciscans all mixed with each other regardless of their political affiliation. They loved to mix with people and debate, and it was all fun. It's a city that really the social activity took place in the restaurants and the pubs. That's where it was different, and it was a very old culture. It was always run by bosses, by city bosses, much like Boss Tweed out of New York. The old-timers, the city fathers, determined who the mayor was going to be. At one time, the board of supervisors that I served on was made up of 22 members. Now it's down to 11. They were all chosen from different facets of the economy, different businesses, but they're all businessmen. So the city fathers, the downtown people that were invested in the city, pretty much selected who they wanted to run the city. And they selected people from across the board. That's the way the city ran. And what was the values like? You mentioned there seems to be a lot of compassion. Was it like that? Oh, it was a lot of fun. They took care of their own, whether they politically agreed with them or not. They took care of the needy. They had a lot of faith-based institutions that took care of different facets of the needy. And it was a very compassionate city. They were very benevolent, very benevolent, and loved life. It had soul in those days, and that soul is now gone. It had an interest, a verve, a vitality about it. And without dwelling on that too long, that's what it was. When I first went there, that's why I fell in love with the city. I wanted to raise a family if I was fortunate, and from then on I went on to have seven kids and have them be part of that cosmopolitan culture. It was the Paris of the West, no doubt about it. And I had done a lot of traveling around, working in different cities before that time. There was no place like San Francisco. No place as beautiful, no place as benevolent, and whose people were more alive than anywhere else. And what happened? So you spent a lot of time in the government, right? You've been serving in different roles. Well, I was fortunate in the fact that I've served as an executive and administrator in seven different departments over all three branches of government, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. I don't think there's been another guy that ever ran for office that did that. But I was fortunate. I worked for those departments as an executive and an administrator in all three branches of government. So I learned over a 33-year period of time how the city functioned, how it should function if it's serving its people, and how it's not functioning. And I've watched this part of it deteriorate over the years. Why? Because people no longer care about going in for public administration, public service. I don't think they teach that anymore. Now politics is devising a program, capitalizing on it, going on to the next ladder. Then I remember specifically if you did anything for yourself other than try to do the job right, that you worked for yourself, you were looked down upon. By your colleagues? Yes. And everybody was looking at everybody. Are you helping the people here? Are you serving these people? You're serving yourself. Serving yourself did not exist then. To work for the city, you had a true civil service, merit-based system. You had to take a test. That was very strong in San Francisco. So what about, you mentioned the people that are vested into the city. I call them city fathers. City fathers. They're people who own the downtown real estate. You just recently heard about the Hilton moving out, Park Hotel moving out. Well, I'm talking about the owners of the land that they're vacating. The hotel operators are gone. They defaulted on their $750 million loan. So now it's up to the owners of that property, the people that actually own that property. And there's a, in San Francisco, there's a big coalition of them, the downtown property owners. They're seeing their properties vacated by stores, by corporations, and they're getting a little worried. The backbone has begun to hit the belly button. They're getting nervous, because over the years, the city fathers used to determine who was in office, the mayor and the board of supervisors. So what is the culture like in San Francisco now? Back in the day, you saw a lot of compassion, you saw the people. It was an amazing place to live, and I wasn't there to join. The culture now? Yeah, what is the culture now in San Francisco? Get ahead in any way you can. Culture now is fighting each other. Everybody's unhappy, everybody's fighting. I don't agree with you, you're a liberal, you're a conservative, I don't agree. Everybody's fighting. Politicians are all looking for that little program that they can say is successful. I'm going to give you shoes for the rest of your life. Aren't I great? And now I'm going to run for the assembly. And now I'm going to run for this. That's all they're in it for. These guys know nothing about serving the public. They're all in it to move ahead and go up the political ladder so they can become president of the United States and more power. What about the average people? You mentioned people who are very compassionate and they would have debates and you go to restaurants. Has that changed, that open mind? Yeah, no one wants to debate anymore. No one wants to say what they really think because they'll be castigated, they'll be targeted as a homophobe or as a racist. You know, the race card is, I'm so sick of hearing about the race card because the San Francisco I grew up in didn't see color. You cannot legislate human feelings. You can't do it. To interject race into the equation completely destroys a true democracy. It doesn't mean we ignore the plight of certain groups. We try to do what we can to help them. But when you start legislating and discriminating, as some of the programs coming out in San Francisco are doing in a big way right now, they're discriminatory. Not only is it illegal by the state of California's constitution but the federal constitution. You cannot discriminate in your dissemination of public service. And once you do, you destroy the economy. You destroy the civilization. So what was it like? You mentioned there was no color. What was it like? Well, you didn't go there because it was wrong. It was wrong. A lot of Irish people in San Francisco, and I'm Irish-Italian, that if I was to say, oh, we're going to do this for the Irish guys because there's a lot of poor people in one part of town, that makes me a racist. Racism is wrong. Racism is dominant today. It's been manufactured as an excuse to do nothing. Now, Tony, if you were in charge tomorrow and you were actually chosen right away to get put in this position to run the city and you had all the support from the supervisors. If I went in with a board that was compliant, that agreed with me, it would be a breeze. That city would be fixed up within a year or two or three. What would you do? Well, I'd do just what I told you. I'd limit. First thing I'd do is say, okay, the inn is closed. We're going to treat 8,000 to 9,000 people who are homeless and living on the street. We're going to give them shelters. Not going to give them permanent housing because I'm not going to support them for the rest of their life. I will give them shelters. I will give them a path out of homelessness. I will give them a path out of homelessness, get them off the street. But I'm not treating people from other parts of the country because we can't treat the people that we have the right way. We have to get to the root causes of their homelessness Is it substance abuse? Did they run on bad times? Is it because they have bad habits? We have to treat that. And I will treat San Franciscans because they're from San Francisco, and I love them, and I want to do what's best for them. But I'm not going to be treating the world here. 21,000 people, the inn's closed, boys. So that's homelessness. Crime? You can go back to the time of Caesar, and you're a historian, I know. If you don't push back against crime, if you don't push back against the people who are exploiting people, stealing from them, harming them, they're going to grow. So you have to have a DA who goes after crime. We've got a very good public defender's office up there, as you know. We have to have DAs who know how to prosecute fairly. Fairly. Go after crime. You have to push back against crime. It'll keep growing. All this stuff about new justice reforms, that's all hogwash. That's, you know, there might be a few aspects that we could use, but you've got to push back against crime. You've got to make a police force whole. The charter calls for 1,800 officers. The charter called for 1,800 officers 20 years ago, 25 years ago. We probably need about 2,500, 3,000. Let's at least get it up. We've got 1,400 now. You know, you mentioned San Francisco has lost its soul, and it's kind of lost that culture that you moved to, you moved in. How are you going to fix that if you were? You have to promote an atmosphere of honesty where everybody can talk, can express themselves. You have to, right now people are afraid. They're afraid because they'll be targeted. You have to make it an open dialogue, and you have to have a certain degree of morality. If you don't have honesty, integrity, loyalty, and pride, as my cousin taught me, and as George Christopher ran his administration, you have nothing. You have gangs. You have the breakdown of a civilization. If you administer because of race, color, or creed, you're automatically eliminating the very heart and soul of what a free enterprise, real democracy can do for its people. You can't do that. That's immoral. It's immoral, and you can't do that. People have to understand the rewards of being honest. They have to understand the rewards of really helping their brother. They have to understand when I say, let's treat a third of our homeless the right way to get them off the street. I'm not saying this for my exercise. I'm saying it for their benefit. Get them off the street. Get them in a productive way of life. Let's not spend five times as much and just bring in the world's homeless and say, hey, live on the street. The values of the city, you mentioned the city's soul is kind of lost, what you moved in, and those values were in the people, right? Yeah. Do you think they're still in the people? The values I'm talking about are real-life solutions to real-life problems, not ideologues' vision of what a city could be like. I'm going to remake the world. Let's help the people that are there. Let's get the soul back. Let's get the soul back by expressing things that we all agree to. Everybody wants to help the downtrodden. Everybody wants to live in a safe environment. Everybody wants to be able to communicate with their neighbor. If we don't allow that, if we don't open it up and allow that, it's not going to happen. You can't have politicians say, I don't believe in this, I want to do this. You can't do it. It doesn't work. So, yeah, the soul's there. It doesn't mean it's just based on one religion or one philosophy. People in San Francisco are very sociable. They want things right. It's there. But you can't have a newspaper that knocks this guy because he's a Catholic or knocks this guy because he's black or knocks this guy because he's white and he shouldn't weigh in on the drug trade. You know, you can't have that. If we were one newspaper town, let's have another media come in and talk about the good things that mankind can do for his brother. Now, Tony, do you have any other thoughts for our audience? The time has come for the people who are most vested in that city, since we're talking about San Francisco, to step up, put your money where your mouth is. Put your money where your mouth is and put your money where your property is or you're going to lose it. So get your act together now, boys. Find someone to run for mayor who believes in the right way to do things and back him up with a slate for the Board of Supervisors so he doesn't get vetoed every other five minutes and can't do anything. That's what you need. That's what you need to correct that city. And then try to get a media organization in there that really tells the truth, not a newspaper town that buys, that's part of the political machinery. That's what you got to do. And short of that, it's going to become a Detroit. And will I stay there? Yeah, I've got a lot of kids and family and friends there, but I'd probably be spending a lot of my free time elsewhere. You know, as many people are making that decision today, they don't want to be around the hardship. It's hard. It's really hard trying to be in public office and serve everybody the way you should. Tony Hall, former Board of Supervisor member in San Francisco. It was great to have you on California Insider. CIMAC, thank you. And again, I really appreciate the opportunity to speak my mind. You know, you don't get a lot of that up in San Francisco. And hopefully you'll continue doing what you're doing so that many people can speak their mind. Because unless people hear it, unless people hear the facts, nothing's going to change. Anyway, thank you. Thank you. If you like the show and our content, you should go to InsiderCA.com and sign up to our newsletter because we never know what can happen with social media and other platforms in terms of distributing our content. If you'd like to come on the show and be an insider, you can reach out to us at Cainsider at EpochTimesCA.com. Again, it's Cainsider at EpochTimesCA.com. We'd love to have you on the show to tell us what's going on in your field in California. Thank you for watching.