Westfield’s San Francisco centre mall lost 46% of its stores since 2020
sfstandard.com
sfstandard.com
You could walk the sidewalk and more cars than you could count had the windows broken out of them from thieves. We had dinner at Brenda's French Soul Food where we witnessed an armed robbery. We called 911 a dozen times. The police never showed up. One in my party was told by the dispatcher unless there is an injury, they may not come.
I'm not going back until this is fixed. I'm not sure how it gets fixed.
Also “more cars than you could count” actively had broken windows?
Not saying you’re lying, buttttt… that would be highly unusual. This comment reads like you googled SF from 2000mi away and brought up the hot topics
On bad days, I have seen single-digit numbers of cars with smashed windows. On typical days, I see zero. Your report just doesn't jive with my on-the-ground experience, whether past or present.
If you were in town for some big event of some sort, I guess you should consider the possibility that folks associated with the event decided to turn hooligan and smash shit.
I assure you that I'm very much not blind to it.
I'm super angry about how the city governors refuses to suppress the anti-housing faction, and lines their pockets at most every opportunity. But I'm definitely not blind to the folks living in the streets and their regular goings-on.
And while I'm angry about what the government is failing to do, I'm not _shocked_ and/or _appalled_ by what's happening on the streets. In my personal experience, I've found that folks who are shocked and/or deeply offended by a thing tend to remember the thing as being far more extreme than it actually was. shrug
Something that really puzzled me about the homeless was many of them would be standing but bent over with their hands on the ground, and head between their knees. WTF is with that?
Yep. Housing the homeless and providing the medical and psychological care they need is the humane thing to do. The _inhumane_ thing to do is to simply move them out of the way so that rich tourists don't have to see them. (This is sometimes what the SFPD is ordered to do, and it boils my blood every time they do it.)
> Disease outbreaks occur because of these conditions.
You might be surprised at the medical outreach work that happens in the city. You'd do your psyche a bit of a favor by learning about the support programs in the city, maybe.
> ...many of them would be standing but bent over with their hands on the ground, and head between their knees.
Some are high. Some are physically damaged.
Next time you're in town, you should _really_ talk to some of these folks. (edit: And by "these" folks, I don't mean "the folks who are clearly high out of their gourd", but I mean "the folks who are out on street living a normal life... just without a roof over their heads") The majority of them are actually quite pleasant people who are fun to chat with.
You guys do have some great restaurants. I hope you're able to keep them.
Best of luck.
And what -exactly- do you mean by that? Please do be specific.
Let me put it in terms that Gene Roddenberry would have explained. He emphasized it in his work. You might have heard about it. Star Trek. "The needs of the many, out way the needs of a few, or the one."
When you're more interested in the humanity, and dignity of those afflicted (the few) than those not afflicted (the many) then you're going to continue to generate more afflicted. You have to stop the problem at the source.
That means: Cutting off the drug supply. Enforcing laws. Everything you most likely despise. You only care about those that are on those streets.
You have to make it harder to become homeless, than it is to be a successful functioning member of society.
Jobs are not the problem. There are jobs everywhere. In one of my businesses, I needed truck drivers. I can't find them because hardly anyone can pass a drug test. I will pay for them to get their CDL, if they're drug free. It's not happening. I sponsored 3 people from India to drive trucks for me. They work 6 hour days, make $35 an hour, with route bonuses, and benefits.
I have a software company (or had), where we did DoD projects. It is next to impossible to find anyone that can pass a background check for a security clearance with the FBI. Why? Drugs.
I had another software company that was in the Casino Gaming space. It was difficult to get people licensed. Why? Drugs.
There is opportunity for everyone, bad decisions put you in the street. Then people like you and I have coddled these people, and give them enough to get by, so they don't want to return to being a functioning members of society. Anything else, they steal or commit another crime to get more drugs.
I have spoken to many of these people. Your presumption shows your character. I have donated more money to this problem than you will make in your life. Money is not fixing the issue. I have stopped supporting many alcoves. We keep creating more, and more that end up needing help. The majority of the problem revolves around drugs.
Drugs cause mental issues. This is a fact. People don't want to work. They want drugs.
So, I will not be returning to SF. I will not fund the business I was there to invest in. Keep going with your idealism. The universes own laws will eventually catch up with you, as history shows us every time.
Forced relocation to care communities (which would need to be built) is the only move I see. Food, Shelter, Waste disposal, etc. The idea of a group of homeless people being able to set up a camp wherever they want, when everything else in society needs to go through planning permission is insane.
Speaking about presumptions that show one's character...
> Money is not fixing the issue. ... You have to make it harder to become homeless, than it is to be a successful functioning member of society. ... Jobs are not the problem.
On this we agree, very, very, very strongly. Jobs are not the problem. A lack of money for homeless assistance (and "assistance") programs is not the problem. (In fact, there's certainly way too much money thrown at those sorts of programs.) Based on what I've observed over the years here in San Francisco, for the situation in San Francisco, lack of housing is the problem.
As I said upthread:
> Housing the homeless and providing the medical and psychological care they need is the humane thing to do.
When you can't find housing because there is no housing to be had, and when it's tough as shit to hold down a job because you don't have a solid place to sleep, to clean your clothes, to safely store your alarm clock that's gonna wake you up for tomorrow's shift, etc, etc, then you have one of those "self-perpetuating cycles" that leaves you jobless and homeless.
> That means: Cutting off the drug supply.
That's effectively impossible. We can't even do this inside our prisons. If their child is determined, parents usually cannot do this inside their own homes. I guarantee you that even Singapore has drugs and drug use within its borders.
> Enforcing laws.
Yep. We're a nation of laws, and all laws should be enforced at all times. I very strongly believe this... to an extreme degree.
However, you do need to think about a few key points:
1) You can't extract money from someone who doesn't have an income to garnish or assets to confiscate. This renders fines and other monetary penalties largely ineffective.
2) The obvious alternative to fines is prison time. Because our prisons aren't built to rehabilitate, if you're tossing folks back into the very same situation they came out from, once released from prison they're going to be right back in prison in short order... because nothing about their life changed, except for the fact that they got an unpleasant roof over their head and three square meals for a little while.
2a) In practice, that boils down to "We have decided to house the homeless in prisons, rather than in houses.". Most (all?) of the time, that's _way_ more expensive than, like, housing folks in houses and hooking them up with a rehabilitation program so that it's -as you said- "harder to become homeless, than it is to be a successful functioning member of society".
2b) Our prisons have finite space, and are typically substantially overfull. It's better to have free space for new violent offenders (and other substantial threats to public safety) than to cram them 110% full by cramming in nearly every homeless person.
> There is opportunity for everyone, bad decisions put you in the street.
Bad decisions, but also bad luck. Sometimes bad shit happens to decent folks, and sometimes something comes along and absolutely wrecks you... wrecks you so bad that if you don't have really solid friends (or generations of accumulated wealth) to help you out, you're absolutely going to lose everything you have because you're rendered totally useless for a very, very long time.
> [I can't find truckers, or TS/SCI-ready employees because "everyone's" smoking weed and the regulations haven't caught up with the fact that weed is legal now in 75% of the US.]
I mean, this is self-explanatory.
Not too long ago, it was the case that you couldn't get TS/SCI if you were openly homosexual. The requirements for high-end clearance tend to lag substantially behind what's acceptable in the wider world. It's also a goddamn shame that weed stays in one's system for so very long after its psychoactive effects are gone. It makes testing for "Was this guy doing hazardous work while under the influence?" very tough... so tough that absolute prohibition is the easiest way to deal with it. It'd be super cool if we could build more sensitive tests, but that probably won't happen until FedGov drops the charade and de-schedules weed.
These, and infinitely other unmentionable things (including a myriad of stories that involve myself as the victim, many of them worse than above): absolutely a daily occurrence for me in the TL.
What is your bar for "shocking"? I believe you are blind.
I lived in New York for ten years, and can count on two hands the number of smashed car windows I’ve seen. In every case except one, there was someone nearby calling the police; in that one it was me.
get-get-get get-get get-down 9-1-1 is a joke in your town
-- famous rapper
Maybe there are still "a lot" of places where that's not true, but I think that phrasing misrepresents the state of policing in the US.
Many things scale favorably in larger cities: people served/foot of water & power lines, street maintenance, etc. But adequate policing seems to scale at a flat or maybe even inverse rate: the tighter people are packed the more police presence per person is needed to keep the "peace" constant and crime solve rates low.
(Admittedly, the above is at best anecdata from having lived in many larger and small cities in the US and abroad.)
Is it one of the following?
(a) The citizens and leaders have a clear plan in place, and they're waiting for it to bear fruit.
(b) The citizens and leaders don't have a plan in place, but they have some other reason to believe the problem will sort itself out.
(c) They're paralyzed, because nobody can identify a plan that seems effective and politically acceptable.
(d) They don't consider the problem so significant that major action is needed.
(e) (something else)
Caveat: I'm sure this account is accurate, but I've also heard counterpoints that only small regions of SF are like this. So as an outsider I don't really have a clear picture about the situation.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/14/san-francisc...
At any rate, the larger point is that SF’s out-of-touch political elites need to work on real solutions rather than engage in performative politics.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984919925/san-francisco-schoo...
I'm not sure why ideas like this get floated when the number makes it DoA, and even hurts the credibility of the campaign.
We are far from that. San Francisco remains a AAA issuer. But if receipts crash, deficits bulge and services get cut while the administration debates reparations, that’s how you get regrettable policy. There is still time for people to meet in the middle and find humane but productive solutions that don’t involve sloshing billions through useless NGOs.
Then everything is fine. It’s just a question of time horizons. I disagree with this determinism. But if you hold it, the present is fine.
Still, one aspect of this does seem easily solved: in Westfield's case, having a bigger police presence. If they had to name a reason why they went out of business, it would be that, not enough police & too much crime. That seems like part of the problem: the police are not responsive, and since police performance is kind of a thing that straddles right/left divisions & powerful constituencies, it's not like one person can easily solve it. There are laws on the books to stop crime, and the DA can do something after suspects are caught, but if the police are missing in action at the places where crimes are happening, not investigating and not making arrests, they will continue.
The larger problem is the death of downtown due to: crime, falling tourism, and the rise of remote work. I personally don't think pushing on the 'crime' lever - especially not by just installing another DA - will be enough to stop it. The problem of remote work leading to falling vacancy rates, leading to an empty downtown, leading to a rising crime and homelessness problem, hasn't been addressed by any of the contemplated solutions, not seriously imho.
Long term, I think downtown will need to be rezoned to be more residential, and the combination of more foot traffic (mostly that) supporting more businesses, and the people & businesses softening the edges of the crime & homelessness problem, will eventually improve the situation. But turning office space into residential space is a huge ask, and even today many people will say it's impossible. It will be years until those downtown office space owners accept this, years more before City Hall can find acceptable ways to rezone that area, more years for the work to be completed, and still more years before people start moving in.
So we might see a turnaround starting in, say, a decade. I wouldn't hope for too much until then.
The mayor has little power in SF compared to other cities. My understanding is the Board of Supervisors is more distributed than a typical City Council.
Housing: A single person in SF has managed to thwart 1/3 of all building development (source: some anti-NIMBY transparency website), which means NiMBYs have an extraordinarily strong Heckler’s veto. Very little development means supply for dwellings stays far below demand. Rent control ordinance from 1979 has meant that market rate units cost 3x what rent controlled units cost. Tenants in Cali and SF have very strong rights compared to landlords, so people aren’t rushing to invest in SF rental properties.
Crime: The state changed the thresholds between misdemeanors and felonies about 8 years ago and most people blame SF for something that a majority of Cali voters did.
As far as I can tell, the SFPD is sitting on its hands. As much as they complain about being short staffed, my larger city is nearby and has far fewer officers per resident and still manages to answer more calls. I never understood the argument that officers are slow walking because criminals would be back on the street without the prosecutor pressing charges. The patrol officer doesn’t know or care. This is more likely a “blue flu” thing where police are punishing people for their government’s liberal policies.
SF suffers from lots of “bridge and tunnel” criminals. The area around Oakland and Vallejo (across the Bay Bridge) is where lots of the thieves and shooters come from. People don’t tour the East Bay like they do SF and the affluent are more likely to live in SF, so the criminals go to where the money is.
Coordinated thief gangs for catalytic converters, store-mob thieves, car theft rings, etc are mostly issues that can’t be solved by SFPD — they all require multi-jurisdiction task forces.
Post-pandemic: SF had some of the harshest lockdown policies in the US and there was no policy push to reopen and announce the reopening. The jails were overcrowded during COVID and the Sheriff Department (staffs the jails) is very understaffed, so there were lots of incentives to keep jails from filling up.
SF’s city government spends more per capita than pretty much everywhere else in the US on social projects. They vastly overspend on homeless mitigation, health clinics, public bathrooms, etc. It seems to me there is no political consensus in the city for a single plan.
Point of order: Without those rent control ordinances, all units would cost right around the current market rate. The thing driving costs is failure to build to meet demand.
> Tenants in Cali and SF have very strong rights compared to landlords, so people aren’t rushing to invest in SF rental properties.
Another point of order: The NIMBYs are the primary reason people aren't rushing to develop residential rental buildings in SF. Or, if you were referring to the fact that oh so many rentals are massively overdue for essential repairs, then that's a combination of
* Because your renter is almost certainly already renting the best place they can afford, and because it's almost certain that nothing cheaper will appear on the market, you -as a landlord- have no incentive to do more than the legal minimum.
* Because Prop 13 fixes your property value reassessment at something tiny (like 2% per year) until your property changes hands, and because any major improvements to that property are assessed at their current market rate, and then added in to your tax assessment, you -as a landlord- are __seriously__ disincentivized to improve your property.
I think that 364 days in the county jail is more than enough to deter people from shoplifting, etc. So the problem isn't the penalty; the problem is that the laws aren't enforced.
> The problem is that the laws aren’t enforced
I would argue that legal punishments only work well when they are consistent and swift. The US legal system has failed on both accounts. Violent crime closure rates are abysmal, and the end of that funnel is just that someone was charged, not the right person being convicted.
In practice, the IS legal system depends on leaning hard on anyone who might be a criminal (especially with bail bonds, the slow time to trial, the failure of public defenders to handle their caseload competently, and the overwhelming dependency on plea bargaining — which was unethical in this country until after the Civil War).
Also, saying “the laws aren’t being enforced” seems naïve to who isn’t enforcing the laws and why.
And of course there is a lot of D, people denying there's a problem at all. The "this is fine" response.
In subsequent visits I didn't wander about.
And then I hear that things have gotten worse....
People are going to buy and sell drugs, sex, & etc. It's better to have that out in the open where police can keep an eye on and discourage violence.
I didn't see any police presence there.
Do you have any scientifically researched reason for this claim or is it just a hunch?
How long did you stick around? A few minutes?
In my personal experience, as someone who has lived here for more than a decade, I see regular auto patrols going through the neighborhoods, as well as occasional foot patrols whose purpose seems to be to talk to some of the folks in the area and get a sense of what has been going on lately.
This isn't shit you're going to see if you're just passing through... you've gotta stick around and pay attention.
Also: Your original claim was "People are going to buy and sell drugs, sex, & etc. It's better to have that out in the open where police can keep an eye on and discourage violence."
Not: "solid links between regular neighborhood mounted and foot patrols and reduction in violent and property"
I can tell you from experience that if you don't have the drug deals happening out in the open, then the vast majority of them are going to happen in someone's home.
As I mentioned, it's _way_ easier to keep an eye on things when you can funnel it to a relatively small, open area so you can just drive by and see it, than it is to go knocking on a couple-hundred (or even couple-thousand) doors across an entire metro area.
And no, I'm not flagging your comments. I don't believe I've flagged any comments on this site, ever. If I disagree sufficiently strongly with a statement, I engage in discussion, as I have here and elsewhere.
Now it’s a mess though. It is not charming anymore at the level it is right now. I went back around Covid and it was crazy surreal.
But it's fun to take a larger trend that's been happening for many years in many cities, and pretend it's a uniquely SF disease.
The city's politicians can blame remote work & Covid all they want - but the numbers don't lie.
San Francisco is uniquely in trouble - and it's due to policy decisions & poor leadership.“ https://twitter.com/michelletandler/status/16700691729764638...
> In that same period, Westfield Valley Fair in San Jose has seen a 66% increase in sales, the company said.
In other parts of the country, they are actually building new malls. Go down to Palo Alto or San Jose, or even Stonestown. Those malls are thriving. https://montco.today/2023/01/triple-five-group-florida-king-...
Santa Clara is No. 3 and San Francisco No. 12 [1]. Medians can obscure gut-wrenching poverty.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_count...
Median household income is a poor proxy for a mall’s revenue driver: aggregate proximate disposable income. One can maintain lofty median incomes while peripherialising disposable income through higher median costs of living.
(Side note: I spent a hot minute in childhood in McClean. The food in Leesburg might have triggered my inner gourmande. Forgot that until just now—thank you.)
It was pointing out that the chosen isn’t the signal it’s being positioned as.
> Loudoun County has the 3rd highest average household disposable income and a low poverty rate, so again should be a great location for a mall
Source? (Purely for curiosity.) Averages don’t matter. Aggregates do. If I am a county of one, even with tremendous disposable income, a good location for a mall I do not make.
Malls are absolutely in structural decline. But pointing to median and average metrics is misleading, though not in an uncommon way.
Later in the article:
"An analysis by The Standard shows that 45 stores, or 46% of the mall’s 97 pre-pandemic retailers, have closed since 2020. While 21 new stores have opened in the past three years."
So -46 existing stores and +21 new stores for total of -25 stores (down about 25% from pre-pandemic). Losing Nordstrom doesn't help.
The property managers are walking away from the mall, so there doesn't seem to be much confidence wrt profitability of the mall, esp. given rising interest rates.
That's a drop of foot traffic of more than half in the area.
Obviously foot traffic is important to retail success, but retail success is important to vibrance. And crime is important to both retail success and foot traffic.
And now, even if people return to the office, there's no reason for it to be in SF.
The government ignored all those issues because it didn't stop people from visiting SF, setting up businesses there and buying real estate there.
Things got worse during the pandemic. City turned into a ghost town. The shoplifting went into high gear, and the density of tents around downtown went up even more.
Still the city didn't do anything. I bet they thought, "oh, this pandemic will be over soon and all the working from home will end along with it".
https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...
AT&T is closing their store. They've lost over 1 million in inventory over the past 2 years.
The author Shelby Steele had their camera equipment stolen valued at over $20,000, and the police didn't bother to show up.
I asked the the store clerk if he wants that info for calling it in, I know that car well because I used to own one.
He told me they don't call in crimes at all the the police because it doesn't do anything.
So your town city hall and police might not even KNOW how bad crime is.
Why would people even bother to report crimes when nothing is done about them?
Like recent story from good morning America: they got scared going downtown at 4am. What a cry babies..
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12202737/amp/GMA-te...
Nearly _everything_ in the Financial District was open _only_ during regular business hours -- those businesses were there to only cater to the folks working in FiDi and noone else. Outside of business hours (and during many business holidays) that district was dead, dead, dead.
I wonder how much outside-of-work-hours spillover there was from FiDi office workers to businesses immediately adjacent to FiDi, and also wonder if those adjacent businesses have been significantly impacted now that oh so many people are no longer working inside those offices.
And yeah, like four years ago the Westfield Mall had _way_ more foot traffic than it had the few times I visited like four or six months ago.
I was just wondering out loud about the effects of the loss of the workers in FiDi.
https://sf.eater.com/2023/5/19/23729883/ikea-livat-mall-mark...
Anyway, a big blow for SF to lose Westfield.
The only way this could work is if they charged people a refundable entrance fee of like $1000 or something. Otherwise I could see it turning into a squatted living space with druggies hanging out getting in the way of potential customers. Or posing health risks to customers (needles in cushions, unsanitary personal hygiene, etc.)
I guess you'll be shocked to hear that shops with furnishings inside of them (including, but not limited to the Macy's department store) have been operating for decades without installing anti-homeless spikes on the floor samples, _or_ charging an entrance fee.
Having a human posted at the entrance whose job is to bounce away hobos is (based on my personal, first-hand observations) more than sufficiently effective.
You (intentionally?) missed the part where hobos get bounced out at the front door.
You've also pretty clearly not been in either of the Macy's buildings. [0] They, -too- (just like the other large department stores that have been operating in the area for decades) are so large that the employees on the floor cannot see what's going on across the entire floor with a glance.
[0] Well, they _used_ to have two. Since a year or two ago, they closed their menswear building and consolidated in a single building.
This issue is a new issue --it's not decades long. It's only become an issue since intersection of prop 47 with SF governance. This is why companies are only beginning to pull out now.
Unbelievably, SF already had loitering and vagrancy laws on the books, but the panhandle had to have a new more specific ordinance to address druggies blocking doorway entrances etc (the sit/lie law), of course, in typical fashion, it could only be enforced after a written warning and after a second it became a misdemeanor...
It's just easier and better to find a place that's friendlier to business.
Sit/lie in SF is from 2010, ~13 years ago.
SF has been in a commercial decline for a whole bunch of reasons.
Despite that, front-door bouncers have continued to be -as far as I could tell, as a customer of these establishments- more-or-less totally effective at keeping hobos out.
"But it is worth mentioning that we are not at Union Square or the Westfield Mall this morning because we have been advised it is simply too dangerous to be there at this hour"
Sorry, emotions are running pretty high right now. If you made this comment at her vigil, it wouldn’t have ended well I think.
We're not at her vigil, nor are we talking specifically about it.
It makes the already-shitty life of the homeless even worse when folks paint them as crazed murderers. It is -in truth- no better than asserting that any other broad group (whether you group based on ethnic, racial, state-of-origin, or any number of other overly-broad categories) are crazed murders.
Every single death is a tragedy. I very sincerely believe that, and will be angry at myself until my dying day that I did nothing to help try to fix death.
However, it does the living no good to dehumanize an entire group by saying "Oh, well they're a member of $BROAD_GROUP, so they're murderers. Better stay away.".
The sad fact is that this person was already committing crimes, was already considered violent, but our system in place gives them a free pass unless it comes out to homicide. No, don’t dehumanize the homeless, but yes, hold them to the same standards as everyone else. You commit a crime, you get arrested and go to jail; then maybe it doesn’t have to get to murder for the system to take action.
It is true that the mentally ill are overwhelmingly not dangerous. But as the number of mentally ill people in one place goes up, so do your odds of encountering that minority of mentally ill who are aggressive. In most of the world, you might see one mentally ill person in a day and they are harmless. In parts of California, sometimes it feels like you see a dozen mentally ill homeless in a day, and one of them is berating passersby or worse.
San Diego County data from 2021 showed that member of the homeless population there were murdered at 19 times the rate of the non-homeless population, and were 27 times more likely to be subjected to attempted murder—as well as 12 times more likely to be assaulted and nine times more likely to be sexually assaulted.
Please accept my apologies and thanks for the level-headed response
The line is pretty thin here, you never know what's going to prompt mentally ill person to kill you.
[1] jun 12: https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/sanfrancisco/news/early-morning-...
[2] may 22 phttps://sfstandard.com/criminal-justice/two-people-shot-in-f...
[3] Jun 2 https://www.ktvu.com/news/man-wounded-in-broad-daylight-shoo...
[4] jun 5 https://neighbors.ring.com/n/Z1elNLxc2Z
I’m glad you support gun confiscation and across-the-board illegalization tho! So do I, so we have something to agree about :). Have a nice evening!
"Too dangerous" obviously includes robberies and assaults, but you've neatly excluded those to narrow the focus of the conversation to murder. Where is this idea coming from, that violent crime doesn't count unless somebody is murdered (or specifically shot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36374483)?
This attitude exemplifies the problem; that all manner of crime should tolerated from homeless unless they shoot or murder somebody. Only then does it rise to your concern. And in the case of tlogan's comment that I just linked to, even somebody getting stabbed to death doesn't count because they weren't shot. This is how you get situations as described by seanmcdirmid here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36374451 Crazy guy known to be violent is tolerated by local authorities because he hasn't yet killed anybody. No big deal until he murders somebody, only then do people care. This is why the electorate of these cities is the root of the problem, because the electorate don't give a shit about the crime until somebody gets killed.
Whenever I hear shit like this that doesn't mesh with my on-the-ground assessment, I have to wonder if there's an ulterior motive, and what that might be.
Is someone trying to get Federal funding for policing in the city? Is a group of someones trying to trigger some "I don't have to pay to break my lease because conditions around my business are 'obviously too terrible'" clause so that leaving the city is much, much cheaper? Is someone trying to prevent folks from airing yet more footage of folks sleeping on and doing drugs on the street? Something else?
Dunno.
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/local/2022/12/28/eastlan...