Last week, Vice President Kamala Harris made the pitch that her economic policies will benefit the middle class more than Donald Trump’s. But in San Francisco, where she has been a power player for decades as a district attorney, state attorney general and finally as a senator, it is the middle class itself most hurt by the city’s crippling decline at the hands of Democrats.
"There are a lot of cheap options," Dave, who moved here from back east three years ago and is in advertising, told me at lunch, "and of course there are Michelin star restaurants on the high end, but not much in between."
KAMALA HARRIS' SAN FRANCISCO IS A DYSTOPIAN NIGHTMARE. IS THIS WHAT SHE HAS PLANNED FOR AMERICA?
It is a dynamic that one can see all across town, as the highest end stores, like Armani and Neiman Marcus sport dangerous-looking guards outside their tony shops, while more affordable haberdashers face greater risk of shoplifting.
"Just our presence outside kind of keeps them out," one guard told me of thieves.
Likewise, in the fast-food restaurants there are no condiments except behind the counter to keep them from being stolen, and a basic diner breakfast will easily set you back $30 after tax and tip.
On Sutter and Stockton streets, the ramshackle Starbucks has no chairs, just a few tables to stand at, presumably because the employees cannot control the homeless, addicts, or mentally ill from taking them over. Sitting at Starbucks and having your coffee is a basic middle class luxury all over America, but not here.
Across the street, you can see the vague outline of a now-missing Joseph A Banks store. That was a place where you could get a nice tie for $60, instead of the $500 you can easily pay at nearby Hermes.
Upstairs from the Starbucks, Joseph runs a salon. He is also a personal shopper and fashion writer.
"My husband and I are taxed at 50 percent," he said when I asked how squeezed the middle class is here, "and we have a kid. It's very hard."
He told me the changes for the worse began around the turn of the century and have sped up ever since.
In San Francisco, the threshold to be in the middle class is almost $90,000 a year. In the average major U.S. city it is about $50,000. In fact, five of the 10 highest thresholds in the country are in Harris’ California.
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Another woman told me the secret was to work in the public sector.
"The government unions run the city, they get whatever they want, it makes working in the private sector very difficult," she said.
On almost every level, it seems that political and social resources here, including Joseph’s taxes, go either to serve the top elites, especially big tech billionaires, or the squalid poor for whom some new harebrained and lavishly expensive policy doomed to failure is thought up every other day.
One bright spot for middle class workers is the tourism industry. There are a shocking number of European tourists here. You can spot them from their weird sneakers even before they start speaking their crazy moon-man languages.
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One hotel employee I spoke with who didn’t want to use his name, told me, "You can make a good living, it isn’t that hard." But in fairness, he was an immigrant from a small, poor town in Mexico, so his definition of "good living" doesn’t exactly match the average Americans’.
The sheer number of tourists speaks to the storied nature of San Francisco, not just in America, but around the world. There is a romance of the West here that can be spoken of in the same breath as Paris, or Venice, but for those who live here, the hard grind is clear and obvious.
In Chicago this week, Harris will claim that she and the Democrats can create an "opportunity economy" for the middle class. Well, her track record here in the city by the bay suggests that she might be good for venture capitalists and government workers, but at a crushing expense to most mid-level workers.
If the driving principle for Harris and her particular breed of California Democrat is to help the middle class, there is no evidence of it in her hometown, much the opposite, and voters need to ask themselves in this regard, just how much they want their hometown to look and feel more like San Francisco.
