The owner of a luxury San Francisco department store took out a full-page ad to bash the city’s leadership — warning that rampant homelessness and drug abuse could force it to shut up shop after 166 years.
“Gump’s has been a San Francisco icon for more than 165 years,” John Chachas wrote in his open letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom, Mayor London Breed and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
“Today, as we prepare for our 166th holiday season at 250 Post Street, we fear this may be our last because of the profound erosion of this city’s conditions.”
The letter in the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday suggested that some of the Golden City’s woes come from “advising people to abandon their offices” during the pandemic.
“Equally devastating have been a litany of destructive San Francisco strategies, including allowing the homeless to occupy our sidewalks, to openly distribute and use illegal drugs, to harass the public and to defile the city’s streets,” he said, decrying a “tyranny of the minority.”
“Such abject disregard for civilized conduct makes San Francisco unlivable for its residents, unsafe for our employees, and unwelcoming to visitors from around the world,” he wrote.
In the letter, Chachas asked the governor, mayor and city supervisors to clean city streets, remove homeless encampments, enforce city and state ordinances, and return San Francisco “to its rightful place as one of America’s shining beacons of urban society.”
“San Francisco deserves better,” he said.
Chachas told the San Francisco Standard he has received nothing but positive feedback for his sentiments.
“No one’s told me, ‘Oh my, how uncaring you are toward the homeless,’” he said. “I received multiple responses saying ‘Truth to power,’ ‘You’re saying exactly what everybody believes.’ It’s just that no one listens.”
Chachas, who acquired Gump’s following a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2018, said he has received feedback from customers who say they are too scared to shop in San Francisco, recalling one who told him, “I love your store. I love your product. I’ll buy something online. I don’t want to step foot into that city.”
In 2022, San Francisco had more than 7,754 homeless people, approximately 4,400 of whom slept in the streets or inside a tent or vehicle, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Retail has also drastically gone down in San Francisco’s Union Square area since 2020, according to CNN, which reported that over 39 stores have shuttered since the pandemic.
Chachas said he hopes his ad sparks a “real conversation to change what San Francisco’s doing” and that local leaders act “like there’s something humanitarian and evolved in their permission of that kind of behavior. There’s nothing evolved.”
While the lessened foot traffic downtown due to the lack of return-to-office policies for companies in the area has hurt business, Chachas said retail has also been hurt because shoplifting is rarely prosecuted in San Francisco.
“People don’t walk into stores in Salt Lake City and steal things because they know that the police will arrest them, and the district attorney will charge them, and they will be found guilty and put in prison, so people don’t do it,” he said.
“You have to return to a set of norms and standards of conduct that are enforced and stop talking about it like there’s some special pixie dust that exists in San Francisco,” he added.
“Decide you want to enforce that, so that people can have a livable city. Some think it’s complicated. I think it’s quite straightforward.”
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