Rising crime, looting, and tolerance of drug-addled transients taking over the streets has led to an exodus of retail establishments from San Francisco.
Now another Democrat-controlled California city is enjoying the same exodus of retail establishments: Berkeley.
Here YouTuber Metal Leo looks at streets near Cal Berkeley University, where store after store after store are closed, boarded up or for lease.
Banks, pharmacies, cinemas, pizza chains: all closed. The only thing that seems to be open are Starbucks.
There are stores that were last Radio Shacks, which haven’t been around since 2017, which suggests Berkeley’s decline has been underway long before California’s Flu Manchu shutdowns (though obviously those didn’t help).
Is it the crime? The lawless disorder? The insanely high taxes and rent? Mortgage backed securities rules? Probably some combination of all of the above.
He doesn’t seem to come across any homeless sleeping on the streets, perhaps because Berkeley has started doing aggressive homeless camp clearances, which might have encouraged them to move over into Oakland or across the bay.
There is one amazing find: An apparently working payphone!
This video should remind you of the similar ones Louis Rossmann did of New York City before he left.
Berkeley’s last Republican mayor left office in 1971. Since then it’s been Democrats or “Berkeley Citizens Action” (social justice before it was called social justice) running the city. Jesse Arreguin, the current mayor of Berkeley, says he wants to “restore Berkeley to the forefront of progressive leadership on the environment and social justice.”
Looks like he’s succeeded.
This is your city on social justice.
Tags: Berkeley, Berkeley Citizens Action, California, Crime, Democrats, homeless, Jesse Arreguin, Social Justice Warriors, video
If Newsom runs for president, and it looks as if he will when the Democrats depose Biden, clips from this should be played in every Republican campaign commercial.
Berkeley is vanguard of social conscience for the proletariat. Glorious comrades are triumphantly rejecting vulgarity of the marketplace in favor of foraging for crickets, grubs and arugula.
Down with the false idols of economic plenitude and bourgeois comfort. Shutter the shops of capitalist exploiters!
[…] THEY’RE FINALLY RIDDING THEMSELVES OF THOSE NASTY CAPITALISTS: Berkeley Retail Shutting Down Just Like San Francisco. […]
Sure, the businesses are gone and there are no people anymore but the ART! It’s worth it, just for that! (lol)
I’d like to see up on Telegraph Avenue.
[…] CLOSED! Marxifornia and it left-leaning idiot leaders […]
“People need to get everything they vote for, in spades, good & hard, until it grinds them to powder, and, they blow away like dust in the wind.”
Nietzsche?
“ Metal Leo looks at streets near Cal Berkeley University”
Dude, on the letterhead, it is University of California, Berkeley. When discussing sports, it is Cal. When I am making affectations to erudition, it is Berkeley.
Few things are more important to me than the destruction of the authoritarian left and CAL BEARS sports. Whatever it is, it is not Cal Berkeley university.
Those stores are a few blocks from campus. I wonder what Telegraph and Dwight up to Bancroft look like?
And Cal Lawyer is correct. It’s “Cal,” or Cal-Berkeley.”