The Sad Death of San Francisco
San Francisco is a dangerous place to live. The resident of the Tenderloin, a drug-infested neighborhood overrun with crime, Stallcup describes himself as a witness to a “zombie apocalypse” and “fentanyl genocide.” Every morning, he must navigate his way through sidewalks littered with needles, human waste, and even dead bodies. He describes “Frisco” as “a fourth world country within a first world country.”
“Living in San Francisco has been a wild ride,” Stallcup tells me. He has “personally witnessed the city go from being a cultural capital to the technological capital to the fentanyl capital. After the massive tech exodus, led by Elon Musk, San Francisco lost billions in tax revenue.”
According to Stallcup, “Local leaders who gained an appetite from tech tax money soon found themselves desperate to quench their newfound appetite for money. The only other way for them to achieve this was to enable the homeless-industrial complex by allowing fentanyl to plague our community and corrupt various nonprofits and organizations.”
For Stallcup, his mornings and nights begin and end in an eerily similar manner: opening and closing his eyes to the sounds of people screaming for their lives and ambulances speeding by, sirens blaring.
“Sleep,” he says, “is very difficult to come by, especially living in the Tenderloin, where my apartment building has been broken into multiple times.”
“It’s traumatic, to say the least, a fight for survival,” he adds. Quite literally, a fight for survival. On more than one occasion, Stallcup has had to fight off burglars with his own bare hands.
Stallcup’s apartment building is surrounded by bodies (dead and barely alive), inordinate amounts of litter, tents, and an array of drug-related accouterments.
“Every morning, I go out and count the bodies,” he says, “sometimes giving them a small love tap just to see if they are alive.”
It’s “Groundhog Day” meets “The Road.” Early in the morning, white vans come by his place and stack the bodies on multiple layers of metallic trays. Welcome to modern-day America.
“This humanitarian crisis,” says Stallcup, “is a fentanyl genocide.”
He’s right. It is. In San Francisco, a person dies of a fentanyl overdose every 10 hours.
“Theft, rape, and murder is rampant,” Stallcup tells me, “with mom-and-pop shops under attack every day.” Grocery stores are ransacked dry. Cars and apartments are broken into regularly.
Even the city’s richest neighborhoods are being plagued by “smash and grabs, robberies, burglaries, and open-air drug use.” As Tracy McCray, San Francisco Police Officers Association president, noted, “The problems in the Tenderloin have escaped the Tenderloin.”
They most certainly have. To compound matters, gangs of youths, baseball bats in hand, are reportedly tormenting mothers and nannies, mugging them on their daily school run.
Last month, in Noe Valley, once a “charming, family-friendly neighborhood,” 11 phone robberies occurred. These robberies, according to the Telegraph, “are believed to have been carried out by the same gang who are targeting women picking up children from school.”
One woman was allegedly assaulted with a baseball bat, while another woman was punched in the face. It’s hard to believe that, less than two years ago, San Francisco was named the 15th safest city in the world.
