Billionaire Venture Capitalist Michael Moritz Blasts San Francisco Dem Leaders for the “Zombie” Land Atmosphere in the City 

Edited by: TJVNews.com

Angered at the fact that the city of San Francisco is in rapid decline, a billionaire venture capitalist and partner at Sequoia Capital has lambasted the city’s Democrat leadership that “bans plastic straws but permits plastic needles,” according to a recently published report in the New York Post.

in a fiery op-ed published in the Financial Times on Wednesday. Michael Moritz, 68, addressed the seedy underbelly of San Francisco and its drug infested downtown area. He wrote: “It’s a strange city that bans plastic straws but permits plastic needles. Yet that’s San Francisco today,”

The Post reported that he added that, “Between 2020 and 2022, 1,985 people here have died from drug overdoses compared to 1,143 from Covid-19.” The report indicated that he also said that San Francisco has morphed into a “zombie” land due to the rampant and unchecked drug use in the City by the Bay.

Moritz wrote: “Fentanyl, the synthetic drug that is 50 times more powerful than and a fraction of the cost of heroin, has turned many blocks of the city into zombie zones.” The Post reported that Moritz provided a lengthy list of the issues plaguing San Francisco, including “the highest commercial office vacancy rates of any big city in the US” and “a public school system whose enrollment has fallen and which has only 55 percent English proficiency and 46 percent math proficiency.”

Mortitz also placed a spotlight on the issue of sky-high housing costs that make the city “prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthy,” the Post reported.

According to RedFin, the median price of a home in San Francisco in December 2022 was $1.3M — more than three times the national median house price, the report said.

Statistics provided by the real estate company indicated that by comparison, the median price of a home in New York is $789,000 and in Los Angeles it is $917,500.

The venture capitalist whose company, Sequoia Capital is headquartered in Menlo Park, an area just south of downtown San Francisco, is  determined that the lion’s share of the difficult challenges that the city is experiencing originate from the homeless crisis and the widespread drug epidemic, according to the Post report.  Moritz exhorted London Breed, the city’s Democratic mayor, to address these key issues immediately.

“But without tackling San Francisco’s open-air drug markets and homeless encampments, efforts to solve these problems will be fruitless,” he wrote. “Beyond the shocking waste of potential, the drug use and homeless tents consume an enormous part of San Francisco’s annual $13.95bn budget,” he continued.

The Post reported that Moritz added: “Direct city spending on homelessness has risen from about $200mn for the fiscal year 2016 to $680mn this year.”

According to official figures, homelessness in San Francisco rose by 38% in the decade from 2009 to 2019. The Post reported that in 2022, more than 7,700 San Franciscans were experiencing homelessness.

Moritz argued that local propositions, lack of voter turnout and politicians who exploit malleable term limits prevent the right kind of change that is required to turn things around for the better.

“None of this has happened overnight — it’s a situation that has built up over decades and to which state and federal policies have contributed. But much of it is the result of skillful politicking,” he said, according to the Post report. He added that, “San Francisco’s drug and homeless crisis can be solved, but that would mean changes to the mechanics of government and coordinated political will.”

In order for the City by the Bay to rectify its social ills Moritz said that the city’s leaders must ensure “persistent pursuit of harm-reduction programs, sufficient public shelters, commitment for treatment for those who are a danger to themselves and others, visible policing, a judiciary that enforces the law and — most of all — a change in the armature of government.”