by Zain Jaffer
As a real estate investor, people expect me to love seeing the beauty of cities. Tall aesthetically pleasing skyscrapers that touch the sky as if to symbolize man’s aspirations and achievement. Beautiful parks that recharge families. Great shopping and restaurants to satiate our desires and epicurean passions.
In reality everyone should love beautiful cities. Before I came to America, before I became an immigrant and citizen, the spectacular skyline of cities like New York and San Francisco captured my imagination. I wanted to live here, to work here, because the energy and passion was here. Just seeing the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate bridge, and other US city landmarks, were must stops on many tourist tours.
Now that I live here, I am saddened to see our most beautiful large cities turn into cesspools of homelessness, drugs, street crimes, prostitution. Litter and grafitti, along with human excrement and trash, pollute what used to be fashionable retail, shopping, and dining areas. People like Elon Musk are taking their companies to other areas like Texas.
For what? For mistaken notions of defunding our police, non-enforcement of basic laws that should side with the victims and not the criminals, lack of drug enforcement and homeless arrests, and kowtowing to false ideas of extreme liberalism.
We have turned our once beautiful cities that were the envy of the world into examples of what they should not be.
Take a look at cities like Singapore and Dubai. In Singapore for example, spitting is punished. Cleanliness and frequent repairs are the rule, not the exception. Here it is the opposite. In San Francisco we have let go of our basic responsibilities of upkeep and maintenance. Sure we still have the Golden Gate bridge and other tourist areas, but we have to warn our visitors against street crimes, and images of unsightly trash, graffiti, and closed retail shops, malls, and restaurants.
I am not saying we should be as draconian as Singapore when it comes to laws and ordinances. But we have swung to the other extreme of the pendulum. We have given too much freedom to those who violate and contribute to the decay and filth. It is time to rebalance. We need to refund our police. Not to bring it back to what it was. But to build it to what it should be.
The current failures of our cities to clean up hurts their bottom line too. Not just the building owners who see less retail and office rentals and leases, but the restaurants and retailers who make a living from the people eating and shopping there. The cities earn less too from taxes, and they have more expenses for cleaning up the trash and grafitti, drug enforcement (if any), and they see large taxpayers move out.
The situation is unacceptable. We need to get our control of our cities back. Pandering to the homeless, the drug addicts, the street criminals, sends the wrong signal to our citizens. We should be a country of people striving to be the best we can achieve.
It is time to restore our cities back to their former splendor.
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