Urban Cities are Declining Fast

Time my friends that this country gets a bit of an urban rethink. Unfortunately, we just have a complete lack of leadership when it comes to this topic. And the interesting thing is too, is I think that this is something that the country could gravitate around. I think you could bring people in, the people, the ultra greens, the climate change people. And I think you can also bring some of the conservatives. Now, first and foremost, full disclosure. Okay. I am… I’m a greenie. I’m a greenie in the sense that I want the cleanest possible environment for everyone, but there has to be an intelligent way of doing it. I’m also a law and order guy as well. And we’ve obviously seen the decline of our urban cores and what’s taking place. How many stories have I done here over the years on the program where we just watch this urban decay decline? I’m also a big believer. in the free market. I don’t believe the government should be subsidizing certain cities, areas of the country with special tax breaks, trying to revitalize them when again, it’s just not going to work. Can we highlighted this a week or two ago, we were making fun of the state of New York where I happened to reside at this point in time and blew a billion dollars on a useless Tesla factory up in Buffalo, New York. Let’s go through a couple of stories just from today. San Francisco, again, we’ve gone off on San Francisco and it’s just an absolute failure of the people in San Francisco, based upon who they vote for. They were showing pictures inside some Walgreens now where the entire store is locked down. The entire store is behind those little plastic cubby holes or whatever you want to call them that are locked up. The freezers. And refrigeration units there, they’ve actually got chains and padlocks on them to prevent people from stealing. Another story, this was out of Southern California. All sorts of RVs, I guess, are taking up the streets. The government can’t figure out how to go about moving them. Many of them don’t move in the first place. They were brought out of some sort of junkyard and just left there so people, in these things. 9,000 gallons of sewage a month are going into the wastewater system, meaning storm drains, okay? Think cousin Eddie and Christmas Vacation, who empties out his RV into the storm drain and the gas, and you’ve seen Christmas Vacation, you know what happens next. Well, all of this is going into Santa Monica Bay. and the beaches are being shut down on a regular basis because they’re not clean, all of the sewage going in there. It gets into the sand. It’s a disgusting mess. Problem. There’s a story here, another story here, talking about city of Baltimore. Baltimore is considering investing. Oh, geez. No, no, stop. Stop. Don’t look to invest, okay? Investing billions of dollars and 40, 15,000 vacant homes. I don’t remember the exact year, probably one of the best television shows, in my opinion, one of the best television series of all time, The Wire was out and we saw what Baltimore was like at that point in time. Now again, I’m a lacrosse guy, so I’ve been to the city of Baltimore quite often. And you drive through certain areas and you’re like, holy crap, where the hell am I? having to get to Loyola and I’m like, my Lord merciful, you know, you take a wrong turn. You are in the wire and it’s gotten worse since then. It hasn’t gotten better. And even though the good areas of Baltimore have gone to hell in a hand basket. And you got another one here. Again, this is fascinating as well. We talk about empty office spaces in cities around the country. Empty government buildings galore. Not one major federal agency, not one, has in-office attendance above 50%. New report shows that federal government buildings have reached their own tier of ghost town, making corporate towers look bustling in comparison. GAO revealed the on average headquarters of federal agencies are about 20% occupied. The near uniform emptiness across different agencies is another way the government stands out. Weekly attendance in the bottom quarter of surveyed offices is 9% and not one reported attendance above 50%. I mean, we thought it was bad with corporate offices in New York. They just surpassed 50%. And again, this inefficiency costs we the people about $7 billion to lease, operate, and maintain federal office space. Okay, so what is this urban rethink that I want to get to here? At some point in time, some point in time, and again, I don’t know if it just doesn’t win mayoral elections. I know politicians. We talk about golden shovels and beware of golden shovels. They love giving tax subsidies and being at some new project that they’re starting. You need at some point in time, you got to just start rethinking just these urban areas in certain parts of the country, and you just have to start knocking buildings down. And this is where I’m trying to get to where you can bring various different groups together. Plant frickin’ trees, man. Okay, you get all sorts of government boondoggle ideas in regards to the environment and carbon and reducing carbon in the atmosphere. We all know guaranteed, again, the sixth grade science class, going back to photosynthesis. Trees eat carbon. They eat it, they breathe it in, they need it to survive. Start turning these urban areas back to nature. There’s nothing wrong with doing that. This Baltimore, 14,000 vacant homes, 14,000, I don’t care. Turn it back to nature. Make it a bloody park for crying out loud. At least the mayor of San Francisco actually suggested knocking down some of these buildings in their city center. And I think it’s a great suggestion. Let’s say the same thing with New York. At some point in time, somebody is gonna have to say, hey, this is the only thing that we can do. These buildings that are the size of a city block are useless at this point in time. So, you know, you’re trying to kill two birds with one stone. Now, as a taxpayer, I don’t know about you, but I would rather than the government throwing money at boondoggle ideas or handing all sorts of subsidies to corporations. more golden shovel stuff. How about green shovels instead? How about that? How about more parks? How about more trees? Just saying. I know it’s a different way of thinking and I know that these politicians love, you know, having these areas to collect, you know, property tax dollars, but at some point in time, again, you have to rethink these areas. I’ve been saying this for ages. I’m from upstate New York. And our country’s changed over the years. And you go back and you take a look at, you know, how goods were transported across the United States via the Erie Canal. And all of these cities that are all upstate New York that were along the Erie Canal, they’re a shell of their former selves. And they’re not gonna come back. and you get one politician after another talking about how they’re going to revitalize this and do this and do that. No, you’re not. You don’t need to do that. Private money will go to an area that they feel it should go to. That’s what the free market is. It’ll flow to places where it needs to go, just like it was flowing to those areas, flowing to those areas back in the day. It was smart. Nothing wrong with returning some of these places back to nature. And I would rather see, I’d rather see my tax dollars being used to buy up pieces of property and turning them back to nature and condemning and knocking down these buildings rather than trying to blow it on some other bonehead idea. 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